My friend Dale Allyn has posted a new image up on flickr and it’s fantastic.
Dale and I go way back. I knew him in the ’70s when we both lived in Eugene, Oregon and were both semi-serious rock climbers. I was in college, he was in high school but among climbers it didn’t matter.
When I moved from Oregon to Connecticut in 1986 I lost track of many of my Eugene friends but as the internet and web happened and as I had an early presence online, Dale found me. He may have found me via the linked to climbing story, I don’t remember but we’ve been connected online ever since and I consider Dale a close friend who I’ve only seen in the flesh once since those early Eugene days.
Besides email and chat we’ve used flickr to stay connected, both with heavy involvement for many years as admins in the Canon DSLR Group and other hangouts on flickr.
This is an aspect of flickr that people who are quick to quit over the new changes don’t appreciate: flickr is a huge online community where at least some people have made meaningful connections. I’m glad to see Dale back on flickr and who knows, maybe we’ll start up a new flickr group and get reinvigorated.
One thing that many who are reacting to the big changes in flickr haven’t taken into account is this: flickr is a community, not just a place to post images. Over many years I’ve made hundreds of friends all over the world on flickr, have been involved in some great groups and group discussions, and have used flickr as both a place to host my images but also as a place to hang out.
Flickr was the first large scale social community on the web although not everyone on flickr used or uses it that way, many people do.
What I’ve realized in the past day is that changing the wallpaper does not break those connections, and because I interact with flickr via Reeder, an RSS feed reader, I don’t have to navigate the black mess that is the current user interface as much as many do.
For me, the biggest violation that there is no excuse for is that they did this overnight with no notice to us. Had they rolled this out incrementally and gotten feedback on each change the entire fiasco would have been avoided. For me, the process (the way they did it) was worse than the product (what they ended up with) which is bad enough.
The site is a mess visually but we have to admit that at least some of this is a reaction to a big change in something we used daily for many years. I’m not defending the look or the way they’ve changed it but most of the old functionality is there if we dig for it. It’s not right yet but it’s a web site and it can be changed and I’m pretty sure it will be changed.
The other concern for me was what looked like a price increase for what used to be called “pro” users but in fact, that has changed and our pro accounts will be grandfathered in and the price has actually gone down. Check out your account page if you’re a paid account holder, it’s been changing in the past 24 hours as they’ve listened to feedback.
My pro account was due to expire in May, 2014 and I just bought another two years (for $44.95). They won’t charge my card until May of 2014.
I don’t like the look of the site as it is but I do like flickr and I have a community of friends on it that I’ve known for close to ten years and images embedded here from my flickr account and from other people’s. That’s meaningful to me and I don’t want to give that up.
This is a brilliant short documentary on the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama. What an incredible eye for both detail and emotion he has and that small (Ricoh) camera makes it easy to walk around cities taking pictures.
Watching this makes me want to go back to Japan (we were in Kyoto and Nara twelve years ago). What a place.
Wow, lots of other videos about him up on Vimeo: Daido Moriyama.
This is a great video. Ezra is not only incredibly frank and honest about his circuitous path to bike building but as you’ll see by exploring his site, Fast Boy Cycles, he’s one heck of a creative person who knows how to live his life with grace.
It looks like he’s taken his account off of flickr, maybe as a reaction to yesterday’s fiasco of a redesign change so the images on his site are dead at the moment. He’s an excellent photographer, hopeful you’ll find enough of his images that aren’t embedded from flickr to get a sense of his skill and eye. Note: his flickr account is back up: Ezra Caldwell.
Check out his cooking videos for a taste of his style. It seems everything Ezra does he does with art and grace, I’m both inspired and humbled by people who live this kind of full life.
As you’ll learn toward the end of the video above, Ezra has cancer and keeps a blog about it: teaching cancer to cry.
The photo sharing site and service that I use, flickr has made a major update to its service and site.
I’ve been using flickr since 2004 and I’ve stuck with it even after Yahoo bought it and let it dwindle. Certainly the amount of time I’ve spent with the old user interface makes it difficult to look at any change with an open mind so I’ll reserve ultimate judgement for a while. But, Yahoo is attempting to bring itself and it’s popular properties back from the dead and this flickr update is part of that process (as is the buying of blogging platform tumblr.
My quick take: Too much information, too tightly packed. Here’s what my home screen looks like now: Richard-.
I hope over time they fold in some customization tools that make it possible to display a bit less information on one’s landing page. We’ll see.
Flickr member weemeeuw took this great landscape image in Zillebeke, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium with his Fuji X100s. The light is wonderful and the image is perfectly composed and exposed. Great work.
Flickr member LBeckons took this great image of the Marina City condos in Chicago on the Chicago River with his Olympus OM-D. I’ve always loved these buildings: bottom part parking, upper part condos. Very futuristic looking and right on the river.
Washington, Connecticut. This patch of moss (polytrichaceae family) is on a hillside in Steep Rock’s Macricostas Preserve which is right down the road from my house.
I visited this patch of moss a few weeks ago and revisited it with the intention of getting a few more shots in focus. I’m very happy with the results.
Flickr member mingthein shot this excellent architectural shot in San Francisco with his Sony RX100. Fantastic framing and processing make this a fascinating image.
Flickr user Homemade has captured a great shot of morning sun rays in Ridgefield, Connecticut (right down the road from me it seems) using his Sony RX100.
Salisbury, Connecticut. Hiking up to Bear Mountain across Paradise Lane we always stop at this little pool of water to check for interesting reflections. Today there was a nice group of frog egg clusters. Looks like they beamed down from another planet.
Bert Stephani does a video review of the Fuji X100s in Brussels. A very nice discussion and tour through the city shooting two women in various settings. His use of a small corded off-camera flash is brilliant.
Descanso Gardens, La Cañada Flintridge, California. Trying the Sony RX1 out on a group of flowers with a slight breeze. It was cool out so the poppies were closed up but the colors were vivid and there were plenty of unopened buds to shoot. It was tough to get into a group of flowers like this with the RX1′s 35mm lens to get closeups and I longed for my longer macro lenses of years past.
Messing with some wide open, shallow depth of field shots with the RX1. It’s going to take some time to learn to use a 35mm lens to do these kinds of images, I’m used to shooting them at 100mm or longer.
My mother enjoyed these gardens quite a bit. The problem is there are few paved paths and pushing a wheelchair on dirt can be tiring. And, the day we were there it was cool so my mother kept nagging me to hurry up and take my ####ing pictures because she was freezing.
I posted about The Vivian Maier Photography Project before but this video is the trailer for the documentary on her that’s coming out this year. It looks fantastic.
Flickr member Mel Stephens took this great landscape shot on the northern shore of Scotland with his Olympus OMD. It’s a stitched panorama made up of multiple overlapping shots.
