This is promising: SmugMug has bought Flickr & plans to “maintain Flickr as a standalone community…”

This is promising: SmugMug has bought Flickr & plans to “maintain Flickr as a standalone community of amateur and professional photographers and give the long neglected service the focus and resources it deserves.” (quote from article)

Now I don’t have to worry about Verizon shutting it down!

Exclusive: Flickr bought by SmugMug, which vows to revitalize the photo service

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And the Flickr Q&A

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Murals in progress on what used to be featureless gray walls

Murals in progress on what used to be the featureless gray walls of an apartment complex. The aviation theme on two of them is due to this being Aviation Blvd.

Composition brought to you by the angle I could take a photo out the car window before the light turned green. 😁

#mural #southbay

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Update: I drove by it again, and this time stopped to look. There’s a signature: on the last section: Jacque Dupuy 2018, Mural Executed by LeviPonce.com

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Finally, Instagram will allow you to download an archive of your account. We’ll have …

Finally, Instagram will allow you to download an archive of your account. We’ll have to wait to see how useful it is (ex: can you easily find the caption from a photo, or do you have to search a giant HTML file with everything in it?)

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17226186/instagram-download-data-facebook

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Brush fire reported at the marsh preserve where I took the last photo I posted …

Brush fire reported at the marsh preserve where I took the last photo I posted here. It’s not a very big preserve – basically a large city block, in the middle of suburbia. (There’s literally a Target across the street.)

Here’s hoping they manage to stomp it down quickly, before it does too much damage.

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Got a follow-up alert that the fire’s been put out. The word “small” was included, which is a good sign. Next time I hike there, I’ll have to ask about it.

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I’ve been using the same headshot across multiple social sites for ages. Now that …

I’ve been using the same headshot across multiple social sites for ages. Now that I’m juggling multiple Mastodon accounts, it’s gotten confusing, so now I’m going for themed avatars.

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It got even more confusing since I signed up with the same username across all of them!

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Flashback to last summer: a red panda (sometimes called a fire fox)…

Flashback to last summer: a red panda (sometimes called a fire fox) at the San Diego Zoo. I made a point to look for them and the penguins on that trip. For reasons. 😉

#photography #photos #redpanda #firefox

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Sadly I didn’t get to see them doing much. There were several in the enclosure, maybe three or four, but the rest were either hiding in the tree or sleeping. This one was just sort of perched up there, looking around.

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@salmon_cannon Thank you on both counts!And yeah, I’ve been really impressed with the …

@salmon_cannon Thank you on both counts!

And yeah, I’ve been really impressed with the Pixel 2 camera. Not just the daylight photos, but it does surprisingly well with night shots too. And it’s fast enough that the burst & motion modes don’t seem to sacrifice much.

I keep meaning to look for an alternate camera app that will let me do long exposures.

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I remember doing a bunch of experimenting when the camera was new…

@kemonine I remember doing a bunch of experimenting when the camera was new & settled on some best-for-most-cases settings. White balance is only available in some modes – it usually does a decent job on that, but I think it must have just detected the wrong type of light in this case.

Thanks for the tip on turning digital zoom off completely. I don’t use it very much, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to have available for when I do. Maybe it is?

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I guess I should do a new round of experiments with this camera & see what I can convince it to do!

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Yeah, I rarely have reason to use the digital zoom with that lens!

I used to figure if I needed to zoom past what the optics can do, I’d just crop it smaller. In most cases it’s still better than screen resolution anyway. But I’ve found that digital zoom has one advantage over cropping after the fact: the camera bases any automatic settings like exposure on the actual image you intend to take, not the wider view.

But yeah, might as well turn it off the rest of the time.

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Pixel 2 vs. PowerShot SX710HS

Pixel 2 vs. PowerShot SX710HS.

I’m only a hobbyist photographer. I don’t have a really nice camera, just a point & shoot that I picked mainly for its optical zoom. And I’m still astonished that I can often get better pictures out of the tiny lens on my phone.

This is from #WonderCon over the weekend, my wife’s #cosplay as Whitney Frost from Agent Carter. The phone picture is so much sharper, and the Pixel 2 finally gets the color balance better too.

Album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/albums/72157694829944955

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Nighttime fountain at the Anaheim Convention Center (full)

Nighttime fountain at the Anaheim Convention Center. This was a popular spot for cosplay photos even after sunset, but I managed to catch an angle that looked deserted.

#wondercon #photography #fountain #night

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My full gallery of photos from WonderCon is up on Flickr. Most of them are just cosplay snapshots. This ended up being the only artistic shot I took that came out really well.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/albums/72157694829944955

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Birds of Madrona Marsh

Birds of Madrona Marsh in Torrance, California.

It’s a seasonal marsh, where the low-lying parts stay wet most of the year, but the rest dries out ever summer and floods during winter rains.

I spotted ducks, doves, geese, these black birds with bright red wings that sound like a smoke detector battery alert, this white bird that looked like it was fishing, plus dragonflies, a huge bee, and I heard (but didn’t see) frogs.

Full album (21 pics) on Flickr

#birds #photos

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Actually the croaking frogs might have been quacking ducks in the distance, now that I think about it.

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I think the white bird might be a snowy egret, and that red-winged black bird turns out to be… a red-winged blackbird. 😄

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_egret
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-winged_blackbird

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Rising above the clouds…

Rising above the clouds… I tried a lot of crops on this (otherwise it’s unmodified) but finally settled on the square because I wanted enough of both the rooftops and the sky bracketing the clouds and mountain, and I wanted to steer clear of some of the foreground buildings that would have appeared on the sides and break up the layout

Photo taken at: Los Angeles, California

Rising above the clouds… I tried a lot of crops on this (otherwise it’s unmodified) but finally settled on the square because I wanted enough of both the rooftops and the sky bracketing the clouds and mountain, and I wanted to steer clear of some of the foreground buildings that would have appeared on the sides and break up the layout.

#mountain #clouds #cityscape

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See-through skyscraper?

See-through skyscraper?

See-through skyscraper?

#building #reflection #sky

On Facebook
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Comments on Facebook:

Don Anthony
Is that close to LAX? It’s the best place for invisible buildings.

Kelson Vibber
Yeah, right on Century. Tall buildings on one side of the street, short on the other.

Looking back through my oldest Instagram photos, I’m struck by just how awful phone …

Looking back through my oldest Instagram photos, I’m struck by just how awful phone cameras used to be.

I mean, yeah, I remembered flip phone cameras were terrible, but even early smartphones couldn’t handle situations we expect them to now. Got to remember filters were introduced to compensate for the grain, gloom & fuzz.

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