Alan’s working up a 5 Card Flickr Story project to show at Northern Voice, and it’s a really fun little application to explore simple visual storytelling. Any photo on Flickr tagged with 5cardnv is sucked into a pool, where 5 photos are chosen at random and presented as a mini story. You can “keep” any of them, or roll the dice for a fresh batch, until you’re happy with the frames of the story.

Nancy White’s been playing, and saved a screenshot of the output of her mini story. Which she then uploaded to Flickr, and tagged as “5cardnv”. Where it is then placed into the pool of photos for random selection for new stories. Recursion in visual storytelling. Gotta love it.

I’d upload my 5-card-story containing the recursion to Flickr and tag it as 5cardnv, but I’m afraid something would implode due to excessive recursion.

Of course, you have to be familiar with the rules because they exist for a reason. But you also need to know when to just ignore them, or flat out contradict them.

This shot breaks almost every rule in the book. Composition. Lighting. Exposure. Focus. White balance. But, the emotion and life that pour out of it make it worth laughing at the rules. It’s one of my favorite photos of all time.

For a really good and fun overview of some decent photography rules, be sure to check out the Photography Rules group on Flickr – started by a fellow Calgarian.

Yahoo! Mexico posted a photo I took last halloween on the front page of their site. That’s pretty cool. Almost 6,000 people have clicked through to view the photo page today alone, making it now my most viewed photo on Flickr.

The mummy was back again this year, and I got a shot of it with a wider angle lens.

I’ve been geotagging many of my photos on Flickr, but it’s always bugged me that the geolocation metadata was not available in my Aperture library – geotagging only happened after posting photographs to Flickr, and that metadata was essentially lost from my library.

That just changed. Now I’m using the awesome new Aperture geotagging plugin Maperture, adding latitude and longitude data directly within Aperture before uploading to Flickr etc… That means I get to keep my metadata.

Here’s what the Maperture metadata entering screen looks like:

geotagging in Aperture with Maperture

and once posted to Flickr, the geotagging data is still available:

displaying the geotagged data from Flickr after posting

And, thankfully, the coordinates seem to match up pretty closely. I’d tried using Google Earth via the Flickr Export plugin for Aperture to add the geotag data before, and there was a mismatch when viewed on Flickr. Maperture seems to work great so far!

I’m definitely not the most prolific photographer, but it only took me 4 years to publish 5,000 photos to Flickr. Not all are publicly viewable, but they are all available under a simple Creative Commons Attribution license.

Here’s #5,000 – my 2008/366photos from today, of my son Evan being a typical pyromaniac kid at the campground this morning

pyromania - evan doing what boys do: find out what burns and what doesn't.

flickr’s interestingness ranking has always been fickle and unpredictable, but I just took a look at a bunch of the photos in the current “7 days” interestingness section, and it’s just confusing how some of the photos get in there. I suppose networking and gaming has a lot to do with it, but they seem so formulaic. Step 1: get a cute girl (or, if you happen to be one, shoot yourself). 2: pose seductively. or oddly. whatever. as long as leg and/or cleavage is visible. 3: tag the hell out of the photo. 4: profit.

if interestingness somehow indicated the real “interesting-ness” of a photo, in terms of quality of composition, aesthetics, or anything other than “gollllly, that’s a purty pic-ture!” it would be, well, interesting… but it’s really not.

Sounds cool, but is the 90 second limit real?

Flickr’s official stance on the time limit is this:

Video on Flickr grew out of the idea of “long photos” and as such, we’ve implemented what might seem like an arbitrary limit of playing back the first 90 seconds of a video. 90 seconds?

We’re not trying to limit your artistic freedom, we’re trying something new. Everyone has endured that wedding video, where even the bride will fast-forward to the “good bit.” In fact, even Tara at FlickrHQ hasn’t made it past the first 90 seconds of her own wedding video.

Just try it! It’s fun once you get the hang of it.

If that’s the case, why not put some kind of filter on the size of photographs? The number of photos in a set? The number of photos uploaded by an individual? There are lots of people posting photos to Flickr that could easily fall into the same category of annoying and boring wedding videos. Why treat video differently?

Yup. Only plays the first 90 seconds of an 8:24 video. Stupid.

So MSFT is trying to spend $45 BILLION dollars to buy Yahoo. Rumour has it that the borg want Yahoo’s search and advertising stuff, which would be a little odd – I can’t remember the last time I searched using Yahoo, or saw a Yahoo-powered ad. Whatever.

But, Yahoo does own two resources that I care a great deal about. del.icio.us and Flickr. It’s pretty safe to say that neither of those are worth $45 BILLION, so it’s likely that they aren’t the direct targets of the acquisition attempt.

The first reaction of a vocal group of Flickr users is “cheque please. outta here.” They’re saying that they’ll pull up and move if Redmond is able to sign on the dotted line.

Again, whatever.

Yes, I could very easily host my own photographs (using Gallery2, or even just a simple photoblog – I’ve done both) but the real value of Flickr (and also of del.icio.us) isn’t in the software or the service provided. It’s in the community. Taking my ball and going home would be the wrong thing to do. It’s not about who owns the ball, it’s about playing the game. If I dump Flickr or del.icio.us just because some company bought the company that bought the company that built the playing field, it just isn’t a rational reaction. This isn’t a religious crusade, it’s a community.

Now the risk I see is that MSFT might scare all of the cool out of Flickr and del.icio.us. That’s probably the biggest risk – engineers, designers, UI folks, etc… Will they bail because the borg is coming? If they stay, will they still be able to do cool stuff, or will they have to work on Windows Live Photo Publisher™ integration or somesuch nonsense? I’d hope not. Microsoft IS able to let effective business units keep doing their cool stuff. Bungie kept pumping out the Halo, and the MacBU keeps pumping out their version of Office, which consistently kicks the crap out of the Windows versions. I’m hoping that Balmer has the sense to run the Flickr and del.icio.us units at an arm’s length (or at least not to throw any chairs at them) so they can keep going.

My data is all safe – my photos all live happily in Aperture, and I don’t use Flickr as a repository – it’s strictly a sharing service and community for me. What concerns me most is all of the images I’ve got in the 134 posts on my blog that use Flickr for hosting – any switch will cause a LOT of grief in updating all of those.

I’m willing to wait and see. Microsoft would have to do something pretty stupid to make it worth leaving Flickr or del.icio.us.

I can’t say how happy it makes me that a good number of these are from good friends of mine