2009 Ferrari California flickr find

Ferrari California top down
Originally uploaded by thomas pix

While out on the town to celebrate our anniversary last month, my wife and I happened upon a photo shoot for the new 2009 Ferrari California while grabbing a drink at Vesuvio's in the North Beach section of San Francisco.

Since I had my camera with me, I decided to take my own pics of the action as best I could in the low light and without a tripod.

As always, I uploaded the pics to my Flickr stream, and went about my day-to-days.

Wouldn't you know it, but a few weeks after the upload, my car-crazy brother (crazy in a good way) points out my Ferrari picture set is featured on the front page of both Carscoop and Jalopnik blogs this week!

Great to be a part of the social media stream, and to have contributed to a couple communities I've only lurked in for a long while now.

yet another battle at Kruger?

Last July I blogged about the Battle at Kruger, an epic battle between lions, hippos and Cape buffalo, thanks to a tip from our tour guide at Safari West.

Today, thanks to boingboing, I got a tip to check out a leopard attacking a crocodile at Kruger National Park that was photo documented by Hal Brindley.

Not sure what it is that makes Kruger National Park the site of so many surprising predator-prey combinations, but I'm glad there are folks around to document it so I can witness from the comfort of my keyboard.

A teaser slideshow is below:

PicLens is BEST web tool for browsing images and photos

I first discovered PicLens, a cinematic presentation of photos and videos, while attending a session at Stanford University put on by the D School on Creating Infectious Engagement.

The folks from CoolIris gave a demo to us, and even though I didn't have web access (or phone acces for that matter) during the session, I pre-populated my Blackberry browser with the following Tweet:

18:40 found a must get app: PicLens from cooliris.com you'll be blown away

I downloaded and installed the app that night, and I've been enjoying it ever since as it allows me to sift through images and videos so very quickly to find what I'm looking for.

The utility of the tool hit home again last night as I was doing reconnaissance for a race I'm participating in on June 8, the Muddy Buddy here in San Jose. It's a combo ride/run/obstacle course, and I was wanting to see whether folks had cages on their mountain bike pedals and what kind of obstacles they've run in the past.

I navigated over to Flickr to find the MuddyBuddy tag and instead of scrolling page-by-page through the 1,579 results (30 at a time), I fired up PicLens.

Within 5 minutes, I'd seen all the pictures, navigating through them as if they were on a light board like one might have seen Tom Cruise spinning through in the Minority Report.

I've also used the interface to quickly find Creative Commons images for use in presentations and to scout out trail conditions on Mt Whitney at various times of year. In all, great stuff.

Well worth the quick download and install. Do it. Now.

mischief making tools

mischief making tools
Originally uploaded by thomas pix

At long last, I have the camera to go with the Eye-fi card that LeftCoast Mom got me for Christmas.

This picture of the pretty packages was achieved through using the Eye-Fi card to wirelessly upload the pic to Flickr. And the Canon SD1100 camera's smaller than my Blackberry 8830, so I feel like I'm finally "whole" again after switching from camera-enabled Treo 650 to BB8830.

Looking forward to seeing what kind of trouble I can now start to document. :-D

NYTimes Year in Pictures: good pix, novel UI

The NYTimes has posted its 2007: The Year in Pictures collection, and of all the pix collections I've seen so far, this one is getting closest to a true navigate-as-you-wish interface.

GOOD:

• The collection is divided into nine groups with thumbnails for each on the main page
• Each group of photos can be thumbnailed and scanned (although this isn't the default setting)
• Captions for each photo (toggle on/off)
  
• For those that care, there's a soundtrack for each group (toggle on/off)
  

NOT-SO-GOOD:

• No way to see the entire collection as a set of thumbnails
• Default presentation forces the slideshow into full-screen mode
• "Drag photos to scan thumbnails" interface is nonstandard and feels weird
• Where are the links to the accompanying stories?

Overall, however, I'm impressed with the work of the crew listed in the credits: Josh  Haner, Lisa Iaboni, Tom Jackson, Sarah Kramer and Meaghan Looram

Maybe the IHT photo folks can learn from the NYT team?

Reuter's Pictures of the Year 2007

Glad to see that Reuters has posted their own Pictures of the Year 2007 collection,

Bummed to have to warn you that the navigation through their collection is painstakingly laborious, at best.

Why can't they do something like the Flickr set thumbnails view instead of forcing us to scroll-and-click, scroll-and-click?

I have to admit I only made it half-way through the collection out of frustration with the interface. I'm hoping I didn't miss too much good stuff.

National Geographic photo contest winners announced

My favorite time of year is here: the announcement of winners from all manner of contests as well as folks announcing their "Best of 2007" lists.

First up to be featured here, National Geographic's International Photography Contest. Of course NG lives up to expectations of curating a great set of pictures. Unfortunately, the pix are trapped in a presentation method that doesn't allow me to link directly to individual photos. As per usual, my favorites aren't the feature photo on any of the splash pages for the sets below.

In the International Winners category, four photographers are chosen from 148,203 images submitted to
the International Photography Contest.

In the English Language Winners category, Four photographers are chosen from over 24,000 images submitted to the English Language portion of the International Photography Contest.

Honorable Mentions and other selections are featured in their remaining Animal, People and Landscape Galleries.