Recently in Photos Category

Microsoft just released version 1 of their Pro Photo Tools  (genuine advantage and .net framework 3 required) that allows you to geotag your photos. Interestingly the software seems to think it is called Photo Info v2 as trying to install it popped up a message saying I needed to remove Photo Info version 1 before installing version2. Having got that hurdle out of the way I loaded the software. I was pleased straight away as this application loaded a lot faster than photo info v1 which could take about 45 seconds to load but at first glance I shuddered at the dark grey colour scheme but then continued to click around the application. I loaded a photo I had already geotagged and sure enough the information was displayed in the gps fields and on the map. One cool feature is the "Get Location Text" button that gets the street address from the co-ordinates - very cool.  The application also allows you to load in a gpx file (or other location files)  from your gps and automatically sync the location with the time stamp from the camera.  I haven't tried this yet as I don't have a recent gps log with photos - I'll have to go out geocaching some more to rectify this! If your camera time is slightly off (I just realised mine is an hour slow due to the time change) you can change the time stamp on all of your photos basing the original time on gps time or exif time.

I finally stamped a whole load of photos with my name, website and description of the event and quickly saved all the information back to the files. Keywords can be entered to tag the photos but need to be comma separated (the software doesn't tell you that and space separating them puts them all in as one long keyword.) It was handy to have the photos open in Windows Live Photo to view the keywords as the files were changed to see how this would work. No changes in WLP were necessary - as the files were saved the tags were changing in real time.

I'd really like to be able to create macros in this application to automatically stamp my data into photos such as Photographer, url etc as at the moment its a process taking a few steps - not many, but it would be nice to automate it. Also the ability to select various copyright choices such as creative commons would be good too (it defaults to all rights reserved).

Overall a nice package to be added to my existing set of photo editing tools - it will probably replace wwmx as my geotagging tool of choice.

I think my daily picture taking process should get a bit easier now. Up until now I've been ejecting the compact flash, SD or XD card from the camera and then putting it in the card reader. However tonight I plugged the Canon into the usb cable and saw it come up as a mobile device in Windows Explorer. By right clicking on the device and choosing properties I was then able to select an action on inserting the camera. One of the options is to copy the pictures to a specified directory on the disk AND put them in a subdirectory of todays date, another option is to delete the pictures off the camera afterwards. Seeing as though this is a process I do manually at the moment, this should be really helpful. As the camera has a really good battery life (I've just swapped the batteries over for the first time) I'm not too concerned about draining the battery whilst the data is being copied across. I might use the card reader process on Saturday when I get back from the Columbus Ohio Flickr meet at the Southern Theatre. Seeing as though this trick has saved me some time, I thought it was appropriate that the photo for today was Time.

As part of my effort in trying to improve my photography skills I have set up a PicADay set in Flickr. The most efficient way to view these photos is with an RSS reader but unfortunately Flickr doesn't easily provide the links for the RSS feed. However by installing the Flickr RSS greasemonkey script you get one click access. Alternatively you can create an RSS feed using the Yahoo Pipes interface and a nice web page builder kindly provided by alto maltés. The end result is my PicADay RSS feed. I have include these pics automatically on Absoblogginlutely! - IRL but for this I used the Flickr Widget (unfortunately the authors website is broken so there is no point in linking to it).

Some of the Friends In Tech team have posted some of their best shots of 2007 so I thought I'd post my own too. Some of them have already been uploaded to the various photo galleries but some photos are new ones (and at least one was taken today). I've tried to keep the number to about 2 per month, but some months needed more than that. They may not technically be the best, but they are some of my best memories of 2007 that I took (I've not included pictures that Kristen took). Flash is required but most people have this nowadays and the photos are fairly small to allow a quick load but it does take a little while.

I got an invite to Photophlow this morning. Photophlow is like IRC with flickr pics, all on steroids. A nice interface but be warned that it will suck up time when you start using it! I had an issue with firefox trying to get to the chat rooms - the system would just sit there and never connect into the room.
This turned out to be an issue with flashblock - if you use flashblock you need to go to the tools menu, Addons, Select Flashblock and choose options. Then add www.photophlow.com. Restart firefox and you should be able to connect. For some reason this didn't work first time for me - only after I totally disabled Flashblock, logged in and then re-enabled it, would I be able to connect.
I have some invites available if anyone wants to try it.

