little bits of everything

Flickr's new 1000 photo limit on free accounts hasn't gone down well. I agree with Thomas Hawk who says it's a smart move though . (It would be good if they just hid your photos over the 1000 limit from the photostream like they used to when your Pro subscription lapsed.) I have 1,086 photos, so I'm viewing this as an opportunity to choose my best 1000 before they get deleted on 8 January 2019. Here's my photostream . Update: I found out that Creative Commons licensed photos are exempt from the limit , so actually I'm OK. 

You can now embed some Getty images for free, providing its for non-commercial use. Embed from Getty Images That is all.

I don't often check my Flickr photo stats, but I happened to the other week and found a massive spike in the number of views. Normally I get around 100-200 views a day, but on that particular day I got 569,829. My theory is that they came from this post on Viralnova about money trees . I reckon that somehow embedding the pictures on that web page caused the view count to go up. It's interesting that as well as the two money tree pictures the ones near it in the photo stream also got a lot of views. I couldn't find anyone else reporting that they've had a similar big jump, so I put this post out there in case someone knows just why the pageviews did go up.

This is a sort of "draft public" post. Also, it's about Flickr, so maybe it should be on my techie blog. Oh well. Fact - Dan Catt is giving up on Flickr Fact - I will have been on flickr for nine years in November Fact - If I type fl in my browser bar then Chrome thinks I want to go to a parking company Fact - I uploaded a load of pictures to my photostream  at the weekend Fact - I have 1000 public photos Fact - I just looked at my stats page (which I haven't for months) and the daily views are around 60-100 which is more than they have ever been. Fact - two people I know have added me as contacts on the last week which hasn't happened for months or years.  I'm not giving up on flickr, but it is just somewhere I don't go to very often.

Those talented people at Utata  have released their latest "big project" which I've taken part in this time. My photos were taken on our Norfolk Broads boating holiday.

My money tree photo got included in an article on thisiscolossal.com .

You can see some of my photos as part of the Utata Colour Story 2011. I chose a blue theme.

I was very impressed with these. Nearly every window box had flowers in it. Lots of people making an effort to keep things looking good, even to the tail end of August when gardens tend to look a bit tired and worn out. Click the picture to see a couple more shots.

Creepers on a wall , a photo by paulmorriss on Flickr. Third picture on my way to work.

Worn stone wall 1 , a photo by paulmorriss on Flickr. Another picture taken on the way to work. For some reason I find the fact that these rows of bricks are worn away quite interesting. I've no idea what has worn them away.

No ghost vehicles , a photo by paulmorriss on Flickr. I've often passed this sign and though I ought to take a photo. Then I think "I'll do it another day". Over the next few weeks I'm trying to stop and take photos that day, rather than just leaving it.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I post from time to time when my photos get used on other websites. I do this mostly as a way of noting it down somewhere, as well as because I find it slightly exciting. Google are rolling out a new reverse image search which is available for some people using the Chrome browser. If you go to images.google.com and there's a camera icon in the search box, then you've got it. I did a search for one of my popular pictures on flickr (below) and found 18 places which are using it. I started contacting the websites saying they were using it without permission, but gave up after a couple. You are allowed to use it so long as it's not for commercial purposes, and as long as I get credit. Those sites weren't. I'm not really that annoyed, as it's not as I make money out of my photos, but it's the principle of the thing. Most of the sites are visitors guides to Cadbury World, one of which looks a bit like an official on...

Two vaguely related thoughts: In real life everything is dark until you add light. Photographers, whether still or motion picture, worry about light a lot because it makes such a difference to the picture(s) they are taking. With CGI making a pixel light or dark is just a number. Making light look like the real world is hard. It's easy to create a 3D image. It's hard to make the software light it well. Getting surface texture right is part of it, because part of the way you perceive texture is because the way light falls on parts of the surface that are only small distances apart. Toy Story worked well because the characters were mostly plastic toys which have a very predictable texture. Since the first film there have been a few films based on computer games, but they haven't been brilliant because of the uncanny valley effect. Despite the abundance of CGI cartoons are still popular, probably because they aren't realistic. However when I watch Storkhawks I can see...

I'm not sure if anyone's particularly interested in sites that use my photos without permission, however this is a good a place to store them as any. http://www.mint.com/blog/investing/5-things-to-consider-when-investing-in-green/ uses http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulmorriss/4528191886/ . Update: They say "We actually view the blog as a “non-commercial” initiative – it’s a personal-finance advice/ consumer advocacy publication. Whenever an individual author has a problem with their photo appearing on the blog, we are happy to remove it." Hmmm. Not sure I agree. Anyway, they removed it.

A nice person at The Morning News asked if my photo could be used on an article on their Golem blog , so I said yes.

Looking at the visitors to my work blog I discovered someone had come there from http://www.123people.co.uk/s/paul+morriss . Looking elsewhere on that page I discovered that the St Francis of Assisi parish magazine from June 2005 had included a photo of mine on page 6. I'd given a whole set of photos to someone to use for the Fresh Noise website, now defunct, but available thanks to archive.org: freshnoise.org . I presume the photo found it's way into that magazine from someone involved.

My bidet picture was submitted to the The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks a while back and I found it on Bug Girl's blog .

Barns Originally uploaded by paulmorriss Another photo of mine popping up elsewhere. http://www.viaouest.com/galerie1265.html

A photo I took is being used by this website about food news in Chile . They are allowed to use it so long as they are not a commercial organisation, but even with Google Translate , I can't work out whether they are. Can you tell?

My photo story " I felt a little strange when I woke up that morning " has been published on utata.org.