I’ve been putting my photos on Flickr for a while now, but Flickr never seems to do the photos any justice (not just mine, but in general).  Every now and then I post them here on this blog, but they usually contradict the “Linux Ninja Geek” theme, since the photos aren’t actually related to Linux, or ninjas or even technology.

So, I have created an entirely new blog.  A photoblog.

Just in time, too, since my new Strobist gear was delivered today, which more than likely means I’ll be taking MANY more photos that have very little to do with the theme of this blog, and more closely related to photography.

So, if you’re interested in the photos I take, head over to http://photo.mysticmorph.net.  I hope to see you over there.

There is a stretch of the highway along my commute, near my house, that has blooming flowers each Spring.  The flowers seem wild, but they aren’t.  They are an introduced species, named Carpobrotus edulis, or Ice Plant, which is a succulent plant originally planted in Southern California to help stabilize the soil and reduce erosion.  The flowers are rather nice, to be driving along and see waves of different shades of purple and pink flowers along the roadside.  I’ve often wanted to take a photo (or two) of the flowers during the day as well as when the flowers close during sunset.

So, that’s what I decided to do.  Right after my son’s soccer practice, I dropped him off at home, grabbed my tripod and camera and headed back out.  I picked what I thought was a rather nice location to capture the closing blooms right as the sun went down in the west.  I was a bit late, because by the time I got set up and started shooting, the sun had already dropped behind the mountains.  I had got only about 6 shots done, low to the ground right next to a 30-foot lamppost that was just out of frame, when a California Highway Patrolman pulled up behind my truck.

Well, I was done at that point.  He was in the shot I wanted to take, and CHP don’t normally stop to admire the flowers or make idle conversation.  As soon as he got out of his vehicle, I picked up my gear and told him “Okay, I’m leaving.  I just stopped for about 5 minutes, but I’m going now.”

He motioned for me to stay, with his overgrown masculine/overcompensating flashlight/nightstick.  “This is for emergency stopping only”, he shouted at me over the roar of the highway traffic passing by, as he drew closer. “I don’t think taking pictures is an emergency.”

“Well, no, its not.” I replied.

Before I could get another word in, he asked me for my driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance.

“Sure, hang on, I’ll get it,” I said as I took my license out of my wallet and handed it to him.

I started digging in my glovebox for my registration and insurance paperwork, when he shined his pole vault pole of a flashlight into the glovebox (presumably to make sure I wasn’t packin’ heat).

“Havin’ trouble?” he asked me, as I rifled through my glovebox looking for the paperwork to fulfill his request.

“I have it all here, somewhere,” I told him. There is a lot of stuff in my glovebox.  None of it could be considered a weapon.  I pulled out my registration from 3 years ago, and another from 2 years ago, and yet another that expired last month.

He saw that I had multiple registrations from years ago, looked at the ones expired in 2007, 2008, shook his head, and saw the one dated 2009.  He said, “Ah, there ya go.”

I noticed it had expired last month, and pointed that out to him.

“Yup.  You’re right.  Have a current one?”

“Well, I’m sure I do,” I said, “just give me a minute, I know its here somewhere.”  Finally, I pulled out the current registration, which is actually smaller than a 3×5 card, believe it or not.

“Proof of insurance?”

“Oh, right.  Sure, hang on.” I replied, as I continue rummaging through all the stuff my glovebox has collected.

I managed to hand him GEICO insurance papers from 4 years ago, 3 years ago, 2 years ago, and last year, but couldn’t find the current piece of paper that said I was insured.  Crap!  “I know I have it somewhere, but I just can’t find it at the moment.”

“Well, make sure to tell them that in court,” he said with a sideways smile.

I continued to put my photo gear away while he went back to his squad car to make sure I wasn’t a sereal killer, wanted in multiple states, or had a record for random acts of violence.  After I put my stuff away, I noticed that he started writing, and occassionally would glance over at me while I leaned against the side of my truck while I waited.

