Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
This is a park at the top of a hill rising up from the Pacific Ocean. Today there were a zillion crows riding the air currents and occasionally alighting on the fence that separates the park from the steep drop-off.
I liked the idea that the crow might be bristling at the prohibition. But I miss the old signs they used to have on the fence. They had a bit more personality.
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
And the Flickr Q&A
Some sort of flowering scrub brush in the dry part of Madrona Marsh preserve. Some parts of the preserve have ponds year-round, some collect rain in winter and spring, and some are always dry land with grass or chaparral.
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.
It got even more confusing since I signed up with the same username across all of them!
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
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.
@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.
@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?
I guess I should do a new round of experiments with this camera & see what I can convince it to do!
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.
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
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
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
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
Actually the croaking frogs might have been quacking ducks in the distance, now that I think about it.
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
Light dusting of snow in the mountains above Los Angeles after last night’s rain.
We need more… #mountains #sangabriels #losangeles
Testing out the new phones camera on a bee. It has an option to add a second or so of video to still shots when it detects movement, which I figured I’d try out as well.
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.
Thought I had a great view of these stalks and dried-out flowers at a seasonal marsh, but the lens flare…
The actual good photos from my hike are on Flickr, if you’re interested
Naturally-screened city.
In the distance: buildings along Los Angeles’ Wilshire Blvd as seen from the hills of Kenneth Hahn Park, an island of open space in the middle of the suburban sprawl.
Two views of a rainbow during a rainstorm a few days ago (first of the season for southern California).
J: “My mom’s porgs are the tastiest porgs in the whole world….probably.”
The hour grows late, and Los Angeles rises out of the palm trees, preparing for another night. 😉
Seriously, though, I was trying out different settings on a camera with a good zoom lens.
In response to KemoNine asking about the haze:
By LA standards, for 11 miles away, that’s crystal clear!
We’ve actually had some really clear days over the last month or so, especially after the winds have blown all the smog out to sea (before they bring all the dust out from the desert a day or two later), interspersed with smoggy days and days when the sky is full of smoke from wildfires in the mountains or canyons. The smoke from the massive fire raging in Ventura is mostly being blown the other way from here.
It’s a lot better than it used to be 20 years ago. A couple of years back on a visit to my parents’, I noticed that I could see the mountains from their front door. I had never noticed that the whole time I was growing up there!
And even that was better than their stories of LA smog in the 60s: outdoor school activities cancelled due to smog, being unable to see the end of a block, observing sunspots directly…
Air quality laws have made a huge difference!
