JasonMorrison.net

In addition to creating web apps, doing research, and pontificating on usability and social software, I like to wander around and take photos.  Until now I’ve gotten along pretty well with a Nikon CoolPix 5700.  It has a number of features that have turned out to be really, really useful - an 8x optical zoom that makes it easier to take photos from far away, a nice macro mode for very very close shots, and a swiveling LCD display that makes it easier to do overhead shots and candid photos.

But, it has a few limitations that I find myself bumping into again and again.  No vibration reduction, poor performance in low light, slow autofocus, and it definitely does not give you the kind of manual control that traditional SLR film cameras have.  So I’m looking into getting a DSLR.

I definitely want to get a new camera before our kid is born in November.  The only thing stopping me from running out and buying a DSLR is that I don’t want to turn my minor photography hobby into a major production - I like the relatively small size and light weight of my current “prosumer” camera, and the fact that I don’t need to carry 2 or more lenses around with me at all times.

So here’s my project:  to find a combination of camera and lens that gives me a nice balance between control, portability, and versatility.  I’m not as worried about super-high resolution (by the time you hit 5-6 megapixels, you can do pretty much anything you want with the prints), or having really professional gear.  Price is also a big consideration.

My guess is that I’ll have to try to find a small, entry-level DSLR and attach a “walking around” or “vacation” lens - something with a wide range, like 18mm - 200mm.  Another thing I’ll be looking into is automating geotagging - I’m a big fan of photo sharing systems like Flickr and Picasa and it would be great to have faster, more accurate place data on photos.

This definitely calls for a spreadsheet.  I have a tendency to approach major decisions with the application of spreadsheets and/or databases.  But before I start laying out facts and figures, any recommendations?  Suggestions on brand names, specific models, etc. are all welcome.  Please post in the comments below.

Last week I compared some real-life photos with the same scene in Google Earth.  Since I’m a bit of a computer/mapping/photography geek, I couldn’t resist doing a few more.  That actually ended up being a pretty popular post, with thousands of pageviews, which just goes to show I’m not the only combination computer/mapping/photography geek out there.

Here’s a view of San Francisco from Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill.  Follow this link to see larger versions in Flickr.  This one is even better than the two from last week - look how well the streets, buildings, and Golden Gate Bridge match with the photo.

Now I’ll go a little more international.  Here’s a photo from the site of ancient Mycenae in Greece.  This is above the famous Lion Gate looking out tat the hills surrounding the Argolid plain.  See larger versions in Flickr.  The aerial photograph that Google Earth maps to the topography isn’t as detailed as the real life photo, but even the borders of the olive groves line up.

These next two are not as identical as the San Francisco cityscapes, but are still impressive because of how well they evoke the real life scenes without 3-d buildings.

The first is from the Acropolis in Athens, looking out over the surrounding neighborhood.  Larger versions in Flickr.

Here’s another shot from the Acropolis showing the new Acropolis Museum.  Larger versions in Flickr.

If you feel like making some comparisons of your own, please let me know in the comments below - I’d love to see what other people could come up with.

I do a bit of amateur photography.  I’m not very strong technically and I don’t have particularly good equipment, but I enjoy finding interesting angles and compositions.  I’ve been putting up photos on Flickr for a while to share them with friends and the public.  I also have an account on Panoramio with some photos that show up in Google Earth.

No matter the particular photo site used, sharing photos online has been a great experience.  I’ve had a number of encouraging comments on my photos and people have emailed me to ask if they could use a photo in a report for school or a pamphlet for their non-profit.

When I signed up with Flickr I noticed they had options to add Creative Commons licenses to photos by default.  I’m more than happy to let people use my photos for noncommercial purposes, so why didn’t turn on Creative Commons licensing from the start?

Part of it was the number of options available.  Creative Commons licensing allows other people to share your work but it’s not the same thing as releasing the copyright or putting photos in the public domain.  You have some options:  do you want people to be able to make money off your work, or do you just want it available for non-profits, educational, and personal use?  Do you want people to be able to alter and remix your work or just present it as-is?

So I was a bit struck by the paradox of choice and decided to skip ahead and start uploading photos.  In retrospect, that was a mistake.

There’s a great page at the Creative Commons site that explains the options.  I am going to license my photos with an Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc) license.  That license covers my default attitude about my amateur photography - everyone is welcome to use my photos for non-commercial purposes, so long as they give me credit. This is, of course, in addition to fair use rights that people already have.

Another important point:  it doesn’t mean people can’t use it commercially, they just have to contact me and get permission.  Depending on the use, I might put a price on it.  And I can always sell prints or make products myself.

I might even switch over to allow commercial use as well, if I can get over my delusions of being the next Ansel Adams.

The abuse and incessant extension of copyright might not seem like a life-or-death issue, but it’s one of those issues where technology and public policy are inextricably linked.  It’s like the problem of software and business method patents.  There’s a great story by Spider Robinson that illustrates what happens if taken to extremes.

So take a look at the licenses and consider applying the appropriate copyleft to your work.

