And to tell the truth, if it shattered, what would I do?

Flower 1

Flower 2

The photographs were taken on July 3rd at Valtavaara hill in Ruka, Kuusamo.

Today I realized that when uploading photographs to Flickr a setting had changed, and the photographs were not publicly available for browsing. This happened some time ago already, and the latest 2,100 photographs were not visible to other viewers besides myself. I changed the visibility so that they are now available for viewing.

(Posting title is from the poem “What potion should I give the night so she’ll always wonder?” by Abraham Sutzkever.)

It has no concept

Spring 1

Spring 2

Spring 3

Spring 4

The photographs were taken on May 14th in Sipoonkorpi National Park.

It rained today afternoon, and I got wet when commuting by bicycle. I took my normal route instead of going through the central park, as I thought the paths might be muddy and slippery due to rain. There is construction work going on along this route, and traffic lights to go through, and I noted that it took two minutes longer even though this is a shorter route.

I had a look at Flickr stats once again, and noted that the view counts are now going down. There used to be over 3000 daily views, and now the average is about 2000. In total there have been 1,65 million views, and I have 50,460 photos stored at Flickr, so the average view count is 33 views per photo. Not much.

Btw, GW-Images is looking for comments about Panasonic cameras.

(Posting title is from the song Seven Seconds Away by Youssou N'dour.)

This discipline, this glaze

Lake 1

Lake 2

Lake 3

The photographs were taken at lake Suolikas on March 28th.

There have been over 1.5 million views of my photographs at Flickr. On June 29th, 2015 the count passed 1 million views. Currently the view rate is such that there would be 1 million views each year. Looking at the statistics, it seems that certain places generate interest, such as Sipoonkorpi, Tremanskärr, Saana, Porkkalanniemi, etc. Sometimes there are several hundred views in a day generated by such searches.

(Posting title is from the poem This Inwardness, This Ice by Christian Wiman.)

Whose full perfection all the world amazes

Trees

The photograph was taken at Lemmenlaakso on March 26th.

Last night the temperature dropped below 0 °C, but for this afternoon the forecast promises +12 °C. There was some fog this morning when I walked at Tremanskärr swamp. The swamp is starting to melt, but a lot of it is still frozen, and there is some ice and snow left.

I looked into the view counts of my Flickr account once again, and I realized it is not just the LX100 camera which generates views. Apparently Flickr has some kind of image recognition system which adds tags to photographs, such as "outdoor", "tree", "plant", "snow", and so on. When people search for photographs, these tags are being used for searching.

I haven't used much tagging for my photographs, as I'm using Flickr for storage: a place where to keep a copy of my photographs in addition to a normal backup system. The automatically added tags seem to generate a steady stream of views. During the last 30 days the daily view count varied between 2000 and 7000 views, which is about 40 times more than it used to be.

So, a recipe for gaining views of photographs stored at Flickr:

• use a camera that is interesting for gear enthusiasts
  
• attach a lot of descriptive tags to photographs uploaded to Flick, including the model of the camera
  

But things may soon change once again. One could use certain popular terms such as digitalization, mass data, robotisation, automation, etc., but what seems certain is the fact that people are putting less and less effort to taking and processing photographs, and machines are taking over.

That said, I'm lagging behind in processing my photographs. There are over 3000 photographs waiting for processing, and the queue is not getting shorter. I guess I should take less photographs. Or is there software that automatically decides which photographs are worth saving?

(Posting title is from the poem Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare.)

To be sure this time I know where I belong

City 1

City 2

City 3

City 4

The photographs were taken on February 9th in Helsinki.

I had a look at the view stats of my photographs at Flickr. When I got the Panasonic LX100, the daily view count grew by almost a factor of 100, from 100 daily views to up to 10,000 daily views. The number of views started soon to diminish, and I expected the trend to continue until it would be back to the original.

But it seems that the daily view count is not diminishing any more. It varies between 500 and 6,000 daily views, and the average is between 1,000 and 2,000 views.

I wonder why the view counts are so high, as the photographs I take are for sure not such that they would have a large potential audience.

(Posting title is from the poem Scavenging the Wall by R. T. Smith.)

Embraced in being

Koli 1

Koli 2

Koli 3

Koli 4

These photographs were taken on July 26th at Koli.

I have been using Flickr for storing my photographs since 2008. Currently I have over 45,000 photographs stored, 130 GB in total. Recently Flick changed the terms for "unlimited" Flickr Pro accounts, and I'm bit unsure what that means in the future. A price increase quite possibly. But at least my Flickr stream remains ad-free.

