I am eagerly awaiting to post up pictures from my new D90 which will have to wait until this weekend. However, in the interim and as part of my Daily Lunch Special project, I managed to get a pretty decent food shot with my Nokia N95.

Quite proud of that one myself, I am.

I can think of worst complexes to have.

Inspired by one of my former bosses, Allen Bukoff¹ (albeit in the godsphere), I am initiating my own social experiment into a daily lunch time photographic exercise. Each day, depending on time, circumstance and me actually remembering, the world at large will have the privilege of seeing what I have for lunch.

See the useless excitement taking place over at the Daily Lunch Special album.

It will be mostly useless but perhaps occasionally interesting. Who knows? Who cares?

Oh the suspense…

1. See Allen Bukoff’s Lunch Project.

Been trying out Flickr recently, backed up with ShoZu support on my phone as some of you may have noticed on my site. More detailed posts to follow but for now… I will be testing the WordPress Flickr Manager plug-in from Trent Gardner.

Right, let’s test privacy settings by adding a private photo.

Can see the above? Hmm, I guess the plug-in can override privacy because it knows you don’t care about privacy setting once you decide to post to your blog. But is it sending me to my Flickr page with private photos? Good, when you click on it, it sends you to Flickr login.

But what if I want to show the public a full image? Does selecting JavaScript Viewer address this concern?

Nice little lightbox effect. Shows the image but doesn’t lead to the Flickr page. What about different sizes? This one will produce a large image when clicked.

But the image generated in the post is a thumbnail size. What different sizes can we play with?

Square

Well, only Square size apparently since we are on a Free Account with Flickr.

But the test looks pretty good in any case. Only thing missing are nice little captions to add to images which WordPress’ native image handler does do or any alignment options.

Resurrecting my blog and upgrading to WordPress 2.6 pretty much broke my Coppermine gallery and integration with the now abandon-ware plugin Coppermine plugin. On the one hand, it means that all my embedded pictures from Coppermine within WordPress are broke and means a lengthy trawl through my posts to update the links. On the other hand, it partly helped me to re-evaluate my thoughts on what I wanted Eshin Direct to do for me, in the case regarding photos I wanted to share.

Back in 2000, when I started blogging, sharing photos online was a cumbersome almost mystical process that left photo sharing to the realms of email attachments. The egoist in me very much wanted to share with the world my life in images. And let’s face it, my site wouldn’t have been much interest to anyone beyond my circle of friends (and with the downtime, I think that it has reverted very much back to that), so what harm to upload them to a public gallery on my site? It would also be a great testament to my amateur coding skills to show how well I could use and adapt different scripts to my will.

But today, the world has moved on to Web 2.0 and photo sharing has become more sophisticated and more prolific. When I think in terms of how best to reach the people who those photos of my life will hold interest to, I realise that there are better locations to store my photos and share them. If everyone you want to see your painting is hanging out at the Gugenheim Museum, you aren’t going to be showing them at the Tate, right?

In addition to that, there remains the privacy issues. Firstly, my own privacy. The change in the last two years in personal circumstances means that I cannot afford to share with the world everything visual that is Eshin. Secondly, the privacy of others. Others often aren’t too happy to be displayed in all their glory to the world at large. Combine these two issues with the cut and paste culture to create “new” pieces of creativity, personal photos can appear anywhere. You’ve all probably seen photos that are obviously someone’s family snaps doing the rounds as a “humour” spam email.

So, most of my photos now reside on Facebook. Which is where 90% of the people I know reside and I can limit to the best of my ability, who gets to see what with the privacy settings. This also gives me a public link to share the photos with non-Facebook users and in email. I’m playing with Picasaweb but the user experience is limiting for sharing since you need to register for a Google account and not everyone lives on Google.

This decision, along with the ease with which WordPress facilitates embedding media, means that the Eshin Direct Image Gallery will be limited to non-personal photos.

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When we went to Tai Tam with Daniel, Kit, Steve and his mate, Daniel took some photos with his digital camera. The resolution isn’t so great when focused on the actual rider but then you can’t expect much from a point and shoot. Still it was great to see some pictures of me riding. I think I can see some clear mistakes in my riding posture which I’ll need to address. Anyway, if ya’ll are interested then check out the photos here.

Went on an uploading spree today. I managed to upload some pictures for last year – the Paintball session, the fateful evening at Otto’s, and a night at Trader’s with the waitresses. Some really bad shots of me looking drunk, and I assure you, I was not drunk in the slightest.

I’ve uploaded some old photos I have. They aren’t recent but I’ll expect I will upload some more when I get some more interesting pictures. You’d think that with a digital camera and digital camera on my phone, I’d manage to keep up to date with the pics of me??? Go figure. You’re not missing much though.