Collisions with Reality

It seems like it’s been all bad news over the last couple of weeks. But there are some interesting and bright spots out there!

• So apparently the iPad 2 is out? Is coming out soon? Whatever. Will no one think of the marginalia?
• The Unnecesarean has a fascinating post sharing the script used by 911 dispatchers for guiding someone through an unassisted birth.
• The Year in Pictures had a great writeup of Pier 24, a private gallery/museum in San Francisco. Admission is free, but you need to schedule your visit. No labels or descriptions: just the photographs. I know what I’m doing the next time I go into the city by myself!

Have a great weekend and Mardi Gras, everyone!

A recent post on Frolic has a pretty foolproof guide to crediting photos online. In short: “Always credit the original source.” Nice and simple!

What the post did not do was go into the ins and outs of the various Creative Commons clauses, as it was aimed at the bloggers, not the photographers. If you’ll indulge me for a paragraph, I’m trying to figure out which Creative Commons clause I want. Right now, the pictures in my Flickr stream are all set to Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons*. Which makes sense — I want credit for my pictures, and I don’t want other people making money off of them. The other day I noticed a photo of mine had been adapted here and here. It’s perfectly allowed under the current license, but that doesn’t mean I love the final result.

This all has me thinking of adding No Derivs. Then why bother using Creative Commons at all? And that raises the question, why am I putting pictures on Flickr in the first place? Why is it that I’m okay with people using my pictures with attribution?

What licenses do you all use on your pictures online, and where is the strangest place you’ve found one of your pictures?

* Pictures of my family are on a different Flickr stream, and on those I’ve set the copyright to All Rights Reserved.

This has been a long week, and here are some highlights!

• This article about Muslims and Christians protesting together in Egypt nearly made me cry. (Related: Muslims in Egypt protecting Coptic churches, and Christians protecting Muslims during Friday prayers during the protests.)
• I didn’t make it to IKEA today, but here are some awesome images from Homemade is Best, a cookbook of Swedish baked goods by IKEA. Unfortunately, it’s only available in Swedish IKEA stores. Can I even pick a favorite? Okay, maybe this one: (via the always awesome Things Organized Neatly tumblr.)
• I’m not entirely sure why the Wall Street Journal keeps writing articles about college hockey. In their latest, they celebrate the low-frills college hockey arenas, and rank them on various qualities. Michigan was ranked as the best crowd, to which I say, “Duh,” and, “You’re welcome.” (via my father-in-law.)

Have a lovely weekend, everyone! I will try not to brag too much about the lovely weather we’re having here.

Another long week, another list of fun things I’ve seen this week!

• There is actually a new library opening in Oakland this weekend. And not just any new library in any part of Oakland — a large, beautiful space in one of the rougher parts of Oakland. It’s so great to see this much enthusiasm and excitement over a library. (Although, while the library is on the site of a school, the article notes, “School Superintendent Troy Flint said that not every school in the district has its own library, though all have access to online resources.”)
• I’ve never played much with Flickr Toys, but after seeing someone’s mosaic of orange photographs, I really want to. Unfortunately, the Flickr Toys do not actually analyze the photos for color — the photos are all selected based on their tags. Many of my photographs are tagged with their predominant color, but I’d still have to go back and manually tag many of my pictures.
• Last night’s 30 Rock had my husband and me in search of an old Saturday Night Live sketch where an anchor is prerecording the news, so that he could go on vacation for the winter. I thought it was a recent sketch, maybe even in an episode hosted by Brian Williams. He thought it was a classic one from the 70′s. Turns out we were both wrong — it was from the 90′s, and it wasn’t even on SNL, but The Dana Carvey Show. It’s still pretty funny (even if I can’t embed it, dang it!). And if you hang on until the closing credits, there is a funny and surprising little bonus for you.

Have a great weekend!

I wasn’t blogging over the holidays, so here are some of the interesting things I’ve seen in the last few weeks:

• I adore this picture of New York City from 1907 (via Shorpy, go there to see larger version).
  It’s such a familiar perspective, looking at Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge. There’s something about the faintness of the buildings — it’s almost as if you could see today’s skyline if you could peer through the haze.

