imran*

Category: Photography

  • It’s like a photo, but it moves!

    Here’s my first Flickr video – from a visit to Boston in 2002 🙂

    There’s been a lotta whining and grousing about the launch of video for Flickr Pro users today, with criticism largely polarising around the 90-second limit or elitist fears of a YouTube-style pollution of the pristine Flickr community. I  these concerns will be largely unfounded…

    • I suspect most users will be recording video ‘before and after’ a photo is taken. Perhaps such a contextualising video to accompanying a Flickr photo will be seen in time as no different than geotagging an image…it’s just extra contexty 🙂
    • Brevity in video is maybe not a bad thing. 140 character limits on Twitter have only enhanced the creativity of that community…
    • Flickr’s full of good and bad photographers. There’s no reason to assume they’ll be any more or less skilled at ‘videography’. The Flickr community is actually very good at collectively surfacing the best contributions and with video only available to Pro users, that’ll act as an additional filter.
    • Flickr’s a little more personal than YouTube- it’s largely photos for friends and family, rather than a wider broadcast. You’re more likely to see cute clips of a friend’s niece – like this – than a trailer for Iron Man.

    I tend to shoot a handful of videos with my point & shoot or phone when I’m taking a whole lotta photos. When I’m looking at the photos of my nephew’s first visit, it makes sense to me that all the related media is contextualised in the same place, by the same application. I don’t wanna create a mashup, I just want to post.

    I think Flickr made the right choices…now I’m just hoping I’ll be able to MMS video from my phone to Flickr real soon 🙂

  • Photobombing

    Photobombing
    A couple weekends ago, I took some visiting family to the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway. Later that day I geotagged my photos of the trip before uploading to Flickr. Whilst exploring other photos taken in the vicinity I came across a charming phenomenon called Photobombing.

    Photobombing is essentially the act of attaching printed photographs to public places and leaving their corresponding geotagged digital equivalents at public web sites such as Flickr. I guess it’s basically the inverse of geotagging, rather than tagging a digital map with digital photos, you tag a physical place with real photos 🙂

    There’s the seed of a great web app here, mashing up something like BookCrossing with Moo…check out the photobombing map, Flickr page and ‘official’ blog.

    —

    This is as close I’ve got to dropping a photobomb…in Vancouver, Spring 2006!

  • Rooftop Terrorism

    RooftopI’m always flattered when someone mistakes me for a terrorist – from people shooting funny looks at me wearing my keffiyah in Winter, to regular interviews with US Customs, Homeland Security and people in airport gasping when they hear Urdu speakers dropping ‘terrorist’ into a conversation with my parents; I can now add NCP cap park attendants to that illustrious gallery of boneheads.

    Last Thursday, after a lunchtime Carbon meeting with Mark and Ian, I tried to get a panoramic photo of the Moon and setting Sun from where I’d parked – a lovely, crisp Autumn view of the developing Leeds skyline. An NCP guy came across and confronted me – ‘can i help you Sir’ – whilst keeping a safe distance. He must’ve assumed my Timbuk2 was (bin?)laden with Semtex…actually, my VAIO’s battery probably was explosive!

    Needless to say I killed him and posted a lighthearted execution video on YouTube…he might report me for my suspicious aerial photography fetish.

    In the last 60 years, Brits held their nerve against invading Germans and the threat of nuclear annihilation. All it takes to spook us now is a Paki-tographer. To paraphrase a quote from Niall Ferguson’s article Empire Falls – when men stop believing, they don’t believe in nothing..they believe in anything.

    Get a grip.

  • Beautiful Serendipity

    YouarebeautifulCrossing the bridge to Granville Island in Vancouver last March, I spotted a cute sticker that read You Are Beautiful and snapped a photo.

    Several months later, a stranger leaves a comment on my photo linking to a photo of themselves at that very location – just a few hours after I was there!

    More photo serendipity – I’m loving these transient Flickr moments 🙂

  • Photo, Mine!

    Staidens_1 Flying back from Paris in June, I managed to shoot some lovely aerial photos of Leeds as we descended into Leeds-Bradford airport. One of the images – took me some time to identify,; eventually user annotations on Google Earth identified it as the St. Aidans opencast mine, flooded a few years ago when the River Aire burst its banks. Today, I received this surprising Flickr message:

    Hi Imran,

    I’ve just found your great aerial photo of St Aidans. I’m a lecturer in Mining and Leeds Uni, and used to work on St Aidan’s 20 years ago. Would you allow me to use your image for lectures at the, and also for a presentation I do for A-level Geology students? Full acknowledgement would be given.It would really help me to finish off the story of St Aidan’s.I look forward to hearing from you.

    Many thanks,

    Toby White
    Leeds University
    Dept. of Mining, Quarry and Mineral Engineering

    Wow! I’ve no idea how Toby managed to find my photo, but I was happy to oblige him. Though I guess, as a former worker at the mine and a lecturer in mining – it’s was probably inevitably serendipitous 🙂

    —

    I can’t wait for the day, Flickr starts to integrate geotagging – it’s just too much of a hassle at the moment. Really, what we need are smarter cameras that can write geotags into the EXIF portion of photos. Cameraphones have the neccessary technology already, but carriers are notoriously protective of their locative data 🙁