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I set up a new group on flickr:

“Moblog: I love moblogging”.  If you are on flickr, check it out!  Join up and add photos.

I love the GorillaPod.  I have a large one for slr-zoom but I also have a small one for the point-n-shoot that I take w/ me everywhere.  That, plus macro, plus white-balance, plus a 3-second self timer (because the small gorillapod tends to quiver a bit), and I’ve been getting some fun shots up close in darker places. 

I ordered this fun tripod, I can’t wait to get it!

Pix from

http://jennycisney.1000words.kodak.com/default.asp?item=310439

UPDATE! There’s a whole flickr group for it!

http://www.flickr.com/groups/gorillapod/

I love Flickr.  I never get tired of it.  I lose HOURS AND HOURS there.  Surfing pix from old towns I used to live in (along w/ google maps), surfing popular photos…

Check out this Sea Of Pumpkins…

Here are ALL the flickr photos I’ve ever Marked As Favorite… (got hours?)

Just LOOK at this HUMMINGBIRD… (be sure to click on “All Sizes” above the photo to zoom in)…

The water reflecting on this ship looks like fire…

the title of this photo is “she did it!”
and I WANT to comment, but won’t:
“well of course she did it, what, did you think she was going to keep her knees together and keep that fetus inside of her for 40 years?”
… but I wont.  LOL

Haha, there’s a Dogs That Lay Like Frogs group on flickr! Flickr rocks.

flickr.com/groups/dogsfrogs/

Now, if only it came in PINK:

Thanks to RGV for pointing this out. It comes out in February-

http://www.sanyodigital.com/C6/index.html
… and other models:
http://www.sanyodigital.com/

I found a neat program called AutoStitch (because I can’t find my CD that has Canon Photo Stitch on it). It works really great.

A stitch of two photos):

I’m working on making a folder of my very best photos. I have SO many photos online that when I want to show a new person my photography, I’m not sure where to send them. I’ve sent people to my online galleries and had them say “oh, there were just SO many photos, I didn’t look at that many“, so they may have missed my very best photos. So I’m sorting and making one difinitive collection to send people to if they want just a quick look.

Today I met w/ a lady from the Unitarian Church again. She’s really nice. Down here in Florida you have to get along with all ages or you’ll find yourself alone. Some 73 year olds are really with it! This lady has a camera even more complex than mine and she’s doing really well with it. My mom is 73 and uses a Palm Pilot, a computer, downloads music (rock n roll no less!), emails, surfs, you name it.

Went to Olive Garden tonight. M and I always make fun of it but they have this dish that is to DIE for, the Steak Gorgonzola Alfredo Pasta which has steak in it which is as tender as freakin’ filet mignon and has this FLAVOR that I just can’t place. It’s so good (and so fattening).

I’m keeping up w/ the news and talking about it alot w/ _M_, but by the time I get around to blogging it’s old news, and I hate being one of those bloggers that talks about yesterday’s news.

I’m searching for a Subaru Outback wagon. I love that car, I always have. That and the Eclipse are my favorite car. If I replace my eclipse w/ an Outback, I’ll eventually get a used Eclipse since I really love the older body style better than the newer body style anyway [although the newEST body style is awesome!]. That, or M might get a used MR2. But either way we’ll keep the Z cuz that’s like, the ultimate.
Anyway, the Outback I want new is like $30k. But I’d be ok w/ like a 2 year old one, but we found a couple new ones at a discount cuz they were probably Dealer Demos or something. Those are the best if you can find them (my family is in the car business, too bad they don’t sell Mitsus or Subarus).

Why an Outback? I hate sport utes and I want 4 wheel drive and the ability to put people in the back seat. Sometimes we drive my mom around and M’s Z has no back seat and my back seat is a death trap. Your head is about touching the glass and metal above. I knew a girl in high school who was asleep in the back of a jeep and the jeep hit a bump or something. She got slammed against the roll bar above her head and she died. That’s nuts!!! So when I got in my back seat recently, I realized it’s REALLY tight. So sometimes we drive my mom around, but ALSO… duhhhh du dun dun duuuuunnnnnnn!!!!!!!!

See, when they come down, which is usually about 4x a year, they have to drive because we effectively have no back seats. So they drive the rental and they can’t work all the buttons and usually the windows are LOCKED and the FART in the car with the WINDOWS SHUT. Also, the dad in law falls asleep at the wheel, crosses the line into oncoming traffic and slams on his brakes at green lights… EVERY VISIT.

