Thanks, gfurry!

All the photographs are uploaded to Flickr and create a living documentary of camera’s travels.

In Ami’s own words:

This Friday I’m going to hand the camera to my friend Y. That’s where the T7’s unusual journey will begin. Y, who’ll be the camera’s new custodian, is an amateur photographer among other things. On Sunday he’ll take his own picture with the camera, along with a clip from that day’s newspaper. He’ll upload the picture to Flickr. It doesn’t matter where, provided that he does one thing: upload all images under one tag: “katze-blog”. That way, anyone who wants to see the pictures can key “katze-blog” in Flickr’s search engine and join the photo journey. That’s all.

Photo journey? Exactly so. Y isn’t going to keep that amazing camera. Instead, he’ll hand it on with the box (and this text) to a certain friend. Now the story starts over. Whoever gets the camera can keep it for a week. On Friday they have to pass it on. But before they do that, they’ll upload to Flickr (katze-blog) at least one picture of themselves with a newspaper and a date, and several others – all of them taken by this little naughty camera. They should not forget, of course, to put them under the appropriate tag so that we can all see it.

And on Friday they’ll hand this little treasure to a new user.

Ami’s post announcing the Nomadic Camera Project can be found here.

I was very fortunate to be the third one in the chain to get the Nomadic Camera – after my friends Yaniv Golan and Amit Knaani.

You can see the Nomadic Camera photos I took so far on Flickr and on Flickriver. All project photos are added to the Nomadic Cam group pool that also has its own Flickriver view.

I’m really looking forward to following the Nomadic Camera travels – first here in Israel and then, hopefully, all over the world.

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Now playing: Bob Dylan – Like A Rolling Stone
via FoxyTunes

I think Flickr has great user interface, but after using it for a while I could think of quite a few things I wanted to add, tweak or just do a bit differently.

Enter Flickriver – my latest personal project. It’s new website that offers a different approach to viewing and exploring Flickr photos. Basically, it encompasses several of my ideas for how Flickr viewing experience could be enhanced. As I said, I’ve been thinking about these ideas for a while now, so I used the recent holiday to go ahead and implement some of them using the Flickr API – and this is how Flickriver was born.

Here are a few examples of what Flickriver offers:

• River of photos view – on Flickriver, the photographs are always displayed as one continuous stream – you can view thousands of photos without ever needing to hit ‘next’ and waiting for the next page to load! This is also known as “infinite scroll”. I noticed that with paged interfaces, I’d typically see a page or two of any specific view and then give up and move on to something else. With “river of photos” I can see much more photographs, or even all photographs in a view, quickly and conveniently. For an example, you can see the most interesting photos stream from a couple of days ago
• Large images – I believe that size really matters when you truly want to appreciate the beauty of photography – thumbnails just don’t do justice to many photographs, making it so much easier to miss a great photo. So, all photographs in Flickriver streams are always displayed in large size.
• Black background – I believe that most photographs just look much better on black. I think that the photograph (and not the background) has to be the brightest thing on the page – this really makes great photos “pop out” and look even more beautiful.
• User most interesting photos – when I stumble upon a new Flickr user, the only view I get on Flickr is “user’s most recent photographs”. But what if the most recent photographs are not very good, while other, older photographs, are really outstanding? How can I discover these great photographs? I believe that “user’s best photographs” is a very important view for discovering and exploring users. Flickriver adds “user’s most interesting photos” view, allowing you to quickly see user’s best work. Check out my most interesting photos for an example.
• Photos of user’s contacts – this is an additional Flickriver view not available on Flickr. Basically, Flickr can show me what my friends and contacts are posting. But what if I want to see what the friends of my contacts are posting? This additional Flickriver view is a great way to discover new people and photos through other people. For an example, you can see photos from my contacts here.
• Most interesting Pool photos – similarly to user views – Flickr only shows the most recent photos added to any given group pool. Flickriver allows you to also see the most interesting photos in any pool. Here is an example for the 24 hours of Flickr project pool.
• Keyboard navigation – when viewing a Flickriver stream, you can press j/k to go to the next/previous photo. Hitting space also allows quickly jumping to the next photo. So, you can quickly go over many photographs with Flicrkriver just by pressing space and going through the pictures one by one. When you’re using keyboard for navigation, Flickriver adjusts the view so only one photo is visible at any given moment.

