Tagging my photo galleries

Posted on January 17, 2009 by James

I run two photo galleries; a hand-picked collection of my best photos over at Landscape Photography, and a general gallery of all my photos. I’ve just installed the Gallery2 tags module on them to make finding photos easier, so rather than having to search by only the names of the files or words in the description there are now clickable tags that can be added, the idea being to link related photos together.

Tagging photos is easy if the content of the photo is used for tags, rather than its location or other non-visual information. For example, the following image

Burnt out car

was taken in Wiltshire, and is of a burnt out car. The tags for the photo, however are

since that’s what I can see in the photo. I can’t see ‘Wiltshire’ or even ‘car fire’ (because it’s not on fire – tags must be accurate for this to work), but I can see some trees, some blue sky, a bit of frost and the melted bit at the front of the car where the bumper used to be. Tagging photos this way is simple if I imagine trying to describe the photo to someone. Tags should also be generic and re-usable, their puprose is to link items together. Having thousands of tags, each with only one photo is no good, if I do that I may as well just write a really good description instead.

War Memorial

Posted on November 18, 2008 by James

(Cross posted from my Photo blog)

While driving through the outskirts of Scunthorpe, around Brigg, I saw the perfect scene to test my digital camera. There was a war memorial on a street corner lit perfectly by a light, casting really interesting shadows. Even better was the lamp post on the street corner that I could lean against.

Of the five photos I took, this was the best. Shot in RAW and post-processed in Photoshop to bring out the detail and change to black and white made the picture so much better than it originally was.

A light spot of Photochopping

Posted on October 31, 2008 by James

I was mildly bored this evening so decided to have a play with the world’s favourite image editor and an attempt at some tilt-shifting. Not quite sure I have the effect but I kind of like the photo all the same, cropping it has made the composition of the image much better. Here’s the original to compare.

Oh, if the above image looks square, click on it. My blog seems to do bad things to images that don’t fit its template.

Tesco Value Lager

Posted on October 11, 2008 by James

Tesco Value Lager

Are you an aspiring chav or wannabe alcoholic? Do you wish you could drink as much beer as your friends, but are actually a bit of a lightweight? Or has your giro not come through this week and you need a quick beer fix and only have 97p left? Well fear not, Tesco to the rescue!

Witness the curious stuff known as ‘Tesco Value Lager’ which comes in can form, four of, for 97p. Yes, 97p for for cans of lager. And as soon as you open one the reason for its insanely cheap price will become obvious.

It has a whole 2% alcohol content per can. Yes, that’s 0.9 UK Units per can. It is lager, it just doesn’t have much of a kick to it. You will have drunk stronger shandy when you were a kid.

While roaming the Meadowhall Centre looking for the way out, I found this slightly odd display for some Durex sex lube. The lube itself wasn’t the odd thing, more the sticker saying “try me” on the tester bottle.

So… are we supposed to get naked and smear it on ourselves and give it a test first? Or what? It is cherry flavoured, so maybe it’s something to suck on if you’re hungry.