Entries tagged 'photography'

It is a little strange to think back on when I used to post here pretty much every day.

Since closing our store, spending a year finding a new job, and now being thoroughly immersed in that job for nine months, I have felt very uprooted from having a particularly healthy routine. Did I ever have a healthy routine? Maybe not, but in any case it has felt particularly unhealthy the last few years. Living in an ongoing, barely-acknowledge pandemic and the collapse of the United States probably isn’t going to feel particularly healthy any time soon, either.

But I am trying, and part of that has been getting out and enjoying the city of Los Angeles.

Every weekend there is a Thai night market in Chinatown (called “DS Night Market” which doesn’t have a website but you can search for their Instagram). They have different entertainment each night, but Sunday is always Karaoke Night. There are some great vendors, the people watching is fantastic, and it is a great excuse for us to walk to and/or from Chinatown.

It is disappointing that Chinatown isn’t getting the investment it could use to become a thriving community again, but the sort of sustained small/mid-scale investment that would be needed just isn’t something that exists any longer. I fear this story from the Los Angeles Times about Yue Wa Market closing is just another heartbreaking example of what is going to keep happening.

(The photo was one I took on the way back from the night market one weekend. The night market itself is a few blocks away from this.)

I visited what was still then East Germany in 1990 as part of the People to People Student Ambassador Program, which is when I took this picture of the ruins of the Frauenkirche Dresden, which had been destroyed during World War II. It has since been rebuilt.

I don’t think it’s in the cards, but it would be interesting to visit Dresden again and see the rebuilt version.

Anyway, this picture caught my eye again as I was looking back at my photo archives and looking at where my life stands.

There are about 1,900 photos in the photo library on this site, but I have almost 25,000 pictures in my iCloud photo library. I need to figure out how to close that gap.

I think mostly what I want to integrate will be many, many more pictures of Wonton.

Until then, enjoy this old picture of a squirrel.

(I also made it so entries with images will use those in the link previews elsewhere. It is another thing that could use refinement, but I am trying to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to pushing things along here.)

I’d call it maybe an alpha release, but a very basic version of my photo library is now up and running. There is one last picture I need to migrate over from my old Flickr presence, but otherwise they should all have made it over. I should look at pulling in the photos from my Instagram account. The real test of things would be to load my iCloud photo library, but that is about 25,000 pictures and I’d certainly have to go through to see what could be public. It would probably be better to figure out how I want to get photos into the library going forward, and then I can back-fill photos from before this year.

Just implementing this has made me think a lot about how my system here is structured, how the data is structured, and how I want to structure it. I am trying to move towards adopting more of the IndieWeb principles and standards.

I decided to stop renewing my subscription with Flickr recently to create some incentive for me to self-host my photos and integrate them more closely here. Before my subscription lapsed, I requested an archive of all of my Flickr data, and now I am finally getting around to working with the data.

When you download your Flickr data it includes JSON files named like photo_50626142.json and JPEG files named like young-mimes_50626142_o.jpg and the name of the JPEG is not in the JSON data.

You can generate it, probably, using the name and ID but I’m not sure what the rules are for turning the name field into the snake-case form.

Except that images without a name have JPEG files named like 17483805680_f57f81feb5_o.jpg. The id is at the beginning, the other bit is just random or something. (Looks like this is the same filename used for the original URL in the JSON.)

The way to go seems to be just matching on the ID embedded in the filename. (That’s what the one other tool I’ve seen that uses the export data does.)

And when working through all of this, I found that I must have not downloaded one of the archive files from Flickr, because I was missing 83 JPEG files. I was able to use the JSON files to rescue them.

