Greg Wallis

From my Flickr stream (before I decide to delete it), this candid shot a father kissing his baby son is tender and poignant. Captured quickly with manual focusing and guestimated exposure, I’ve cropped it to to a square aspect (visually corrected to 11:10) and given it a delicate monochrome treatment.

Another shot taken in Greenwich Park, London, this April on an amazingly sunny day, it just shows how many photographic opportunities are out there if we just have a camera in our hand.

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Once, a few years ago now, from the nascent photo sharing market was thrown Flickr. It was different, refreshing, and very much the modish choice for the IT in-crowd; simply, it was outstandingly cool. Then it grew and grew, many things changed and it finally came out of beta. Never intentioned for professional and business use — even, weirdly, with a Pro and paid-for account — features were added, complexity grew and, worst of all, it got bought out by Yahoo.

Now lots of professional photographers use it to display their work, but run the risk of account deletion should some jobsworth at Flickr HQ decide it was being used for promotional purposes. And this has happened, and not infrequently, either. For the amateur and enthusiast Flickr is a great choice and the basic and free account is a sensible option, but I’m looking at this from a pro and semi-pro viewpoint.

In terms of page load speed, things seemed to have slowed down. The graphical look can’t be customised in any way, though as it’s not meant for anything other than amateur use this can perhaps be forgiven. But it’s looking decidedly old-hat, now. I’m also concerned that having a Flickr stream, professionally, may well devalue the images and the photographer in the eyes of potential clients, though that may be stating the obvious.

Are there any decent alternatives? Yes, unquestionably. A parallel photo sharing service is the little known French site Ipernity. In many ways far superior to Flickr and has seen droves of former (and ususally disgruntled) Flickr members setting up shop on a more flexible though similar platform. Although very much worth a look and with a closer-knit and very friendly community, it still has the same downsides to public photo sharing but nevertheless it’s fast, free (with a paid option that I’ve yet to see the point of) and reliable. It’s also partly customisable, though not to the degree that most people would wish and often seems unfinished (it still carries a beta tag). But it also has one fab feature that seems unique: you can upload mp3 audio files that can then be used as a soundtrack for a full-screen slideshow and is probably the best of its kind anywhere, and this alone makes it a bit of a sexy choice. It’s a hidden jewel and very worthy of consideration.

Professional alternatives? Many. But I’ve never been happy with any of them, not until I discovered SmuMug. No free account, which is likely a good thing, and three paid-for options which can either be settled annually on monthly, with one naturally being cheaper. SmugMug rocks. I’ll say that again, SmugMug ROCKS. No, it’s not perfect, it’s a little clunky in some aspects, confusing in others. But it can be completely customised, have domain name URLs pointed at it and has an incredible user community for help and advice. It’s aimed at the marketing of photographs and if you’re in the US this would work brilliantly. As I’m in the UK, it doesn’t have the same attraction and I don’t wish to sell my work that way, either, so that’s fine.

And if you’re into video streaming, and want your productions to be embeddable in a web page without branding, then SmugMug is the best choice I’ve ever seen. Their Flash based player is brilliant, attractive, simple to configure and streams HD video like lightning. Oh yes, and with no bandwidth and usage limits, either. YouTube is fine, but for those requiring a more polished and professional option, SmugMug rules.

Although I’ve only skimmed over what’s on offer, and I’ll probably write more in-depth reviews at a later date, the two best alternatives to Flickr are — in my humble opinion — Ipernity (the free one) and SmugMug (the paid one). Me? Oh, I have both.

Here’s an example of Ipernity’s slideshow, showing a collection of my monochrome images with soundtrack. Just check out how quickly this loads:

http://www.ipernity.com/doc/gregwallis/album/193028/show

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I was in Greenwich Park, at the top by The Royal Observatory, when I saw this very happy couple, and I managed to catch them unawares with a longish lens that was wide open. Although the bokeh doesn’t show too well, because I’ve processed this image for maximum skin effect, it was decidedly striking in the original image. I might attempt to redo it, if I think I can still get the image as effectively striking.

Taken with a Pentax K10D, old and trusty 135mm SMC lens, and a x2 teleconverter, which although not technically outstanding I seem to have fallen in love with. Both exposure and focus were completely manual, which in theses days of complete automation is decidely tricky once you’re out of practice.

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Caught with an old 135mm Pentax SMC lens with x2 teleconverter, this was hurriedly focused and exposed manually, and has been processed to give a very cinematic look and feel.

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Imagine the scenario: a contact sends you mail, resends it and you still haven’t got it. You doubt them, they doubt you. For the umpteenth time you check Gmail’s Inbox, the Priority Inbox, and the Everything Else section. Nothing. So if it hasn’t gone into Spam, then your contact hasn’t sent it, right? Wrong. Here’s what can happen if you use Labels and Filters.

