Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
My photo essays have moved! I’ve created a new “permanent” home called Framespotting for my esssays on Substack, and have moved some of my older articles into it. One I’m particularly proud of isa point/counterpoint essay on how to handle the endless bits of contradictory advice you’ll encounter in the photography world. I hope you enjoy, and consider subscribing to Framespotting.
I’m so excited! The editor of Fuji X Passion magazine invited me to write a travelogue with pictures, covering our time in Portugal. It took a week of evenings to put it together, and they did a ton of work on layout, EXIF data, etc. I think it came out nicely.
Well that was fun! A watercolor painter named Tom Vaughan on Mastodon contacted me a bit ago and asked whether it would be OK if he made a painting from one of my photographs (from Pierce Point Rd in Pt. Reyes with Paul Porter last November). I said yes, and this is what he posted in response today. He said in advance that he was an amateur and to not expect too much, but I think it’s lovely. He took some liberties, adding the tree and converting dusk to daylight, but that’s part of what makes it his own.
This image at Flickr.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, we all benefit enormously from open source software. Most web servers and most browser engines are open source. The operating system that powers most internet servers is open source. Critical components of MacOS and Windows are open source. We the People are really good at making free software for each other.
But one thing open source hasn’t been able to do is to own and operate a platform like Twitter or Facebook or Reddit. It’s too expensive, and involves too many difficult challenges, like content moderation and resilience. The concept of federation addresses that gap in the open source world by saying “Rather than having one massive expensive server “instance” that runs everything, what if we could split a service up into thousands, or hundreds of thousands of small server instances that intercommunicate? This approach to service design is called “federation” and has a bunch of advantages:
It’s been a hell of a year, everyone. The pandemic has affected everyone differently, but no one has been untouched by it. My personal therapy through the Quarantimes has been to explore the wonders of the Bay Area with a camera. 2020 was the year I finally made the switch from iPhone to proper cameras (for real this time). I put much of my spare time into learning about lenses, about the power and flexibility of the RAW format, and finally made the jump from Apple Photos to Lightroom. Also spent some of the time messing with editing apps like Snapseed, Tiny Planet, and RNI Aero. On the weekends, on hikes and bike rides, and on morning/evening dog walks, I explored every nook and cranny of this amazing place. I tried to make it a discipline to post one image to Flickr and Instagram in the morning before work, and another after work. Didn’t always succeed, but tried. Here are shots from Point Pinole, Albany Bulb, Berkeley Hills, Mare Island, Pt. Reyes, Guerneville, Alameda, Crab Cove, Tiburon, Morro Bay, and everywhere I landed. If you’re curious, yes, I’m very careful, always masked, almost always alone or well-distanced (I’m safe). Photography has been my therapy, my go-to, my geek-out, and a re-awakening of a long-dormant creative side. For better and for worse, here are some of the images I shot in the first year of the global pandemic. May all humans be vaccinated before we lose another soul. Can’t wait to see you all again.
I’ve gathered up most of the posted images from the first pandemic year in a Flickr album – a few samples embedded here.
One of the “buried treasures” of living in the SF Bay Area is discovering the strange remnants of WWII that still exist in remnant form. One of those I’ve been visiting lately is the Richmond Shipyards – an area spanning several acres of crumbling concrete piers and docs, old-school Mike Mulligan and the Steamshovel-era cranes, rusty tugboats, and the monolithic Art Deco / brutalist General Warehouse.
In their heyday, more warships were produced in these yards than anywhere else in America – as many as three per day (747 total). And the final stop before each ship set out to see was the General Warehouse – a four-story edifice full of ropes and stoves and beds and compasses and clocks and radar screens and everything else a ship needed to support a crew and carry out its mission.
Today, General Warehouse is still standing proud, though its sign has crumbled and there’s no getting inside (though one photographer did a few years ago). Anyway, a few shots from the yards one night last week. Amazing place.
After an amazing hike with Dave at Mount Montara in Pacifica last weekend, headed off to Maverick’s to watch some big-wave surfing (it was flat, despite 6-foot waves farther up the coast!), then stopped at the bizarre Devil’s Slide Bunker on the way back up Hwy 1.
A teenager had figured out a way to climb inside (not obvious!), then up on top. Caught him in mid-air jumping down, before he ventured back in to help his little brother, who was temporarily stuck.