Flickr Pro offers a new kind of statistics display for view counts, but I'm a bit unsure whether I have any use for it, or whether such things are in fact harmful to know. Today I had a look anyway. During the summer the daily view count dropped to 300, but it is now coming back up to 3000...4000 daily views. It seems that Flickr users are systematically going through the photographs, generating a lot of views. Another source is searches with the search term "lx100", which generates hundreds of views every once in a while.

(Posting title is from the poem Holding On by Richard O. Moore.)

Not ungrateful like

Water 1

Water 2

There has been over one million views of my photographs at Flickr, of which 2/3 since getting the Panasonic LX100 camera. I have taken over 426,000 photographs with digital cameras, so the view count is approximately two views per each photograph taken. However, only about 1/10 of the photographs I take survive the selection process all the way to Flickr.

Also, I checked the view counts to see which photographs had most views. 9 of the top 10 were taken with the LX100; 18 of the top 20 were taken with the LX100. It seems that the LX100 has generated quite a lot of interest, not the content of the photographs. Personally I think the best photographs I have taken so far were taken with the LX5, but I'm slowly learning to use the LX100, and I may catch up some day.

These photographs were taken on June 6th at a nearby lake.

(Posting title is from the poem coping skills lost in the flood by CAConrad.)

One can imagine terrible

Street 1

Street 2

Street 3

I commuted by bicycle today, and it took 38 minutes in the morning and 45 minutes in the afternoon.

I tried today the new Photos app for Mac OS X, and it is just too different from Aperture to feel good. And uploading photographs to Flickr doesn't seem to work the way I want it to work. So, for now I'm sticking with Aperture.

These photographs were taken in Helsinki on April 4th.

(Posting title is from the poem Trollius and trellises by Charles Bukowski.)

Something, in the ineffable clips of light

Zero 1

Zero 2

Zero 3

Zero 4

Zero 5

Today I attended a seminar on open science and research which ended with a panel discussion. The discussion was a delight to follow, the best one I have seen and heard in years. The panelists listened to each other and to the questions from audience, thought carefully what they were saying, and seemed to have fun. All were top people in their professions, and even though the questions asked were complex, all were tackled with finesse and clear vision. I wish all work weeks ended like this.

Yesterday I wrote about how the view count of my photographs at Flickr grew by one or two orders of magnitude since getting the Panasonic LX100 camera. This doesn't mean that all my photographs are popular. Almost 10% of them have zero views, which is a bit depressing.

So, here you see somewhat older photographs, all with zero views according to Flickr statistics. These photographs were taken with the Panasonic LX3 between October 4th, 2008, and January 21st, 2009. At that time I hadn't yet grown into square (aka 1:1 aspect ratio).

I commuted by bicycle on four days this week. This year I have so far got 862 km.

(Posting title is from the poem Going to Zero by Peter Balakian.)

The first art we know

Swamp 1

Swamp 2

Swamp 3

Swamp 4

Swamp 5

These photographs were taken on March 8th at Tremanskärr swamp. It was a wet day, and the swamp was flooding.

Every once in a while I check the statistics of my Flickr account. It used to be that there were 100-200 views per day, but when I got the LX100 five months ago, the view count rose by a factor of 100, to 10,000 per day. Since then the count has gone down, but it is still between 1,000-4,000 per day.

It can't be that I'm suddenly a much better photographer, it is just that for some reason people continue to be interested in photographs taken with the LX100. And some photographs which I didn't feel would be especially interesting are getting a lot of views. For example, this night-time photograph has got almost 2,000 views.

(Posting title is from the poem The Visit by Carole Bernstein.)

And we’d be hungry from travel and for being almost home

Tracks

Lamp

I'm keeping to the chronological order with the photographs, making it easier to keep things in order myself. So far I have processed the photographs of traveling to Kilpisjärvi in Lapland by train and by car, and of climbing to the top of two fells, Salmivaara and Saana. The two photographs shown here were taken from the night train P266 from Helsinki to Rovaniemi.

In my Flickr stream there are usually 100-200 daily views of the photographs, but the Lapland photographs generated extra interest, as there have been a couple of thousand views so far today. Using the photographs in postings here at Light Scrape will take quite a few days, but that is good, as I have taken only a couple of photographs since returning back home.

