Simon Willison’s Weblog

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18 items tagged “photography”

2023

Wikimedia Commons: Photographs by Gage Skidmore (via) Gage Skidmore is a Wikipedia legend: this category holds 93,458 photographs taken by Gage and released under a Creative Commons license, including a vast number of celebrities taken at events like San Diego Comic-Con. CC licensed photos of celebrities are generally pretty hard to come by so if you see a photo of any celebrity on Wikipedia there’s a good chance it’s credited to Gage. # 10th October 2023, 4:17 am

2020

Cameras and Lenses (via) Fabulous explotable interactive essay by Bartosz Ciechanowski explaining how cameras and lenses work. # 8th December 2020, 3:38 am

Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos

According to the Apple Photos internal SQLite database, this is the most aesthetically pleasing photograph I have ever taken of a pelican:

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2017

Dead End Thrills. Duncan Harris Is a photographer who works in the medium of video game screen captures. # 12th October 2017, 2:23 am

2016

Practical gift ideas to positively improve a friend’s life and hobbies

I’m a big fan of the Dorling Kindersley travel books, which are chock full of photos, maps, diagrams and illustrations. Thanks to the internet there’s really not much point carting around a reference-style guidebook like Lonely Planet—TripAdvisor etc will always be more comprehensive and up-to-date. This makes guidebooks more important for general inspiration and browsing.

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2009

“That’s maybe a bit too dorky, even for us.”. Astonishingly exciting: Flickr now have machine tag support for OpenStreetMap—tag a photo with osm:way=WAY_ID and Flickr will figure out what OSM feature you are talking about and link to it with a human readable description. # 28th September 2009, 10:39 pm

Red Dust. Tom Coates used Flickr’s new Galleries feature (which lets you build a curated collection of up to 18 photos from other Flickr users and add your commentary) to construct a stunning compilation of photos of the Sydney dust storms. # 23rd September 2009, 2:20 pm

Augmenting photos—with OSM! “You climbed up a mountain and took a photo ... but it’s 2009! Why doesn’t it have all kind of magic over the top of it.”—Marmota matches your landscape photos to height field data, then overlays data from OpenStreetMap mapped to the contours of the photograph. # 9th June 2009, 11:34 am

2008

Preparing to rescue Hubble. The Big Picture has pictures of the preparations for next month’s Space Shuttle Atlantis mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope for the last time, including a photo of astronauts practicing underwater. # 1st September 2008, 1:54 pm

A Leopard attacking and killing a Crocodile. Amazing sequence of photos by Hal Brindley. # 20th July 2008, 6:48 pm

A Look at the Presidential Candidates. The Big Picture (the Boston Globe’s fantastic photojournalism blog) presents a fascinating collection of historical photos of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain. # 4th July 2008, 9:09 pm

The Sea Forts (via) History and stunning photos of British World War II sea forts (kind of steel castles on stilts) seven and a half miles off the coast of Kent. # 27th April 2008, 10:51 pm

How to Do Anything Photographic (via) A huge collection of excellent looking photography tutorials by Ken Rockwell. # 5th March 2008, 1:12 am

Canon EOS 450D / Digital Rebel XSi. Two weeks after a buy I EOS 400D. Sigh. It’s not out until April, but the big new features are a 3" LCD and "live view" mode. The kit lens now has image stabilisation. # 24th January 2008, 2:48 pm

Canon EOS Beginners’ FAQ. A really good, detailed FAQ; I just picked up a Canon EOS 400D (aka Digital Rebel XTi) and I’m figuring out what I can do with it. It looks like I’ll need something better than the kit lens for wildlife photography. # 17th January 2008, 7:59 pm

2007

Eye-Fi launches. Really neat idea: a digital camera SD card with built-in WiFi to beam your photos straight to your laptop. SitePen built the UI, which runs in your browser on top of Dojo and talks to a small web server running locally. # 11th November 2007, 10:40 pm

2002

Short guide to digital photography

Rob Tougher: My Guide To Digital Photography. A short but informative article on using Linux and Python to manage a collection of digital photographs.

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