Now that I know that I actually have all of the data and all of the images are in a Backblaze B2 bucket fronted by Gumlet, the next step will be loading all of the relevant metadata into a database table and then wiring up some ways to browse the images here.

if you check out the wikipedia page for redman, who is not part of the wu tang clan, you might notice that the picture of him is obviously cropped. who is the person that was cropped out? my wife.

this isn’t the first time that one of my pictures has been snagged for use on wikipedia, but it is the funniest.

i joined the first shootdowntown meet-up today, where a large group of us walked around downtown and took pictures. i did not take very many pictures. it will be interesting to see what everyone else came up with. they are starting to show up in the blogdowntown photo pool.

and this should quiet some of the people who are sick of puppy pictures in my photostream.

stephen friday of angelenic stepped up and took pictures of everything on broadway in downtown los angeles, something i first did in 2005, and eric of blogdowntown did last year. you can read more about this year’s effort, including some side-by-side comparisons of buildings that have been transformed in the last two years.

one of the greatest things about this collaborative effort is that it hasn’t really been collaborative at all. both stephen and eric just stepped up and took pictures when they noticed nobody else had.

sam hall kaplan writes in the downtown news that the streets of the old bank district skid row are not for strolling. while i would take some exception to that (it is much better now than it was several months ago), i know my tolerance for that sort of thing is higher than average. the corner of 5th and main can still be pretty sketchy (particularly because of the persistent drug dealing at the entrance to the rosslyn hotel).

but kaplan and architect wade killefer are going to “map, photograph and document the street's frontage” (or at least killefer’s office will). been there, done that. it’s almost time for me to go out again and take pictures of everything on the same stretches of broadway, spring, and main that i did last year. i had hoped to invest in a wide-angle lens before then, but that doesn’t look likely.

and although the hellman and san fernando are nice, it’s a stretch to call them high-end. i’d save that label for places like metro 417 or the sky lofts.

one of the sights that just blew me away on my trip through eastern europe in summer 1990 was the still-destroyed buildings in dresden. when doing some research to figure out what church was in this picture, i ran across the articles about how the frauenkirche had been rebuilt, and realized the photo above was of the destroyed frauenkirche.

my fiancée celia and i, her brother angel, and some other family members made it back from an extended weekend trip to vancouver.

other than visiting stanley park, where the picture of the daisies comes from, we didn’t do a whole lot of touristy stuff. but we did eat. and eat. and then we ate some more. some of the chinese restaurants we stuffed ourselves at included no. 9 (which had great lemon chicken), spicy szechuan (with great red-bean puff pastry desserts), and northern delicacy (where we first had “little dragons,” or juicy wonton-ish things). on the non-chinese front, we enjoyed cuban food and people watching at havana on commercial street, jazz and italian food at capone’s in yaletown, tasty treats from tim horton’s, and gelato from la casa gelato — just a few of their 218 flavors.

we had a blast. so much so, that there’s some serious consideration to heading back in about six weeks for some of the celebration of light (or as it used to be called, the “symphony of fire”).

here’s a reasonable shot that includes most of the people who were in my tour group. i’m not sure where exactly this was, or even the date — my notes for the roll just say “fulda / weimar” but neither of those are in the itinerary i still have.

and here’s more evidence of a long-running photographic interest: graffiti. wir hassen nazis, indeed. i’m not sure what the symbol that looks like a circled “b” with an arrow pointing from it means.

when we left washington, d.c., we first went through jfk airport in new york city, where we had to run with our luggage between terminals, and then heathrow, before making it to munich. from munich, we travelled on to nuremburg.

this latest batch of photos from my summer trip in 1990 is from places we went in munich and nuremburg, but my notes are scant enough that i can’t say where in each city these places are, or even which of the cities they are in (or near).

i think the name of the girl in the corner of the frame was rachel. she was one of the other students in my tour group.

way back in the summer of 1990, i participated in the people to people student ambassador program, and spent a month traveling through parts of western and eastern europe. i recently had the negatives from the ten rolls of film i shot on the trip digitized, and i’m going to start putting the highlights online.

the first two days were spent in washington, d.c., where we toured the capitol building and some of the other usual tourist stops. we also met up with some of the other student groups getting ready to head overseas.

