A recent comment alerted me to the photographs by David White of Brunel’s engineering feats.
He had a camera built to a specification similar to that used by Robert Howlett, Brunel’s photographer who took the famous photo of Brunel standing in front of a backdrop of giant chains from the Great Eastern. He used a lens made just a year after that famous photo was taken, mounted on a box made by a cabinet maker out of mahogany and brass.
White then travelled around the UK taking photos of surviving Brunellian structures, such as Paddington Station and the Tamar Bridge. The resulting photographs are beautiful.
David White has compiled a slideshow with a commentary by him.
His ingenious idea could be applied to so many technologies from the past.
Silbury Hill, Wiltshire
Hosted on
Zooomr
There’s one thing that Flickr doesn’t support natively, and that is the ability to ‘geotag’ photos. In a nutshell, geotagging is just associating spatial data (i.e. a set of coordinates) showing where you took a particular photo (or where the subject is located). You could then see where it was taken on a map, or browse photos via a mapping service such as Google Maps.
A number of determined people have written hacks to get geotagging into Flickr. But these often use a plugin for Firefox called Greasemonkey, and a further set of scripts to build in the functionality into your photo pages. If you’re not technically minded, it’s not easy to do, and I think that most people will be put off by this approach.
If you do use extensions such as GMiF, coordinates are stored in with your tags, so your tag lists will eventually become cluttered with tags such as “geotagged” and “geo:lat=51.519606″ etc. It’s not very elegant, but it does work.
Step in Zooomr.
Zooomr have built geotagging right into the heart of the system, with elegance. Your geotags are nicely hidden away (but still accessible). Viewing where photos were taken, or simply browsing photos by location on a map are all built-in, and very easy to use. Not to mention kind to the eyes.
Zooomr doesn’t yet have the community aspect that Flickr does. Community is what makes Flickr so brilliant, and it is now very well established. I think that startups like Zooomr fill a nice gap at the moment, and help to keep giants like Flickr innovating and on their toes.
Good luck Zooomr!