« Main | Photography archives

Why does Amazon punish mobile users?

Sitting on my sofa this evening, reading through some tips and tricks for selling photos for use in magazines, calendars, postcards and the like, my Photos That Sell book made a number of references to the Freelance Photographer's Market Handbook which gives details of publishers and publications that are on the lookout for photos to use.

Curious to find out more about the different ways to crack into the freelance photography market, I reached for my iPod touch and tapped out the address for Amazon into its Safari browser. Amazon had detected I was on an iPod (well, it thought it was an iPhone) and gave me a nice mobile interface to work with.

I found the book with ease and added it to my basket. Wondering what the minimum order was for free shipping, I went into their help section to try and find out. It was then that I noticed that they punish people for using their new mobile interface, stating 'All items ordered from your mobile device will be shipped standard shipping, unless you are an Amazon Prime customer.'

Why make it easier for customers to buy products from you but then not give them the shipping option that must have attracted them so more customers over the years? Admittedly, they do give the option to use their full site instead, but it's not as convenient on a mobile device.

In the end I resorted to using the laptop, so Amazon didn't lose the custom, but it would be nice if they'd give the free shipping option as part of their iPhone/iPod beta site.

Posted in Photography at 10:32 PM on Thursday 14 February 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Amazon online shopping photography

Welcome, iPod Touch

Last week I added a new iPod to the family - the iPod Touch. This is not just an iPod in the sense of music, but an iPod in the sense of a truly portable network device with a sexy interface to boot. The iPod is no longer the music player that it was when it was originally released, with music now just playing a much smaller part of the product.

When planning my purchase I was torn between the iPod Touch and the iPhone, the only differentiating factors being the camera and the phone capabilities (and therefore its ubiquitous data connection). At basically the same initial price for both, it didn't make sense for me to go for a mobile phone with an 18 month contract that had a below par camera when I could also go for a free Nokia N95 and its embedded 5 megapixel camera while paying around the same amount of money on a contract. Thanks to my employer I already had a chance to try out Nokia's internet enabled camera and loved its quality and ability to post photos directly to the internet and am looking forward to being able to do that again in the near future.

There's quite a bit of overlap between the iPod Touch and the N95, but the Touch has an interface that's just so much nicer to use than the N95, for mail and web browsing especially. Talking of overlap, at eight gigabytes the device isn't big enough to hold my entire iTunes collection, so I don't think I'll be ditching my 80 gigabyte iPod Classic any time soon.

Despite being very pleased overall with the Touch, there are a few things that I'd really love to see added to the device:

• Media streaming from other iTunes libraries on the network
• Wireless syncing with host computer
• Jabber chat client
• Video plugins for Safari to allow viewing of RealPlayer content (e.g. from the BBC)
• Email search in the Mail app (server-side)

Without a cellular data connection, the wifi on the device is very important for those times you want to access the internet when out and about. There are a number of UK companies and organisations starting to provide free wifi in their premises (e.g. Wetherspoons pubs, McDonalds, local libraries and other places) and in public spaces which is great, and the Cloud has dropped their monthly fees for iPod Touch owners to a price that mirrors what you'd pay for a single hour at most wireless hotspots.

It's also amazing how many other venues have wifi available in them thanks to some unknown third party provider. This is a grey area when it comes to the law though, with wifi theft already being punished under the Communications Act 2003 in a number of cases. I say it's a grey area because there is often no easy way of telling if an open wifi hotspot has been intentionally provided free of charge either by a venue or by someone else actively sharing their connection for passers-by.

Posted in Communications, Miscellaneous, Photography, Systems at 9:57 PM on Sunday 27 January 2008 | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: iPod Apple portable network device

Art Auction for Age Concern Isle of Man

A group of Applied Business students from St. Ninian's High School in the Isle of Man is holding an art auction on 29th January in aid of Age Concern. Over 40 local artists have donated artwork for sale in the auction which will hopefully produce a nice donation to charity as well as a great thing to put on the organisers' CVs.

