Why is this image so Interesting?

Old Isuzu Truck in Thonburi

Originally uploaded by Ian Fuller

I don’t understand Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ metric.
According to Flickr this is the most interesting of the 200 photos in my photostream. Yet it’s been viewed less than 20 times, is nobody’s favourite and hasn’t been commented upon.

I sense a bug.

My Flickr Ration is All Used

I have uploaded my limit of photos to both my Flickr accounts: Ian Fuller & GB-in-TH. Fortunately the counter resets tonight so I can upload more tomorrow. I am too ‘kee-niaw’ (tight fisted, Cheap Charlie) to buy a subscription!

Actually, I had a subscription for many years but I let it lapse as part of my ‘moving to Thailand’ economy drive. I used to use it as a backup medium and uploaded every photo I took without much effort to keyword them, or add them to groups.

Now with a photostream limit of 200 photos and a 100MB/month upload limit I am far more selective. I try to ensure that each image is better than my average shot or of something (I think is) interesting. I keyword each image, carefully select the groups I post it to and geocode all of them.

It’s interesting how Flickr has become a bit of an obsession with many people. I spend far too much time selecting and uploading images. But more than occasionally I meet interesting people online that make it worthwhile.

It’s probably true that no matter how obscure your interest you can find a group about it on Flickr. That of course leads to other photographers with a similar interest.

For some reason, despite some superior features and the Google brand, Google’s Picasa Web Albums have not achieved anything like the same scope or community. Maybe I’ll write more about my ideas on that in a separate blog post.

Cooliris

Cooliris | Discover More.

I discovered Cooliris via a note on dpreview.com – at  http://www.dpreview.com/news/0906/09063001cooliris.asp.

I downloaded it for the first time and enjoyed using it with Flickr. Even though my internet connection in Thailand isn’t that fast I was able to look at many Flikr images very quickly. It seems to be a good idea to give it some time to settle down by caching a load of images. Then you can move randomly around a 3D effect “wall” of images very quickly.

It is a add-on for Firefox and probably other browsers.

Flickr’s normal web interface is slow and clunky that I rarely look beyond the first few pages of images in a group. I suspect they make it like that to limit the load on their servers. If they made it too easy to navigate people would use it more – so it is a compromise.

You can also use it to browse images on other sites and on your computer. The latter isn’t much use to me. Why? Because of course it views the original images as I imported them to Lightroom. All my editing improvements are in the Lightroom database. Cooliris also does not display DNG or RAW files.

I am sure a Cooliris Lightroom addin would be a great success.

One thing I don’t understand – how do they monetize (make money on) this tool? It’s clearly the result of a lot of work from some very clever people. They don’t even show me ads. The economics of the web still mystify me.

If you try it, please post here and let me know what you think.

My First Lightroom Crash

I was uploading some images to Picasa. Lightroom crashed when I pressed the Export button in Library View. There wasn’t an error message, the window closed and the process terminated.

My heart sank. but when I restarted everything appeared to be fine. We’ll see.

I backed up the database with the option set to verify the database integrity. that didn’t produce any errors. But of course it’s impossible to prove there is nothing wrong with the database. I wish that process would produce a report so I can see what it has checked. I may not understand it but I’d feel better.

Maybe I’ll be testing database recovery from the XMP information in the image files soon.

My database is 605MB and catalogs 29,192 images. I hope that is not considered big and I am not pushing the envelope of Lightoom scalability.

It’s worrying when a crash happens with no error messages and is not reproducible. When I wrote software we used to joke about random un-reproducible bugs being caused by alpha particles. I wonder what today’s programmers blame.

Austin A40 “Devon” Van in Thonburi, Thailand

Austin Van in Bangkok

Austin A40 “Devon” Van in Thonburi, Thailand

Originally uploaded by Ian Fuller

I was very surprised to see this 50+ year old British van in Thonburi, Bangkok. The badge on the bonnet still proudly says ‘Austin of England’.

I have posted some more images of the van at http://picasaweb.google.com/the.bangkok.photographer/AustinVanInBangkok#

I recall the Southern Electricity Board had vans like this in the late 1950s.

I don’t think the indicators on the wings are original. I am sure the van came equipped with semaphore indicators. My father had a Morris 8 fitted with them when I was a kid. I recall trying to pry it out of its housing and breaking it in my childish curiosity.

Digital Picture Frame

Sony D80 8″ Digital Photoframe – Black: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo.

