Pages tagged “photo”
13 Apr 2022
Timeslaps
Inspired by Green Planet, in which some wonderful sped-up plant proliferation is captured, I’ve been working on a little hobby project. My very own “timeslap” (this is Finn’s name for timelapse, and I think it’s a big improvement). I had been looking for an excuse to get a recent Raspberry Pi and try out the HQ camera module. My first idea was to capture the spring emergence of the leaves on the big lime trees outside our house, but a better opportunity presented itself: Mum and Dad have been having their garden “done” over the past few weeks.
18 Jan 2018
The Wind in the Willows
Honoured to be invited for lunch in Trinity Hall today. I got to see the Trinity Hall Prime in the SCR and met some friends for a catch up. On the way over Garret Hostel Bridge the evidence of last night’s storm was viscerally obvious. With reference to the title of this blog post (I’m no dendrologist)… this is (was!) a willow tree, right? [Full size image]
14 Nov 2017
Beverage bias
The UK version of Amazon Prime Photos just added a seemingly magic set of features to bring it to parity with the US version. My digitised photos - or at least, a private cloud-based copy of them - have been lodged there for a while, since unlimited (photo) storage is an included benefit of the aforementioned subscription service. The new features could loosely be called “AI” - in that Amazon’s computing power has churned over my pixel collection and applied a bit of machine learning: face recognition, object recognition and geolocation deduction.
19 May 2016
Mozz family metadata
I’ve written before about the lengths I go to to keep photos safe. I don’t miss the ceremony of dragging out a physical album, ostentatiously blowing the dust off and crackling through the pages. Not for me - gathering round an iPad or a screen is just as good if you want to make an occasion of it. My entire photo collection is over 13,000 photos at the moment, growing rapidly thanks to Iris and Finn.04 Mar 2015
Social media is broken
How is it that something like this can happen and I don’t find out about it until the day after? Come on Facebook, Twitter - you let me down there. 24+ hours?! Weasel photographed riding on a woodpecker’s back - the headline says it all.
15 Sep 2014
A utility for photo triage
You know when you’ve shot a grillion photos and you just want to keep the good ones? Here’s a small utility I’ve written to make this easy and quick. It’s for geeks, since it involves the dreaded command line to begin with. Change into a directory full of photos and run a single command triage. Open a web browser and point it to your computer (works nicely from iPad, allowing you to sit on the sofa flipping through photos.
11 May 2014
Digitising family albums
A collection of learnings and recommendations derived from helping my family to digitise old photo albums. In the end, our family albums amounted to about 2,500 photos across 15 or so albums (that’s not counting the photos in shoeboxes). I think my mum and dad had been pretty organised and disciplined about putting their favourites into albums. It was a bit of a wrench ripping the photos out, but I persuaded them to go for it because the prints were degenerating, fading and, well, they’ve been at the bottom of a drawer for quite a while.
01 Feb 2014
DisembArqing
A long post summarising why I’ve fallen out of love with Arq backup, and some noodlings on the longevity of bits. Being currently engaged in the digitisation of all my Mum and Dad’s precious photo albums, and relatively recently having become a father myself, I’ve been thinking about backups. A dull topic, admittedly, but my personal photos and videos aren’t like my music collection or, if I’m honest, my work files.
23 Jan 2014
North Norfolk Digital
A great day out today with Norfolk Birding. Standing by the marshes, listening to the geese flying overhead and admiring the colossal skies, you can forget the fact that your feet feel like blocks of ice. Having Chris Mills on hand to help you realise that you’ve seen exactly five different types of geese, fulmars, red-throated divers, scoters, five or six hen harriers and countless other birds from a multitude of species made it even better.
08 Jan 2014
Undigitisability
Over Christmas, I leaned on my parents to let me dig out their photo albums, so that the photos could be removed and sent off for scanning (before being put back, of course). I plan to write up some thoughts and experiences from that process soon. Sending off precious photos just to get them back with a CD isn’t too expensive, especially if you value your own time and the expertise of others; yes, there will be hassle and fiddliness, but it’s worth it, because non-digital photos are irreplaceable.
17 Jun 2013
Two more metaphotos for my collection
I’ve mentioned my liking for metaphotos before. Now, with the hugest of thanks to photographer extraordianaire, Quentin, Sarah and I have a great set of photos of wee baby Iris. Equalling Iris’s toy collection in size and quantity but probably surpassing it in terms of expense, the contents of Quentin’s photographic kit bag were put to deft and skilful use, and the results are brilliant. Grannies/grandmas/granddads reading this: we are deliberately witholding the full set, but don’t worry, just be patient!
17 Jun 2013
j = 100i
Yesterday Iris passed an interesting milestone with one of her parents' parents. Grandma was (near enough) exactly 100 times Iris’s age at the time of this specially arranged video call. By the magic of maths, although her grandparents' ages span a few years, she will pass the equivalent milestone with all of them in the space of a week. I hope to compile a full gallery - technology permitting. Since it fits so nicely, and because her “turn” came first, I’ve decided to remember this moment in Iris’s life as… a Janniversary.
17 Dec 2012