Stock Options

The Oxo Tower, originally uploaded by Me (?).

I have a number of my photos on Flickr for sale on a number of microstock sites. Each site offers different payment options and price points. Take your pick...

Buy My Stock Images:

• iStockPhoto
• Fotolia
• Shutterstock
• Dreamstime
• Bigstock
• Microstock Button

Sell Your Stock Images:

• iStockPhoto
• Shutterstock
• Dreamstime
• Bigstock
• 
  

Camera Equipment UK Price Drop Alerts

Criss Cross, originally uploaded by Me (?).

In my last post I said I would really like to be able to create a price drop alert email to tell me when a specific product reaches a specific price or has been discounted heavily.

I am sure there is a proper service somewhere that does this but I thought it would be a good excuse to create a really basic mashup using Yahoo Pipes.

What this 'thing' allows you to do is create an RSS feed filtered by brand/product and also by the amount that the price has dropped by.

You can then use Yahoo RSS Alerts to email you the feed when it changes.

Great! Well it is a bit "String and Sellotape" but I like fiddling!

Step 1: Create a Filtered Feed

Go to my Price Buster Yahoo Pipe at pipes.yahoo.com/xrrr/camerapricebuster

Click "Run Pipe" to see the raw camerapricebuster.co.uk price drop feed so you can see what sort of information is in the feed.

Enter a product or brand into the "Fliter Text" box - for example enter "Canon" for all Canon products or "300" for all 300mm lenses. This will filter the original feed so that only the words you enter end up in the result. You can test it by clicking "Run Pipe".

If you want to limit results by the size of the price drop then enter a number into the "Price Drop" box - for example enter "9" to remove all feed items where the price drop was less than (and including) £9.00. Again you can test by clicking "Run Pipe".

If you want to limit results below a maximum price then enter a number into the "Price Lower Than" box. Any item with a price higher than the price you enter will be filtered out.

So if for example you wanted to get an email when a Canon 24-105mm f/4L lens is priced lower than, say, £700 (I wish) you would enter:
Price Lower Than = 700
Filter Text = "24-105"

If you are entering a product that is not already in the list then you need to be careful you use the same item name as the camerapricebuster.co.uk or else it will not work.

Step 2: Create an Alert

When you are happy with your new feed click on the "Get as RSS" button and copy and paste the RSS URL:

e.g.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=4kKo4O0B3hGmiar4PhJ3AQ&_render=rss&filter=24-105&price=400

Press the back button on your browser and press "More Options" and then "Results by Email or Phone". Note: you may need to be logged on to Yahoo in order to do this.

Fill in the form and start receiving your personalised price drop email notifications.

Job done.

Camera Equipment Buying Tips

X Marks the Spot, originally uploaded by Me (?).

I am in the market for a new camera lens because I am getting rather annoyed with my Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM. At the wide end it gets huuuuuuge barrel distortion and quite bad chromatic aberration. So I have decided it is time to change. After much consideration and dilemma I have decided on investing in a Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM instead. I have one other "L" series lens and I swear that it is hard to take a bad picture with that lens so it is time to upgrade. I have done all the donkey work so I thought I would summarise my usual Internet haunts for camera based research.

For the newby photographer out there; these are the five key sites you need to know about when looking for new equipment:

1) Flickr
There are 3 aspects to Flickr that make it a great resource:

(i) The discussion forum search. A great place to get real world opinions on equipment.
(ii) Lens tagging. Perfect for finding examples of shots taken with your particular lens. See the Canon DSLR User Group and Nikkor Flickr groups for details.
(iii) Camera finder. Not sure which camera body to go for? Check out the rankings and example shots.

2) Digital Photography Review
Without a doubt *the* best place to go for in depth reviews of camera bodies. They have been a bit slow at doing lens reviews (2 or 3 lenses a month across all brands) but there are an awful lot of lenses out there and they have limited time!

3) Fred Miranda
This is the best place to go for a 'crowdsourced' view of the best lenses out there. It is all based on the scoring from real users and therefore opinions can be quite polar. My advice is to look at the aggregate score and take the individual comments with a pinch of salt.

4) SLR Gear
This is a new find for me as I only found out about it this week. In a similar way to dpreview.com these guys are doing lab tests of all SLR lenses out there. In addition they also have a user forum for end users to score (similar to Fred Miranda). The lab reviews are not as in depth as dpreview.com but they do currently have better coverage. If you want to compare lab results graphs between lenses this is currently the best place to go.

