I'm most certainly leaving flickr. Ipernity is one of my favourites. Let's see how it develops.

Most certainly I'll not move all my pictures. Maybe the best ones. Meanwhile you can have a look at them "there": http://flickr.com/photos/carstenschurig/

Yes, I am feeling at home here! Even though there're some rough edges still. For instance the activity mail I get is in French and the page forgest my language setting sometimes too. Well, maybe time to start learning French again... ;)

I'm still missing a few things from flickr:

• The list of latest docs is just too short. I'd rather have a feature where I can browse the last x docs of my network in a nice way.
• There's a list with recent comments, but not a list with activity on items you left a comment. The available list just show replies directly to your comment. (The threading feature of comments is very nice, though. A feature everyone used workarounds for on flickr ;)).
• I'm missing feeds for a few features: latest comments, latest activities on items you left a comment, etc. Those are quite important for me.
• Groups. But this is being implemented as it seems.

But even regarding those "drawback", this is a very nice alternative. I esp. like how commenting works here. And now off testing the API...

PS: and I just see that there seems to be no way to add tags on this post directly while editing?

Currently I can't access flickr at all.

"No connection"

Hard measures against Germans? :D

They're really listening to us new comers. Now there's a Greasemonkey script available to make migration easier. You still have to go to every picture you want to transfer and activate the transfer, but it imports tags, geo information, title and description! Even privacy settings are imported, even though not perfectly (a friends&family photo was imported as private and for a public one, commenting, tagging, etc. were disabled). But still very nice job!

Get it here: www.ipernity.com/about/gm

Thanks a lot!

PS: For me this means I'll set all my pictures at flickr on private and wait a bit with deleting the account. I've paid for quite a while anyway...

As you might have already noticed I'm now .pro here. :-D

Why so soon? Well until now staff here reacted very nicely and quickly to our invasion. I am aware that a service like this needs money to be developed and maintained. So I decided to support them besides trying to add to the community. And I find this very important. Being still disappointed about flickr, I just signed up for a year for now. To have a look how it all develops.

This means as well that I decided to stay here for the time being and not to got to any other service. I don't have the time to handle more than one community at once..

Did you notice if you go to "My network" there's a new entry under "What's up in your network" called "Latest docs & posts".

Can you guess what it is?

Right!

Thank you very much for this!

Is someone from Grenoble or near here and reading this? I'll most certainly be in Grenoble from 9th to 15th of July. 2 days for a workshop plus a few additional days off... ;-)

How about a ipernitymeet?

...is better communication as it seems to take place currently.

So how about a roadmap entry in the team blog? I'm not really thinking about a fixed time scale, but more some idea what you're currently working on. We know already that you're working on groups and we've seen some great new and wanted features implemented very quickly. And there are many posts floating aaround where people did ask you directly. I think it would be great if you posts at least some of your plans openly. If you can publish a time when you expect a feature to be available, fine, is not just post how important it is on your roadmap.

I think this would be a great feedback for the community. And this way it could easier to get feedback about wanted features as well.

Thanks for the great work!

Yes, it works.  A few small differences to f****r, but basically the same. Not too much functions supported, yet, but the basic upload functions I need are there.

That means: I have Ipernity upload possibility in my photo management software (f-spot.org) now. After all small issues are solved I'll try to get it into the official version (and then I'll publish a patch too because I don't know how hard it will be to have it accepted).

Implementation was very easy, if it wouldn't have been for one slight difference I spent quite a bit of time on figuring it out. ;-)

Ostragehege, Alberthafen, City Centre, Friedrichstadt, ...

Ok, it is over a year old but the numbers are still impressive.

• 90 shots (maybe 88 used here) at 83mm focal length
• final cropped panorama is 77624 px × 3072 px
• stitched using hugin with the nona engine, blended with enblend
• nona did take about 3 hours (this just morphs the images)
• blending them using enblend did take about 3 days (!)
• in the first run I did forget to activate LZW compression for the tifs created by nona, so each one was about 1.2 GB and my hard disk was filled up, with LZW it's just about 24 MB per pic as there're big transparent areas
• the final LZW compressed tif is about 600 MB, loaded in Gimp to crop, Gimp needs about 3.5 GB
• the uploaded scaled down JPEG version just is about 2.5 MB

So is it feasible? No! Just a test and next time I'll use a smaller focal length... The problem is not only the stitching time, but it's hard to work with these many images in hugin (and I assume in any other stitching program). Because of that this stitch isn't perfect by far (usually I'd have defined more vertical and horizontal lines), but I don't care for this one.

