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  • Leeds Market Big Wigs

    March 7th, 2009

    More Leeds Market photos here on my Flickr profile.

    Tags: heads, leeds, mannequins, market, photos, wigs

    Posted in Photoblog, Photography | No Comments »

  • My Old Passport

    September 23rd, 2007

    My old passport expired last year – I’m hoping the rfid crap will be nixed before I have to get a new one (unlikely I know). But anyway, I doubt I would have got very far with my old passport photo anyway. I happen to have been wearing my band’s t-shirt at the time of the photo and my band’s name is clearly in shot.

    I’m not sure a post “911″ USA would have accepted me with the words “NERV GAS” written on my passport. A pre “911″ USA seemed fine with it when I went to Las Vegas for Defcon in 2000, but THE WORLD IS A DIFFERENT PLACE NOW as you might regularly have been told by people whose job it is to know about these things.

    My old passport

    Tags: me, passport, photos

    Posted in Personal | 5 Comments »

  • Cottage in Staithes, North Yorkshire

    February 17th, 2006

    photo of cottages in Staithes, North Yorkshire

    Louisa and I went on a little Holiday to Staithes in North Yorkshire at the end of January. We stayed in a tiny cottage 20 steps from the sea with no Internet and no mobile phone reception. It was the most relaxing holiday I’ve had in years. Usually we’re storming all over whichever city we’re staying in to make sure we see everything.

    More photos are online in my Staithes photo set.

    Tags: cottage, holiday, north yorkshire, photos, staithes

    Posted in Personal, Photoblog | 29 Comments »

  • Blendr: merge images together from Flickr

    November 28th, 2005

    The image below was created by blending 500 photos of sunsets together. I’ve made a bunch more images like that too.

    To create these I wrote some tools to pull images from Flickr and blend them together to make a new and usually interesting image. The tools are written in Python and licensed under the GPL.

    I was inspired by the “amalgamations” artwork of Jason Salavon.

    Tags: amalgamations, blend, flickr, images, jasonsalavon, photos, python

    Posted in Photography, Tech | 1 Comment »

  • New version of The Gimp

    October 7th, 2005

    There is a new version of the The Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) on the horizon. Version 2.4, due to be released this month, has lots of cool new stuff:

    • Foreground selection tool, to help cutting people out of photos and placing them with Ghandi and/or Hitler.
    • New interpolation method called Lanczos. The best they’ve had until now was Cubic, which apprently sucks (this will please King Andy)
    • Reorganisation of buttons, labels and dialogs in accordance with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, to make things easier for us humans to use.
    • Colour management! At last! It now supports ICC profiles, though you can’t do much advanced stuff, like converting between profiles. Early days.
    • All filters now support previews
    • Lots of little bug fixes and other improvements

    See the Changelog for more geeky details. And some screen-shots.

    Tags: gimp, graphics, image, photos, photoshop, thegimp

    Posted in Tech | No Comments »

  • Russia photoblog

    September 4th, 2005

    Here are two selected photos from our holiday in Russia. I’ll be upping a whole bunch more at some point. The first is a sunset behind the Kremlin in Moscow. The second is of some kids in St. Petersburg.

    photo of Kremlin sunset

    photo of Russian kids in St. Petersburg

    Tags: holiday, kids, kremlin, moscow, photos, russia, stpetersburg

    Posted in Photoblog | No Comments »

  • Creative Commons Licensing

    August 22nd, 2005

    I’ve now licensed the text of this blog under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License. This means everyone is free to copy, distribute and display it but they must attribute it to me. They can even make commercial use of the work.

    They can’t alter or transform any of it though. It is mostly just my opinions anyway, I don’t think it would be useful for people to change what I think willy-nilly (they should at least have to invest in a large network of propaganda devices to do this (Hi Tony))

    All of my photography is now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, which means anyone can pretty much do what they like with it, but they much attribute it to me.

    My explanations of these licenses are just a rough summary, they are not legally binding in any way. Follow the links for a more complete summary, and from there the full legal crap.

    You can read more about free culture at the Creative Commons website. You can even use the nice wizard thing to choose which license you want.

    Tags: blog, creativecommons, freeculture, license, photos

    Posted in Personal, Photography | 1 Comment »

  • photo management with gthumb and f-spot

    August 21st, 2005

    I’ve been looking at ways to manage my huge number of photos better (currently around 11 Gig). I’ve been using Gthumb for years now and it’s worked very well and is always getting better. I’ve tinkered around with f-spot recently which shows promise and is already pretty cool.

    Gthumb and F-spot have two different approaches. Gthumb works like a conventional file manager, showing your directories and the images in each. Notes, keywords and date metadata can be added on each image. You can add selections of photos from various directories into “albums”.

    F-Spot presents you with a flat list of all your photos from all your directories. You can filter the list on date range and keywords. Notes and keyword metadata can be added on each image. F-Spot has a keen emphasis of use of keywords, or tags as is the fashionable parlance.
    Read the rest of this entry »

    Tags: f-spot, fspot, gnome, gthumb, metadata, nautilus, photos, rsync, sha1, sqlite

    Posted in Photography, Tech | 4 Comments »

  • Leeds Unity Day in Hyde Park

    August 15th, 2005

    I went along to the Leeds Unity Day in Hyde Park on Saturday. It looked as if it wasn’t worth leaving the house as it had been raining all day, but it stopped around 1700hrs and the clouds dispersed and the sun came out. We were only there for an hour or so but I managed to snap a few photos. The light wasn’t ideal so they weren’t so great, but I managed to salvage a few with a good bit of post-processing using The Gimp.

    As usual I’ve made them available in my photography folder.

    I also submitted some smaller versions to IndyMedia.

    a photo of a girl at Leeds Unity Day 2005

    Tags: hydepark, indymedia, leeds, photos, unityday

    Posted in Photography | No Comments »

  • New photo gallery

    March 4th, 2005

    I’ve written a new photo gallery system and am now using it for my photos. I’ve also uploaded a huge back catalogue of photos. Take a peek and tell me what you think.

    The best place to start might be the yearly selections.

    There are lots of new snaps up, such as when a bunch of IRC buddies came to visit, when I visited James in the USA or various drinking times.

    I’ve been to loads more places than I’d previously let on, such as Budapest, Brimham Rocks and recently York. Lots more photos around Leeds and Bradford too.

    Lots of portaits too. Some of me in all my glory too. And cats.

    A few more to come, including Prague, which I seem to have missed.

    Tags: Friends, photos, snaps

    Posted in Personal, Photography | 1 Comment »

  • gthumb diff and website changes

    July 15th, 2003

    I’m back from my holiday in the Czech Republic.

    I’ve rejigged my website a little to make it easier to see where things are on the front page.

    I produced the web albums using Gthumb by Paolo Bacchilega. I need a little feature it seemed to lack (or a bug prevented it) so I wrote a patch to add it. This patch changed the behaviour of the Tools->Change Date tool. For each file that it changes the last modified date, it now also sets the comment date. You should be able to do this in Properties but a bug causes all images to be set with the first image’s date. I couldn’t see how to add this functionality there anyway. According to Paolo, this is now fixed in ver 2.1.3 so this patch is redundant.

    Tags: coding, gthumb, photos, prague

    Posted in Tech | No Comments »

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Creative Commons License The text of this blog is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-ND license