Over 99% of my photos stay on my computer. I don’t have the wall space or tolerance for high ink prices to print many and display them

A digital photo frame looks ideal. I looked at some in Fortune Mall but I wasn’t impressed with the quality and prices are high in Thailand.

Does anyone have any advice about buying one? Are they really as good as they look?

New Picasa Web Albums

I created a new Picasa Web Albums account: http://picasaweb.google.com/the.bangkok.photographer/

I am using the Google User Name the.bangkok.photographer. Someone already has bkkphotographer!

I will load albums, usually organized by date, of all the photos that I don’t have space for on Flickr. I want Flickr to have the best or most interesting of my photos. But sometimes I take several photos of a subject that may be of interest to a few people.

An example is the lovely old Austin van I saw in Thonburi on Sunday. I posted one image to Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianfuller/3668028745/. But old car nuts may want more images of the details. So I’ll put them on Picasa.

Let me know what you think.

Next Trip to Thonburi …

I will investigate WangWian Yai railway (as in State Railway of Thailand) station and the route to Mahachai. It seems to be written up so much on the web that it will not be “undiscovered by foreigners” for much longer.

For example My Krung Thep กรุงเทพฯ (Bangkok): Off the beaten path: A hidden railway towards the Gulf of Siam and Amphawa Floating Market.

According to the State Railway of Thailand trains leave WongWian Yai as follows:

Leave WongWian Yai     Arrive Mahachai

05.30 -06.23
06.25 -07.27
07.00- 07.58
07.40-08.39
08.35-09.28
09.40-10.36
10.40-11.39
12.15-13.10
13.20-14.15
14.25-15.22
15.25-16.27
16.30-17.26
17.05-18.02
17.35-18.36
18.35-19.30
19.10-20.04
20.10-21.00

Definitely worth a trip at 10B per ticket!

The King Taksin Monument – a monument to a great warrior

The King Taksin Monument – a monument to a great warrior.

The monument is very impressive but it is in the centre of a busy traffic circle. I was not brave enough to cross over to get a close look so I took photos from the circumference.

I used my Canon EOS-30D with its inexpensive 75-300mm lens. It isn’t even the Image Stabilized (IS) version. Still, I was happy with the results after some optimization in Lightroom.

Here is a crop from a larger image I posted to Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianfuller/3668027913/

King Taksin Statue Detail

And here’s a snapshot of the location of the statue from Google Earth.

King Taksin Statue from Google Earth

It’s at lat 13°43’34.68″N, long 100°29’35.14″E and the link for Google Maps is http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=13.7263,100.49309&z=16&t=h&hl=en

I Have Sore Fingers!

Rotate images - inefficiently!

I took about 200 pictures yesterday (Sunday) with my Nikon Coolpix P6000 camera during my trip to Thonburi. I took more with my Canon EOS-30D. I took about 15% of the images in portrait orientation.

I took the subway from Hua Lamphong Station to home at Thailand Cultural Centre. It’s about a 20 minute journey. I spent the whole trip rotating my images correctly.

I know I have mentioned this before, but the software Nikon provide on the camera to do this is very annoying.

1. You can use the wheel control on the top right of the camera or the four-way multi controller on the back to select an image. But you can only move serially through the images. The up/down arrows on the multi controller don’t do anything. I want them to move forward or backward a whole row of images. I think the reason Nikon don’t allow this is ‘user interface consistency’ with another tool on the camera. This is the one that allows you to mark a photo read-only. In this module you use up/down to mark/unmark an image. There is no such command in the Rotate tool – you can only rotate one image at a time. So the user interface designers must have thought it better to disable up/down.
2. Every time I use the tool it positions the screen at the last image I took. So I have to move serially backwards or forwards increasing number of clicks to locate the next image that needs rotating. It could easily remember where I was last and start from there – reducing a lot of scrolling. But no – it wants to make the user work.

Of course it would be far quicker to rotate the photos in Lightroom. But if Nikon provide a tool then I think they should make it as good as possible. Again, this is their top-of-the-line compact.

Best of all is to make it unnecessary by implementing an orientation sensor in the hardware. But I’ve complained about that before.

So I got tired fingers rotating everything. I expect the other passengers on the train thought it was playing a video game. No, it wasn’t that much fun.

Enough carping about the faults of the camera. I was very pleased with the images I obtained on a sunny, not too humid day. I enjoy using the camera and I enjoy being able to see more-or-less exactly where each image was taken using its GPS unit.