I'm very pleased with the new camera purchase so far. Unfortunately the picture quality may go down a bit whilst I work out how to use all the new settings on the camera.  The first couple of shots I took outside the house I couldn't understand why the camera was bleeping at me and then the photo was taken.  It turns out that the self timer was turned on and it was giving me 10 seconds to get into the picture!

I've also ordered a couple of extras to go with the camera, the rc1 remote control which enables you to take instant photos and 2 second delay photos with the remote. This will be useful for group shots and also for taking photos while reducing camera shake. I'm also getting a replacement  lens cap as the one that comes with the camera does not have a loop for attaching to a strap so I know it won't be long until I lose the original cap. I've already purchased a 2GB Compact flash card from Bestbuy for $35 with the camera as they had a good deal on the card and was even cheaper than Amazon.  I went for the extreme version of the card as it twice as quick as the ultra cards at reading and writing, with quoted speeds of 20mb/s and speed is important when writing many pictures to the card in quick succession when using the multi shot mode.

I'm also hoping that the tripod quick release mount arrives in the post this afternoon - I ordered it on Sunday and it arrived in Dublin this morning according to USPS. This is slightly longer than I hoped for, one of the books I ordered from Amazon at the same time arrived on Wednesday (although as usual with amazon, the other books have not arrived including the one that really needs to be here.)

The picture of Kate is a reduced and cropped version after she ate some of Katie's birthday cake. She's looking a bit sad as all the cake is gone and she is suffering from a cold/fever/virus infection (but she did cheer up when eating the chocolate and icecream cake)

A while back I managed to loose the quick release clip for the camera to attach it to my tripod which meant that I couldn't use the tripod. Seeing as though I will be having some indoor photo sessions in the near future with Christmas and the Columbus Flickr trip to the theatre, I decided to get it working again. I was debating getting a new tripod and the Opteka Tripod looked pretty good and cheap, but after a search on Google I tracked down a store that sold replacement quick release clips, so I've purchased one from Adorama. Hopefully the service will be good and the part is the right one!

I know this is going to be doing the rounds, Kristen got it in a text message about 30 minutes after the game finished, but she couldn't forward it. I found it at MotorCityBuckeyes

I'm now able to get Windows Photo Gallery working on the home pc - I no longer get the cryptic error message when I try to run the program. It is pretty similar to Picassa and I must admit I prefer the Picassa interface for most things. The one thing that I love in WPG though is the Panorama feature. All you have to do is select your photos and choose Make - Create panorama. The software then intelligently stitches all the photos together and saves you a very large file on your disk. Unfortunately the upload facility to Windows spaces only uploads a thumbnail, you don't get the full benefit of the files. I've uploaded three panoramas to my spaces account. The best way to see them is to select the Full view icon on the right of the page, then click the gear icon at the bottom and then select pan and zoom. This gives a really good display of the Niagara Falls and the Scioto River panorama that I took fairly recently. However to see the full size, original photo you will have to go to my Panorama pictures on Zooomr and then click on the All sizes button.

The photos from our Canada trip are now uploaded. I haven't entered any captions or explanations yet though - that will take some time to do. I had hoped to use Zooomr to host the photos but their infinite upload program just doesn't work. It has uploaded a lot of the photos but a lot of them also come up as "Sorry this photo is currently unavailable". I'm about to give up on Zooomr as there seems to be no interest in fixing the problems that have existed ever since the botched upgrade to version 3 took place back in May sometime. Unfortunately the head of Zooomr seems to be now focused on the Japanese market and gimmicks and less on the multitude of fixes. A real shame as they had a promising product. So, my pictures are hosted on my website for now and I'll update the descriptions soon - honest!

