Photos of Kauaʻi, January 2018 (in progress).
Red Dirt Falls
When asked for a Waimea Canyon lookout, Google Maps took us to an essentially arbitrary place on Waimea Canyon Drive with perfectly decent views of the canyon, rubbish parking, and a rather scary dropoff. But coming up Waimea Canyon Drive meant that we ran into another essentially arbitrary place with truly terrifying parking: the Red Dirt Falls, about 2km south of the fork with Kokee Road.
Photos of Kauaʻi, January 2018 (in progress).
Shipwreck Beach
For almost all of our trip, Kauaʻi beach safety reports seriously overestimated how dangerous the surf was. Theory: it’s winter, it must be terrible! Practice: my non-swimming four year old is safe and comfortable.
Shipwreck’s Beach was the major exception. It was certainly survivable, particularly past the breakers where not coincidentally most of the swimmers were, but neither of my children swim well enough to penetrate a churning wall of water.
Pretty though!
Photos of Kauaʻi, January 2018 (in progress).
Nā Pali coast in winter
The January winter ocean was rough, the sun was behind the cliffs, and the air was full of sea spray. Breathtakingly difficult to photograph and develop, and yet…
Photos of Kauaʻi, January 2018 (in progress).
The road to Makauwahi Cave
It was slightly too hot for a comfortable walk, everyone was a little tired, the kids were grumpy. They wanted to go down to the beach, we didn’t want to slog back up the hill covered in red dust. And when we got down to the promised cave, it had shut for the day and we all had to turn tail and go home.
You’d think this would be difficult to forgive, but this made it possible:
Photos of Kauaʻi, January 2018 (in progress).
London in autumn
New York in autumn
Autumn photography 2017
I switched camera systems in May this year to a mirrorless system, specifically a Fuji XT-20 body with various lenses. Its first big expedition was to New York but soon enough it was time for the much closer to home annual trek around the autumn foliage. The camera body failed around mid-day (had to go in for repairs as it was unable to detect lenses connected to it), very poor timing since Andrew’s niece was born that day, but we had some adventures first.
I remain fascinated by the ludicrous, alien, ornamental pear that is planted in such profusion around here:
But eucalypts can hold their own:
Flickr features I’ve known and loved
As the planning for the sale of Yahoo!/Altaba to Verizon continues, I’m not the only person worried about the fate of Flickr, which has been owned by Yahoo since 2005:
Remember to post a picture of yourself kissing your photos goodbye to Flickr
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) January 10, 2017
I’ve got a tediously backed-up local copy of my photos and won’t have to kiss them goodbye, but as a happy Pro user of Flickr I’m really worried about its future and beginning an active search for replacements. I’m going to start evaluating possible replacements on the basis of these specific features, roughly in order of importance:
My favourite Flickr features
Embedding my foremost use of Flickr is as a photo host for my parenting blog and, increasingly, to show off my best photos. The ability to embed photographs in third-party websites is essential to me.
Locking at the photo level and guest access. It’s not easy to find non-recent photographs of my children on my Flickr account. That’s because I have a script that marks photos as private once they’re a certain age. Some other types of photos (for example, photos of other children) I often mark as private immediately.
Much of my web life runs this way: just because you can find my recent stuff doesn’t mean you get to casually browse everything I’ve done on the Internet since the beginning of time (circa 1999). I’ve taken full advantage of websites with individual locking every time I’ve used one, including WordPress sites, LiveJournal&Dreamwidth, Pinboard, and, yes, Flickr, and strongly prefer it.
At the same time, the chance of people who care about me obtaining a login to Flickr, or to social-photos-site-of-the-month in order to view pictures of a party we were at is basically nil, so the ability to share links to photos via Flickr’s guest pass system has made it useful to me for semi-private events and photos.
API access. I’m not locking all this stuff on all these sites down by hand! It’s all scripted and done via APIs.
Multiple albums for a single photo I look at my photos through several different types of, uh, “lenses”. There’s events, there’s individuals in the photos (mostly my children), and there’s my show-off albums for my favourite photos or ones most I’m likely to want to share with other people if only they’d ask to see more of my photos. I use albums for all three ways of looking at photos, and thus many of my photos are in both a “my kid at age 3” album and a “visit to the beach in November” album.
I also use tags and I might be able to modify my workflow to use tags to replace some of these features, although the result of a tag search would need to be viewable as a first class album, rarely true in my experience so far.
Creative Commons licencing. I like easily dropping my photos into a big pool of photos that might someday find good uses elsewhere and licence a lot of my non-portraits CC BY for (nearly) maximum re-usability. I fear that even sites that support CC licencing won’t end up being searched by anyone in practice, and if I note a CC licence myself in the description, it’s never going to happen.
Features I’d reluctantly sacrifice
Chromecast support. It’s been really enchanting having our TVs display great photos of our kids throughout their lives, travel we’ve done, and a lot of clouds, all via Chromecast’s support for using Flickr photos for background images, but I’m willing to give it up for my core set of features.
An app. Don’t get me wrong, I do like being able to peruse my photos on my phone, but I’d give it up if I had to. Because I do about half my photography with a DSLR, and edit essentially all my photographs, I don’t upload photos via apps in any case.
Less important
The social ecosystem. I started using Flickr regularly after a lot of people stopped, and I’m indifferent to the social features, eg favourites, comments, following other folks, putting my photos in group albums. I do use some of these, but I won’t be looking for them in a replacement.
Locking to different sets of people. I do use Flickr’s “friends” and “family” distinction a little, but in giving up social, I’m also happy to give up locking other than “locked” and “not locked”.
And now, I’m afraid, it’s well and truly time to go shopping for a new photo host. My favourite. Only not.
Autumn photography 2015 & 2016
Last year, inner west autumn in the rain:
This year, in the wake of one of the heaviest couple of days of rainfall I’ve ever experienced, and after such a warm autumn that the leaves in fact turn in winter, inner west autumn in the sun:
