Past Thinking

Tagged: Photography RSS

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  Tom Goskar 2:55 pm on 22 April, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Archaeology (13), archaeopix, Creative Commons (2), photographs, Photography   

  Archaeopix: a Creative Commons archaeology photo search tool 

  Alun Salt and I have been working on a new website to help simplify the process of finding archaeology and heritage-related photos that have a Creative Commons license attached to them.

  Without further ado, introducing… Archaeopix!

  

  The homepage features a photo of the day, which we hope to update daily. Clicking “Search” on the navigation bar takes you to the tool where you can look for CC licensed images which have been posted to a hand-picked series of groups and accounts on Flickr:

  

  This is what Alun has to say about the search tool:

  The clever bit is the search page.

  Searching Flickr can be hit ‘n’ miss. Generally if you want to use a photo for a blog or educational handout and you need it quickly, it needs to be licensed under a creative commons licence. You can search on Flickr for cc-licensed photos, but a search for “Rome” will bring up everything with Rome in it. Groups are handy because they’re themed. So you could search the Archaeology group for Rome. The problem then is that you’ll find a lot of ©opyright photos. You really need a group which is all cc-licensed. Chiron is a good example of that. However Chiron’s strength is that it focuses on the classical world, which means you won’t find prehistoric Europe in it, or anything Mayan. This is where Archaeopix search comes in.

  Head over to Alun’s Archaeoastronomy blog to read more about Archaeopix.

  Link: Archaeopix

   

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  Tom Goskar 1:58 pm on 5 September, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Brunel, Photography, Victorian   

  Photographs of Brunel’s Structures 

  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.

  Benjamin Chesterton is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Benjamin Chesterton 10:17 am on 12 September, 2008 Permalink

    thanks for posting this … really glad you liked the slideshow.

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  Tom Goskar 2:08 pm on 18 July, 2006 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: flickr (3), Geotagging (3), Photography, spatial, zooomr   

  Geotagging Photos: Zooomr 

  
  
  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!

  SB: Relaxing on the Trail » Many museum bloggers and Zooomr, Paul, Tom and one other person are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Kristopher Tate 2:37 pm on 18 July, 2006 Permalink

    Hi there and thanks for posting Zooomr!

    I suppose I’ve tried to make sure that geotagging is as simple and easy as possible. Though, in regard to community, we’re steadfast on building community systems into the whole picture.

    Flickr does a good job, but there is just sooo much more than can be done when you look at it.

    Looking forward to showing it to you and others.

    Best,

    Kristopher Tate

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    Tom 3:10 pm on 18 July, 2006 Permalink

    Thanks for responding Kristopher – it’s encouraging to know that a) you’re managing to run Zooomr and still reply personally on people’s blogs, and b) that community tools are on there way. This is great news.

    On a social level, people are tied to places, not just on a physical level – but memories of places, and pictures are memories in a way. To be able to tie the two together in a natural way is certainly the way forward, especially since GPS is beginning to appear in digital cameras now.

    Keep it up! :-)

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    Paul 1:30 pm on 28 July, 2006 Permalink

    That’s the way forward; gps feeding straight into a camera. I like the idea of geotagging but in practice, it’s a bit of a pain. There are fields within the exif metadata standard for location, so why not use them and automatically populate them from a gps unit…? Ideal solution :-)

    atb,
    Paul.