From a distance, I thought it was an abandoned attempt at a modernist home, but found this description in Atlas Obscura later:
“The bunker on Devil’s Peak was originally built during World War II as a triangulation and observing station and was once simply a piece of a much bigger set of buildings and facilities. When in service, a watcher equipped with a set of binoculars would keep watch out at sea and if they spotted any enemy ships they simply radioed a massive six-inch gun not far away which would sink them before they got close. Unfortunately, with the advent of more modern missile defenses the station became obsolete and the entire site was abandoned in 1949, leaving an empty bunker atop Devil’s Slide.â€
Amazing piece of history, and a local wonder.
Update: This post has been substantially updated and re-posted as the Medium article “Flickr Is No Ghost Town” – please read that version instead of this one!
Original post:
People like to say flip things like “Flickr is dead†just like they’ve been saying “Apple is dead†for decades. It’s true that Flickr’s heyday has passed, but there are still hundreds of thousands (millions?) of photographers posting there daily. Interaction is lively, there’s an interest group for every photography niche you can think of, and users are really supportive with the compliments and CC. Flickr still has upwards of 75 million accounts, and can receive up to 25 million photo uploads on a good day (stats).
Flickr dominated the online photo sharing scene for around 15 years. But as Facebook’s popularity rose, FB became the world’s dominant photo sharing platform, eclipsing Flickr’s numbers (which were already astounding). After a recent brush with financial ruin, Flickr was purchased by SmugMug, and they’ve been great stewards of the platform so far, with improvements being released on the regular.
Somewhere in there, along came Instagram to soak up much of the remaining photographic juice in the room. Everyone is on it, so you’d be nuts not to use it, right? I use it too.
So why not just use Facebook and Instagram and call it a day? A bunch of reasons!:
On Flickr, your images are available in super high resolution, with a wide variety of copyright options. There’s a huge number of interest groups, and detailed statistics. The challenge of getting an image into “Explore†(Flickr’s homepage featuring the best images on the service, changing constantly) is ongoing, and so rewarding when it happens. Discovering great new photographers daily is inspirational. Flickr is photo paradise to this day, IMHO.
All of which makes me wonder why so many photographers I meet aren’t using it. It seems like the best of all the options (yes there are other options, but they don’t compete with Flickr IMO, except maybe SmugMug (I’m curious about the features and community there too, honestly – promising).
Are you on Flickr? And if not, why not?
FWIW #1: I usually post the same image to Instagram and Flickr at the same time, but only share the URL of the Flickr version, since it’s high-res. I only post images on Facebook occasionally, and just for the audience of my friends, rather than for the photo community.
FWIW #2: No I’m not a Flickr employee! Just a long-time user who never fell out of love.
FWIW #3: I’m shacker on Flickr and would love to follow you if you’re there too.
Almost no one posts images straight out of the camera (SOOC) — there’s always work to do, improvements to be made. But how far can you go before crossing an ethical line?
As our photo editing tools grow artificial intelligence, and tricks that used to be difficult become progressively easier to pull off, photography forums continue to erupt in debates over what kinds of edits cross the line from acceptable and unacceptable? How far can you before an image becomes untrue? I just posted this in the /photography subreddit, on a topic titled “No It’s Not Cheating“:
There is only one question that matters as far as I’m concerned (but several ways to ask it): Is this an honest photograph? And by that I mean “Is the viewer being intentionally deceived?
If you convert to b/w, the viewer is not deceived. If you add a frame the viewer is not deceived. If you focus stack, the viewer is not deceived. If you modify saturation or contrast, the viewer is not deceived.
On the other hand, If you remove a blemish from a human face the viewer IS deceived. If you replace out the sky, the viewer IS deceived. If you change skin tone in such a way as to misrepresent, or “heal†out a passing airplane, the viewer IS deceived.
The difference between acceptable and unacceptable editing is easy when looked at this way. Does this photograph still tell the truth, or does it now tell a lie? Am I attempting to deceive or not? For me, this makes it easy to tell the difference.
I’m shacker on Flickr and Instagram if you want to follow along.
The “doldrums” describes the area around the equator where wind sometimes doesn’t blow for weeks, and sailors get stuck, motionless, for long periods of time. Was just thinking about how being on lockdown is kind of like getting stuck in the doldrums. At least we can still get out to exercise, and we have entertainment, but the motion of life is pretty much on hold and out of our hands. Imagine what it was like to be a sailor stuck in the doldrums at any point in the past millennium, just staring out to sea, making up head games to pass the time. We’ve got it good. Maybe it’s time to write a new shanty.
Meanwhile I’ve been doing a lot of photography, and a lot of messing with photo tools and apps, just exploring and experimenting. Yesterday I spotted this little bird in a bush while out walking the dog, and later did this treatment of it in BeCasso.