I finished uploading the Ohio Theatre pictures to Zooomr yesterday. It took a while to process the pictures and narrow down the selection. I didn't use a flash for most of the shots, but as most of the decorative items were lights, the flash wasn't needed. For the few shots that I did use the flash, I often preferred the ambient light versions instead.
For those of you in Columbus, into photography and meeting up with other photographers, then I strongly recommend you keep an eye on the Flickr group and also the Upcoming group pages. (Both have rss feeds)

This week has been pretty busy with several rather amusing happenings. Earlier this month was Kristen's birthday so we decided to get new licence plates. I got blogg3r (as blogger was unavailable) but I wasn't unable to remove the old plates from the car as the screws had rusted in tight. Whilst waiting for the new plates to arrive I was driving around with the temporary tag in the back window. I borrowed an extractor tool from one of the guys at work and tried to remove the plates from the car but no joy but by drilling the screw and some brute force I was able to get the old plates off. However, I had to get some proper fasteners to hold the new plates in. After one trip to the hardware store, the fasteners didn't fit and so I planned to get some new ones the following day but and as I was driving home from work a cop pulled up right behind me. There were two sets of lights that he followed extremely close, I could see him talking on the radio in my mirror and then eventually the lights started flashing. I pulled over and he gave me a warning for not having the temporary tags displayed properly as it was lying flat on the parcel shelf rather than sticking up for everyone to see. That night the duct tape came out and the following night I drove to the hardware store to get some more fasteners and I eventually managed to get the plates put up whilst in the car park. This was the first time EVER I had got pulled over by a policeman.
Friday night we helped load up a moving van for friends from church and then this morning I headed off to the Ohio Linuxfest. There was a long break over lunch until the next talk (and the previous Ubuntu one had been disappointing and irrelevant) so I decided to skip the final talk and go take some photos in downtown Columbus.
I wandered around the streets taking various photos that I've uploaded to Zooomr for my 20070929 set including the shot below.

I continued taking various photos of the Columbus skyline and buildings (the rest of the photos in the set) and spent quite a bit of time taking various photos of the green paint "accident" and then took this photo.

Just after I had finished taking the photo, a siren blipped right behind me and a cop in his car called me over - this was the second time in a week! Allegedly someone had called the cops as I was looking suspicious taking photos of the buildings. He asked if I had been near a particular building, but the name wasn't familiar to me and then said I had been taking pictures of a garage door (which I hadn't - the only thing I can think of is the hydrant shot). He also asked if I was a photography student - (does this mean anyone who claims to be a photography student could not be a terrorist??) I said that I wasn't but tried to explain Flickr to him. He then asked how long I had been in the country, where I lived, whether I had driven there and where I had parked my car - to that answer I waved vaguely in the general direction as I had no idea the name of the street I had parked on. He also asked for ID - it was a good job I had it on me!
I pushed him for more details on the alleged call but I got the "people are suspicious since 9/11" but I'm not convinced as when I asked where I should stay away from he said "I can't really say". I wouldn't be surprised if they saw me on CCTV and then came to see what I was up to.
The good news is that at no time did he say I should not take photos of any of the buildings so I was almost tempted to retrace my steps and take photos again - but I wasn't feeling *that* brave.
I continued to take some more photos which have been uploaded to Zooomr and then came home.
It really is a sad state of affairs when you can't take pictures of picturesque buildings in a city without being accused (indirectly) of being a terrorist.

I had an awesome time on Saturday afternoon meeting up with the Flickr Columbus folks to take photographs of the Ohio Theatre. More than 40 people turned up for a 2 hour tour where we could take photos of anything (and everything). We couldn't go on the stage but there were so many other things to take photos of. There are loads of photos online - I took over 200 but only uploaded about 5 so far. The flickr tag cmhflickrmeet092207 has the photos uploaded on flickr, the cmhflickrmeet092207 page on zooomr (currently only my 1 photo) and the upcoming event page contain the photos (if they are tagged appropriately).
Upcoming has nice integration with flickr now - you just need to tag your photos with the event id and they automatically get added to the upcoming page. Zooomr also works in a similar way, but instead links to the Upcoming page automatically for you and includes a link to show you all the photos with that tag however the photo doesn't get added to the pool automatically.
Towards the end of the event we all sat in the seats and posed for a group photograph using various flash units from people. Thanks to Fensterbme for taking the photo below. (click through for the larger version)

We came up with a name last week for the new kitten - Tater, pronounced tate-er - the same as Ron White's dog (strangely enough). We have loads of photos and video of him being cute (and daft) and he now has his own Tater smartset of zooomr and updates will appear in this blog here in the Tater archives