5) Camera Price Buster
This is also a new find for me this week and it now my new favourite. The site aggregates prices from a number of online dealers and displays the best prices for each piece of equipment. Price aggregators are not new but I like this site's specific UK camera buyer's focus. Another great feature is the price tracker graphs. They act like stock price trackers to show the price history and trending. If you are not in a rush to buy then keeping an eye on the graphs is a great way to keep on top of the best prices. I would really like to see some sort of price alert capability where you can get an email alert if a particular product drops below a price threshold. The site *does* offer a 'price drop' RSS feed which you can subscribe to which does go some way towards this. Note it is a UK only site.


So there you go, five places to go in order to make sure you always make the best camera purchases.

One final note of caution. Due to the financial meltdown and the crappy £ verses the Yen, lens prices have all gone up recently and show little sign of dropping in the near term...

TrackTour

International Harvester 454, originally uploaded by Me (?).

I have been pretty busy for the past month or so with "stuff". I have managed to make my Flickr breadcrumb trail web test a little better. It is now called "TrackTour" and can be found at the link below. Let me know what you think...

xrrr.co.uk/tracktour

TrackTour, originally uploaded by Me (?).

Photo Breadcrumbs

Lake Welch HDR, originally uploaded by Me (?).

I have started geotagging my Flickr photos when appropriate. It got me wondering if I could use the geotags to act as a breadcrumb trail to see where I had been.

So last night I knocked up a quick mashup between Flickr and Google maps to put markers on the map for each photo and then draw a line between each photo in order of date taken. You can then browse the trail to see where I have been. Great for virtual stalkers.

My [non-existent] javascript skills have failed me to do anything more advanced but maybe when I get some time I will be able to add 'next' and 'previous' buttons so you can 'walk' the path of photos.

See the breadcrumb trail.

Has anyone does this properly anywhere?

Create a Flickr Tag Cloud in PHP

Sunset over Pewley Down, originally uploaded by Me (?).

Here is a very basic way of creating a Flickr tag cloud in PHP. To make the Flickr API calls simple I have used phpFlickr.

The what and the why are listed below but there is a worked example available also.

I am going to use these variables in the code:

$reqtags = 150; // Number of tags to display
$user = "xrrr"; // Flickr user to search for tags
$min_font = "10"; // Font size to start drawing tags
$max_font = "30"; // The maximum font size tags can get

First of all we need to convert the username string into a Flickr User ID. To do this use the flickr.people.findByUsername API function:

$ns = $f->people_findByUsername($user);
$nsid = $ns[nsid];

Then we obtain the tags from Flickr using the flickr.tags.getListUserPopular API function which returns an array of tags. The phpFlickr object will return an array of arrays. Each array contains the tag value and the count of the number of times the tag is used. We store the number of tags by counting the size of the array and sort the array by the tag count value:

$tags = $f->tags_getListUserPopular ($nsid, $reqtags);
$numtags = count ($tags);
sort ($tags);

We now calculate the number of tags that should be displayed at each font size. To do this we just divide the number of tags by the number of font sizes available (maximum font minus the minimum font) and round it down to the nearest whole number. Note if there are more font sizes than tags (in this example the user has less than 20 tags) then the interval will be zero. This is ok.

$increment = intval($numtags/($max_font-$min_font));

In order to calculate the font sizes we loop though the tag list (which is in tag count order) and create an associative array of "tag_name => font_size". This code is basic so does not attempt to calculate the font size from the tag count. It just loops through the array and every time the interval value is reached it increments the font size. If the interval value is zero then it just increments the font size for every tag.

$size = $min_font ;
for ($i=0; $i < $numtags; $i++) {
$output[$tags[$i][_content]] = $size ;
if ($increment == 0 || $i % $increment == 0 )
$size++;
}
}

We now have an associative array of tag and font size ordered by tag frequency. Tag clouds tend to be in alphabetical order so we sort by the associative array keys using the PHP function ksort:

ksort($output);

Finally we print out the HTML to build the tag cloud and link back to Flickr:

$url = "http://www.flickr.com/photos/$user/tags/" ;
echo "<div id='TagCloud'>";
foreach ($output as $tg => $sz) {
echo "&nbsp;<a href='".$url.$tg."' style='font-size: ".$sz."px;'>".$tg."</a> &nbsp; \n" ;
}
echo "</div>";

