I Can See Your House From Here

The Flickr map of Ireland now has detail at street level granularity. So you are no longer limited to stabbing down geo-tags from an altitude of one thousand feet in the general vicinity of wherever you are aiming for. (Although, the potential timesuck of going back and accurately repositioning the geo-location information for all of your photographs is difficult to resist.) In the short time that I have had to look at this, it appears that the geographic information, while mostly very current, is oddly inconsistent. For example, Ballinasloe is pretty up-to-date, but I am unsure where Portersgate Avenue has disappeared to on their map. Hopefully the whole of our estate will have been found and incorporated when Flickr release their next iteration.

Salthill Promenade, November Morning

We just spent a few days staying in Galway city. Somewhere I have not visited for years. I had forgotten that there are lots of unusual 1950’s-style structures on the Salthill promenade.

They have been painted in an unusual colour scheme – a mixture of lime-yellow and orange – that makes them fairly pop out of their surroundings. I took a few photographs which I think are interesting and now have posted online. I took these shots early in the morning, hence the ‘28-Days Later’-esque lack of people.

Son And Heir

Ethan Edward Kenny made his arrival at 6:14 on Monday evening, weighting in at a co-incidental 6 pounds and 14 ounces. More information forthcoming once my frazzled brain restarts itself.

Kenny Family Photo History

We were in Ballinasloe for the weekend, attending Cora’s surprise sixtieth meal. I came upon a long-mislaid facet of our family’s photo archive.

During the latest phase of the, now ongoing, de-clutterization of the parental attic, Claire discovered a box of old transparencies from the seventies. They were stored away with this battery-powered, magnifying, handheld viewer, which was still stored in its original, hippy aesthetic, packaging – groovey or what?

Some of the benefits of analogue kit like this viewer are its simplicity and resilience. Once we stripped out the ancient corroded batteries, cleaned up the inside and bended some pliable metal pressure-sensitive connections, we were good to go.

The transparencies were a mixed lot from the mid-seventies. They are particularly interesting as they fill a lacuna within the family photo albums where transparencies were popular for a brief period in the seventies.

I intend to clean them up and scan them, so that Cora has digital archive copies and I can get some new prints made for her. You never know, I may even post some of the less mortifying images on my Flickr page...

Flickr Presence

Once I started to gather together all of the digital photos which I had stashed away throughout my work Mac’s hard drives, I was taken aback by how many of them there actually were. Especially given that this is only a subset of whatever total amount is on the big drive at home. So uploading from this lot onto Flickr, I hit the monthly allocated memory ceiling pretty quickly. But I guess this is how they entice you into forking out some of your hard-earned to become a Pro-Account user. The ease of use and the Flickr featureset makes this quite an attractive offer, but I will have to take a pass on it at this stage. For two reasons: whatever impending Tribble-related financial shennigans I will be experiencing in July, and the fact that my piecacrap Explorer 5 and System 9.2 combo here at work means I cannot access most of the really useful Flickr tools from the studio anyhow.  Twenty megs a month will have to do me for now.

On a related note, one interesting quirk to the Vodafone billing system I have discovered in my Flickr-related tinkering is that while they charge me thirty to forty cents when I send a cameraphone image as a Picture Message, if I email the same image to Flickr from my moble it is free-gratis (indicated as ‘Photo Album’ on my bill). This is even though a text-based email comes out of my monthly kilobytes of GPRS allocation. I need to look into this further.

Morning, Pearse Street, Sunrise

Morning Pearse Street
Originally uploaded by Aiden Kenny.

Test photo from Flickr to my blog.
Taken when walking into work, the phone camera does not really capture the intensity of colour.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aidenkenny/9189961/

Weekend In London

Gosh, we are such tourists! Val has posted a few snaps from our weekend in London on her album site. We managed to see the Carravaggio exhibition at the National, the information design exhibition at the Design Museum, get to the Tate Modern for the first time, and pay good money to see Patrick Stewart take his pants off in the Apollo Theatre! All-in-all a good weekend.