Edit: Updated name source thanks to Kristen

No, not a spelling mistake, but last night after going to see the new Josiah Lefor we saw loads of deer in one of the gardens nearby and took some photos. I've uploaded the better ones of each to zooomr with some thumbnails below

The pumpkin carving has been done and the results are uploaded to zooomer

The Cruise photos are now online at zooomr. There are a lot of them and a couple of big panorama ones too so don't view them on dialup! All the photos are in the Cruise album or you can look at each country individually. Let me know what you think and what you think of the zooomr interface. There are a couple of things I'd love to change but at least it gives me free storage for the large amount of photos. All the photos are also downloadable in their original size too.

I've been trying to use Microsoft's WWMX application to geotag some of the photos that we took on holiday ready to upload to zooomr, but the level of mapping detail for Jamaica and Grand Cayman Islands was pretty awful However I have found that by using Garmin's mapsource to load the track data from the gps and then saving the tracks to a gpx I can then use wwmx to automatically tag the photos if I had the gps on at the time the photos were taken.

However, for the rest of the photos that were taken without the gps I needed a better way of marking where they are taken. A combination of picassa and google earth makes the job very easy. First the photo's need to be loaded into Picassa - this will probably be done automatically (although for some reason Picassa doesn't like to find my cruise photos and they disappear from the folder view even though I can see them being scanned). Anyway, once the photos have been loaded, select the photos that need to be geotagged and then go to the tools menu, geotag, geotag with google earth. Then use Google Earth to navigate to the spot that the photos were taken -the satellite view does an outstanding job for this. Then just hit geotag, select the next picture and repeat (or do geotag all if they are all in the same place. At this point, the locations are written to the picture (exif data I presume) and can then be uploaded to flickr or zooomr already geotagged for you.

As it will take some time to load the cruise photo's, I took some pictures of the Pumpkin Festival at Oakland Nursery including the Worlds Fastest Pumpkin Carver and entries for the Worlds biggest pumpkin.

I've reuploaded my Sidney pictures to zooomr although I've yet to go through and label them with details. Some of them are of interesting buildings, sculpture and architecture and some are of childhood memories for Kristen.
I also uploaded some Little Morton Hall pictures which I made into portals.

Zooomr are apparently releasing an update on Monday which will activate notes on photos and something they are calling portals. Like Notes, an area of the photo is hotlinked to give you a scrolling view of another photo (such as a closeup shot of an area in the first photo). You can scroll around the closeup within the original photo and then click on it to zoom into the next photo - A unique implementation. The blog post by Kristopher has a link to the YouTube video of it in action.

We got tickets to go to the Dublin Irish Festival so went over this afternoon. Personally I didn't think there was much there apart from a lot of Irish shops but I wasn't interested in buying some Irish tat ;-), a lot of overpriced food and drink stands but the Funnel cake was delicious and the first time I'd had one. It was very hot so the soft iced lemon stand was doing very well and was nice and refreshing.
After wandering around the festival we headed back to the traditional stage and watched Gaelic Storm perform a set. They were very good with a lot of audience participation. I've uploaded my photos of Dublin Irish Festival to my zooomr profile (as it has more space than Flickr) and also set up a smartset in case other people also upload photo's.
I also managed to take some video of one of their drum solo's which I uploaded to YouTube.
Edit Updated the YouTube link as I uploaded the wrong video to start with!

Well Zooomr is back at last - It's been out of action since last Thursday as they prepared their upgrade and then got hit by a DOS attack. I was beginning to wonder if the whole thing was a hoax dreamed up by flickr so that anyone who was thinking of defecting would stay with flickr ;-) (thats a joke Mr Lawyer man). Anyway, they are now back online but the site must still be under stress as it is really really slow - must have taken about 45 seconds to load the front page for me.

Zooomr are giving away free pro accounts to bloggers (like me) that sign up and post an image from their servers so the image below is my deer photo taken with the cameraphone last night whilst out to do a geocache - GCWFY1. Funny thing is that I can't see any information about what a pro account is on their site - a free account gives you 50mb storage (plus 1mb per user you refer).

