From the category archives:

Photos

Scenes from Roman Life 16: A Palm

September 23, 2008

They pruned a palm next door. What were they thinking? Plonkers.

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Beguiled, in a good way

August 24, 2008

The moonflowers (Ipomoea alba) are almost as pleasing as the Plumeria (which is still putting on a show). Not quite, because the plant itself is a bit raggedy; the leaves look like they’ve got a severe case of mosaic virus or some such, and the stem bottoms are bare and not very attractive. But hey, [...]

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Ill-equipped for walkies

July 21, 2008

It was going to be just an ordinary Sunday morning walk, but we were planning on about double the normal distance because our appointment for coffee was an hour away. The air was wonderfully fresh, a fine contrast to the night before’s heat which had mired me in lethargy. The streets were just about empty [...]

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Scenes from Roman Life 14: Nun surfing

June 13, 2008

I am developing an unhealthy obsession with nuns. After all, in the end they’re probably more or less normal people, with the same hopes, fears, ambitions etc as the rest of us. But I still find it noteworthy when I see them doing more or less normal things. Like using laptop computers. And [...]

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It had been so long

June 4, 2008

After three days of almost incessant rain, I got up one morning to find that one of my cacti had gone berserk.

And just as suddenly, a couple of days later, all those flowers were limp and dessicated. that set me to wondering about the synchrony of flowering in cacti. Many are pollinated by birds and [...]

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Flickering out?

April 23, 2008

This post is number 43 in a series.
My latest camera download contained about 170 images from at least four trips. And I’m resolved not to get behindhand in organizing them. So I sat down to rank, keyword, catalogue and upload one of the trips, and before I know it I’ve spent an extra hour wandering [...]

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Radicchio Rosso di Treviso

March 16, 2008

I was going to rant. I was going to rave. I was going to find a voodoo doll of my printer — or maybe of Photoshop — and stick pins in it. Because after I had spent a decent amount of time cleaning up a scan and getting it just so on the [...]

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‘Membering Morocco

May 7, 2007

Finally finding time to tag, label, metalabel, geo-reference and all that the pictures I took over Easter. Making that task a whole lot easier is a new little application I found called Geotagger. It does one thing — adding latitude and longitude to pictures — really well. I’ve other applications that make it easy [...]

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Knowing where you’ve been: Part I

January 29, 2007

Geotagging Photos
I understand there are now cameras with built-in GPS systems that record where each photo was taken. I can’t afford one. But I do have a GPS device and a digital cameras, so it seems silly not to marry the two. But it is not in fact as easy as it seems, not if [...]

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Villa Lante

October 9, 2006

Wonderful expedition yesterday to the Villa Lante, “the consummate example of the best period in the history of garden design: the Mannerist phase of the Italian renaissance”. A very fine garden it is too, made even more enjoyable by a glorious autumn day with just a hint of chill in the air.
This post, however, [...]

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Found in cyberspace

September 27, 2006

After yesterday’s unpleasant little moan about the difficulties of [tag]geotagging[/tag], cyberspace has made everything more or less right again. First off, Jeffrey Early, author of GPSPhotoLinker, took the time to deal with my queries and suggest strongly that I complain to iView. I will, but now that they are owned by Microsoft I’m not all [...]

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Lost in cyberspace

September 26, 2006

It seems such a no-brainer. Add geographical information to your photos, upload them to Flickr, and Lo!, you can bore the world with a map showing where they were taken. OK, it needs a few gizmos and some software, but all that was an utter doddle compared to the bit that ought to be [...]

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Minor triumphs

August 29, 2006

One has to get one’s job satisfaction where one can. Which tonight means here at home, slaving over the presentation of the blog. I’ve spent a fair while wrestling with [tag]falbum[/tag], a [tag]WordPress plug-in[/tag] that displays photos from Flickr, without making too much headway. The problem isn’t with the way falbum works; it is very [...]

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Where are we on metadata?

August 29, 2006

There’s huge excitement out there on Flickr’s announcement today that it meshes with Yahoo maps to enable geotagging of photos. In other words, you can show the world, on a Yahoo map, where a Flickr photograph was taken. [tag]Flickr[/tag]’s video introducing it is very slick, and I look forward to trying it. But there are [...]

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Lost time

July 2, 2006

Where does the time go? A rhetorical question, of course, designed to deflect attention from the fact that I seem to have been waiting weeks to upload some photos from a recent (ha?) return visit to the gardens at Ninfa. I’m uploading four at a time, partly to lessen the load and thus make it [...]

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A problem shared is a problem solved … almost

June 18, 2006

The Problem: I installed falbum, a plug-in for WordPress that displays photos from flickr within a WP blog. Installation was pretty smooth, although I had to edit the htaccess file by hand. Then I noticed that although the photos displayed very nicely on Safari, the pages looked complete crap in Firefox, Camino and IE.
It seemed [...]

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Test post — picture upload

June 9, 2006

So here’s the thing. something broke between ecto and WordPress, such that they no longer wanted to play nicely together. And WordPress seemed to think it was ecto’s problem. And ecto thought it might be something to do with the server. And the nice folks at TextDrive suggested a possible solution, which I have [...]

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Not entirely happy

June 4, 2006

My photographs are part of who I am, and I enjoy sharing them with people and getting their reactions. But I have never yet been entirely happy about the way I do that on the web. Flickr is marvelously simple, but everyone’s pages look essentially the same; only the photos differ, and while some would [...]

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Botanical chump

April 2, 2006

Thrilled, on returning from hospital, by this bud on my Lithops, I had been waiting for it to open fully. Morning, before work, and evening, after, I checked it; no change. But this afternoon, before my nap, there it was, fully open.

I should have known (or guessed) there might be a circadian element to it.
It [...]

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Photojournalism

March 30, 2006

Antipixel points to his favourites from the National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism 2006 awards, with a fine portrait of the Bushes, father & son.

Technorati Tags: photo

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Tidy, tidy, tidy

August 21, 2005

A dull but ultimately satisfying day, unpacking and shelving six boxes of books that have been waiting since the end of June. And then tidying up some scans of slides from Canada. Much, much duller. Waiting for my machine to deal with a 70Mb file is worse by far than watching paint dry, and makes [...]

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Copycat

August 7, 2005

Goaded, prompted, inspired by Dunstan Orchard’s recent photoset on Flickr (blogged earlier this morning) I decided to set to and scan a few pages from my own autograph book. They are here. But I’m still wondering whether a Flickr group is a good idea. Too nerdy?
By the way, Neddie, if you’re reading this, I’ve put [...]

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Secure Orchard

August 7, 2005

For a Very Big Cheese in the world of web design and CSS, Dunstan Orchard is clearly not in the least bit insecure. His Flickr photostream of Things I Found While Tidying Up is a wonderful glimpse into his life. I’d considered something similar while moving here, but didn’t in the end have time. Now [...]

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A fine weekend

July 18, 2005

It is not for me to judge perfection. But there are occasions that come pretty damn close, and last weekend was one of them. It all started with a call from my dear old friend Rob. I’ll summarize his rambling: “We have a spare ticket to Van the Man at Audley End. It’s yours if [...]

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