So, I’ve wanted a car that’ll handle passengers for a long time. I hate sport utes and gas guzzlers. The small sport utes are cute but they’re a dime a f*cking dozen. If I see one more of these I’m going to freaking scream! I don’t want to be a sheep. The 4wd wagon is 4wd, takes passengers (moms and inlaws), telescopes, photography equipment, the dogs, won’t get stuck in the sand when geocaching, etc.

Idunno, it’s late, I’m babbling.

Ok, since beginning this post, I’ve finished my Portfolio of best photos: ..::PHOTOS::..

I can usually see the shuttle launch from where I am…
[[My pix of the shuttle taken from here.]]
It’s about a 211 mile drive from here.

But today I could not see it. It was too cloudy/hazy. That’s too bad, I would have liked to get some pictures.

I saw this on sinceretheory.net,

Using Picasa to send photos to your flickr account, and when they arrive they have TAGS, a TITLE, and a DESCRIPTION.

I tried it and it works great!

http://sinceretheory.net/weblog/?p=435

I love this picture, from “Hangeu”:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31874940@N00/14671758/in/photostream/

I’ve seen other pix like this, and there is always some argument about whether the photos are fake. People say ‘a plane CAN’T get that close to people on the beach or they’d be sanded to death by the jet blast!’ but the people who post these pictures always insist that they are real. I’d love to hear from somebody who’s actually been to this beach.

UPDATE: M says: “I’ve seen pics like that too. Yes, the beach is real. The planes really do get that close to the beachgoers.

http://www.anniebees.com/Photos/SpottingSaintMaarten.htm “

This is a similar photo on PhotoSig.com where some of the reviewers blasted the submitter for posting a fake:
http://www.photosig.com/go/photos/view?id=66136

UPDATE 2:
Lots of great photos at Airliners.net

Check this one out:
http://photos.airliners.net/photos/9/9/6/721699.jpg

What I find interesting is that in a photo dated
November 28, 2004
it shows a beach:
http://photos.airliners.net/photos/2/0/8/720802.jpg

But in other photos, like this one dated
November 16, 2004
it shows the beach gone:
http://photos.airliners.net/photos/6/6/3/713366.jpg

What I wonder, is did the beach wear away and they will try to rebuild it? Is this an ongoing process where it wears away and the keep rebuilding it? They do that here, “beach regeneration” or something like that. Or… did they take the beach away for liability reasons? I doubt that though, that’s destruction of natural property. If there were liability issues, they’d just prohibit trespassing. Idunno. Does anyone know? I’m curious.

Hahahah this is a riot! Check out this flickr photo by “Green Destiny”:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/greendestiny/3359449

Do you ever feel like you are on internet overload? Like you want to look at 3 sites at ONCE? Like you can’t stop surfing flickr.com yet you are dying to go thru your own pictures so you can upload them? But at the same time you want to go out and take photos? It’s like “AAAAAAAaaaaaaackkkkkkkkk!”. Look at my pictures! No! I want to go look at pictures! No! I want to go out and take pictures! It’s like internet ADD. But really it’s internet addiction.

Photojunkie (link || another link) has been on my blogroll since this blog was in it’s past incarnation. I LOVE his nickname. I can’t think of a better name than photojunkie. I’m a photojunkie for sure. I can lose an entire day AND night to flickr and photoblogs and moblogs and camera sites and my own photos. I’ve lost many hours in Photojunkie’s photoblog! Also, he is in Toronto, where I REALLY want to live, and where M is from. It’s my dream to live in Toronto and find other photo buddies to go photo-ing with. It’s such a photogenic city and area. I thought “pixeladdict” would be a good nickname for me, but that dot-com is taken (I’ve been wanting to start a nice photoblog for a long time).

I’ve been wanting to do a nice photoblog for a long time, but the truth is I have so many blogs (this blog, the family blog [a toned down version of this blog], a fitness blog, my Backyard Blog, a pretty much defunct religous exploration [or lack thereof] blog, a travel blog for when I travel, a defunct cat blog, a dog blog… ack!) and a fotki premium account and a flickr pro account… that how in the hell can I start and faithfully maintain a photoblog? I don’t see how I can, especially when I actually forget to post in some of my other blogs.

Flickr allows you to email a photo (like from your camera phone) straight to your blog. The photo then shows up on the blog and in your flickr account. But you can only have one active email address for that at a time. So when I’m out and about, away from the computer, I have to have chosen beforehand which blog I’d like to be able to email photos to from my camera phone. They don’t seem to have plans to change this either. So… my main flickr account which is a “pro” account, is associated with The Pug’s blog, for no reason except that’s just how things started out for me.

