What Is Noise

I didn’t take that many photos at Podcamp Boston 3, but I took a handful that I thought were decent and fun so here they are on my flickr feed. Enjoy! Comment, favorite, share! BY-NC-SA

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We held a funeral for DRM by encasing an iPod and a Zune in concrete and dropping it into the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge. We ended up getting front page of Digg with the invite. I was invited to take photos and video. I still haven’t had a chance to edit the video and stupidly left it all on a hard drive at home. I took (what I consider) to be some great photos however. They are all posted to Flickr as CC (by-nc-sa). See some of the photos below.

ROFLCon Crew, dressed for the part. Christina, Tim, Diana, Dean

Burial at sea, view from the bridge

The Splash

Dean about to lower the Zune and iPod

The Brick resting peacefully

Everyone gathering at JFK Park

Evening prior from the 8th floor of the Harvard Science building roof

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Everyone’s got their own general photo workflow. Mine is as follows

1. Prepare to take photos. This involves making sure all gear is charged, lenses and filters clean, cards cleared off, and cables/gear packed in my trusty backpack
2. Take photos. Not that hard
3. Transfer photos to external hard drive in an Aperture library
4. Split into various libraries if needed
5. Create two or more “Smart albums”. One has items rated above 4 called “to upload”, one is called “X” and contains only photos with a rating of -1 or X.
6. Rotate all photos upright. Aperture 2.x no longer gets this right, as in Aperture 1.5 they automatically rotated based on the metadata. Aperture 2.x sees the metadata but does nothing with it. I suppose I could write a script to make this right, but this doesn’t take long
7. I use two monitors, the one on my MBP and a 37″ 1080p LCD. I have a mirror of each photo sent to the 37″ screen which I use to gauge sharpness, focus, blur, details and DOF. The MBP screen is used for all color choices (matte screen).
8. I rate all photos in the first pass quickly looking for gross errors, poor composition, blurring, horrid exposure, etc. Those get an X. I roughly sort the other photos
9. In a second pass then I focus on sorting the photos in priorities, trying to figure out the ‘best’ ones. I keep not the best ones as rating of 1, 2, 3 stars. Photos I think suitable for printing get a 5. I don’t give many 5’s. Photos I want to put online get a 4.
10. Photos with a 4/5 get a pass of color correction, cropping, etc
11. I upload the 4/5 photos to Flickr, and choose if they are Creative Commons or not. I’ve been using CC more often than not recently.
12. Photos that get a 5 might be uploaded to Smugmug for printing capability
13. I delete the photos in the Smart Album “X” as they are worthless and not something I want to keep. Anything that I might want to ever see again (alternate shots, etc) I keep however.
14. Delete memory cards, promote photos, twitter about them, etc. Start over.

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Thanks to Sooz this Saturday I’ll be giving the Nikon Nikkor AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF a run through its paces on my D200, which I am rather looking forward to.

I normally keep the Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens on my camera, and honestly its a killer daily lens. The 70-200 is twice as big, nearly 3x as expensive and likely weighs 4x as much. That being said, it’s significantly faster and much sharper. The 18-200 isn’t ‘unsharp’ but it is certainly not razor sharp like this lens. To get any sharper you must go with a prime of some sort.

I honestly hope that I don’t like the lens TOO much, as it’s $1700 (actually over 2K on Amazon) and I’d rather not add this to my wishlist of photo gear. Ken Rockwell has some killer information and review of the lens. Err, and that’s his photo of the lens above.

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The first step towards getting past addiction is admitting you have a problem right?

“My name is David Fisher, and I am an analytics junkie.”

Ok, I admitted it. Let’s move on. With a Flickr Pro account you get to have a little Stats page about your photos. It’s pretty cool and useful, but it leaves me wanting so much more. What are the problems that I have with it? What more do I need? Honestly, much of the functionality of Google Analytics would be really appreciated

• A longer history: The past 30 days only isn’t really sufficient for me. I haven’t been taking photos for only 30 days. I’d like to be able to compare the response that I’ve gotten between events. These events might be months, or even a year apart. As it stands now, it’s just a pretty picture of the last month of activity.
• Variable time selection: I want to be able to select a timeframe of just a week or so. I appreciate that it shows it by “yesterday” and “all time” but I want to see things for a specific month or slice
• Comparing vs others photos in a pool: I’d like to see how much traffic everyone else has gotten about a specific tag or event. I have a “hunch” that I had the most popular photos for ROFLCon, but it’s really hard to tell. That’s a really big thing for me.
• More graphical trend information: I’m a visual person. I like to see everything that I can visually. Just the fact that I’m on flickr makes this apparent. Graphs, charts, diagrams. You can’t overload me.
• In this vein of things, I want to see referral information over time.
• I want to know some things about my viewers. Resolution, color depth, browser, time spend on page. I also want to know if they “bounced” or kept viewing more of my photos. How many unique viewers vs “hits” overall? What sizes are they viewing?
• Tell me about what I’m doing: What cameras am I using, what size am I generally exporting, what lenses am I using? Graph my EXIF metadata for me. Some of us shoot with multiple formats, cameras, etc… and I’d love to know more about my own shooting/usage and compare it against traffic patterns.
• Overlaying: I want to be able to overlay any of this data against each other. I want to see trends. Are all of my creative commons photos getting more traffic? Are the things that I shoot in portait getting no traffic? I want to know!
• A simple/advanced mode: I don’t think that everyone wants all of these. Some people are overwhelmed by Google Analytics. I don’t want to scare people off, but some of us need more power!
• I’d like to have export to CSV or XML. Sometimes I just need to export data and analyze it elsewhere.

A few things could happen here:

1. Flickr could allow the insertion of analytics Javascript into the pages on your account, and you could use some external service. I’d love to build a Flickr analytics engine/page or hell, just use Google Analytics and then hack a few extra things onto another page to deal with stuff
2. Expand their own! They have gotten some of the smoothest photo management software going and they can’t get decent analytics out there? WTF?

It kinda pisses me off that they are screwing around with Video services on flickr, when it’s clear that YouTube has that covered and it’s kinda pointless, when they should be improving the photo services. There is a reason that I still use a Smugmug account for my “professional” work.

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