I went out this morning and walked along the new trail in Dublin alongside (or above) the river. It was nice and peaceful, with one guy even bringing a deckchair and he was sitting there reading the newspaper. I'm not quite sure why he needed a deckchair as there were plenty of benches to sit on instead. There were several people around, but most of them were older couples taking their morning stroll. I took several photo's - playing around with the exposure settings of the camera and have uploaded some of them to flickr - I wish I could have got a clearer photo of the spider though but I didn't have my full size tripod with me and it was too difficult to take a photo on the macro setting, zoomed in without it appearing out of focus. It's a really nice place to go for a stroll or a picnic (with lots of picnic tables along the route). You can either park

For my uk readers, snapfish are doing a promotion until the 22nd January with up to 50 6*4 prints for 1p each. Shame I don't live in the uk anymore!

Kristen had an upsetting moment when she plugged in the XD card from the camera and saw the following



It looked like all the photos that she had taken today were corrupt and unreadable (and translated into chinese!). Fortunately I remembered reading about PC Inspector File recovery which I had tried out but not in a real life scenario. One download later and a search of the hard drive returned lots of image files stored on the disk (as expected). Recovering them was just a matter of selecting whereabouts I wanted to put the files (on a different disk). There were two options available. The first was using FAT1 and the second was to use FAT2. When I used FAT1 most of the files came back ok, but there were several files that came back slightly corrupted - this one is one of the worst


Some of the other photos have been uploaded to my Birdtable zoto gallery as Kristen took some excellent pictures of the birds on the birdtable today.

I've uploaded lots of new house photos including lots of the decoration in progress and also some visitors to the bird animal table. A lot of the house photos are probably boring but some people wanted to see the house in more detail. There will be more to come so keep an eye on my zoto page.

Remove relocate_server.php file from your website if you are running coppermine gallery 1.4.x

Coppermine 1.4.2 is out now so I spent most of Thanksgiving Morning playing with it. There was a bug in the keyword search facility which I worked around and coded a method of sizing keywords depending on how many times they occur in the database ala flickr. I posted about my new search page in the forums and have posted the code for someone else to tidy up and improve as I'm not a good mysql php coppermine programmer. I'm pleased with the results though.

I think that Microsoft Max stands for Maximum Hassle, Maximum uselessness and Maximum Waste of time. I downloaded the small stub installer yesterday and then when you install it, it insists on downloading a winfx graphics pack and some other files that it needed. This took about 40 minutes on my fast connection so I dread to think what it would be like on dialup. I find stub installers very annoying as it means you can't burn the application setup program to cd ready for reinstallation at a later date/another machine - instead you have to spend ages downloading. Then after it had installed it insisted I signed up for an account/linked my max account to my passport account. Thats all very well and good, but the email that is meant to get sent to my passport account never arrives. I then realised that this was probably due to the fact that I have to have my hotmail junk filter to exclusive due to the amount of spam I get even on the enhanced option. A solution to this is to add maxteam@microsoft.com to your contacts in hotmail before you attempt to activate/log into Max.
Once signed into an account it doesn't seem possible to sign out from that account and re-sign in with a different account as you only get prompted for your password address and not your email address. Actually after renaming store.xml and settings.xml in %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Microsoft Codename Max you can sign in as someone else, but this doesn't do you any good as Max is a peer to peer application so you both need to be running it at the same time.
Oh and did they forget to mention the fact "If your ISP does not support IPv6, you will not be able to access websites after you install Max. " (from the readme that doesn't get displayed when you install the software). They also have a blog of help posts but these do not appear on the main page unless you select one of the categories.

The 161 photos from Dave and Katies Wedding have now been uploaded to my photo gallery. I didn't upload them to flickr due to the fact that I don't have a premium account and I still have 1.5 gb of disk space left on my hosting package.

There has been an important fix to coppermine to prevent a Cross Site Scripting hack. The patch and discussion can be found at the Coppermine forums. I am surprised that they do not have a (working) announcement mailing list to find out when patches such as this are released. Update A workaround is to go to the forums and click the notify button. You will probably need to be logged in though.

A photographer on flickr underwent brain surgery recently and had the surgeons assistant take photos of the procedure. Very graphic photos but it shows just how amazing the human body is. Warning - don't view whilst eating lunch.