• The A.V. Club has a list of some of the crazy swag they received in 2010, with their recommendations for improvement. I can’t decide what my favorite is — the Russian nesting dolls depicting Kirstie Alley? Or the visor that looks like a brain?
• I was really excited to see this study that shows that treatments can have a placebo effect even if you know it’s a placebo (via @mskyle). I have a cold that is just not going away, and I’ve reached the point of scrubbing the house and doing all the laundry in hopes of thwarting it. Next up today: buying out the entire cold remedy section at CVS in hopes that something kills it.

Happy Friday!

The most successful resolution I ever made was to go to the beach more often, for 2009. It worked because it was a fun resolution, and it forced me to manage my time better. I never would have succeeded at just resolving to manage my time better. On the photography side, in 2010 I learned that I’m much better at project-based goals, not deadline-based goals. (In other words, no Project 365 for me.) With that in mind, here are my resolutions for 2011:

1. Learn one new thing every day. This could be anything — a Python trick, an interesting spot in the neighborhood, a weird factoid about the state of Delaware, you name it. This is a fun resolution that i think will help me combat some of the inertia I get stuck in.
2. Go to the dentist. I have good health insurance, and haven’t been to the dentist in about five years.
3. Do physical therapy or yoga at least once per week. I’m having some neck and shoulder issues that, if not preventable, should at least be more manageable.
4. Create photograph collections. I haven’t decided exactly what projects I’d like to do. But what I want to focus on in 2011 is on creating cohesive series of photographs. I’m stuck in a mode of wanting each picture I upload to Flickr to be able to stand alone. But sometimes, a picture is more interesting in a series, and that’s okay. Of course that’s okay. So I want to work on seeing the big picture more often in my photography. (No puns in this resolution intentional. Sigh.)

I think that’s a reasonable and fun list. Happy New Year, everyone!

There are some things that didn’t quite pan out for me in 2010, but I want to focus on the positive. My family moved to the Bay Area, and we’re having a good time. My son is at a fun age — 14 months — and doing something new every day.

I even accomplished many of my revised goals for 2010. I didn’t manage to take my camera on the family strolls very often — for a variety of logistical reasons — but I finished nearly everything else. Admittedly, I only went carefully through my backlog of photos because I was running out of hard drive space, and needed to archive things. But if I took a picture before December 24, 2010, and I liked it, it’s online. Woo-hoo!

Tomorrow I’ll post my resolutions for 2011. Today I’m just going to enjoy the startling realization that my life is actually pretty well balanced right now.

Boy, have I been buried by life lately. Let me emerge for a bit, though:

• The World Series! Eh. I don’t know a single fan of the Texas Rangers. And despite being in the Bay Area, I know only one real San Francisco Giants fan (shout-out to KS!) in real life. And I’ve only seen about half a dozen people wearing Giants hats, total. Maybe the buzz just hasn’t made it outside of SF city limits?
• I don’t remember how I found it, but CALIBER is my new favorite photoblog.
• And through CALIBER — or maybe the other way around? — I found i live here: SF, which is a series of photoshoots and life stories of various San Franciscans. Both are highly, highly recommended.
• I’m dreading next week’s midterm elections, but in honor of them I dug up the “Daily Show Rocks!” Midterm Elections clip from The Daily Show:
  

  The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
  Daily Show Rock! – Mid-Term Elections
  www.thedailyshow.com
  Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

Have a Happy Halloween, everyone!

One of my revised resolutions was to upload the last few pictures from my 2009 trip to Europe. I finally went through them, and there really were only a few worth uploading. I guess it’s a sign that I’ve improved, even in the last year? But this picture has been my desktop background for the last several months, so it can’t be that bad.

Lightroom has been great for helping me organize and go through my pictures. At the rate I’m going, I may actually have to get my camera out and take some new pictures. In my infinite spare time.

A bit of progress here, on several fronts. Not to jinx it, but we are signing a lease in just a couple of hours on a place in the Bay Area! It’s not quite perfect, but we really love the house, so we’ll see what happens.

And I’ve made some progress on my revised Project 52! The educational discount for Lightroom III is a steal, so I bought that and have been playing with it. Hooray for tags! Not only that, I figured out how to sync it to my Flickr account, and it uploads it with the title and caption and tags from Lightroom. Nice. Saves me a hell of a lot of typing in the long run. Here’s a picture I took last month:

I know. Flowers. Backlit. Soft focus. Well, we’re moving to Oakland, so I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunities for pictures of urban decay. (Mom, don’t worry, that was a joke.)