Tag: flickr Posts

This entry was written for Blogathon 2008, and in support of the Union Gospel Mission charity. If you’d like to donate to the cause, please visit the blogathon donation page and fill out the form near the middle. You can also follow the blogathon RSS feed for this site by clicking here.

As most of you know, I really enjoy photography. I have been fortunate enough to have received a bit of recognition for some of the shots I’ve done, and even managed to attend the 2008 Canadian Juno Awards as a photographer. I thought I’d post a few of my favourite shots here for those that are new here. Most of these shots make use of a technique called high dynamic range (HDR) photography. This entry was written for Blogathon 2008, and in support of the Union Gospel Mission charity. If you’d like to donate to the cause, please visit the blogathon donation page and fill out the form near the middle. You can also follow the blogathon RSS feed for this site by clicking here.

I read this article this morning, and as a photographer, found it rather surprising. A few weeks ago CityTV used some guy’s photos off of Flickr and used them in an on-air broadcast. The person who took them did talk to someone from CityTV, but did not give them permission to use the photos. Nonetheless, they aired the photos without any sort of attribution. Obviously the person who took them was upset, and appealed to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) about it. After nine months, the CBSC finally ruled that CityTV should be forced to apologize on air: As a result, City must issue a rare on-air statement at least twice, during prime time, over the next ten days. That statement will follow a script set by the CBSC, stating that, in part, the news organization breached the aforementioned Code of Ethics and “included three still photographs of the […]

I accidentally stumbled onto my own feed in Google reader today and noticed some photos I actually didn’t take. For whatever reasons, it seems like feed burner is not filtering the content based on my user account at Flickr, but instead is including public photos tagged “feedburner”, something it never used to do. I checked my settings, and it’s definitely setup to only include photos from my stream, so the problem seems to be on their end. I tried finding a contact email on their site, but all they do is push you to the support forums (I hate this practice by companies nowadays — support your product people). So I might have to disable this feature for now. I’ll link to the feedburner blog and hope someone reads this.

I received an email a while ago from an editor at Wikipedia, asking me if I would mind if they using one of my juno photos on a page. The only catch is that they wanted me to change the license of the photo to allow for commercial use and derivative works. I’m a big fan of Wikipedia — I use it all the time. So I really wanted to help those guys out and let them use my photo. Since I paid for the entire Juno trip myself, I have a hard time actively letting other people make money from my work. As a compromise, I offered to grant Wikipedia a non-revokable license for use of that photo on their site, but wanted to maintain the non-commercial license for people using the photo. They came back and said that wasn’t possible, and that they were worried that if someone […]

So I felt like flexing my brain a bit tonight. Everyone has been going rather stir crazy over Flickr video, so tonight I uploaded a few and played around. Two things I really like: The quality is really good They let you use whatever aspect ratio you want Those are two big wins in my eyes. Anyways, I reverse engineered their RSS feed a bit, and modified the Crossroads plugin to handle video. The end result is now on my website, and you can play with it my clicking on the videos listed in the sidebar. Have fun!

Last night while lying in bed I had the crazy idea to try and make a mosaic out of all the photos from Northern Voice. Tonight, while sitting in front of the TV, I decided to make an attempt at it. So, here is the end result. It’s 40 tiles wide by 40 tiles tall, for a total of 1600 individual images. If you want to see it large, click on the image to download a huge version (approximate 9MB).

So here’s some food for thought for the blogosphere. Lately I’ve been pondering a few of the legal aspects of the Internet, namely what it is we are all allowed to do, and what it is some companies think we shouldn’t be allowed to. Let me give you a use-case to demonstrate what I’m talking about. Photo by Ben Sheldon on Flickr Let’s say I set up a blog, and I’m checking out Flickr and I see a photo I like. Let’s say for a second that the CC license is set in such a way that I can use the photo on my blog. So, I right click on the image, say “copy image address”, and slap it into a blog entry. Now, according to Flickr’s terms of service, I’m not technically allowed to link to any one of their images without providing a hyperlink back to the website. […]

Ok, seriously. The things I would do if I had a few million bucks. I’m amazed to no end how many things about the internet kind of suck. Things that you’d think would be easy to fix, but for whatever reason nobody gets around to fixing them. First company that I need to bash is YouTube. Seriously, Google buys you for 1.6 BILLION dollars and what’s the first thing you do? Stick your head in the sand. How come there aren’t any cool features, or you know, like standard features coming your way. Why do you always screw up the audio/video sync on EVERY video I upload? Another prime example — they STILL only support 4:3 video. More and more cameras coming out support widescreen, and many of the new CCD sizes are actually 3:2, not 4:3. All new camcorders over a few hundred dollars have 16:9 modes in them, […]

In about 30 minutes, the beach photowalk near my place is going to begin. It turned out to be a rather nice day with some ideal light, so hopefully there will be a pile of great shots taken. The challenge always for me is figuring out what lens to bring and what exactly I want to shoot. I haven’t shot film in quite a while, so I loaded some 160VC portrait film in my one camera and put my wide angle on it, and will bring my 70-200mm f/2.8L for doing some portraits near the water. I’m just making some coffee and making sure my cameras are good to go, then heading downstairs to meet people. I’ll post some photos when I get back.