Since the API has been released, people have been busy producing kml files that you can load into google earth. You can add these bookmarks to GE and then browse geotagged photos from flickr (newest) and nearest or del.icio.us.

Theres a nice tool to make mosaics out of pictures uploaded to flickr sets. It will make mosaics out of other pictures but its quickest with sets. Here's one I made earlier from Angela's photos of Mike's Birthday party

1. clay group, 2. Working, 3. surprise_mary, 4. surprise_howardbowl, 5. surprise_group2, 6. surprise_group, 7. surprise_chat, 8. suprise_sherry, 9. surprise_andykristen, 10. surprise_mikemug, 11. surprise_myplate, 12. surpriseak, 13. surprisebrsh, 14. surprisemike, 15. surpriseworking, 16. surprisemike1

Both Dave and Neil were talking about Googlimage, the latest meme and it was pretty interesting so here are my results. Incidentally none of these answers are of any use for security questions so don't bother phishing with them.

The place I grew up. Emsworth, Hampshire. This picture is of the harbour and similar to the scenes that you will often see on postcards of the place.
The place I live now Dublin, Ohio. This is a great shot of the concrete field of corn just down the road from where we currently live. Not everyone who lives in dublin even knows about the place but there is a geocache there (and we often drive past it.
My name Andy. The picture actually shows a friend of mine, Brian, taken by myself on a geocaching trip when we had to abseil over a cliff to get it. It appears under my name due to the copyright notice on his web page. Interestingly the first picture on Andrew is rather explicit, even with the safe searching switched on.
My grandmother's name Ada - my grandmother never looked this stern (but then I was always a golden grandchild :-)
My favourite food. Lasagne. Also the first meal that Kristen cooked for me.
My favourite drink Coffee. Although in the temperatures that we are having at the moment I am being weaned off (apart from the early morning cuppa. I also find it ironic that Kristen's blog is called CupTeaLuv
My favourite song.This Means War by Petra - on the first tape that I ever got and the title song. I really like the cover and even had it on my denim motorcycle jacket.
My favourite smell.Sunday lunch. Although if done well it always looks a lot more appetising that ANY of the photos on the first page of google images. This shot shows the Yorkshire Puddings which are an essential ingredient.
My favourite shoes. Comfy shoes. I have no idea of the make of my shoes - as long as they are comfy I am happy. These shoes didn't look that comfy to me - especially as they have cacti planted in the top!
My favourite number.42. This picture was the first result and there was also a cute hedgehog in the list which I was going to choose.

Now that's wasted 45 minutes, I'm off to reboot the machine to install all those patches.

Well ok, some of them are. Using the instructions at Steve's page I've now been able to locate the positions of photos taken on geoblogging.

Kristen has been doing a lot of scrapbooking recently and rather than use up a lot of her parents ink we decided to use Samsclub to print some photo's off (as the price is 17 cents a picture for 6*4" photos, 1 hr processing with pick up at the store. 11c for mail order.) The quality of the pictures is not too bad but as you'll see there has been some cropping of the photo which Kristen was not expecting. This has ruined a couple of the photos as having the top of your head missing does not make a nice portrait.
Here we have the original picture as uploaded from the computer (Click on the thumbnail for a large version of the file)



However the version that came back from Sams club had been cropped to the following image.(I've cropped the original photo to get this image shown as I don't have access to a scanner at the moment)


(Yes I know the cropped version looks bigger but that is due to the proportions of the thumbnail pictures).
In this particular shot it doesn't matter too much although the heads have been chopped off a little. This cropping would be a major drawback to using this facility. At least some other services ask you where you want to crop the photo.
I've got some codes for 36 free photos with winkflash so I'm going to try these at 16c a photo and Dimeprints are 10c per copy. In the end I created a spreadsheet to work out which was going to be the cheapest for a certain number of photos (as the postage costs make some services cheaper than others at different quantities). Of course this all assumes that the cropping is user controllable and the quality of the pictures are the same. I'm going to send some of the samsclub pictures to the other services so that I can do a comparison.

I submitted an entry to photofriday (rare) today for the first time - Orangutans are rare enough. If you read the feed for this page then you will have already seen my submission. Incidentally this is a great way of getting people to look at your photos. By the time the xp wizard had finished uploading the photo and I had visited the webpage I had had 5 views and 1 comment.