Earlier I mentioned that I have some photos uploaded to Panoramio. I’ve also played with Flickr off and on, and have recently started uploading some photos there as well. To add to the confusion, I use Picasa to manage photos on my hard drive, and my wife uses iPhoto on her Mac. Picasa has a web albums feature, and I’m sure iPhoto has something similar with a .Mac account.

Why use four different services that overlap each other to such a degree? Picasa and iPhoto both do the important job of managing photos locally, Flickr seems to have the largest community and the most widgets written for it, and Panoramio integrates with Google Earth. Since I want to do all those things, I have to use them all.

There are ways to make them play nice together. You can use a Gmail account to email photos from Picasa to Flickr, and so far it seems to work fairly well. There are a few iPhoto plugins to upload to Flickr and you can use iPhoto to subscribe to Flickr photostreams. Google just bought Panoramio, so I’m sure there will be more integration there soon as well.

Even with all these options, there are some annoyances. Picasa’s keyword tagging is not very useful, it only allows one-word tags. I tried creating multi-word tags with dashes or by enclosing them in quotes, but Picasa ate the special characters. There’s also the complication of managing public photos vs private photos.

Still, it is amazing how well these different websites and programs work together, through the magic of RSS, web API, and plain old email.

If you’d like, you can see my Flickr photos here. You can also see my photos in Panoramio, or just look close enough in Google Earth, since a few of my photos now how up there.

Panoramio is yet another photo sharing site like Flickr. What sets them apart is their integration with Google Earth. As you pan around the globe, photos from Panoramio users will appear in as icons. The also support tagging and some social networking features as any Web2.0 site should.

I’ve uploaded some photos, you can see my page here. I’m a little disappointed that I don’t see an easy way to embed my photostream directly into a blog post.

Even more interestingly, you can see my photos in Google Maps or (if you have it installed) on Google Earth.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

I went ahead and looked up some info on RSS.  It seems pretty interesting-details can be found at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, a common format for content you want others to be able to pick up through their news sites, blogs, and web applications.  It’s a flavor of XML, which allows you to set up different channels and different items within the channel, with some other standard tags like creator and description.  It’s nice because it’s an open format, and it seems to be getting pretty big.  Like so many other things, there’s a set of dueling specifications for it, though some are backwards compatible with each other which is nice.  If more sites keep using it, I’m sure Microsoft will ad their own proprietary version to Office any day now.

One thing that’s interesting about this list is that people use it to announce papers, books, and projects.  For example, there’s “The current status and potential development of online news consumption: A structural approach” by An Nguyen at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_9/nguyen/index.html, which makes the bland assertion that more news web sites are going up and more people are getting their news from the web.  That one was mentioned by someone who had read it; other times the writers themselves make announcements like Robert Berkman, who co-wrote Digital Dilemmas: Ethical Issues for Online Media Professionals.  This book likes kind of interesting, just because I’ve read a few journalism ethics books and they usually don’t have much on online journalism.  There are some important issues which are particularly pressing online as opposed to print–like reader privacy.

In other threads, some people have been discussing a poster called “JOE BIALEK” who seems to have appeared out of nowhere to write huge diatribes.  The name looked familiar to me and some of the other posters confirmed my suspicion-he’s a troll from Usenet and other forums who tries to start fights.  There was an interesting meta-thread about how these sorts of things happen.  Another thread was about the use of mobile phone cameras by reporters.  The first poster talked about how great it could be, but others quickly added there could be ethical concerns.  It might not be a great idea to let your reporter (who’s not a trained news photographer) take insensitive pictures of victims and post them without going through an editor first.

In “Is News a Reflection or a Construction,” the author writes that news is most decidedly a construction created by journalists and not a reflection of reality.

This is a pretty easy argument to follow.  For one thing, there’s news selection.  The author points out that only a sliver of everyday events are covered, so journalists have already abandoned reflection via selection.  Journalists also decide the focus and how the story is told.  The author goes on to list some influences and constraints on the construction process.  Commercialism, which is the first and possibly strongest influence, is a result of market competition between news organizations.  This can cause journalists to abandon professional ideals and seek the story or angle that will grab attention or shock and avoid controversy that might alienate customers.  Other influences listed in the article include story formulas, like the inverted pyramid, which tends to make news coverage similar; resource constraints which may not allow journalists to cover everything they’d like to, organizational forces like ownership patterns which may influence a paper’s ideology or profit-motive; advertisers, who may try to buy off stories critical to them; source use, for example quoting one expert over another; the interest in covering deviance, and sometimes limited geographical focus.  The author argues that although this all has the advantage of simplifying the daunting task of selecting, writing, and editing the news, it also narrows the scope on what is news and how thoroughly things should be covered.

It’s hard not to agree with the author.  Of course reporters and editors construct the news; it wouldn’t take all day to produce a newspaper if they didn’t.  The closest thing to reflection a newspaper does is photography, and even that is construction if you accept selection as a creative act (and photographers do).  The influences the author brings up are valid too, though I think general cultural influences like race, gender and class need to be added to the list.  But what’s the point in just running down a list of influences and proving news is not a reflection?  The does not seem to say this is all good or bad, per se.  Just saying journalism isn’t a magically perfect mirror to all of life and reality in the universe at any given moment is like shooting fish in a barrel.