But to email photos to this blog, I have a different flickr account which is not pro, user “miamyselfandi”. I feel bad sorta, like I don’t want to take advantage of flickr, but if they’d offer the feature, I’d close the free account. It’s not that I want to be double-dipping, but there are literally days where I want to send a Pug-Meetup pic to the pug’s blog and an hour later send a funny pic of something else to this, my main blog. I wish flickr would allow us to have more than one “email2blog” email address at one time. Fotki.com allows you to have a different email address for every album, so it’s obviously not that hard. The addresses are computer-generated on the fly and can be changed at any time. It’s really cool. In reality though, I don’t email many photos to this blog, so I don’t think I’m really taking advantage of flickr.

Anyway, the best thing I can do right now is get OFF THE COMPUTER and go get lunch, and bring my camera with me. Really. It IS addicting.

I love this picture of cat-tongue:

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=9604282&size=l
(I didn’t take this, I just like this photo.)

So I’m halfway through moving all my photography off my web server and over to fotki.com. It’s taking a while. It’s not hard, nor is it a huge job, it’s just mind-numbingly boring. So I do about 10 galleries a day.

Recently I realized a problem with what I am doing. By moving my images off of my web server where I have meta tags in the html as well as a robots.txt file to deter search engine bots, and putting the images on a photo site, I’m opening myself up to the images being catalogged by search engines like Google Images. When people find images via search engines like that, they tend to act like the images are public domain, and mine aren’t.

I may decide to password-protect the folders and maybe even put the password in plain view. Doing this would deter search engine bots, but still allow people to view the images.

See, the problem with Google Images and other search engines catalogging images alone, is that when people then do a search for, say, “pink flower”, the search engine then serves up your photo without the website that surrounds it. Yeah, the user can click to see the website, but most don’t. Most just download the photo for their own use, i.e. steal it. So even if I have “Do not steal my pictures!” all over my website in red text, people will never see that part.

But allowing people on fotki.com or flickr.com to view my images, the viewers are most likely other photographers who understand this and wouldn’t just steal my images. No, not every fotki.com or flickr.com user is honest, but most are of the same mindset when it comes to how photos are to be shared (for viewing enjoyment, for feedback, not for stealing).

My philosophy may be wrong, but it’s worth a try.

I don’t know yet, I have to think on this one a while. Well, most of them are low-res enough (small enough) that even if someone did steal an image, they couldn’t do much with it, not even makea 4×6 print out of it.

Remember the Infinite Cat project I mentioned earlier?

Now there is an Infinite Flickr Project, and I got in during the early stages. Here’s hoping that this takes off like the Infinite Cat did. It’s fun! Go create a free Flickr account and join in the fun!

I’ve moved some of my older photo galleries off my web server over to fotki.com.

Fotki.com is great, and so is Flickr.com. Both give you unlimited photo storage for the reasonable yearly fee. Flickr is more of a “photoblog” in that you have a “photostream”, or stream of photos. Not folders and albums. You can create “sets” but I find those to be a pain.

Fotki is more traditional. You have folders and galleries. So you can have folders by year, and then by subject, for example. Fotki has ftp, which I live by, flickr does not (yet).

Flickr has more of a community, where people comment on your photos, add you as contacts, invite you to groups… there are photo groups with discussion boards and “photo pools”. Flickr lets you blog directly. I can take a pic w/ my camera phone, email it to a particular email address, and in one moment the photo appears not only in my flickr account, but ALSO on my blog at the SAME time. I do this ALL the time with The Pug’s blog.

Both are cool, but in different ways. I like both. I store all my photos at fotki, because it’s straightfoward and organized, especially for the viewer who may or may not be very computer savvy. I put copies of some of my favorite photos on flickr to share w/ other photo nuts, to hear comments, to participate in groups, and I use it to blog photos.

Anyway, it’ll take a while to get all my galleries moved over to fotki, but it’s well on it’s way. Then I can use my web space for other things, like video. Although… there will soon be a place like flickr and fotki but for video: vimeo.com. Ah, the world keeps changing.

Flickr is crack. Flickr is CRACK! Flickr is crack!

You get on there, you can’t stop surfing good photoraphy. You can’t stop surfing the groups. You can’t stop surfing the tags. You can’t stop compulsively going through you own photos looking for good ones to upload.

It is SO addicting!