I got a film camera at one of the caches I did this weekend so now I have to work out where to get the pictures developed. Previously I've used 24hour processing at the shops but I'm not too bothered about the response times for someone elses pictures. I'm also trying to work out whether to get a cd done at the same time (as ultimately the pictures will be posted online). Any suggestions on who to use or avoid?

Friday I took the day off for my birthday and we met up with Tash & Dave (non-bloggers) to go to Birmingham's BullRing shopping centre and then to Outback for tea. The bullring was an interesting shopping centre - not the usual meadowhell/trafford centre type layout of shops and the outer design is definately funky in the extreme. I was not impressed at the parking fee's though - it is VERY expensive to park in the middle of birmingham - we paid over £5 for 3 hours parking. I managed to get one geocache done, A bit of ..... which is a bit of a cheat really as it was a virtual and needed a photo taken of a bull statue. After lunch we went to see Hitch which was very good and funny (although the funniest bits were shown in the trailers for the film. We went to an AMC cinema and that was suprisingly cheap, £3 for the matinee performance and £5 for shows after 6pm. The local Vue cinema near us charges £6 and you have to pay about £3 for parking so a night out at the cinema works out pretty expensive (which is why we go on Orange Wednesday's instead). Photo's uploaded to my flickr page.

I've been meaning to try out some digital photo printing services, especially after Kristen got the scrapbooking bug and wants to print lots of photos out. Yesterday morning I placed an order for 10 prints from truprint and they arrived in the post this morning. That is what I call fast turnaround. I don't know if its because the order was flagged as a first order (and therefore fast-tracked) or whether this is normal service.
The interesting thing is that they offer a service where the photo's aren't actually 6x4" due to the prevention of cropping of the photos as apparently digital photos don't fit in with this aspect ratio.
The quality of the photos that came out is very good and I'd use them again. If you fancy using the service then drop me an email using my contact mail as that way I get some photos free as a referral or you can just sign up without referral here. Wish they'd have a straightforward referral link though!

I finally signed up with flickr and have uploaded a couple of old photos to the site to play with.Flickr: Photos from absoblogginlutely is the home page. It looks like a good tool to share photos online and for people to find out that you've posted new pictures online. The tagging is really handy too as it doesn't tie you down to directory names when assigning categories. What would be really cool would be integration with a tool like picasa2 so you wouldn't have to re-tag everything.

Google have released a new version of picasa according to theGoogle Blog. Although I downloaded the original Picasa I must admit I didn't use it much, mainly as I didn't take the time to understand how to use it. I use paintshoppro almost exclusively for my editing and organise pictures into "albums" by storing them in directories on the disk or in my web page gallery
Interesting that the check for updates in the old version of picasa didn't know there was a new version to download.

PS If you do download it, then read the readme.html file as it tells you want they spent time programming and the new features.

Finally got some time to put up our holiday photo's taken over Christmas and the new year.

The snow is melting fast in Dublin now so I had to get this photo quick before the rest of it melted. It had looked a lot nicer during the week (and wasn't as overcast/cloudy/foggy as it is today) with more snow on it but we never had the camera or time to take a photo.

The Zoomquilt has a recursive set of pictures similar in principle to that which you would see when looking into a mirror looking into a mirror. Some of the art is rather dark but the technique used is great. I'd recommend the flash version for viewing.

Although not properly erupting yet, the CVO Photo Archives - Mount St. Helens - 2004 are pretty awesome. I wouldnt like to be too near to this place when it does erupt.

Uploaded two new albums this afternoon, pictures of Neil and Suzie's Wedding and the pictures taken at Morpeth the following day, with a few straggler photos taken on the way back home and includes the cute three little ducklings picture. Now if anyone has a clue why coppermine fails to link to the full size picture from the actual album itself then I'd be grateful for the answer!. Full size pics are now available after upgrading to Coppermine version 1.3.0

There is a new release of coppermine available (beta though) which is pretty important to download and install as it fixes several new vulnerabilities discovered recently.
Update This is only relevant for the version that integrates with phpnuke. Fortunately my version doesn't as there have been several successful hacks. More details on the support forums