sylvar

With the help of whatbird.com, I managed to figure out what I took pictures of last week.  Click the names to see my other photos of these birds...


Northern mockingbird


American robin   

Ben and Jodi at the Starlite Majesty

I ended up wearing the tuxedo jacket, black slacks, and a new white dress shirt and a solid purple tie that matched some of Jodi's skirt.

Jodi Geever, USF Graduate

See lots more photos in the complete Flickr set -- including hand-drawn announcements, if you're logged into Flickr as one of my friends or family.

Flickr is neat. It lets you add tags to each photo so that you can index your shots. At a party, for example, you might want to add the name of each person in an image. But that's a whole lot of typing.

I've got around 600 photos of our wedding and reception. There were around 200 guests, and I recognize about 150 of them in the photos. That's complicated.

Worse, if you want to use a full name as a tag, you have to put it in quotes.

The naive way to do it is to click "Add a tag" and then type:

"Ben Ostrowsky" "Matt Ostrowsky" "Peter Ostrowsky" "Ellen Fike" "David Fike"

Consider that some photos have 20 recognizable faces. Your fingers will be cramping!

Instead, use short nicknames at first:

me matt dad mom floyd

Then, when you've tagged everyone with nicknames, use Flickr's tag management options to change all instances of dad to Peter Ostrowsky.

Just make sure you identify people fairly consistently. If there are two people named Chris, you'll have to choose nicknames, use last names, etc. Capitalization doesn't matter, but spelling does (of course). So Rian and his son-in-law Ryan have their own tags, but if you use me for yourself, you mustn't use ME for Mary-Ellen.

And if there's someone in the photo whose name escapes you, just use whoami and come back to it later.

I've taken a few pretty good photos recently:





Seagrape blossom and wasp (?) pollinating it



( 2 more photo thumbnails )

I've also gotten a few contributions to the "buy Ben a better camera" fund. If you've got something to buy, it doesn't hurt to use my link to Amazon.com, and it helps me. Thanks to those who have gotten this katamari rolling!

I wonder if any of my photos are interesting enough to sell framed prints of, say in a coffeehouse...

( Some small versions of photos from this morning... )

Or you can see all today's photos that I've uploaded. (I got ten that I'd call keepers. Not bad in a roll of 24!)
 

Tree, lawn and shadow at Crescent Hill

Tempus fugit

Taken at the Largo Public Library.

I think I like taking photographs of graves. There's interesting graphic design, a variety of textures, light and shadow, and the subjects tend not to blink. And there certainly are some beautiful images to capture.

( They're small images, but some of you are on dialup, so... )

I went looking for someone else's grave to fill a request, but didn't find it. Not yet. I'll return, and while I'm nearby I'll check out the Showman's Rest Cemetery. There's another photo request waiting for me there.

Know what else I like about going to a cemetery? Returning. One of these days I'll have to skip that part of it, but until that day (far off, I pray), I'll keep visiting with a camera.

Homemade pizzas

Made with Alton Brown's Pizza Pizzas recipe. Other than dough, you're also looking at olive oil, sesame seeds, ricotta cheese, feta cheese, basil, black olives, asparagus, and artichoke hearts in various combinations.

For some strange reason, Jodi now likes Alton Brown...