-
Holiday photos
I just finished sorting, processing, uploading and detailing photos for the first two days of my holiday. They are in the album Auckland Day 1&2 in the Auckland Holiday collection and it will be in chronological order if viewed within the album.
You can find the album here.
Still to come:
- Day 3 (and beyond)
- Turning 50
- Birthday Surprise
- Absent-mindedly almost 50
I’m hoping to continue the Auckland posts shortly but may do birthday/turning 50 posts before that since it’s still quite fresh in my mind.
Perhaps when I get caught up, I will think about creating a gallery for my trip on this website, probably with a pared down collection.
-
Flickr
I’m been using Flickr off and on for several years now. I have photos going back as far as 2005 when I started my account. Back then I just used the free account as I wasn’t uploading a whole lot. Over the past few years, I’ve been taking heaps more photos and posting more on the website. It’s interesting to see how my photography skills have changed over the years. I also have been far more ruthless about keeping only a handful of photos most of the time rather than keeping 1o shots of the same thing. Well, I still sometimes keep multiple copies but oftentimes I delete far more than I keep. It’s usually just a matter of not being able to decide between photos.
Back in the early years, I didn’t have all that many views of my photos, aside from family and friends. Once I started uploading more photos, my views went up but then there would be many days where I’d have none at all. I’ve noticed lately that I’m getting quite a few views daily without even trying. What’s funny is the photos being viewed. Probably the most popular ones are the photos I took at our science museum, Scitech, a few years ago of several plastic bottle sculptures in an exhibit about plastic waste…I think… They aren’t great photos but the subject was interesting. People keep coming to see these same photos all the time. I guess they must be doing searches and my photos come up but it’s kind of funny they are the most popular when they are pretty mediocre overall.
-
Back into photos
Last year was a pretty poor one with regard to photography. My main goal has been to reflect experiences and places and hopefully keep improving my photography. I realised last month I’d only uploaded a handful of photos to Flickr, then looked at my photos and realised there really aren’t all that many available to upload anyway. I did finally upload more photos but the pickings were slim. Many were just repeats of the same thing and many just weren’t very good.
I hope this year will be more fruitful. I have a new camera that I’m still getting to know plus my older, sort of fancy but not too fancy DSLR…Not to mention my iPhone camera for more casual photos. I started tonight to work on recent photos in preparation for uploads and have added at least a dozen new photos. These are all still from 2012 but maybe I will soon be working on lots of new ones for 2013.
-
Otherwise occupied
I was going to write about our more recent board game experiences but I’ve been a bit distracted the past few days. I recently upgraded to a Flickr Pro account and have been posting recent and older photos the past few days. I’m currently going through photos I took on our holiday to Albany in July 2008.
I took a lot of photos on that trip and some of them are reasonably decent, especially considering my lack of experience at the time. I’m still very much an amateur but I think I’ve improved a bit with practice. I’m also learning the art of discarding bad photos. When my collection was fairly small, I was keeping just about everything. Now that it’s taking up so much space, I need to pare it down to essentials. Unfortunately, the indoor shots from our cottage are almost all blurry. I’m keeping a few of them but deleted the rest.
I’m also using the Photoshop Elements software I bought a couple years ago to organise and do minor fixes to the photos. Previously it’s been mostly used to organise but I’m starting to play around with it more properly and feel like I’m getting bit of a feel for some of the simpler fixes now. It’s interesting to see the difference that can be made just by doing an automatic level or color fix. Sometimes I’m even doing it manually…but only occasionally, because I just don’t have the time to go through all of them right now. I also don’t have the confidence in my ability to decide what looks right. Perhaps that’s a skill or ability I will eventually learn or acquire.
And now, it’s really time to call it a night because now I’ve been writing further into the night. Might as well have written about board games…