Jim Barter : Digital Imagination

from today’s Sheffield Star.

Click what a picture
By Martin Dawes

THEY call themselves the Flickrites - around 200 snap happy photographers on the prowl around Sheffield looking for decent shots.
And my, how they have succeeded. They’ve recorded the city in all its glory for an online photography archive.
“We want people around the world to see what Sheffield life is like and how beautiful it is,” says John Wardell, Flickrite and amateur photographer who joined the local group on Flickr.com a year ago.
He specialises in abstract and macro (close-up) photography, such as this one of a paddle taken in the Rother Valley Country Park.
Others may be into landscapes, sport, black and white photography , using a particular camera, or just like to wander the city making a journalistic record.
The Sheffield group is part of a worldwide online site - one of the biggest is in San Francisco - but John reckons that while they might not be able to compete in quantity they do on quality.
“The quality of some of the photos in the Sheffield group is fantastic,” he says.
With the advent of digital photography, taking and sending a photo is as easy as pushing a button and clicking a mouse.
With over 3,300 photos in the archive it’s already proving an invaluable resource and no doubt one day it will be of historical importance.
Gareth Davies, one of the administrators who set up the group in March last year, says: “We think it is a unique record as it is now and how it has changed and is changing.
“Different members of the group have different interests and so bring massive variety.”
Photographers can join up as themselves or adopt ‘handles’ or web personas. Harry Halibut, for example, has a penchant for pictures of city doorways while Drunken Monkey seems to shoot everything from pop concerts to his own birthday party.
Gareth (Trois Têtes) adds that meetings are held every two months and competitions set on different subjects. There is also a Pick of the Week every Friday.
It has not taken long for academia to get involved. Dr Julia Davies, who is also a Sheffield Flicker (DrJoolz), has written a paper saying digital photography and sites like Flickr have “changed the way people look at the world
“They now carry cameras everywhere they go . . . and even attend international meetings just to see their Flickr friends face to face.
“With basic membership free of charge, Flickr is easy to join yet seems difficult to leave.”

http://www.flickr.com/groups/sheffield

END.

…pity they got my name wrong in the print edition, at least it’s right here

http://www.sheffieldtoday.net/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=4766&ArticleID=1649802

I really, really, gotta get me one of these…

…and no - not the Woman, I’ve had some of those, they’re hard work.

…the Kite!

At the foot of this site…

from http://www.flagrantdisregard.com/flickr/

<p src="someimage.gif" href="someurl.html">This is some text, but a next gen browser won't display it.</p>

What the heck is that? - it’s never valid! You may well ask, it’s actually perfectly valid XHTML2.

XHTML2 is currently being hammered out by the w3c, it’s in ‘Working Draft’ stage at the minute - but we may see a recomendation sometime soon, I live in hope…

XHTML2 gets rid of* the A tag, IMG tag, BR tag and the HR tag, replacing them with more semantic alternatives, you can put a href on any object, such as a paragraph - turning it into a link the same with src, replacing an item with an image (or maybe any other object…), in the example above an image with a link would be displayed in compliant UAs - with a text fallback for non-compliant UAs and AT.

There is much more too, Separators, Navigation Lists, Roles, Lines and more, but don’t expect it to work in todays browsers, we are talking strictly next generation, even though Firefox 1.5 does include some of the spec - I’m guessing we will probably have to wait for FF3 or IE9 to get full implementation…

…we live in interesting times.

* these tags will be kept for backwards compatibility

Our (un)Government say they’re going to create a database of ALL the children in the UK to prevent ‘At Risk’ children slip through the net - like the Victoria Climbie affair.

What on Earth? How does the (un)Government expect to manage a list of 12 million children when it cannot currently manage the existing ‘At Risk’ register? New tools do not make a skilled worker - they need to be competant at their current work before you let them try something new - clearly our (un)Government are not competant. Spending £224 million (it will be more before it’s finished) on a new system is criminal, fix the existing one first!

…more here

I really, really wish, that the ipod had a function where, when in shuffle mode, and it plays a track you like - one button press would play more tracks by that artist, or the album it was from - and then one more press goes back to shuffle…

…just thinkin’ outloud…

January 6, 1946 – July 7, 2006

You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision,
rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter,
you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

Bye Syd.

BBC Obituary

ghost2, originally uploaded by Jim Barter.

Test 2

ghost2

Originally uploaded by Jim Barter.

Testing Flickr’s ‘Blog This’ function…