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Category Archives: Photography
Happy Birthday, Flickr!
Flickr turned 20 years old last weekend. While it may have lost some of its original lustre in recent years, Flickr was, is, and remains one of the prime sites for amateur and professional photographers alike. My recent photo digitisation project made me rediscover Flickr in a manner akin to meeting an old friend who had recently beaten cancer. Flickr has, meanwhile, returned to its core audience of enthusiasts and professional photographers after it was “saved” from the clueless clutches of corporate greed by a small operation named SmugMug. Continue reading
Posted in Internet, Photography
Tagged backbone, community, flickr, history, internet culture, photo sharing, photos, social media, World Wide Web Heritage Site
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The quality of slide scans
Photo slides had completely disappeared off my radar until early 2008 when my father brought them over — along with a slide scanner he couldn’t figure out how to operate. I knew that someday I would revisit them with my trusty old Epson Perfection 3490 Photo flatbed scanner. What follows are my thoughts and experiences on the matter. Brace for impact! Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged advice, archival, digitization, digitizing old photos, experiences, history, memories, personal, projects, scanning, time
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Panoramio: To boldly go where no Google car has gone before
Panoramio was a geo-located tagging photo sharing site whose goal was to allow Google Earth users to learn more about a given area by viewing the photos that other users had taken at that location. It was sometime around 2008 that I signed up, and Panoramio soon became my new home for (retroactively) geotagged digital photos of mostly Johannesburg (my previous geographic home) as well as any other places we visited. Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged blurmany, cartography, data protection, flickr, geography, Germany, Google, panoramio, privacy, public privacy, South Africa, technophobia, travel
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Photo stitching software
AI-based utilities have no place in my personal photo enhancement toolbox. Their results have been more miss than hit on my digitised snapshots. One set of utilities, however, has managed to generate results that almost border on the magical: Photo stitching software. Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged distortion, manipulation, photo enhancement software, photostitch, software, travel
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Photo restoration through AI? Nope!
Despite the recent incredible developments in artificial intelligence and image generation, I remain steadfast that AI still has no role in the workflow for digitising personal snapshots on prints, slides or negatives. While I obviously made basic edits like cropping, or adjusting brightness, contrast, white balance and colours so that the viewer can actually see what’s going on in a photo, my experiences with AI services (read: face enhancing) have done nothing but confirm a phenomenon that’s already been termed “identity shift”. Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged AI, AI photo enhancement, archival, art, digitization, facial recognition, man-machine, memories, restoration, surveillance
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Current status: Still sorting photos
It’s March 2023, and it’s been about one year since I started digitising my photo collection. What I hadn’t counted on was the amount of time that researching, naming, and sorting of the resultant scans would ultimately take. Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged digitization, history, images, memories, personal, photos, puppies, time
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Photography: What’s the point?
The photo fails as a historic document. It has no journalistic value or artistic merit. It is neither aesthetic nor is there an underlying message. While there is no doubt that it meant something to whoever pressed the shutter at that moment, this information is now, some forty years later, lost. Continue reading
Posted in Photography
Tagged digitization, history, images, memories, nostalgia, personal, philosophy, purpose of meaning
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