The organisation of this event significantly trumps my involvement in a Young Enterprise group as part of a similar scheme when I was at school. We managed to make some novelty items and Christmas decorations as well as coming out with a slight profit for members of the group, but nothing quite on the scale of this.

If you're going to be on the Isle of Man next Tuesday, go and put a bid in for a piece of local artwork, perhaps a photo of the Point of Ayre Lighthouse ;)

Posted in Isle of Man, Photography at 6:46 PM on Tuesday 22 January 2008 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Isle of Man art auction photography

Stuttgart Flickr Meetup

On Friday 26th October there is going to be a Flickr meetup here in Stuttgart. We'll be meeting at 6pm in the Calwer Eck pub in downtown Stuttgart. All are welcome to come along, just leave a comment or add yourself to the event on upcoming.org if you're interested.

--

Am Freitag 26. Oktober kommt ein Flickr treffen in Stuttgart. Treffen wir uns um 18h in Calwer Eck. Jeder ist wilkommen! Kommst du auch? Bitte hier Kommentar einlegen oder unter upcoming.org anmelden.

Posted in Photography, Stuttgart at 11:27 AM on Tuesday 16 October 2007 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Stuttgart Flickr Photography Germany

Maps of Stuttgart

Taken at Buechsenstrasse 54, Stuttgart, Baden-Wuerttemberg, 48°46' 45" N, 9°10' 15" E

The state surveying office (Landesvermessungsamt Baden-Wuerttemberg) here in Stuttgart has a display on the outside of their building showing satellite imagery covering the length of the Rhein with a number of examples of maps from the places across the region over time. This old map shows some of the area around the Black Forest, or Schwarzwald, just south of here.

Posted in Geographic, Photography, Stuttgart at 6:51 PM on Sunday 18 February 2007 | Comments (1)
Tags: Stuttgart Maps geo

Flickr adds support for geocoding

The popular photo sharing website Flickr introduced native support for geotagging photos on Monday.

Because of the flexibility of the system, there have been a number of options around for a while that have allowed users to geotag their photos. None of them have been quite as simple as Flickr have just made it though. And it's great to see that the guy that built the first geotagging mashup of Flickr and Google Maps - Rev Dan Catt - was actually the person that Yahoo recruited to build up the geotagging functionality within the site itself.

The new geotagging system is really easy to use, it's functional and it's pretty at the same time. It also has a geotagging API that developers can plug into if they wish.

The thing that surprises me is the lack of support for GeoRSS in their feeds. With all this location information flying around (1.2 million photos geotagged within the first day) it would make sense to include that geodata in the RSS feeds from the site. I'd really like to be able to pull geotagged photos from my Flickr stream into my geoblog and photos section over at geodan.org and have their location information automatically assigned based on the information stored against them in Flickr.

You can also see my map of photos on Flickr.

Posted in Geographic, Photography at 1:11 PM on Thursday 31 August 2006 | Comments (4)
Tags: flickr geo geotagging photography

Where to print photos online in Germany?

When I was putting up some photos in my room recently, I realised that I didn't have prints of many recents photos that I've taken. When I was in the UK I tended to use Photobox for printing my shots (and still do when I need to print shots to send to people), but for me to order from a British company and pay higher postage costs to get it delivered to me in Germany seems crazy, when I can presumably do it all through a German company for less money.

A quick Google search tonight for 'foto drucken' (photo printing) came back with a list of a couple of different sites that looked to be useful: Bildpartner, Pixaco and Foto.com. My problem is that I don't know how reliable any of them are. To me, the look of a site gives me an initial impression of the quality of the service and I don't look favourably on sites like Foto.com that don't look right in my Safari browser.

For reference, I'm going to compare pricing of the different sites below.