(Posting title is from the poem Night Travel by Esther Belin.)

Paper eight paper eight or, paper eight ore white

Cloudberries

Cloudberry

I have now processed the photographs from the trip to Salla in Lapland. Next I should start planning how the photo book could look like. One of the questions is whether I should focus on the "wild" aspect of nature, and how much should I include the human factor, as there really isn't a completely wild environment any more, even in Lapland. So, what kind of dish should I be serving?

I was less strict about culling the photographs than I'm usually. I saved 439 photographs from the trip, which is 15 % of all, much more than my usual 5-10%. I thought that I should have some reserve material for the photo book, and some of the photographs which I would usually have deleted could work in a book even though not as individual photographs. I also preserved more duplicates than usually, slightly different views of the same subject, as I wasn't sure which one would work best in a book.

I have uploaded most of the photographs to Flickr, which I'm using as a backup service, in addition to the Time Machine backup I have on the iMac. I'm planning to use Aperture to make the original selection of photographs for the chapters of the book, and to explore what kind of book would be possible to get out of these photographs. For layout, I'm planning to use Pages, even though there nowadays are very good (easier and/or more professional) alternatives. And for a printed version I'm once again planning to use the BookSmart software from Blurb. I hope it works as well as it used to.

The process I'm planning to use is to some degree documented in the blog page on making photo books.

(Posting title is from the poem Yet Dish by Gertrude Stein.)

Flickr vs. Google Plus - what is the deal?

Vine

Ferns

Dry

Amanita

Colors

Pond

Despite some small glitches occasionally, I have been satisfied with Flickr for storing my photographs online. I have used Flickr for storage, not much else. And the price suits me well.

I have bought a Flickr pro account for two years for less than 2 USD per month, that is hard to beat. For that I get unlimited uploads, storage and bandwidth which is the main thing for me. (Plus I'm ad-free.)

However, now Google is getting into the game with Google Plus - they have integrated Picasa Web Albums there. Some seem to love this.

But I have almost 20,000 photographs at Flickr, which means about 80 GB of storage needed. For 20 USD per year I would get 80 GB of storage from Google, and for 50 USD I would get 200 GB. So, currently Flickr is rather nice in pricing compared to Google, at least when you have lots of photographs.

But anyway, that is rather theoretical, as moving the photographs from Flickr to Picasa Web Albums would break all existing links to photographs here at Light Scrape. But if price is not a deal-maker are there some other advantages to using Google? Better integration with Blogger?

But anyway. I'm not really getting the point of Google Plus. Clearly Google wants to get a similar thing going as Facebook has right now. But are they able to something better? It doesn't seem so.

Of the social media platforms Twitter is the only that seems moderately useful, at least to some work-related stuff. Best of all, it has a more open attitude to third-party developers, and that is why it can be used for things that other platforms don't easily allow.

And then there is LinkedIn which is tolerable for work-related networking. But Facebook, it is a strange beast I can't grasp at all.

Why is Google targeting Facebook - or is there something really clever going on that I haven't noticed? Paul Lester posted some thoughts about Google Plus, which generated a nice discussion.

But still, I don't get it. I do have an Google Plus account, thanks to a colleague who sent me an invitation, but I just can't see the usefulness of it.

By the way, Paul also posted a nice farewell message to Cedric, who is closing his excellent blog. It wasn't often that he posted, but they were the more thoughtful and thought-provoking for it. Fare well!

Licensing of photographs

Pole

Lupin

Colors

Occasionally I get questions about using my photographs for various purposes, such as books, brochures and web sites. Thanks for asking!

By default the photographs I upload to Flickr are licensed via a Creative Commons "Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike" license. But I'm open for discussion for other purposes as well, for individual photographs.

The main criteria here is how I feel about the purpose. For purely commercial use I have no interest to license my photographs. (And I'm not looking for payment.) But if there is a worthwhile cause, go ahead and ask.

Wet views from a car (mostly)

Shade, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

View, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Fence, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Fog, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Drops, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Nightfall, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

I'm continuing the theme of yesterday, photographs taken from a car, mostly. I think you can guess which two are not taken from a car. The weather has been wet, 1-3 degrees above freezing, so it isn't so pleasant out there.

Yesterday I half-seriously wrote about deleting all photographs at Flickr, and apparently this was what happened to a Flickr user, who lost 4000 photographs because Flickr staff deleted the account by mistake. It seems that Flickr was able to restore the lost photographs, so all ended well.