Finally, he came back over to me and explained that I am not allowed to stop on the side of the highway unless it is for an emergency.  He pointed out that I could be hit by a drunk driver, or worse.  I calmly retorted that it was barely 7:30pm, that I was next to a 30-foot lamppost, and that I could easily run up the embankment to dodge anything coming at me.

“No, that wouldn’t help ya.  I’ve seen everything,” he bragged.  “So, what are you taking pictures of, anyway? Flowers?”

“Flowers.  Sunset.  I even got parts of the road, to make a scene.”

“Its cloudy.  And the sun went down.  These flowers close up after sunset,” he explained to me, as if I was out of my mind.

“Well, yes.  That was my plan.  Overcast clouds tend to subdue the sun, making it seem larger but not brighter.  Sunset, coupled with the flowers closing up for the night alongside the cars passing by might make a nice photograph.”

He shrugged and restated that it was dangerous to be parked on the side of the road.  I wanted to ask him that if it was dangerous to be parked on the side of the road, and if it is for emergencies only, why shouldn’t we move, but I decided to not say anything because I didn’t want to get into an argument.  What I had planned to be a 10 minute photo shoot ended up taking me half an hour, and didn’t want to make things worse.

The citation was for … and I’m not sure since I can’t read his handwriting …   parking in an emergency zone (side of hwy), and not having proof of insurance.

I asked him, “So, I guess this is a fine?”

“Yes.  Its a fine.”

“I see,” I said.  “How much are we talkin’?” I asked him.

“Oh, I don’t know.  That’s something that’s specific to the county,” he told me.

See, the California Highway Patrol only operates, and has jurisdiction over, the state highways, which run through different counties in California.  So, depending on where and which highway they stop you, you may be subject to different fines and/or court process.

Well, seeing as I hadn’t really accomplished what I set out to do, have a citation to boot, and I didn’t even have time to look at the photos I had already taken, I was anxious to get home.  So, I left.

As it turns out, after looking over the 7 photos I managed to capture, they weren’t horrible.  Not entirely what I wanted, but they didn’t make me vomit.  I should’ve changed lenses and taken slower shots with more exposure, to brighten up the flowers and sky.

Over my years of photographing (over 20 years now), I learned that photography is not just the study of light.  It is the capture of something that most people either take for granted or simply don’t notice.  It should provoke an emotion, and draw the viewer into the photograph so that they can feel what was felt at the time it was taken, or feel something different altogether.

What I was going for was: the flowers closing during sunset, while people whizzed by, most of them paying very little notice.  I’m not sure if I got that much in the photo.  What I get by looking at the photo is “that one time I got a ticket near my house for taking a photo of flowers.”

A Picture is worth a Thousand Words, and 1 Traffic Citation

So, you might know about how panoramas are created without a panoramic camera…  Take a bunch of photos on a tripod while panning around a scene, then put them all in something that can interpret the photos as sort of meshing together to create an extra wide photo — a panoramic photo.

Photosynth is kind of like that except it doesn’t work on just 2 dimensions (height and width), meshing the edges of the photos…  it works in 3 dimensions, to create a virtual space by calculating where the camera was that captured the photo (among other magic stuff).  Imagine being in a courtyard, taking photos while turning yourself around.  Load those photos into Photosynth, the software extrapolates the edges and portions each photo has in common, and it creates the courtyard in 3d that you can virtually walk around to examine the features as if you were actually there.

VERY cool stuff, indeed.

It was created by Microsoft Live Labs, and you need to download the software in order to view the “synths” as well as create them.  There’s also a handy guide for tips on taking photos that work best.

This is a great idea and loads of fun, but based on my tests it’s not yet working as well as it should.