as you can see, standing in a rotunda and shooting up isn’t just a new habit of mine.

as a preview to come, here’s the itinerary from the trip:

• june 24-25: washington, d.c.
• june 26-28: munich, west germany
• june 29: nuremberg, west germany
• june 30-july 1: dresden, east germany
• july 2-4: prague, czechoslovakia
• july 5-7: krakow, poland
• july 8-9: lvov, u.s.s.r.
• july 10: debrecen, hungary
• july 11-13: budapest, hungary (homestay)
• july 14-15: budapest, hungary (hotel)
• july 16-17: balaton, hungary
• july 18-21: vienna, austria (homestay)
• july 22-23: vienna, austria (hotel)
• july 24: return home

of the seven countries (besides the united states), four of them no longer exist as they did back then — east and west germany have unified, czechoslovakia split up into the czech republic and slovakia, and the u.s.s.r. broke up.

i just took a few pictures, and only the three that i’ve tagged were worth sharing.

but i like that i caught david in the act of doing what he seemingly does the most at conferences — taking a picture.

the conference was great, or at least the day of it that i attended was. it’s still on-going, and you can check out planet mysql for ongoing coverage.

we got some flowers at costco last time we were there.

i like how it looks like the tulips are straining to get over into the sunlight.

the landscape pictures for wallpapers blog picked one of my pictures to feature as “wallpaper of the day.” personally, i’ve been using “birds on orange” as my desktop background.

i guess if someone is going to take the time to take one of my pictures and do something cool with it (original picture) i guess i should link back to it. here’s another version.

too bad about the spelling.

while i was making dinner (and tomorrow’s lunch), i decided to take some pictures. the crust is just some dough from my basic bread recipe. the sauce is also homemade, with a very basic recipe (onions, garlic, whole tomatoes from a can, red wine, salt, pepper, and fennel seed). sausage, mushrooms, and green pepper have been my toppings of choice lately. i’ve been thinking i should probably sauté the mushrooms, but i’ve just been adding them raw so far.

i was out of sauce, which means i had to make some. which means i had to go across the street to get canned tomatoes. but which also means i had to crack open a bottle of wine. woohoo!

the lights for whatever shoot is happening down on fourth street also lit up the foreground buildings for a shot of the skyline, which i thought was sort of interesting. the pictures aren’t as good as the view, though.

but i have suffered for my art, sort of — my phone rang when i was taking pictures, and when i got up to get it, i smashed my nose on a table. and then got promptly hung up on when i answered. kicked when i’m down.

“your camera does not matter” by ken rockwell is a good rant about equipment fetishism in photography. i’ve been spending some money on equipment, but i try do not think it will make me take better shots, just different kinds of shots. this amur tiger shot wouldn’t have been possible without my 75-300mm zoom lens. i ordered a 50mm f/1.8 lens because it is cheap, should let me take pictures in lower-light conditions, and it has a fixed focal length that will force me to take pictures in a different way.

the 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 is on my wish list, but i don’t expect to get it for a while. i think it will be useful for my broadway/main/spring pictures, where i can’t get as much of the buildings i’d like because there’s only so far back on the sidewalk i can get.

it seems like every christmas, i either get too many calendars or none at all. this was a none at all year, so i decided to make my own 2006 calendar. because i made it using lulu, it was easy to make it so anyone else can buy it for $15.

the pictures i chose are a mix of shots from minnesota and los angeles. i’m already coming up with ideas for more focused calendars for 2007.

i get about three bucks per calendar — and leverage to claim camera equipment as a business expense.

i guess if i am going to say that getting a new camera was one of the best things of this year, i should share why. so here is a set of my favorite pictures from this year.

my absolute favorite is “birds on orange,” even if more people have marked the similar “birds at dawn” as their favorite.

this picture of the fountain at the city national plaza is one that i think helped spark my interest in taking photos again.

there’s something about orange.

