Photo Credit: NASA, APOD

The image above is of the Mice Galaxies taken by Hubble two large spiral galaxies which are circling each other and passing through one another until they finally coallesce a few billion years from now.

Photo Credit: Helpman 77 on Flickr

Our partly cloudy skies gave us an interesting view of the event through the cloud and occasionally directly at the moon.

First off, they’re not copying the images, they are getting them from the Flickr API.  As a result they have access to all the information required to properly attribute the photos, and I sorted that out after five minutes of looking through the Flickr API documentation.

Here are two Creative Commons licensed images that came up in my search for Sunrise vs. Sunset:

Photo Credit: onurati on Flickr

Photo Credit: mandyseyfang on Flickr

Get it together, FlickrFight.  Attribute the photos!  Everything you need to know is RIGHT HERE.

One of the most popular photo editing programs for Windows has to be Google’s Picasa.  Though it’s not the most full-featured image editing on the market it’s free and great for managing photos and albums, something that isn’t a strength of more full-featured applications like Photoshop and Paint.NET.

On the Mac, the most obvious photo organizer is Apple’s own iPhoto.  iPhoto does a decent job of organizing photos, though it does have its drawbacks and it’s not free.

A free Picasa would not only challenge iPhoto, but would also channel users into using Google’s online service Picasa Web Albums.  One question raised is how this will affect competing photo management services like Photobucket and industry leader Flickr.  Reality is it will probably do little to the market since OS X users make up a relatively small percentage of the software market, but what it will do is make Picasa a true cross-platform tool.

I got confirmation today that the folks over at Schmapp have selected one of my photos for inclusion in their 2007 Los Angeles travel guide in the “Best of the Beach” section.

The photo is one I took of the Santa Monica pier when we were in LA last fall.

I’m proud to have had a photo selected.  I (and hundreds of others) had our Creative Commons licensed photos found on Flickr and were asked to submit them for consideration.

The original image, and all of the other shots I took on that trip are up in my Flickr account.

This took about 10 seconds to generate, copy and paste into the blog post. It’s a great service, though I’m not sure how long it will be able to remain due to the amount of processing that needs to be done.

I decided to upgrade my Flickr account because I’ve taken some more pictures I want to upload, but was having to wait until July to post them… not to mention that I couldn’t upload full size photos because it would have only been about 18/month.

So there.  I’ve done it.  Paid for my first online service… after priding myself on free email, free software, free everything… I’ve paid for Flickr.

Here’s a couple of my newer sets: Aikido & Reflections… 

Maybe my $25 will help them speed things up a touch…

Note: Does require the QuickTime plugin…

Click here to see it.

At first I just assumed that I’d convert my account to a “Pro” account to give me the unlimited bandwidth and the necessary freedom to muck about while taking advantage of the nice pre-built Flickr infrastructure. But as time went on, a few people suggested that a photoblog may be a better way to go. Given the added flexibility of being able to customize the entire site to my liking (not to mention the fact that my photos would be ad-free) is a big plus for me. My biggest concern is the potential time involved in maintaining the separate site.

Darren is using pixelpost for his photoblog iSpie, and it seems to do a nice job, though I haven’t seen the admin interface yet. Other options I’ve been looking at are Atom Photo Blog, similar to pixelpost. It provides a quick clean interface to photos and allows comments etc. Yet another candidate is the Yet Another Photoblog plugin for WordPress. I did take a few moments to try this one out. The integration with WordPress was quick and seamless as we’ve come to expect from the “better” plugins.  It was a bit disappointing on execution though, providing very minimal “photoblogging” functionality.

At the end of the day, I’ll probably end up doing both.  Flickr Pro to store, manage and share all of my photos with the community, and post back the photos to my main blog when a longer commentary is required. Or I’ll do something completely different! 

At the moment, two of the major competitors in the 10MP DSLR space are the Canon Digital Rebel XTi and Nikon’s D40x. Each of these cameras is rated very highly, and in most cases the two are rated almost identically.

One of the go-to sites for digital camera reviews is DP Review.  They rated both of these cameras a 51/60 which puts them both in the “highly recommended” category.  So given that both of them are really great introduction-to-DSLR cameras, how’s a guy to choose?

After consulting with several people (thanks Dan, Jay, Chris & Rens!) and reading yet more online reviews, it seemed that the deciding factor wasn’t “which camera is better”, but “which camera feels better”.  Dan described it best when he said that you need to “go with your friend”…

So I did.  I have chosen.  If all goes according to plan I’ll be posting the first pictures from my new camera in the next few days.

In case you’re reading for a review, check out the reviews I mentioned earlier:

• Canon EOS 400D (Digital Rebel)
• Nilon D40x

TTFN…