These are just a few of the things Flickriver enhances. Beyond that, Flickriver has many additional Flickr photo views – user recent photos, favorites, sets, user and everyone’s photos by tag, everyone’s most interesting and recent photos, group and pool photos and much more. Also, Flickriver follows the Flickr URL structure as much as possible, so you can easily go back and forth between the two.

I added several tools and extras to enhance Flickriver – you get a link creator that allows you to quickly create a link to any Flickriver view and post it on your site and there’s a mini-Flickriver widget that you can embed on your Webpage. There is a bookmarklet and a Greasemonkey script – both allow you to quickly jump from any Flickr page to the corresponding Flickriver view. Finally, there are ‘share’ buttons that allow you to post any Flickriver view to StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg and Facebook.

That’s it for now, I hope you enjoy Flickriver as much as I do

For my final course paper I decided to explore both artistic and scientific aspects of photography. I did quite a bit of research for the paper and learned a lot in the process. Anyway, the paper was lying on my hard disk for years and I thought this might be a good time to share it.

The paper is called “Photography – a new art or yet another scientific achievement“. Here’s an overview of the main topics:

• Part I – History of Photography: Camera Obscura, Reflex Mirror, Optical Glass and Lenses
• Part II – Technology of Photography: Light Sensitive Materials, Daguerreotypes, Roll Film, Color, Digital Photography
• Part III – Photography as Art: Pictorialism and Impressionism, Naturalism, Straight Photography, New Vision of the 20th Century
• Part IV – Photographic Techniques: Stereoscopic Photography, Infrared Photography, Panoramic Photography, Astrophotography, Pinhole Photography

I posted the paper online as browseable HTML and PDF.

Also, I posted it to Scribd – “YouTube for Documents”:

[View full screen]

The title image for the paper and this post is “Milk Drop Coronet” by Harold Edgerton – an electrical engineer who began to take photographs as scientific experiments. That’s science and art for you!

Enjoy!

Next are the photos from my trip to India, Nepal and Thailand in 2000. I have more than 1,200 photographs from that trip, out of which I’ll need to select the best ones and post them to Flickr. The process will probably take quite a lot of time, but I’m excited to be starting it, because it will allow me to re-live this amazing journey.

Here’s a photo from this trip, taken on a busy Delhi street:

JPG Mag is a website, a photo community and a magazine. Unlike Flickr, they encourage uploading only your best work. The great thing is that it’s also a real magazine published 6 times a year which consists entirely of user contributed photos.

Time will tell whether I’ll become involved in the JPG Mag community (Flickr is already a great place for that), but I can definitely see myself making an occasional submission, if I have a nice photo matching one of their themes.

Anyway, I started to post the scanned images to Flickr and my own photo galleries, but during these last several years I just didn’t find the time to post the rest of them, leaving a lot of unpublished material from several very interesting trips.

So, I decided that instead of waiting until I have time to post all the remaining photos (probably never), I’d start to post only a few each day. So, here are the first photos of this batch, from my trip to Italy during April 2001.

Jeff had a simple and elegant suggestion – we need a tool that given a conference or an event tag will show me all the people who posted photos on that event and who are not yet on my contact list. This is a great way of finding new and old friends on Flickr.

Anyway, I had some Flickr API code already open in one of my editors (people who know me know that I never close windows, so if I did some Flickr related stuff sometime since the last reboot, I’ll have it handy ), so… Check out the Flickr Post Event Networking tool.

A few implementation details:

• The images are ordered by interestingess
• You don’t have to login to Flickr – the tool grabs your public contact list
• The results are cached for one hour – so after adding people to your contact list, it might take a while for the page to reflect the new status

Jeff – thanks for a killer idea!

The idea is very simple – I often play with flickr to find out what’s the most interesting image that corresponds to a specific tag – for example: what’s the most interesting image on ‘music’ or ‘love’?

So, I decided to write a small PHP script that given a word will find the most interesting corresponding images on flickr. One little caveat – in order to find the most appropriate images, the script doesn’t just grab the first most interesting ones – out of the most interesting images it finds the ones that have the specified word as one of the first four tags.

The first post in the MIFI series will follow.