Photography

The Natural History Museum once again plays host to the Shell Wildlife Photographer of The Year 2008 exhibition. A truly delightful way of spending an hour of your time. The above photograph by Wesley Cooper, was a favourite - creative and captures the essence of the animal without showing its face.

Didn’t get the camera out as much as I would have like in Lisbon earlier in the month but it was fantastic to escape the miserable English weather and spend a week with a fantastic group of people in a fantastic European city. Highlights included a mustachioed man who sold us copious amounts of mojitos, ‘Docas’, the Expo ‘98 site, the aquarium and, of course, Dr. T!

Photos from New Zealand trip, April 2007 now on Flickr.

Indigo-2 has a photoshoot to do for a client in a few weeks time - flower product shots to be precise. My trusty (and beloved?) Nikon F-601 I bought from a second-hand camera shop on King’s Parade, in Cambridge, during my first week at university has been replaced by a shiny new Nikon D80. I can’t bring myself to put the F-601 on eBay, so it sits on the shelve next to the piles of photos it took around the world, like some kind of retired serviceman, wryly smiling in sepia.

My Flickr account (photo sharing site) has recently been hacked and over 1000 photos, along with sets, groups, comments, mails and contacts maliciously deleted. I will restore content shortly as I used the great Flickr backup software but sadly all the metadata has gone.

Whilst not so convenient for those in the UK, I must recommend QOOP service which uses the Flickr API (definition) to provide posters and photobooks made up from collages of your pictures.

The point of this post is not to plug a ‘digital-to-print’ site. The thing that QOOP illustrates nicely is that to make a good internet site, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Utilitilising APIs, XML and RSS feeds allows an excellent site to be created, for lower initial development cost. Just look at the number of people who are making the most of the Google Maps API (blog). When traffic is high enough, then perhaps consider the transition to developing in-house tools, but in the early days of a new site, one trick is to hit the ground running with content supported by syndicated tools and feeds.

Photos from the Allison Mitchell Christmas trip to Stockholm are now available on Flickr.