Entries from April 2007 ↓

Two of my favorite hobbies: photography and boating. And they compliment one another well. There are few vantage points better suited for photographing structures and scenery than that provided by the water.

I enjoy a limited amount of action in my photographs, but when shooting architecture, land- and sea-scapes, I like the look of a clean frame with a little foreground for reference, and a lot of sky. In many cases, this is hard to achieve when shooting from land due to proximity, traffic, or other obstacles. Shooting from the water allows me to frame my shots almost any way that I wish, without having to worry about humanoid interference, or changing out gear to get an acceptable angle (just back up the boat!).

In addition to the above, shooting from the water allows for a very unique perspective. For starters, I’m shooting from a lower angle, so nearby subjects (particularly man-made structures on the waterfront) tend to have a “looming” appearance. Wide-angle shots are often easier to frame, because my distance from the subject is far less limited. And generally speaking, the boat allows me to position myself such that I can capture subjects from some uncommon angles. There’s a certain satisfaction to be found in searching for photos of the Key Bridge (above), to find that none are quite near to my perspective.

The obvious downside to shooting from a boat is that, well, I’m shooting from a boat. Even on the nicest of days, the boat is always moving. Add to that the fact that I’m not always in the captain’s chair, and don’t care to annoy other passengers by requesting a photo stop while we’re cruising. As a result, I find myself framing carefully (when I have time to frame at all), and then snapping away like a crazy person, in hopes that one of my shots will level out or end up being otherwise pleasing to the eye. I take a lot of photographs, many of which I end up throwing away. But once in a while, I end up with a shot that, for one reason or another, I think is neat.

I hope to spend a lot more time this season taking photos from the D.C., Maryland and Virginia waterways, and I’ll continue to upload my favorites here. If you’re into photography, and you also enjoy the occasional boat ride, do drop a line and perhaps we’ll plan for a local photoboating meetup later this year.

I’m relatively new to dSLR photography and on-line photo sharing circles (an infrequent Flickr user at best), and have more or less settled on the decision to build my on-line photo catalog on Zooomr. As a result, I’m constantly being exposed to new features, as well as new ways to use existing features. The following are some observations based on my experience to date.

First things first: Zooomr is in desperate need of some type of community-driven help and/or discussion forum. You guys are doing some really great work. Our inability to discuss technical issues, create discussion groups, and generally socialize sans the inherent constraints of mediums such as ZMail and comments is going to become a show-stopper. Soon. And support aside, given the heavy focus on geography and relative proximity (to other users, based on GeoTags) in the interface, some type of community-driven outlet would be the next step towards something like, say, being able to invite users to a room or thread directly from a geotagged photo. Imagine, being able to effortlessly find other Zooomr users near you and with the click of a link invite them to the next local meetup.

Upload issues: I have a decent connection to the Internet (Verizon DSL, 768 Kbps). About half of my uploads fail. I think. Near as I can tell, the data is being sent. The length of time that data is transfered over the me-to-Zooomr socket is about what I’d expect it for a single image transfer (because of this issue, I don’t bother uploading more than one image at a time). Once the data transfer subsides, instead of the typical ”Now processing N of N images . . . ” message, it just sits on the “Receiving . . . ” page indefinitely.

Empty sets: I’m starting to think that this is some type of batch-processing scheme that goes astray every now and again, but eventually makes its way back home. For no reason that I’m able to discern, some of my sets randomly show up empty for a period of time, and re-appear fully populated at some point shortly thereafter. I’ve seen this issue manifest itself with other users’ sets as well.

Trackbacks: Don’t get me wrong, trackbacks are great. I want to know who’s keeping track of and linking to my images. That said, I don’t necessarily need to see http://google.com/reader/view/garbledgooklonguid, or links to other sites that presumably crawl Zooomr tags en masse and link once to each image. Or something like that. A way to filter trackbacks would be great.

More to come as I gain some additional exposure to the interface and features. And all else aside, Zooomr is proving to be a joy to use. I’m looking forward to Mark III, and all that it promises to fix and enhance. Keep up the good work!

Update (14 Apr 07): E-mail uploads don’t seem to be working, either. This used to be a separate post in the Asides category, but the Asides category was kinda dumb.