i wanted to take a self-portrait before i shaved. i took a break from shaving over thanksgiving and kept that up until now. but there were a couple of days when i gave the beard a trim (including yesterday).

self portraits are annoying to shoot. lots of aiming the camera into empty space, taking the picture, checking the image (thank god for digital), and repeating. i took thirty-four of them, and ended up liking the second one i took the most. i had my eyes closed on the first.

three best things about the last year: getting my camera, meeting shannon, and meeting celia.

honorable mention would go to selling blo.gs. (but after six months, it means the most to me as the catalyst for getting the camera.)

worst thing about the last year: the intense dissatisfaction.

i’m done pawing through my photos, and uploaded the cream of the crop (and more).

i created three photo sets: minnesota zoo, december 2005 (check out the bottlenose dolphin, mid-leap), squirrels in the backyard, and minnehaha falls, cowles conservatory, and walker sculpture garden.

there’s also a few pictures not in the photo sets. you can see all of them by starting with the frozen fountain and hitting next.

there’s a bird feeder (supposedly squirrel-proof) hanging right outside the back window of my family’s house in minnesota.

i took 253 pictures over the last week. or at least, i had saved 253 on the camera — i did delete some as i took them.

a few dozen of those are of the squirrels in the backyard. i didn’t manage to catch one in the act of circumventing the squirrel-proof hood, but i have a few more good ones of squirrels in different contortions on the bird feeder.

i’ll finish sorting through the photos and uploading the best over the next couple of days.

253 photos taken, almost 2000 pages read, four movies watched, lots of food eaten, and a bunch of card games played. it was a good week.

unlike the last one, this photo is not retouched or enhanced in any way. sometimes life doesn’t need an “enhance” button.

i got lucky this morning — i noticed dawn was breaking, popped open my window to see what i could capture, spotted these birds circling over little tokyo, and managed to grab a few awesome shots of them. here’s another of the birds against the orange sky, and one with a little bit of little tokyo visible. finally, a shot of dawn over little tokyo and city hall at dawn.

i leave for minnesota (late) tonight, so when i get back next week i should have some pictures that aren’t taken from my usual window perch. if i don’t freeze to death taking them.

the “enhance” button on iphoto can really take you by surprise sometimes. here’s the original shot before being cropped and “enhanced.”

life needs an “enhance” button.

the pictures are great, but i really just loved the title on this new york times article about a book of photography from a relatively unknown new york photographer.

laist used on of my photos on a recent entry, which was kind of strange. i thought the picture looked very familiar, and then saw the shout-out at the bottom of the entry and it made sense. here’s the original.

and to be clear, there’s no problem at all that they used the picture like this. all my pictures on flickr are tagged with the creative commons attribution license, and that’s only because there’s no “public domain” option in the flickr licensing widget.

here’s a little more fun with my new zoom lens, tripod, and the nearly-full moon.

the image processing of the human eye and brain is pretty impressive when you compare it to how much fiddling you have to do just to get a simple static picture like this from a sophistimicated digital camera.

but i can’t upload what my eyes and brain see to flickr.

because i know you’ve been itching to buy prints of my photos, i’ve gone ahead and enabled the print-ordering feature for everyone. (you have to sign up as a flickr user first, i believe.)

this is the front half or so of the people who were marching along. one of the people in the back had a sign that said “you are standing on indian land.” or something to that effect.

it pays to have a camera around when you hear drumming outside your window.

i need to do some research on a telephoto/zoom lens. this one is only $4000.

okay, that’s absurd. this one is only $1200.

maybe that’s still absurd. this one is only $160.

but maybe this lens would just make more sense as a new general-purpose lens. $430.

i put my minolta dimage z-1 up for sale on amazon. $125. sold.

if you have (or can get your hands on) those cool red/blue 3d glasses, you can enjoy the stereo photography at ari3d.com. it includes shots of things in and around los angeles, like library tower and the new caltrans building.

raw photos from the san diego zoo.