Happy Birthday, Flickr!

Posted on Sunday, 18. February 2024 by hmvh

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.

It is the OG of photo sharing sites. Flickr managed to survive multiple changes of ownership despite becoming something of a running gag for a period.

It was August 2005 when I signed up, armed with wanderlust and a new 5 megapixel Fujifilm camera. I was ready to share the captured sights and wonders of the world around me.

Plastic flowers for sale at the Oriental Plaza, Johannesburg

Since I knew there’s no way I would compete with far more advanced or prolific photographers and their fancy Canon EOS 300D/Digital Rebel cameras, Flickr’s free tier (restricted to a maximum of 200 photos at the time) was quite adequate for my humble needs. I felt a member of a community and an even larger sense of excitement when one of my photos was selected to appear in a real book. Others turned up on various random sites. When I noticed that many of my photos were of landscapes and cities (ergo: geographically relevant but artistically uninteresting), I moved those over to Panoramio while the best of the best went up on 500px. One must diversify.

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Review: 2023

Posted on Monday, 25. December 2023 by hmvh

So this is Christmas, and what have you done?
Another year over, let’s see what went wrong…

That little pandemic which failed to kill off humankind by forcing everyone home has given way to another disruption: Artificial Intelligence. The age of AI is upon us.

Following the pandemic’s end, many tech behemoths such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook and Amazon laid off thousands of workers as the industry went into a form of recession; it also allowed CES to take place again for the first time since the pandemic, showcasing the usual palette of dystopian products the world doesn’t need.

The Doomsday Clock has been set at 90 seconds to midnight.

Google went “code red” following ChatGPT’s sudden success, prompting founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin back into active work. In December, Google’s Gemini model would be unveiled. Governments the world over scramble to control and regulate the genie before it figures out how to escape from the bottle.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Chinese company Unitree builds a cheap, bipedal humanoid robot that resists simply getting kicked over. In fact, they are reproducing: Robots are starting to build more robots.

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My photo naming conventions

Posted on Friday, 8. December 2023 by hmvh

Anyone who’s laboured through the task of digitising physical photos from multiple (analogue) sources will have been confronted with the issue of how to sort them or, more specifically, what to name the files before introducing them to an existing collection of (digital) images.

Although names may be unique, throwing all files into one directory/folder is dangerously stupid. Worse, still, is the scenario when photos are strewn across several data carriers — whether they be hard drives, optical discs, memory cards, NAS, or the cloud.

A simple internet search reveals a wide choice of photo management/organisation applications and as many top-ten lists and reviews thereof. Any media professional worth his salt will already be using some form of digital asset management software, and anyone calling himself a serious photographer is probably using Adobe Lightroom/Bridge — which consistently score at the top. XnView MP, FastStone and Apple’s Photos are other programs that appear to be the most promising for photo collectors and family historians who need a database to help sort, geotag, share, or caption their stash or to keep track of each photo’s most dominant colour.

For those with the burning desire to have mobile access to their photos and don’t have an issue with cloud services foraging through their personal stuff, then Google Photos, SmugMug/Flickr or 500px would probably meet their requirements (until your stuff is inevitably deleted when yet another cloud evaporates).

If you are comfortable with all this, by all means, jump on the bandwagon to see what happens. [Google Photos] does have some fascinating image search capability. — John C. Dvorak

As for me and my personal collection of family snapshots?

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The quality of slide scans

Posted on Tuesday, 5. December 2023 by hmvh

When we were children, photos existed in two formats: as prints and as slides.

The prints were stored in photo albums curated by my parents, and the slides were tucked away in their original little plastic boxes in a bookshelf. Our collective memories were safe.

Every so often we’d find ourselves gathered around the dining room table and Dad would pull out the slides, insert one into the slide viewer and pass it around while recalling an exciting anecdote or another one of his tall tales.

The 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.

Logik LDScan11 slide scanner

Once we did, the results of those scans were rather scattershot.

We blamed it as much on the scanner as the quality of the slides (which had always been stored properly in a dark and dry place) and some of the original shots (blurry and/or poorly exposed). Nonetheless, we did manage to salvage a few good pictures. My father was generally satisfied with the results and left the scanner as well as the slides in my care because I knew that someday I would revisit them with my trusty old Epson Perfection 3490 Photo flatbed scanner.