Labels are a great idea, no question. A “soft” from of folder that doesn’t actually exist but is a list of mail that’s had a name tagged to it. Makes sorting your mail easier, simpler, and theoretically visually quicker to access. And to take advantage of a Label, you apply a Filter to it, so that emails from yournicefriend@wotever.com conveniently all pile up in one place where they can be seen instantly. Now this works fine, but occasionally you’ll want to rearrange the way you have your personal system organized and may well delete a Label, thinking (wrongly!) that mail that would previously have been directed to a specific Label location would then simply appear in Gmail’s Inbox.

Sadly, this won’t occur unless the Filter that was originally applied to the Label (are you still with me?) is deleted, too. Failure to do this will see mail from your beloved contact appear to be undelivered. Oh it’s there. Hasn’t gone missing — and Gmail can’t be blamed for losing anything — but it’s routed directly to the All Mail section. Not in your Inbox (logical), not in Priority Inbox (reasonably logical if mail has regularly come from a particular address), and as All Mail is hidden by default you’d be unlikely to check it, surely?

This is what I experienced with two people, who swore they sent me mail and I swore I hadn’t received it. So if you’re using Gmail and have Labels and Filters organised, do make sure that when you delete a Label that any corresponding Filter associated with it is deleted as well. Mail will then be put in your Inbox as expected and your cyber-world will be as it should be, rather than being cast into mail-hell.

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Haven’t posted in this personal blog for quite a while, I know. A million things going on, including domestic Armageddon and a restructuring of www.gregwallis.net . No excuses, I do realize this, so expect truly regular updates starting in the next day or two, as I feel a need to write, express, and opine.

For those of you are interested, natch.

x

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Quietly and unannounced Google has added a much needed feature to its horizontal navbar element from within Google Sites: Horizontal navigation drop-down menus. Quite why these weren’t included in the initial roll-out of the horizontal menu earlier this year isn’t clear, but this new feature is much welcome and very needed by anyone that has more than a handful of pages to their site.

Somewhat rudimentary, it nonetheless adds an extra dimension to site navigation and bolsters the argument for the use of Google Sites, particularly in a corporate environment. Background colour and text colour of the dropdown menus are changeable so that they’ll fit the site’s colour scheme but there are a couple of issues that should have been addressed.

Firstly, the background colour is just one solid block of colour (albeit with a 1 pixel white border around the whole submenu, which is helpful to visually separate it from underlying content) but with no border per item that would have allowed greater visual clarity and a more polished look. Secondly, the hover colour can’t be set and is inherited from the main horizontal menu, which is fine except that if you wished the dropdown to have a complimentary colour scheme (say a black background with white text, if the main menu had a white background with black text) then the menu item, when moused over, will then disappear from view — which means, in reality, that the colours of the dropdown have to be similar to those of the main menu. Not a huge drawback but one that could easily have been rectified with a little thought beforehand. 

However, it’s very nice to see that there is a small time delay when the mouse moves away from the dropdown menu. Probably only 300 milliseconds, but it makes the submenu very user-friendly. A nice touch, even though it’s not programmable. So the good news is that a much needed feature has been added and one that is simple and quick to implement, and I shall be using it right away with client sites.

But… this is Google and not some backstreet developer working in his spare time, so resources should not be a problem, and it beggars belief that progress is so slow and clunky. It’s also worth noting that a couple of weeks ago a very strange thing happened to the horizontal menu in Google Sites; the “Horizontal navigation selected text colour” option simply stopped working. Not just on my sites but across the whole of Google Sites. Google staff wrote on a help forum that a bug had occurred but plainly this was because they were introducing the new dropdown menu feature (which necessitated new code) and were covertly beta testing across the whole of the Sites’ system. Why would any professional IT team do that? It does seem that the team that works on Google Sites is either not full-time or they have no one to really answer to, as the potential of this feature of Google Apps is enormous but is almost overlooked by Google itself, and is certainly looked down upon by web professionals who just aren’t aware of what’s on offer.

With better IT management, better marketing, and a more mature product, Google Sites could take on the corporate web sector and make a massive gain on the competition. Why isn’t this the case? I don’t know either.

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A new audio podcast, 3 1/2 minutes long, and a simple take on the many advantages of using Posterous to blog.

   (4192 KB)
Listen on posterous

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A deliberately processed close-up of Charlie the snake a couple of years ago. Like something out of a horror film, this image only partially shows the digusting way in which a snake eats its prey. It actually dislocates its jaw in order to make it wide enough to devour the baby mouse whole, at which point you witness a lump slowly move down the snake’s upper body.

Why post this? No idea, I just found this photo in a fold er and decided to have a play with it. Not my normal style, so haven’t posted on Flickr.

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