Originally, I went with Pixamo after I read a comment I saw while I was searching for a good online photo service. I spent the better part of two days diligently uploading to Pixamo, categorizing and tagging my entire photo collection. The thing I like about pixamo is that for each photo, the categorization technique is separated into:

• People (or subject of the photo)
• Location (or where the photo was taken)
• keywords

From a photographer’s perspective, this is really rather handy, and allows some fancy searching methods. This is a step above the “make your own category” category method used by, say… Flickr.

Flickr has a nice tagging methodology, but its somewhat lacking in that I have to sorta invent what I want to categorize my photos into. In other words, a “location” tag doesn’t really act like a location — its just a tag that lives along side other tags of names, events, and one-word descriptions. Sure, in Flickr, you can “geo-tag” an arbitrary number of photos, placing them on a map… but you can’t really do that with people/names, I’ve found. However, in Pixamo, I have locations that act as locations that are linked to other locations. For example, photos taken at “Disneyland” are linked to “Anaheim” and “California” and get those broader locations by default if I enter a photo as having a location of “Disneyland”. Then, I can later browse Pixamo for all photos in “California”, “Anaheim”, or just ones taken at “Disneyland”.

Another thing I didn’t like so much about Flickr was that there are limits on the file size upload.

So, anyway… after uploading every digital photo I have to Pixamo, and then looking around Flickr, I discovered I actually have a “pro” account on Flickr that came with my AT&T/SBC DSL service. Cool. So, then I spent the rest of my time uploading my photos to Flickr as well, which actually I should’ve done first because Pixamo is able to import photos from things like Flickr. Whodathunkit!

Pixamo
pros:

• Easy, practical categorization
• Searching by practically anything
• No limit on upload, from what I could tell
• Able to handle video as well
• Import from other sites like Flickr (the list is pretty long)

cons:

• Not apparent how to print photos, or order prints
• Not as well partnered with online printing as something like Flickr
• Limited to total size of photo gallery (free account, I think, is 5GB)

Flickr
pros:

• No visible limit on storage space; limit is on bandwidth uploaded and only on “free” accounts
• Easy printing and other wacky cool things you can do with photos on things like t-shirts and keychains

cons:

• No practical way for an amateur photographer to sensibly organize photos, without using keywords as a panacea.
• Upload file size seems to be capped at 10MB, which might be a real problem with newer 10+ megapixel cameras.
• No batch file upload utility (at least not for Linux) — best I could find was written by a 3rd party on sourceforge.net

Both have a pretty sensible interface, even though I don’t totally agree with either they still work relatively well. Most other features compare one for one — both have a date-search interface that you can locate photos by the date they were taken (as long as the image has EXIF data to categorize from), both have the original images available to upload (even though Flickr forces you to limit the file size to 10MB, so you’ll have to scale down the photo), and both have a “community sharing” function to share photos with other people with seemingly good privacy controls.

What I think I’ll be doing now is uploading new photos directly to Flickr so that they’ll be available to other things I might use like Pixamo, and QO-OP, etc.

For pure archival of files, I’ve found Humyo (www.humyo.com).  You can have a free account with 25GB of storage for photos, music, and videos plus an additional 5GB for non-media types of files (like documents).  Very nifty, and its brand new, so there might be a few glitches here and there while they evolve the service.

This is where my insanity begins.

For years, I have been looking for something… anything… that does the following functions well:

• categorize photos, possibly with sub-categories, allowing a photo to belong to multiple categories
• group photos by date, location, subject, etc. independent of category
• allow a grading system to sort photos by quality
• access to photos via Internet, viewing with all the above features, and reasonable privacy (don’t want personal photos where just anyone can see them unless given permission)

Some of the online photo sharing services seem to cover that, but not really in a “photographer’s archive” sort of way. Flickr, Photobucket, etc. seem to be more of “hobbyists portfolio” type, showcasing a few photos so that friends and family can look at them cheaply.

This might be a job for the Gallery2 software that I already use for my music video collection…

UPDATE: After reading this post, I learned about a few other photo sharing/hosting services, and pixamo.com might be a good fit.