That day arrived in early 2020. It was time to digitise all my photos.

By then, my own analogue photo collection consisted of a multitude of prints and Polaroids, the aforementioned 35mm slides as well as the original negatives from my own basic analogue cameras.

Before launching into the project, I made the mistake of looking for inspiration and workflow ideas because, well, it’s not like I’ve never scanned anything before, right?

Advice for the grossly incompetent exists in spades; what follows are my thoughts and experiences on the matter. Brace for impact!

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September and the inner demons of detritus

Posted on Thursday, 30. November 2023 by hmvh

This CD, as I begin to write these words today, is exactly 20 years old.

It’s never been played. It’s a virgin.

What is the Quadrumatrix? A 20-year-old CD-R, that's what!

What happened?

I found the CD during a recent archaeological dig in the basement. It wanted to be found because, just a few days prior, a colleague had given a presentation about techno music, complete with a live demo of his mixing skills. While none of the gear and tools he showcased were entirely unfamiliar to me, it did get me to wax nostalgic about the crudeness of the tools and methods we used to create our own series of mixing projects back in the day – and we didn’t use turntables or CDJs either. We relied on audio files while my colleague mixed tracks live via his Spotify account. He publishes his mixes on YouTube, we distributed ours via CD-R. Does anyone even use those things anymore?

I’m starting to feel old. Things have changed.

This particular CD was the runt of the litter. It’s that extra disc (four, actually) with the cracked case that never found a customer.  It’s that disc I wanted to gift to someone or slip in somewhere when I got rid of a larger batch. I remember the project as clearly as if it was just 20 days ago. How could the last two decades have flown by so quickly? I shudder to realise that in another 20 years’ time I’ll be as old as my father when he died.

And so the CD continues to hang around. Contrary to expectations it still plays.

There are many others like it in the basement: CDs that have never been listened to by me (or anyone else), DVDs of movies I have yet to watch (or see again), and documents to be scanned. There’s material for art ideas that have yet to be realised and tech that’s getting more vintage with each passing year it waits to be rediscovered.

The issue with dated media and technical matter became more palpable when I realised that yet another birthday was looming. Every year is getting shorter, I never seem to find the time (and all those other Floydianisms permeated by the clichéd stench of a mid-life crisis). Why am I even bothering with this stuff? Wake me up when September ends!

I needed to jettison ballast.

There be many monsters hiding in the dungeon.

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Panoramio: To boldly go where no Google car has gone before

Posted on Monday, 4. September 2023 by hmvh

Well, how about that?

No sooner had I removed all my photos from Google Places did Google dispatch their fleet of Street View cars to fill in the missing locations in Germany!

It’s just coincidence, of course.

Although both statements are correct they are completely unrelated.

Still, seeing as this year seems to be revolving around nothing but salaried work and digitising my stash of photos, there is a bit of a story to tell. It begins with Flickr.

Flickr is/was a great place to showcase photographs. I’ve been using it for nearly 20 years. Naturally, many of my photos featured city or rural environments with an emphasis on places or objects within them. Eventually I discovered a site called Panoramio.

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Photo stitching software

Posted on Thursday, 31. August 2023 by hmvh

In my previous post I wrote that 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.

Many modern cameras and smartphones today feature the ability to create panoramic or 360-degree images but it is stitching software that is able to take photos, ideally from the same vantage point, of one or more subjects and almost seamlessly stitch them together into one larger picture.

So long as the focal point and lighting are similar, the results can be quite amazing.

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Photo restoration through AI? Nope!

Posted on Monday, 21. August 2023 by hmvh

In late April I was finally able to declare my photo digitisation project “completed”.

It took me exactly one year to clean up, research, name, and sort over 7,000 scans and photos which ultimately made it into my personal “digital photo album” (if that’s what a stringent directory structure can be called) – and that’s excluding the time spent scanning them in the first place, or culling the ones that didn’t make it.

At this point it would be remiss not to mention AI photo enhancement software.

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“.

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