There is a rumour on SFist that suggests that Yahoo may have already bought Flickr – the online photo site with a difference that is the underlying photo database behind the Flickr Pickr site I wrote about a few weeks back. According to the article, they have received offers from Google & Yahoo as well as many VC firms.
Also on the rumour mill today is a story that has Apple buying TiVo!
I have uploaded a collection of photos taken in Tahoe last weekend to my Lake Tahoe photo gallery. This shot was an experiment in black & white, the remainder are in colour.
Another shot from up at Fort Funston in San Francisco. This was taken at the end of January, on the day as the hang gliding, windsock and hottentot fig flower photos.
The blogs are buzzing with news of a new digital camera, as yet not officially announced, from Canon: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT. Engadget, the digital photography blog and Dave Beckerman’s site all have mentions of this new member of the Canon digital SLR family. Let’s Go Digital has the longest write up (two whole pages, and well worth the read).
The specs are kind of interesting though, assuming they are correct. It is using the same Digic II processor as the 20D, but has a sensor that is quoted as just 8.0 mega-pixels (the 20D claims 8.2 mega-pixels). Previously, the Rebel has shared the sensor with its closest cousin, so I wonder if this is just an error in the pre-announcement specs. The remainder of the specs are just slightly lower than the 20D (e.g. 3 fps continuous shoot vs 5 fps for the 20D), which would seem to match up with the original Digital Rebel vs 10D comparison. The currrent “educated guess” for the price seems to be around US$1000 with the 18-55mm lens.
Update: There is an even more detailed preview of this camera available at dpreview.com, based on a pre-release version they got to play with.
Update: This one is spreading around the blogs fast. Today Tech Digest and Gizmodo have posts mentioning it.
A rainy Valentine’s evening in Oakland, California. I only had the small camera (my trusty Canon S100) with me, but I liked this shot of a rainy sidewalk, or pavement where I come from!. It was taken on 8th street, just outside the New World vegetarian restaurant – which I strongly recommend by the way. You can see the Starbucks that is on the corner of 8th and Broadway.
Added a few more photos to the new galleries, including this sunset lit shot of the Porta Ballena sign in the Alameda gallery. Most of the new shots are in the Flowers & Plants gallery, but there are also some new sunset photos.
The more observant reader might have noticed the link to the blueDonkey.org galleries appear in the links list to the left. Now though I have a few more photos in there (most of which have been seen on the blog already). In future though I suspect more photos will appear in the galleries than appear here.
From a technical viewpoint, the galleries are powered by Singapore which I found while looking for a PHP/MySQL based photo gallery solution that also allowed a lot of control over the presentation. Singapore has both style sheet based presentation and very configurable templates. In its most recent version it also has MySQL support for all the metadata associated with the photos. That means that all kinds of smart galleries are potentially possible in the future (e.g. galleries generated based on camera used or location).
Up on Alameda Point, the former naval air station, was a wall with this painted on it. That was ten years ago, so this year marks the 70th anniversary of the first Pan American Airway’s China Clipper flight. You can read more about this little piece of history, recorded in a simple painting on the wall of a disused hanger, on these sites:
Color Fields Colr Pickr is an interesting use of the tags that the web photo site Flickr provides.
Another photographer to check out is Steve McCurry, perhaps best known for the stunning portrait of an Afghan girl photo (right) taken in 1984 that appeared as a cover shot on National Geographic magazine in June 1985.
It is impossible to pick even a few favourites from the shots in his galleries – check them all out (clicking the photo takes you to the next in the series, and at the end of each gallery back to the index page, so it is very easy to go through all of them). When you’re done with the galleries, check out the journal pages, including the September 11, 2001 entry from New York.