The resultant HTML can be styled with the following style sheet to make it look like Flickr:

<style>
body {
font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
}

#TagCloud {
background:#F5F5F5 none repeat scroll 0%;
border:1px solid #EEEEEE;
padding:15px;
}

#TagCloud a {
text-decoration:none;
}

#TagCloud a:link {
color:#0063DC;
}

#TagCloud a:visited {
color:#0063DC;
}

#TagCloud a:hover {
background:#0063DC none repeat scroll 0% 0%;
color:#FFFFFF;
text-decoration:none;
}
</style>

I have created a working example to demonstrate the code and make it easier to reuse.

Flickr Groopy

The Groupie Look, originally uploaded by Me (?).

I have released the first cut of my pet mini-project that I have called Flickr Groopy.

Flickr Groopy exists because of a set of Flickr Groups called Views 25 through to Views 25000. The idea is that once one of your photos reaches 25 views you can add it into the Views 25 group. As soon as your photo reaches 50 views you remove it from the Views 25 group and add it into the Views 50 group and so on.

The group rules state that a single photo should only ever be in one Views nn group at a time. The Flickr GUI is a bit clunky for swapping pictures between groups quickly so I decided to learn PHP, CSS and the Flickr API to create a tool for viewing your photos, highlighting the photos that are eligible for promotion into the next group and providing a one click update of the groups that the photo is in.

The result was Flickr Groopy:

Flickr Groopy, originally uploaded by Me (?).

How it works:
Based on a search string the code uses the flickr.photos.search API call to get a list of the user's photos that match the search criteria.

For each photo in the response:

• Call flickr.photos.getInfo to get the number of views
• Call flickr.photos.getAllContexts to get the groups the photo is in
• Find out if the photo is already in a Views nn group
• Using the number of views and group list work out if the photo is in the correct group
• If the photo could be added to a Views nn group then highlight the photo
  

If the user clicks on a highlighted photo that kicks off an Ajax call to a PHP script to switch the photo into the correct group.

It is all implemented with HTML DIV elements and some CSS fun powered by PHP and phpFlickr behind the scenes.


Current features:

• Text search for a user's photos
• Grid display (restricted to 16 pics for performance) of the output
• Colour coded highlighting of pictures eligible for moving groups
• One click group update for eligible pictures

Planned features:

• Search for user's photos already in a Views group
• Tag cloud to inspire searches
• Search by Flickr set
• Notification of photos existing in more than one group with one click fix
• Support for the sister Faves set of groups
  

Known problems with the current version:

• Internet Explorer does not render CSS the same as Firefox and Safari so I need to work out how to get the CSS to look the same on all three browsers
• The drawing is quite slow - I have added some timing trace to the code and it shows that almost 0.6 seconds per picture is taken up with two Flickr API calls. There is not much I can do about this I am afraid. I am investigating whether I can make the calls in parallel to speed things up a bit but that involves Ajax threading and is a bit scary!
• The page should draw before it attempts to do the lengthy photo processing - working on a prototype Ajax version of the grid rendering
• There is a 1 second pause between clicking on an image and anything happening - also clicking on multiple pictures breaks the UI slightly as update responses get lost - need a wait icon and a way to disable additional clicks whilst a response is pending

Flickr Groopy is here: xrrr.co.uk/groopy

Translation

Adapted, originally uploaded by Me (?).

Is it me or is auto-translation of Russian far far better than French, Italian, etc? We got teflon and WD-40 from the space race; is usable Russian computer translation a product of the Cold War?

This is what got me thinking:
Google translated iPhone blog
Original

Social Networn

Networn, originally uploaded by Me (?).

I invented a new word last week (technically 2 words but run with it):

so·cial net·worn
- adjective
1. Diminished in enthusiasm for participating in online social networking websites;

Derivatives:
1. social netweary (adj.); Fatigued by social network site participation.
2. social netwear (verb); The apathy about keeping your multiple social networking site profiles up to date.

Is it just me that is feeling like this? Not a month goes by without an invite from another newly discovered networking site from one of my friends. It also seems to go in phases. A few years ago it was Friends Reunited, then MySpace, then Flickr, then Facebook and now LinkedIn. Don't get me wrong, I love my friends but I actually like to see them in real life and talk to them in person rather than via a proxy website.