Site	7x5" (18x12.5cm)	10x8" (25x20cm)	A4 (30x20cm)	Postage to Germany
Bildpartner	€0.29		€1.29	€2.65
Pixaco	€0.16		€0.58	€2.85
Foto.com	€0.18	€0.50	€0.50	€2.49
Photobox Ireland	€0.29	€2.99	€3.65	€2.50

It seems like I've been paying too much in recent years for printing my photos at Photobox. Out of the others, Foto.com comes top pricewise, but if anybody has experience of any of the companies, please leave a comment to let me know. In the meantime, I should just try sending some photos to be printed at Foto.com and see how well they come out.

Posted in Photography at 12:31 AM on Sunday 19 March 2006 | Comments (2)
Tags: photos photography printing germany

Photography in the world of Web 2.0

In a world where it has become utterly painless to share photos with the world, it has been difficult to justify suffering the time-consuming process of manually processing images, uploading them and then adding them into a database to be proudly presented in the place I've been sharing my photos since 2000.

The photography section of my site started first with just a few of my favourite photos but quickly expanded into a fully fledged, custom-built, gallery system where I could share all of the photos I was taking using both film and - increasingly over the years - digital formats. Putting them into a database allowed more flexibility than hard coding them into pages and simplified the process of sharing them. Unfortunately, I never spent enough time developing the admin interface that runs it all, so it doesn't do anywhere near as much as it could to help me out.

Then, just over a year ago, I tried a photo sharing community out of curiosity. It was getting some great reviews and the community was growing pretty quickly. My usage of Flickr was patchy at first as I experimented and didn't fully see what all the fuss was about. Soon winter started to fade into to spring and I started taking more photos. Tagging the photos with relevant topics and sharing them with groups of like-minded people, strangers started to come in to my corner of Flickr and leave comments as they flicked through my photo book. I was hooked.

Since that point I've added very few new photos to the hundreds on this site, and instead have added over 1,000 photos to my Flickr photo stream.

Hopefully before too long I'll start to pull some of those back into this site, but I'll have to make a decision of either updating my site to talk to Flickr and pull in some photos that way, or completely redesigning the way the galleries work. If I do the latter I'll almost certainly use the Drupal system as a framework to build the new site on top of. That would give me the ability to let people comment on photos, subscribe to latest updates and all sorts of good stuff. Then I'd just need to add the ability to pull in selected photosets from my Flickr account, and I'm set.

Posted in Photography, Site at 10:48 PM on Sunday 26 February 2006 | Comments (1)
Tags: flickr photos photography drupal

Learning about AJAX

In order to improve the interactivity of my photo map, I have been learning about different ways of linking the information that comes from my database of photos and the mapping data which comes from the Google Maps API to what the user is doing.

Using a mixture of technologies that are commonly known as AJAX (or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), I have allowed the list of nearby locations - which shows to the right of the map - to update itself whenever the user moves the map around the screen. It will show a list of 5 places closest to the centre of the map and also the distance they are from the centre.

One next stage of development will be to allow the user to click on one of these name and automatically zoom the map to the right area, along with other features including improving what is actually shown on the map for each place.

Some of these new mapping features will probably require broadband to be able to enjoy them properly because they can be quite data intensive.

Posted in Geographic, Photography, Site, Web at 11:48 PM on Tuesday 5 July 2005 | Comments (1)
Tags: google google maps maps mapping google maps api photos

Dublin photos

The weekend after our last set of exams, I went off to Dublin for a few days to celebrate taking the last exams we'll take in our academia (for now at least - who knows what will happen in the future). We had a great time, enjoying the Guinness and Bulmers Irish cider, and I even managed to find a little time to take some photos of the city.

The weather wasn't the best whilst there so a lot of the nicer photos (outside of the pubs) were taken within about 10 minutes of each other, with a sunset-coloured sky over a relatively calm River Liffey.

You can see some of the photos in my Dublin photo gallery.

Posted in Photography at 1:36 AM on Monday 4 July 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags: dublin photos photography ireland eire

Mapping my photos

Despite the fact that somebody seems to have hacked into my server this evening and deleted all of my photos, I have been working on a way of mapping all of the photos I've uploaded to the website over the past few years.

