Rain in the desert. 2019.

Urban decay. Phoenix.

John Gruber commenting on the Techcrunch 'Instagram caught selling ads to follower buying services' report.

At the time Facebook acquired Instagram, Instagram was by far the nicest social media experience I’d seen. It is now quickly descending into a cesspool of crap — bad design, bad experience, way too many ads, and a haven for scammers. I fully expected Facebook to Facebook-ify Instagram, but it’s sad watching it happen.

While I'm not on Instagram myself, my wife is, and I do hear her complain almost daily about it. I'm not sure if she's more annoyed with the ads or the algorithmic timeline? Last night she went to show me a photo our nephew posted only to somehow lose the picture? Instagram had literally reshuffled her timeline in the space of a click back. Madness.

One from the vault. Paris Metro, circa 2008.

As far as I could tell, we got all the rain for about 10 whole minutes.  And then it stopped and what remained was a sense of calm and quiet.  You step outside and take a really deep breath and just for a moment, everything is alright.  That, and the car got a wash.

Back in 2010 I added a photography page here. Nothing fancy really, I just wanted to display the latest photos I've uploaded to Flickr. So I wrote some rather dodgy PHP that utilized the Flickr API and phpFlickr. Over the last few years it's started to look a little dated. Flickr has a really nice justified view and I've wanted to do something similar.

I started hacking on some jquery code a while back to do just that but didn't get around to finishing it. And now I really don't need to. For the rather lovely Flickr Justified Gallery plugin takes care of all the things. Up and running in less than 5 minutes.

So now the photography page looks exactly like I've wanted it to for a while now.

(I'd be remiss if I didn't tip my hat to Adam Bowie for the nudge to use WordPress itself)

So yeah, we have a selfie stick. And you know what, it's a lot of fun.

My wife bought me this cool little camera. It's a Fisheye No. 2 from Lomography. Old school analog shooting at it's finest.

I haven't loaded actual film in a camera in forever. Kinda fun having to wind on the film to take the next shot. I love it. Now have to go even further old school and go get the rolls developed.

2013 was a good year photography wise. I fell short of my goal of uploading 5 shots a day to Flickr. Proved a little tougher than I imagined in the end.

Looking forward to what 2014 brings, I have a new lens to learn how to use. And I really really must get better shooting at night.

Happy New Year to you all. I hope 2014 finds you happy and healthy.

My first shot with my new 50mm f/1.8 lens.
As mentioned in how to take good photos for under $1000 "It's made of cheap plastic on the outside, but on the inside it's made of pure photolookbetterium".

I'm still working on that second part as getting decent auto focus with the aperture wide open is really hard.