Sleepless in Seattle

Ever since I crossed over the Atlantic and moved to US, my friends back in Europe have always been complaining that I am not pursuing my photographic hobby any further. Well, while in Italy my work routine was pretty different as compared to here and hence I could manage to create time to travel around the continent. While traveling around Europe you often end up taking some great photographs. Thats how I had managed to build a good photo gallery on Flickr. In Seattle, my work does not give me much leeway to exercise my creative cells and my traveling is now reduced to just between home and office.

With a sizeable Indian community in and around Seattle, there are plenty of activities happening on weekends. Cricket is one such activity which is scheduled on my weekends. There are couple of leagues for recreational and professional enthusiasts. So the hiking and climbing I used to do on weekends (in Trento) until last year has now been replaced with cricket. On some occassions I do get a chance to carry my camera around and click some shots of the city. So, all my freundeskreis aus Deutschland und giro di amici dal'Italia, please subscribe to my photo feeds on Flickr.

Yahoo flips Photos for Flickr

Yahoo has decided that it will do away with Yahoo! Photos in favor of Flickr. It has announced that the transition will occur by the fall this year. The erstwhile users will be directed to other sites like PhotoBucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery etc. Yahoo claims that the transition will be smooth with a 'single-click' operation and will occur in a time frame of 3 months. This decision vindicates the rise in Flickr's popularity over the last year. further reading ...

Rebel XT popularity rises yet again

I came across this interesting statistics on Flickr, about the camera used by its users. As is evident, there is a healthy increase in the user community of Canon Rebel XT. The simple user interface of the camera, coupled with the excellent features helps the non-pro users take amazing and interesting snaps quite easily and efficiently. I am just too happy with mine and would recommend it for all those thinking of buying an SLR camera this Christmas. For further details on this statistics here is the link.

Bits n Bytes - GeoTagging snaps

Now you could GeoTag your snaps on Flickr or even use some 3rd party tools for doing it and then upload the map onto your Flickr profile. By Geotagging your snaps it gives more semantic sense to the snaps and would also help other viewers to know the place you have taken it.

Here is a quick explanation on how to do it. And this is how my Flickr map looks like

I remember having read (in some research paper talking about semantics in Image retrieval), that the new generation digital cameras would be having a GPS tracker built into them which would automatically tag the snap you have taken with its geographical coordinates. This geographical data would be encoded along with the other EXIF data of the snap. This simple act would be a big blessing for those researchers developing algorithms for implementing semantics in image retrieval engines/tools. By just knowing the location details of a snap one can extract a fair amount of relevant semantic information from the picture/photo.