cetan's weblog a man, no plan, a blog, golbanalponnama.

Magnum Photos releases a blog

Magnum is a photography agency that employees some of the best photographers in the world. Started by four photographers after WWII, it was one of the first of its kind and allowed photographers (in particular photojournalists) to control the works they created.

Some of their current members are now blogging which you can find here:

http://blog.magnumphotos.com/

Very interesting stuff.

cetan dot org RSS feed – thumbnails

The RSS feed for cetan.org has been modified to allow non-cropped thumbnail images. helloheather pointed out after she added the feed to Livejournal that the thumbnails were all crops of the original images. I finally made some time to fix that, so now what you see in the thumbnail should be what you see in the full size image.

Also, I've been enjoying the daily updates a lot as it keeps me on my toes, but I'm worried about running out of images to post. Between the weather and the A80 being in the shop I've had fewer chances to find new images.

Act now and we’ll double the amount!!

A couple cetan.org updates:

My original thought with cetan.org would be that it would act as a "best of" photoblog and that my flickr account would be a combination of good and near-misses. This is why I started off with updates every other day, rather than daily. But in reality, flickr has turned more into a "best of" than anything else (with a few near-misses thrown in). As a result, cetan.org has really lagged behind in terms of photo uploads. There are a number of images on flickr that I really like that I've simply neglected to put on my photoblog.

So, for the remainder of this year, (and hopefully beyond that), I'm switching to daily updates on cetan.org. Earth-shattering news, I realize.

Also, for those of you using livejournal to read external feeds, helloheather created a syndicated feed for cetan.org:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/cetan_rss/

Attention Grabbing

On Flickr if your thumbnails are not chocked fulla high-saturated color or extreme contrast, people won't look at your images.

Regardless of the quality of the final image, if you can't grab someones attention with a tiny cropped thumbnail, the image will not likely be noticed.

Ok, yeah, so I'm generalizing. But even though I try and look beyond the thumbnail, I catch myself behaving this way too. The more "friends" one has on flickr, the more groups one belongs to, the more likely (IMHO) one will be to skim images, rather than really look closely.

In order to combat this behavior I've changed how I use flickr. Instead of logging into the site to view new images from friends or groups, I now read the corresponding flickr feeds by way of Google Reader.

The advantage to this is that the feed shows a reduced size image of the original, not a 100 pixel crop. I can better judge which images I want to take a closer look at and, as a result, have a better appreciation of what is being posted. So far its working really well. By actually using flickr less I feel I'm more connected to the photographers that share their photos in the same groups.

cetan.org RSS feed now online

By default, I block hot-linking of images from most of my domains. The reason for this is simply to keep the bandwidth thieves at bay.

And so, when I turned cetan.org into a photoblog, the default action was to stop hot-linking of all images from the domain. However, what this did was prevent the RSS feed from working, as the feed contains thumbnails of the images posted.

Today I finally got off my rear and fixed this. So now only full-sized images are protected from hot-linking and the thumbnails are not.

The RSS feed for cetan.org is available here:

http://cetan.org/index.php?x=rss

Enjoy!

Picasa Web Gallery

Google was kind enough to give me an account on the new Picasa Web Gallery (a Flickr-type solution) and so I decided to try it out:

http://picasaweb.google.com/rbernhard/

I've only created one album so far, but as a part of my test, I'll probably create another one.

It's an interesting product for a Beta. Its integration with Picasa is fairly complete but could use some tweaking. Right now there's a 250MB storage limit on free accounts but for $25/year you get 6GB of storage.

edit/update:
Apparently you can't hotlink to Picasa Web images. I did not realize that.

wbez dot org photo selection (Chicago Public Radio)

A screen shot of today's wbez.org (Chicago Public Radio)homepage.

click for a larger view

glutton for punishment

Apparently WBEZ.org (Chicago Public Radio) didn't learn anything the first time. They've gone ahead and selected another one of my photos for their homepage.

So, this Friday, May 27th, be sure to stop by wbez.org (Chicago Public Radio) to see their selection.

WBEZ dot org (Chicago Public Radio)

The public radio station in Chicago, WBEZ, recently started accepting submissions of photos to be featured on their homepage. Each accepted photo is given front-page space all day (I believe for a full 24H) on whatever day it's chosen.

Tomorrow, Thursday (April 19th) one of my photos will be the featured photo.

So, be sure to stop by and check it out:

http://www.wbez.org (Chicago Public Radio)

entering the world of the photoblog – cetan.org

In direct conflict with my desire to reduce domain name clutter, I've decided to give a photoblog a try again. PixelPost is easy to use and allows some straight forward design changes to the UI. I can pre-load images to show up at a specific date/time, it creates thumbnails, allows comments (spam might be a problem later on), and handles tags as well.

You can click on the photos to scroll back through my previous postings (or click on the previous/next links below each photo). If, for whatever crazy reason, you want to subscribe to a feed of the site, you can do so.

cetan.org

I've decided to do this mainly as a way to motivate myself to start uploading and posting photos again. The bernhard.us photo gallery will still be my main photography gallery, this will just be an extension of that. The entries on cetan.org won't necessarily be "best of" photos, but may turn out to just be photos I like. We'll see. The UI is still a work-in-progress, so things might change a bit.

My goal is to try and update the site every two to three days.