Wikipedia lists 116 social networking websites and I am a member of about 5 of them and a lapsed member of another 3 or so. This does not count the 3 different social networking sites we have on our company intranet.

Of all those sites, the only one I actually participate in any more is Flickr. This is mostly because I consider Flickr to be best place to backup, share and discover photos and not a social networking site. Flickr's social networking is secondary to having somewhere to put my photos and share them with the world and long may it stay that way!

Am I the only social netweary person out there?

PicLens: Cool Internet Picture Browser

PicLens, originally uploaded by Me (?).

I was genuinely wowed this morning when I stumbled across PicLens. It is a full screen picture reader that works with Flickr, Google Images, Yahoo! Image Search, etc, etc.

In one line it is: Cover Flow for Internet images.

It is also bloody cool!

Once installed (into Firefox, IE or Safari) you get a little arrow icon in the bottom left of your pictures when you mouse over them. Click on the arrow and you are presented with the interactive 3D wall of photos:

PicLens, originally uploaded by Me (?).

You can scroll in and out with the mouse wheel and use the mouse to scroll to the left or right. Everything is smooth and intuitive. If you point it at a Flickr photo stream then it will go on forever without having to page through multiple pages to get the picture you want.

Click on an image and it is centered and make slightly larger:

PicLens, originally uploaded by Me (?).

Double click and the image is brought up full screen in something similar to the Flickr slideshow:

PicLens, originally uploaded by Me (?).

Unfortunately the full screen slide show does not have a cover flow style transition but you could always zoom into the 3D wall and view it that way.

Click on the little arrow at the top left and you are taken to the original page. I have found the PicLens is great for browsing Google Images in a much more fluid way than using the browser:

PicLens, originally uploaded by Me (?).

Clicking on the images will take you to Flickr where you can see them full size.

Excellent stuff!

www.piclens.com

Amazon Vine

Twisty, originally uploaded by xrrr.

Completely out of the blue yesterday I got an invite to join the Amazon Vine programme. With Vine, Amazon will ship me three pre-order items a month to review. As long as I keep reviewing I keep getting free stuff to review. I assume it will be books, CDs and DVDs as those were the questions I had to fill in on my invitation form.

Amazon's web site says:

Amazon Vine™ is a program that enables a select group of Amazon customers to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make educated purchase decisions. Customers are invited to become Amazon Vine™ Voices based on the trust they have earned in the Amazon community for writing accurate and insightful reviews. Amazon provides Amazon Vine™ members with free copies of products that have been submitted to the program by vendors. Amazon does not influence the opinions of Amazon Vine™ members, nor do we modify or edit their reviews.

I assume that I got an invite because I preorder stuff and am a Top 500 reviewer on the UK site.

I must admit that I have not reviewed anything for over 2 years because it ended up being too hard. I would spend 20 minutes writing a review and then if you were lucky they posted it. If you were unlucky then they would not. You can chase them but they just send back a form email saying that the review did not meet the guidelines, of which there are many! Because the review was filled in on a web form then you did not get a copy of what you wrote. I therefore started writing the reviews in Word and then pasted them into the form. At least then I got spell checking!

Hopefully they have improved the process now, or maybe there will be a Vine forum that I can post my issues to. Maybe because of the last part of the Amazon statement ("nor do we modify or edit their reviews") they just allow reviews through without approval (unlikely!).

I'll keep you posted.

Pictobrowser

I just found this great picture viewer linked to on FlickrBits.com. I have set it up to look at my "20 most interesting" Flickr Set.

To get it yourself click the "info" button in the bottom right and follow the instructions.

Rocketship Journey

Reach for the Stars, originally uploaded by xrrr.

Whilst trying to get the Google Earth flight sim working (which I didn't) I got distracted (as I often do) and ended up making this short, art house cinema worthy short film of my rocket trip from my back garden into the stars...

Google implements a Reverse Total Perspective Vortex

Stars, originally uploaded by xrrr.

I have just downloaded the new 4.2 version of Google Earth. It now allows you to investigate the sky at night above your current location.

Whist zooming into the infinity of space and rediscovering my fascination with 'space stuff' I realised that Google have actually implemented a Reverse Total Perspective Vortex. I can point Google Earth at my house and then flip to sky mode and see the 'pure unimaginable infinity of space'. It is a good job it is a Reverse Total Perspective Vortex or else Google might have inadvertently created 'the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected'!

Use with caution folks!