It would be interesting to see how long it takes on modern hardware (more RAM, dual core)... :D

Last year I published a series of different crops of a picture on the old site. A nice way to use the blog function here to maybe start a new discussion about it ;) (and it is better to view them all on one page).

OK, first the pictures:

The first one is the original crop. It was a little bit boring, esp. the RAW workflow was not perfect. The sqaured version emphasizes the beautiful sky but on the other hand the powerful river (it was a flood at this time) is lost and the city on the other side gets too much attention for me. The archer stands out less as well.

Sometimes I like golden rectangle compostitions as the bottom ones are. The left one is more or less a changed crop of the squared version. The archer is more pronounced and the city on the other side of the river is less important. Still missing is the power of the water (you have to know the place to see it) and the sky looses some of its power as well.

Because of that there is a forth crop. It's almost the original but in golden rectangle (approx. 3×5 instead of 2×3). The better RAW processing make the water look muddier (caused by the flood), the sky more magnificient and the cropping gives the balance I wanted to achieve on this shot: the archer is a little bit lost in all the water but still prominent, the city is just a hint in the far.

So what do you think? Yes, critique is welcome!

Slight changes to my schedule or better: final planning.

I decided to use the free days more for photographing. That means I'm going to Paris on Friday, 13th (anyone superstitious? ;) . I will arrive around noon in Paris and leave around noon on Sunday. So if anyone has time, is in Paris and likes to join me on a photo tour...

My main "targets" are La Defénse (definitely, on Saturday), Centre Georges Pompidou (Friday afternoon), maybe Bibliotheque.

I'll be one week in France. I don't know yet if I'll have (affordable) internet access and if I want to anyway. ;-) I plan to take a few pictures, though...

Keep on using IpernityFox and the Grapher and post problems, suggestions and everything else. But I'll definitely not work on the code next week (just in case you find a big bug). :-D

I'm back, pictures will follow slowly. Just a first impression from Grenoble:

The weather was perfect: it just stopped raining at the end of the workshop! :D Then a few nice clouds and a few drops in Paris on Sunday morning. BTW, I just happend to be in Paris on Bastille Day, their National Holiday! Just tell me once again there will be a big fireworks here in Dresden. ^^

(It felt a little strange, though, to go to the airport without anything printed in my hands... ;)

Current Version: 2.9.4.4 (2007-08-03)

Changes: Fixed a bug with getting the number of views. Got the number of docs starting today and may be the reason for former problems some encountered.

Well you didn't want it any other way: here's an analysis of all RAW files I shot the last 1.7 years that still exist on my hard drive.

It's based on about 15k files. A few 100s to 1000s have been deleted esp. when I took smoke pictures (the 1000s missing smoke pictures will add to the Center AF Point ;). Additionally not included are the pictures from the beginning of my experience with the 20D when I still shot JPEG only (not too long).

I didn't analyse the data for automatic or manual AF Point selection, but most of those are multiple AF Points and included in "Others". "Others" is the sum of all single AF Points and multiple ones with a count below 1% of all the points available. Considering the very low numbers of multiple active AF Points I assume that most of the time I did choose the active AF Point manually (which I do now all the time).

The "Manual" AF is from smoke shots and panoramas I suppose.

So what's the conclusion for me? Only the center AF Point (it's type and sensitivity) is important for me and I do not need to care about other AF Points my next camera might offer...

...sorry all three prints are given away...

Following brendadada and Panchromatica I will offer a few prints for free! I'm not expecting a print of you in return or something else. This is just a chance to get a few prints out into the world...

Offer

I will offer one Cyanotype to the first three commenters who say they would like one and which one (please do not post your address here!). You may choose from the selection below.

Printing may take a while and the prints may look quite different. The size will be between 10x10 cm² and 17x17 cm² at maximum as I see fit. The same accounts for the coating technology and paper I choose.

To the Dresden people: please understand that I would like to give away those prints to people who are not "at the source" and do not have a chance to get a print as easily. ;-)

Selection

Here are the images you can choose from:

resting

// \\

Deamon

No Window

There Always Is (2)

“stolen” viewpoint in blue

Continuation

And to continue I just copy Brenda's words: If you want to make a similar offer, then please:

1. post your offer here in a comment. This can be for as many or as few prints as you like, of whatever size you think fit. Panchromatica is offering 5, for example. Make sure you include a link to your own pages
2. post a link to this post on your own Ipernity pages (and anywhere else you like) inviting people to join in.

So, to recap: post here, post your offer on your own site, and link back here. Please send me a separate message including your postal address - don't post your address in the thread.

...sorry all three prints are given away...