RedBubble Find: Sidewalk Love by Michael Douglass

Your immediate thought might be that the space should be in front of the woman, not behind. But look closer at the window...

Sidewalk Love by Michael Douglass.

Four Views of Belton House

This afternoon we went for a wander around the grounds of Belton House. As always, I had my camera with me:

Books

Last night I was messing about with books and my camera:

RedBubble Find: Ullswater Shoreline by Mike Finley

Ullswater Shoreline by Mike Finley

CoolIris with RedBubble's Featured Works

Having started playing with CoolIris yesterday and having had some success, and with the thread that started this all off in the first place in mind, I thought it might be fun to mock up how things might look if RedBubble provided a feed that CoolIris could use.

So, I fired up GNU emacs and knocked out a quick and dirty variation on getrbart that created a "Media RSS" feed for the first 10 pages of the featured pages. The result looks like this:

If you have Cooliris installed in your browser you can see what the result looks like by visiting this page and kicking off CoolIris.

Thanks go to Bobbie for helping to test it.

Rutland Water South Shore

The final set of photographs from last week. After spending most of the day messing about on the water we took a drive round to the south shore of Rutland Water and, while I was there, I took a small set of photographs:

South Shore Rocks

South Shore

Tower

CoolIris with www.davep.org

Having previously added CoolIris support to my RedBubble wrapper site I decided to go ahead and add it to my main photography site. Because of the way things work over there it took a little more effort but, now, I've got it working:

For those interested in the technical details: I obviously didn't want to create one honking great RSS feed of every photograph on my site, that'd be far too much data moving around all in one go. Thankfully the advanced developer documentation (note: no direct link to the documentation in question — fancy JS tricks are fun for some things but for documentation? Meh!) points out that a feed file can have next and previous links so I could create a feed for each individual album and they could all point to the previous or next albums.

The nice thing about this is when you're viewing an album and you hit the CoolIris button in your toolbar you're taken to the part of the wall that's displaying those images. Then, as you move about, the wall grows in the direction you're moving in, following those previous and next links.

I'm now toying with the idea of adding a MediaRSS feed generator tool to RBArtMan. Extra (X)HTML hacking would be needed to make it all work on people's own sites but it would mean that most of the grunt work would be done for them. I'm not making any promises, it's all down to available time.

Rutland Watersports

Last Friday, the day after getting back from camping in Norfolk, we all headed out to Rutland Water with some kayaks and spent a large part of the day messing about on the reservoir.

Before I got wet I took some photographs around the shore: Rutland Watersports.

Messing with CoolIris

I've been meaning to have a play with CoolIris (previously known as PicLens) for a while now and this thread over in the RedBubble forums prompted me to have a look (mostly because there was a link to the developer information — how could I resist?).

I had a quick read of the information and managed to quickly add the required feed to my Photography by Dave Pearson site (the one I created a short while back as a way of using my RedBubble art list exporting tool). I installed the extension into my copy of Firefox and right away I had a funky 3D wall of my photography on RedBubble.

Nice.

I then did a little more reading and had a quick play with the "Lite" version of CoolIris. This is more or less a in-browser slideshow tool. That took a little more work (it didn't want to auto-discover the feed so I had to tell it where to look using the feedUrl option) but, soon enough, I had that working too. So far I've tested it in Safari and Opera (on Windows) and it seems to work fine. To see it in action, in a browser that doesn't have the CoolIris software installed, just click on the "Slideshow" option in the menu of my site.

I might have to have a look at adding this sort of feed to my other sites.

Normal for Norfolk

I went camping in Norfolk for a few days last week and, as you'd imagine, I took the cameras along. I've now finished processing the shots and uploading the various albums to my photography site. The different albums are:

• Burnham Deepdale — Where we were camping (Deepdale Farm).
• Burnham Market.
• Hunstanton.
• Brancaster.
• Wells-next-the-Sea.
• Walsingham.
• Old Hunstanton.

CRT Assemblage Redux

Having had a play with the idea a couple or so weeks back I had another play just before I went on holiday:

RedBubble Find: The Raging Stillness #2 by Geoff Coleman

Star trails, Moon trail, aircraft trails, storm... What's not to like?

The Raging Stillness #2 by Geoff Coleman

RedBubble Find: Abstract Sky by Anne Staub

I enjoy photographing the sky so it's no surprise that I love this image:

Abstract Sky by Anne Staub

Iconic Britain - Nikon pull out

According to Amateur Photographer magazine Nikon have pulled out of the Iconic Britain competition I wrote about last week.

You can read statements from Nikon and Microsoft over here.

Rutland Water - 2008-08-03

Yesterday we spent the afternoon at Rutland Water and, while my wife and son went for a short cycle ride, I spent some time wandering around the water's edge with my EOS 400D, PowerShot G9 and Lubitel 166B.

The Lubitel shots (three of them) will obviously be posted a lot later (there's another nine shots to be taken to finish that roll) but I have published the other shots from yesterday.

This is the second trip I've made there (the first was back on 12th April this year) and the weather wasn't that much different. Less rain than the last time, but still very cloudy and windy. I wouldn't mind actually getting down there during a fair day some time.

RedBubble Find: Cayo Blanco by Colin Tobin

Just the scenery alone works for me with this one — the changing layers of colour. But with the person in there too...

Cayo Blanco by Colin Tobin

Iconic Britain

Here's an interesting one from a copyright/licence point of view:

It seems that Microsoft and Nikon have got together to create a competition called Iconic Britain. On the surface it looks like your average online photography competition. But there's a twist: you don't need to be a photographer, you don't need to take any photographs at all.

The idea appears to be that you enter the competition in one of two ways. You can either submit a photograph and stand a chance of winning a Nikon camera, or you can vote on photographs and, each time you vote, stand a chance of winning a Nikon camera.

It's the submission part of the competition that's interesting. The site appears to be encouraging people to submit images they find using Microsoft's Live Search for images. You search for something you think is iconic of Britain, you look at the resulting images, and then you drag one into the submission box and submit it into the competition. When doing so you have to agree to the terms and conditions of the competition. There's an interesting item in there:

Entrants acknowledge that some images generated by Live Search may be subject to the intellectual property rights (including copyright) of a third party. Microsoft does not encourage or condone Entrants submitting images to the Competition that infringe the rights of a third party. In the event Microsoft is notified that an image infringes the intellectual property rights, or any other right, of a third party it shall promptly remove the image from the Competition.

The problem here is that, when you do a search via the site, there's no attribution for the work, no link through to the source of the image, no simple method of knowing if you're abiding by the above rule.

Simply put, the site seems to be designed such that your average user can never truthfully agree to the terms and conditions.

Someone hasn't thought this through.

CRT Assemblage

Me. A television. A camera. An experiment: CRT Assemblage:

RedBubble Find: The Party by John Pitman

It's nice to see a landscape with people in it:

The Party by John Pitman

The 141st Heckington Show

Yesterday I took my cameras to the 141st Heckington Show. This is often said to be the biggest village show in the world (note the careful wording in the banner on their website).

Along with the usual displays of livestock and the normal events you'd expect to see at a village show there was also a display by UK FMX — a motorcycle stunt team. It's the first time I've ever tried to photograph anything like that so it was quite a challenge. As it is, I think I got a handful of reasonable shots.

You can see the full set of photographs from the day over on my main site in the 141st Heckington Show gallery.