Thursday, July 25, 2013

Going dark on flickr!

my flikr photostream is  turning darkerAt the time flickr has pulled out a lot stops and significantly changed its layout and features I see that I have become a lot darker on flickr, both literally and figuratively. I must admit the first step was due to me, I saw all the black banner backgrounds and decided to swap my cartoon to the negative (white lines on a black background). Not sure if I like it yet!

example of a darker/blank screenThe next darkening is something i can’t figure out because it is intermittent. If I scroll through any photostream in the seamless mosaic format and click on a specific image it is highly likely just to show a blank screen. I’m not the only one to see this. I’m fairly certain it isn’t a browser issue, or a bandwidth problem, the intermittent natureis what makes it frustrating. Clicking on the double diagonal icon at the bottom right, takes you into “full screen” light box mode and this seems to always work.

example histogram skewed to the leftSubconsciously I’ve also started uploaded my darker images, such as the sky at night, deep in the forest and on the mudflats. I for one are not obsessive about clipping of the blacks (that thing almost every lightroom tutorial warns you about). A night scene of the stars will naturally have a very skewed histogram (to the left) because the night sky can be very dark. Also deep shadows are often an important part of the composition. shifting the tonal curve just to add shadow detail (just because you can from a raw file) can take the drama away.

my new watermarkI must admit I am also disappointed by the fact that flickr is stripping out some of the metadata, like embedded copyright info from images once they are shared. This could easily mean that my images get classified as orphans and thus free use. Despite the fact that I licence most of my images as shareable with attribution but non-commercial under creative commons. So I have reluctantly decided to add a graphic watermark to my photos.

lightroom wants to update everything!Last but not least I also ran into a lightroom publish services catch 22. The regular flickr accounts now look to the older publishing services add in as if it is an older free account so when a photostream is updated, it actually deletes any existing photos including comment and views, before reloading the photo as a new version. When I added embedding my new watermark into the flickr publishing service it by default wanted to update all the photos I had previously updated. Damn you someone (not sure if thats flickr or lightroom or both!)

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