More Leeds Market photos here on my Flickr profile.
Tag: photos
My Old Passport
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.
Cottage 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.
Blendr: merge images together from Flickr
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.
New version of The Gimp
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.
Russia photoblog
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.
Creative Commons Licensing
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.
Leeds Unity Day in Hyde Park
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.
New photo gallery
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.
Selected photos of 2003
Of all the photos I took in 2003, these are some of my favourites.
gthumb diff and website changes
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.