I had the idea of mapping them a while back but didn't progress further than showing roughly in the world a place is located. Recently, however, online mapping services have improved in leaps and bounds. As part of this, Google has just opened up their system for anyone to add their own data to as well. Tonight, this is what I have begun to do.

Each of the towns and cities in my gallery has been 'geocoded' to a specific location and is now pinpointed on a map of the globe which you can click, drag and zoom to your hearts content.

I am still experimenting with the opportunities here, but features you can expect from the site soon will hopefully include photos in the popup bubbles and maps on each town and city page to show nearest neighbours. Mapping travels would be something I'm interested in trying out as well.

Posted in Geographic, Photography, Site at 2:48 AM on Saturday 2 July 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags: google maps api mapping photos

Centrepoint photos

I was in central London earlier this evening and so took the opportunity to capture some photos as the sun was starting to go down, lighting up the Centre Point building by Tottenham Court Road tube station with a nice warm glow. After taking the first I was almost hit by a bus coming up Oxford Street from behind me - but at least I got a nice photo from it (after altering the lighting on the bus slightly).

Posted in London, Photography at 11:41 PM on Thursday 14 April 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags: centre point photos london bus

Photos from Russell Square, London

My first full day back in London was blessed with sunshine so I decided to take a walk around Bloomsbury - the area around my university - to enjoy the weather and take some photos with my new camera.

I've put seven of the photos into my London photo gallery.

Posted in London, Photography at 5:43 PM on Tuesday 12 April 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags: photos london flowers

Photos of my dogs

A personal blog wouldn't be a real blog if I didn't post some photos of my pets, so over the past few days I've been taking some photos whilst experimenting with my new Canon EOS 300D camera. I have three dogs who live with my family - Lucy, Willow and Buster. They're all lovely but ever so slightly hyperactive. All the time.

Here is a photo of each of them in turn:

The cats may be next, if they'll pose for a photo. Like true cats they enjoy their sleep, and I rarely see them awake!

Posted in Isle of Man, Photography at 12:21 AM on Monday 4 April 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags:

Awaiting my Canon EOS 300D

Last week I decided to upgrade my camera. Having had my trusty Fujifilm S602 Zoom for almost two and a half years, I decided I really wanted the flexibility of a digital SLR camera. I chose to upgrade to a Canon EOS 300D which is a camera that has come highly recommended for a while but is also on offer for an unbelievable price right now. It offers the flexibility I'm after, with the ability to change lenses and upgrade where necessary. I've had the desire to upgrade for a while now but pricing has been an issue - being a student I don't have too much money available, although the bits of web development work I do on the side certainly helps.

I'm looking forward to the camera arriving so that I can experiment with it. I had my heart set on receiving it today but it didn't show up in the post - hopefully tomorrow! This reminds me very much of the time I was waiting eagerly for my Fujifilm camera and it didn't turn up when expected.

Posted in Photography, Web at 11:01 PM on Thursday 31 March 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags:

Random photos added to side bar

I have just added a number of random photos from my galleries to the right hand side of each page of the blog. With me having over 700 photos in my photo galleries I thought I might as well make better use of them and show them here in the blog as well. Photos in the side bar of peoples' blogs is quite popular in the 'blogosphere', with Flickr being the photo sharing service which seems to be used most often. There is no need to use their code here to display my photos though as all of the photos are stored on the dankarran.com server and managed using a database I designed a few years back.

Posted in Photography at 11:40 PM on Saturday 26 March 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags:

Transparent Screens - an interesting concept

Over the past few days there have been a load of pictures being posted to Flickr, a popular photo sharing website, about 'transparent screens'.

The idea is that you take a photo of your computer screen which has a background on it of the area behind the screen. Take this photo, for example. The person who took the photo has taken a photo of their desk with a lavalamp on it, set that photo as their desktop and then taken a photo of the two combined.

I think it's pretty clever - especially with some of the others where there are cats sitting behind the monitor with tails sticking out. They have to be perfectly aligned for it all to work.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Photography at 11:01 PM on Friday 25 March 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags: