A panorama of the Family Connections place, showing all the variety of toys for kids of various ages. Costumes, dinosaurs, a piano, finger paints, a slide, books, etc.

Nora locks her grandmother inside the playhouse.

Mommy looks like a giant peering into the “kitchen”.

There were several other Spanglish-speaking kids there. Nora bummed a juice box off of one. It was her first experience with a juice box; she got the hang of it immediately.

Oh, and they have laundry facilities too, so I guess you can do your laundry while the little tykes wear themselves out.

Nora behaves like any proud new homeowner, inviting in guests, locking in guests, trying to close the door by grabbing the outside doorknob from inside, etc.

1. Due to very reasonable security restrictions on AJAX calls, a script running on this page, for example, cannot communicate with Flickr via an XMLHttpRequest.
2. Even if I could get around #1, I would have to include my personal Flickr API key and secret in plain text in the javascript file. This is not only a bad idea, but against Flickr’s Terms of Service.

The result is that the script must use a cross-site scripting technique to send information to a PHP program running on a server I host, which sends the request to Flickr and returns the remaining part of the script that knows what to do with the information from Flickr.

Video Demonstration

How do I get it?

Well, first you’ll have to install Greasemonkey Firefox plugin. Then you can go to http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/39390 and click the Install button. That’s it!

Enjoy.

One Flickr group that I have been trusted with administrative rights over is called I Wake Up Screaming (IWUS). That which I love about the group is also that which causes many photo submitters great confusion: irony. IWUS is a place for photos of objects that were created with the greatest sincerity and not meant, by their creators, to be scary at all, but if you look at them through the eyes of a child sitting at a campfire hearing scary stories, the object is clearly completely terrifying. As a general rule, anything to do with clowns [shiver!] fits this description. It’s a fun way to look at the world and, if you try it, you’ll find yourself laughing to yourself as you pass shop windows or go to the flea market.

Yesterday, I became aware of a new kind of Flickr group: Flickr Group Roulette (FGR). Rather than pick a topic each week to submit photos about, they choose another Flickr group and (try to) follow the submission rules for that group. Yesterday, by complete chance (and maybe a little to do with Halloween approaching), FGR chose IWUS as a group to infiltrate. In came dozens and dozens of IWUS submissions, only very very few of which actually got the irony at the heart of the group. FGR very much encourages self portraits, which is why they all have people in them.

Here are a few examples of yesterday’s FGR-takes-over-IWUS submissions:

First, we have our literalist, the absolute opposite of irony. A photo of actually waking up screaming.

Getting better. This submitter is acting out a nightmare. Still missing the point, though.

The clown angle is good, but this submitter (awesomely named The Goat Whisperer, by the way) is trying too hard. The point of IWUS is that clowns are scary enough, or more so, when they are trying to be friendly.

This is a great one! He’s found a perfect IWUS object, one made with friendly intentions but can be seen as horrible, and posed with it.

This was my favorite, until I saw……

Brilliant! Sock monkeys are very IWUS. Great lighting, too.

Thanks to all those Flickr Group Roulette players that have visited our humble little group lately. Now go away to rough up some other group and leave us in our ironic peace.

It all began back in September, when I received the following standardized Flickr message:

You’ve been sent a Flickr Mail from pancontent:

————————————————————
:: Santander Images

Hi there! I’m a content editor with a new online company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Panraven. We help people edit, organize, share, and publish their images and stories.

We’re always on the lookout for new images and content to add to our public media library, which we offer free to all of our customers (membership is also free). It’s an ongoing project made possible by photographers of all levels from all over the world. Not only is it a great opportunity to educate and share with others, but it is also a wonderful way to showcase your travels and your work.

I know this may seem strange, but I came across your images of Santander, Spain and would like to know if we could include them in our public image library. We definitely offer compensation!

Please let me know if you are interested by emailing me directly at [email-redacted].

Thanks,
[name-redacted]

Content Editor
Panraven Inc.

I asked what kind of compensation was available, and I got this.

Hi Erik,

Attached is a list of images that I am interested in (flickr urls and titles).

We usually offer anywhere from $1.50 to $5.00 an image, depending on the resolution and quality of the image. I saw that you had the original sizes on flickr, which is great – judging by their size, I would make a starting offer of $3.00 per image. Naturally, I’m always willing to negotiate – you have great images (from a location that we need immediate coverage in) and I’d love to have them!

So here’s what would happen next if you are still interested:

If the photolist looked okay to you, I would then have you submit your images to our ftp dropbox – in short, you’d zip a file folder of the images and drop it onto our ftp website. Or if you prefer, I could try to manually download from flickr, since you have the highest resolution posted there.

I would select a final number of images then pass along a photo agreement for you to sign which gives us a broad, non-exclusive license to your images (excepting resale for purposes that are not related to our company and product). We request this unrestricted license because we’d offer your images for all of our users to enjoy for free, meaning they could view them, add them to their own stories, etc.

You would retain full rights to your images, and you would be credited in two places, one as a tag attached to the image, and also as the photographer name. You would be compensated on a per image basis either by check or paypal (easiest and fastest).

Feel free to ask me any questions that you might have! You can also check out www.panraven.com at any time to get an idea of what we’re about.

Thanks,
[name-redacted]

Thinking myself a top-notch negotiator, I decided that, if we’re going to haggle, I’m gonna start from the top price, doggonit!

Nice choices. I’ll accept 50 USD (barely 35 EUR these days) for my ten photos and give you a link from my blog (Technorati Authority: 111).

My paypal account is the same as this email address: [email-redacted].

-Erik

I got the immediate reply…

That sounds good – I’ll download your images from your flickr account. Attached is a photo agreement for you to look over and sign. Please read it carefully and let me know if you have any questions.

…

Doh! You know you’ve screwed up a negotiation when your offer is accepted immediately. She sent me the document to “sign”. I plopped a scanned signature on it and emailed it back to her.

Once it was over, I emailed her back.

Everybody falls for the “top of the range” price gag the first time, don’t they? I’m not complaining. I think it’s quite clever.

-Erik

To which she responded,

Lol!

Unfortunately not everyone goes for our modest compensation.

Best Wishes,
[name-redacted]

Unfortunately, it took about three weeks for the $50 payment to clear into my Paypal account, which is why I waited to post this. But in the end, I received a crisp Ulysses for my troubles.

Below are the images I gave them rights to use. Like I said, good choices.

They appeared first on this blog in three posts: Luisma Visits, Saturday in Santander, and Afternoon Walk in Santander.

The shot I took of the phenomenon.

When I got home and pulled up the image on Flickr, a Greasemonkey script I have installed in Firefox, called Flickramio, modified Flickr to show a Google Maps satellite representation of where the photo was taken. Because the satellite image was from low tide and the photo was taken looking almost due north, the explanation for the blue streak became obvious.

You can clearly see that the blue streak follows the deeper man-made channel that never completely dries up.

Note that this is correlation and not necessarily causation. This channel will also probably have an effect on temperature and boat paths as well as depth, but I’m inclined to attribute most of the color difference to depth.

Geotagging is really cool, but it’s lacking some dimensions that I expect to see added in the next few years. Knowing the latitude and longitude where a photograph was taken is great, but here’s what’s missing: altitude and direction. Cameras of the future should also be able to encode the altitude above sea level and a three-dimensional unit vector specifying the direction and angle the photo was taken in. With this additional information, it would be possible for computers to perform searches not only of photos taken from a certain place, but of photos taken of a certain place from various distances. Given enough data and clever algorithms, you could eventually end up with 3D models of data-rich locations or the equivalent of Google Street View, all with user-generated uncopyrighted content!

If you are a Flickr user and care at all about geotagging, I highly recommend installing Greasemonkey and Flickramio. The other player on the team that you might not know is an iPhone app called Mobile Fotos that lets you geotag and wirelessly upload 1600×1200 photos from your iPhone to Flickr. I love it.

Flickr Group List Search

Download here.

Flickr Group List Search makes it easier to find the groups you are looking for when you want to add a photo to a group. After using Flickr for a while and participating in the groups system, I have ended up with a lot of group memberships. I can only assume that other active Flickr users do too. The interface for adding a photo to a group is, frankly, pretty disgusting. You have to scroll through an alphabetically sorted list of the groups you belong to to find the group you want. But wait! Some group admins have given their groups wacky names with bizarre ascii symbols in them, so they don’t really sort alphabetically. In fact, I suspect that they do this precisely to solve the exact problem that this script solves!

Demo

To understand how it works, you really need to just watch the script in action.

So what are you waiting for? Install Greasemonkey and go install this script!

I also notice from the One Year Ago widget that I announced my plan to migrate all my photos off my blog’s server and onto Flickr a year ago. Unbelievably, I completed this task just two weeks ago, when the final Cactus Cam images made it to Flickr. As my more loyal readers my recall, we already had cactus flowers in May last year. This year, Mr. Cactus isn’t producing any because he’s really cramped in his pot. We’ve been trying to find adequate gloves – and courage – to move him to a new vessel, but we have yet to do so. I have little doubt that, upon getting a bigger home, he will thrive like never before.

That’s all the internal blog news for now. Let’s make this third year the best yet!

Colindres Pequeño – This one is a little too far away to see the tilt shift effect. Even in the larger version.

Laredo Beach – This one is only a little better. Again, it’s better in the larger version.

Golden Gate Bridge – As if you weren’t sure what this was a photo of. This one definitely looks miniature in the larger version.

This is a pan around the city of Copenhagen, a city very dear to my heart. The original panorama was taken by Henrik Johansen. Since the panorama was so large, I had the idea to use the Ken Burns effect to move the camera around the image. I’m quite pleased with the result.

This video is also available at YouTube, Yahoo, Metacafe, Google, Revver, DailyMotion, Blip.tv, Veoh, Crackle, Stupid Videos, Sclipo and Viddler.

Finally I figured out how to really do it:

1. Use the polygonal selection tool to make a selection around the object you want to color.
2. Feather the selection a little bit (I used 6 pixels).
3. On a new layer, fill the selection with the color you want (select the color and hit alt-backspace).
4. Remove the selection, and apply a Gaussian Blur to the layer. I used a setting of around 8 pixels. This will cause the color to bleed, just a little bit, outside the original selection. If this is a problem skip this step, or add the blur without removing the selection first.
5. Set the blend mode on the layer to “Hue”. This is the key step.
6. Optionally you can modify the opacity of the layer to reduce the effect.

No doubt there are at least 17 other ways to accomplish the same thing, but this is how I did it. And here’s the result:

Check out the original here.

I looked through my entire library, and really didn’t find many photos with 3D frame bursting action. So I had to borrow a few from Jane, of pimento cheese fame. She has photos of all kinds of strange objects. Hopefully she won’t sue me for copyright infringement.

The first is a young “burrito” from our visit to the livestock fair. This was particularly hard photo to frame break because of how hard it was to cut out just the donkey’s head, with all his little hairs sticking out. I think I didn’t a fairly good job, but I’m not very pleased with it overall. Original photo.

I also tried to cut out this plant from a photo Jane took, but it was too fuzzy and was impossible to cut without the dark background coming through.

Handling a parrot in Venezuela. It’d be a better photo if it weren’t for that girl checking me out. I love how, at the time of this post at least, the parrot is looking warily behind him at the BITWRATHPLOOB. Original photo.

This one was easy, and has a natural third axis that makes the break look believable. Original photo by Jane.

I like this one a lot. The orthogonal nature of the subject made it a prime candidate for frame breaking. Original photo by Jane.

That’s all for this episode! Vote for your favorite in the comments.