Interesting links and notes on updates to my main website.



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SE cameraphone contest for Canadians

http://www.sonyericsson.com/ca/thesearch/

I would paste in the contest info but it's all in Flash so I can't.

Summary:
- open to Canadian residents only
- pictures from camera phones only (any model or brand, as far as I can tell)
- 9 semifinalists will each win an SE K850i
- grand prize winner also gets $10k "Picture Perfect Dream Vacation"
- upload as many photos as you want, as long as you don't put a photo in more than one category
- I think it can be any cameraphone photo you've ever taken, I don't think you have to take it during the contest period (based on my quick read of the rules)

Deadline is 11:59:59 EDT MARCH 23, 2008.

Via Flickr Sony Ericsson - Picture Phones group.

Now, can I get Flickr and my photo software to display only pictures from my cameraphones? Hmmm...

UPDATE: Oh bonus, according to Flickr, my Nokia N82 cameraphone doesn't exist

http://www.flickr.com/cameras/nokia/

Buggers.

If they do believe your cameraphone exists, you can do e.g.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=cat&cm=nokia%2Fn75

And in case you're wondering, yes, I try changing the URL with n82 instead of n75, but it just ignores it.

More bad news: it can find some of the photos from my SE K790a

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=rakerman&cm=sonyericsson%2Fk790a&s=rec

and by "some", I mean "three". I have taken lots more than 3.
You might think I could search on photos with DSC*, since my SE is the only one of my cameras that uses DSC* filenames, except that also doesn't work. Apparently it only does an exact match.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=dsc&w=...

"You don't have any photos matching dsc."

I should at least be able to use the DSC* approach in Picasa. I'll see what else I can come up with in Picasa, since Flickr is hopeless.

UPDATE 2008-03-15: In post title content -> contest.

UPDATE 2008-03-15: In case you're wondering, although I've taken about 1800 photos with my SE K790 and about 50 with my Nokia N82, my chances of winning are almost nil, as the categories couldn't be better designed to exclude my photography:

• Action & Adventure (motion)


• Fun & Games (sports)


• Everyday Moments (people hanging out, cats and dogs)

Whereas my main photography categories are something like:
* landscapes (ideally without people)
* cityscapes (ideally without people)
* sunrises and sunsets (ideally without people)
* still life and static scenes
* unusual stuff I saw while walking around

I almost never take pictures of motion, sports, humans, or ordinary events.

Labels: cameraphone, cellphone, contest, digital photography, photos

posted by Richard at 14:49 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

aliens among us

Weird stuff like this is why I got my cameraphone.



I think it came out really well.
It's from the side of a UHaul that I walked past downtown.

Labels: alien, ottawa, photos

posted by Richard at 21:24 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

a tale of four lions





Happy New Year

First lions are from the Chinese-Canadian Heritage Centre, I thought they were stone but apparently they're in concrete.

Here's where I would link to Centretown News article from February 8, 2008 "Building a bridge from East to West: Xing Huang's dedication to the community makes Chinese heritage centre a reality", but the CN site is down for maintenance.

Xing-Zhong Huang works at NRC and put a lot of his own time and money into purchasing the former church



and turning it into the Centre



I thought it made an interesting contrast with the Sparks Street Post Office



Man, the British heritage of Canada sure does know how to do stuffy.

It's good that the "Chinatown" ("Thai/Vietnamese/Korean/China / general other side of the Earth - town") area down Somerset is expanding down Kent and Bank, because it brings lots of yummy food.

Anyway, happy year of the rat.

(Rescued after Google lost this post when I logged out of a different Google account.)

Labels: lions, ottawa, photos

posted by Richard at 07:21 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

fave photos of 2007

Flickr is looking at 2007 faves.
It was really hard to choose which dimension
- favourite picture?
- technically best?
- best looking?
- hardest get?

I picked my favourite as the single one for the Flickr thread, but since I control the horizontal and the vertical in my blog, I get to show them all

Favourite picture:



Technically best - I don't have one, I don't know anything about photo technique.

Best looking - probably:



Hardest get - I have been waiting for years to have the combination of the right conditions and actually having a camera at the right time:



I know it doesn't look like much, but those tiles aren't white, they're actually like a gritty jumbled grey-brown concrete. The reason they look white is they're covered with a perfect layer of snow that has fallen in just such as way that it has covered the tops, but fallen into the cracks between them.

All images Copyright © 2007 Richard Akerman

You can see all my self-faves at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rakerman/tags/myfaves/
(it actually took me a ridiculously long time to think of using a tag - I kept thinking "I wish I could favourite my own photos").

It was still quite a pain to do this, since Flickr has no slideshow-by-date or archives slideshow.

Labels: photos

posted by Richard at 12:09 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

Flickr stats

I wonder when I joined Flickr. There's probably some way to check.

Anyhoo... 850 photos / 20,182 views

850 photos is really quite a lot.

==

I just noticed Blogger has a new "Add Video" button - "We accept AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Real, and Windows Media, 100 MB maximum size."

Labels: meta, photos, stats

posted by Richard at 08:44 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

France photos

164 photos selected from over 600 taken

Flickr > Collection > France April-May 2007

Labels: photos, travel

posted by Richard at 07:53 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)