Vacation Photos That Inform Instead of Bore 129
A News.com story discusses the increasing trend towards adding metadata to casually created content. Their discussion centers around vacation photos taken with increasingly sophisticated cameras, and uploaded to ever more feature-rich websites. These photos, taken on a whim by snap-happy tourists, become invaluable for people wanting to follow in their footsteps. "It's the odd juxtapositions of randomly plotted photos that may be the most surprising--and useful--to travelers with more obscure interests. For example, fans of graffiti can search the word, 'graffiti,' and 'New York City' at Flickr.com/map, and pull up photos of freshly painted tags, all plotted with pushpins on a clickable Yahoo map. A search for 'Dumbo Brooklyn graffiti,' for example, finds some 99 photos, including the infamous 'Neck Face' tag, spray-painted on a brick warehouse at Jay and Front Streets in Brooklyn. Try finding that in a guidebook."
Neck Face (Score:4, Informative)
The Face Neck tag can be found here [flickr.com].
Re:Cool (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129 [ted.com]
Actually... (Score:1, Informative)
Captcha: micros
Re:Camera with LCD keyboard (Score:3, Informative)
My Treo 700p does something like that. You can put captions on the photo, draw doodles on it, and even record voice notes and attach to the photo. The problem is actually finding the time to do it. I took a lot of photos at Disneyland recently but it was always a quick snap then I had to put it in my pocket and move on. Still, though, I thought that'd be great for shopping.
Before you get too excited... (Score:5, Informative)
The 'Lonely Planet' book series made all the difference when I first came to Asia...even inside China, 15 ~ years back. I'm sure metadata will be huge, someday. But it follows on the heals of other terrific resources that have already 'been there, done that' and will continue for quite some time I am sure.
I learned how to get the local Chinese police to help move me to my next destination - If you were caught inside the frontier, they were ordered to return you to the last city you visited. The trick was to tell them your next city instead of the last one - they would load you up and happily take you on to your next destination. Courtesy Lonely Planet - try finding that kind of help w/Flcker
Re:Camera with LCD keyboard (Score:3, Informative)
My Panasonic FZ-5 (which is already what, 2 generations old?) has this feature, you simply turn it on in the menu and then after each shot you can record up to around 5 seconds of comments. The camera stores the comment in a separate mov file with the image thumbnail for video. Rip out the audio with mplayer, run voice recognition on it with some kind of console tool, and store the result in the image EXIF comment field, separate text file, or database. I think I found my next perl project
There are a few (unique to the method) problems with this, though. Most cameras, including the FZ-5, would be using a built-in microphone, which is probably facing the direction of the subject, not the person making the comment. It's also often very noisy, in urban environments this could be traffic or gunfights, even out in the country strong wind could interfere with the quality. Bad sound quality == poor recognition accuracy. And of course it might not be possible or appropriate to say the comment out loud, like "a slutty chick with huge boobs I met at Joe's party" when she's posing for the shot right in front of you.
There are some general problems too, of course, like what exactly to comment on besides the subject. Anyway, some cameras already have GPS units built in, and others support external ones. IMO adding geographical data is the easiest thing to do technologically, and while it's not the complete solution, it helps a great deal.
Re:Before you get too excited... (Score:4, Informative)
Reminds me of the one visit I paid to Compton, southern Calif, back in....1978? Except I wasn't the least bit glad I went.
That person the train hit was most likely a suicide. Those uniforms were soldiers, assigned to ride the trains in case of trouble. Today, there are regular police, however, looking for baggage thieves, pickpockets, swindlers running cons, etc.
Same as in Japan, except in Japan you are expected to not pull this kind of stunt either during rush hour, or on a busy line so as to cause the least trouble to the fewest commuters. They used to publish monthly listings of the best places to jump onto the tracks... I think in the last 5 years, I've seen less than 1/2 dozen bodies...mostly people from the country crossing busy streets or riding bicycles out in traffic.
Those decade old photos should be up on Google/Picasso, as an example. China has changed in so many ways in just the last ten years...of course, many things have not, but to see the cities grow can be interesting, I think
Re:Camera with LCD keyboard (Score:3, Informative)
If it's the former, you might want to have a look at the Panasonic FZ- cameras [dpreview.com]. They're still somewhat smaller than most SLRs, and they don't suck. The shutter lag is around 0.009 or 0.07 seconds [dpreview.com], assuming you don't want the camera to perform any fancy auto focus or IS. The larger number includes the time it takes to actually display the image on the LCD. The Leica lens is pretty good too, the end results aren't too bad compared to a 50mm prime lens on a 350D [dpreview.com]. The image noise at high ISOs still sucks compared to any DSLR of course, but there's simply no way to fit a large sensor in a compact camera.
If the FZ50, or even the FZ8 is too large, there's still the TZ3 and whole bunch of even smaller cameras. As far as I can tell, they all have similar shutter lag, but they aren't directly compared to SLRs in terms of image quality, and I can't comment on them myself.
No, I'm not in any way related to dpreview (or Amazon), but as I've mentioned in a post somewhere above, I do have an FZ-5 and I'm quite happy with it.
mod parent funny (Score:2, Informative)