We got back from our big summer vacation a few weeks ago, and I've finally got all my photos processed and uploaded.  Here's the collection that combines the Cape Cod and Texas parts of the trip:

We had a really great time, aside from the ridiculous hassles of air travel.  Jenna got to meet her 2 cousins, and WE got to actually spend time with my brother and his family, which was something that was limited due to the sickness we had during our Christmas visit.

Now that we're home, I finally got a chance to process and upload my photos from birth on Friday morning to the homecoming today.  Warning, there are a couple of gooey baby shots from the delivery, but nothing to bad (I kept a few private).

Click the photo for my set on Flickr.

In addition, you can check out Jen and Dave's set from their visit Sunday evening to bring some Chipotle to a tired daddy, just like I did for Dave when James was born.

Those of you who follow my vacationing activities know that I have a certain affinity for aquariums, which is odd because one of my biggest phobias involves murky water.  Anyway, while in New Orleans over the weekend, we stopped by the aquarium (map) after the wedding. Enjoy the photos.

This past weekend, we (Me, Becky, my Mom and Dad, and my aunt Kenny) piled in a rented Ford Expedition and headed to New Orleans where my cousin Jeremy was getting married.  We stayed in the J.W. Marriot on Canal street where we had a great view of Canal street and much of the city.  All the wedding festivities went well.  We were very tired from the drive, and had to duck out early from several of the events, but it was really great.  We hit the aquarium (pictures coming soon) and took a stroll around the French Quarter, which I really didn't like at all.  Something about lots of people crammed into a confined space that smells like a mixture of B.O. and pee just seems to get to me for some strange reason.  I've got photo sets of the rehearsal dinner and the wedding/reception.  My dad and I also created a Flickr group to pool all our pictures.

I also played with myGmaps and created this little map that I will continue to annotate with stuff from the trip.

It was really fun to see the family and participate in the festivities, but I probably won't be planning any more New Orleans vacations any time soon.

I've had a bunch of new pictures in the queue to get uploaded.  Flickr announced that the per-photo size limit had been raised to 10MB (from 5), so I thought I'd go crazy and save my raw conversions as lossless PNG files rather than JPG.  This made most of them between 5 and 10MB a piece.  Then I find out that the currently available uploaders had the limit hard-coded, so I could not upload them.  So, I built my own uploader.  Unlike most of the loaders, this one runs as a service and watches a directory.  You can just drop files into the directory and it will load them.  I used it last night to upload some and it worked great.  It can use sub-folders to apply general tags to the images. I have a couple of improvements to make, like:

• A task tray "agent" that will allow me to "suspend" it when I'm playing Halo, as well as do some configuration stuff.
• Bandwidth throttling - I'd like to specify a cap to make it play nicer with other outbound traffic.
• Better retries - Right now if a picture fails, it goes immediately back in the queue.  It needs more standard retry intelligence, like trying again at successively longer intervals.
• Utilizing the user's monthly limits to stop uploading before some percentage of the limit is reached.
• Priority spools - I've still gots tons of old photos to upload, so I want to be able to use up my limit at the end of the month without managing that process myself.
• Automatic processing.  I'd like to just drop my RAW files in there and have my standard photoshop processing applied.  I need to think about that some more because I usually like to tweak them before sending.  With the huge per-month limit, maybe I could do that and use them as "proofs".  Then delete the ones I was to tweak manually and resend them.  Oooh, and perhaps automatically deleting the one it replaces
• I also don't like having the password in the config file.  I'm going to try to fix that as well.  At least encrypt it a bit.

Anyone got any other cool things it ought to do?

Well, it's a new month, and you know what that means.  That's right, another 1GB of photos to upload to Flickr.  Most interesting of the uploads this week is my full set of 4th of July fireworks pictures.  These are from two sessions of fireworks launching.  One out west of Belton with my brother and his in-laws, and another with Jen and Dave's family out in Copperas Cove. During the later session, we were much better prepared for taking photos, so they turned out really good.  My new digital processing techniques really brought out alot of detail as well.

I have now loaded all of my pictures back to the point where I got my Canon 300D, so next comes the flood of older pictures from my old Sony DSC-S70.

My dad got the pictures up of our water heater fiasco from yesterday.  He's got just about the whole process documented in pictures.  I had actually forgotten about using the chainsaw.  Check out the photoset!

Next in the backwards march through all my old photos is a huge set of photos of our trip to Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida.  This was my first big trip with my digital rebel, so I was a little trigger happy.  Check out the photoset.

Since I moved to a hosting company, I took down my old photo gallery to reduce bandwidth and disk space. This is significant, because one of the most frequent search hits I get is for pictures of Busch Gardens. Now they can actually see them again.

I'm slowly backfilling Flickr with photos, trying not to use up all my bandwidth before the month is over.  The latest is a photoset from last year's Florida vacation where Becky and I met up with her family for her brother Ben's wedding (look for those pictures soon).  We had a great time.  After the wedding, we visited the Florida Aquarium in Tampa.  Check out the photoset!

I've just about got my digital workflow down.  I've got a basic batch job to do the standard things to pictures (auto-contrast using levels, unsharp mask, etc).  I've figured out how to tweak the RAW settings to correct color issues and actually SAVE the settings for when I open that picture next time (which I had to do alot in the aquarium pictures because of the interesting stuff water does to color).  And I've got a process for tweaking individual pictures with things like pulling the details out of shadows (which works fantastically when working in 16-bits per channel).

Well, it's the first of the month, and I've got another gig available to upload to Flickr.  Last month, I used up my limit in the first few hours after I enabled my pro account.  Then, I was essentially locked out for the rest of the month.  This month, my strategy will be to upload new pictures only and use up the remainder at the end of the month.  I've been playing with Photoshop and have greatly improved my processing scripts, so the photos should look quite a bit better. (not to mention including the original EXIF data this time)

Look for some new pictures tonight, although I don't think I've taken any really interesting ones since the last upload.  There's plenty in the backlog though.

I've been playing with the Flickr API alot, experimenting with some different things that I have planned for the future.  One of the things I'd like to do is to create context sensitive image collages on the fly for my blog entries.  Thought I'd show you this cool example from a first-pass collage creator.

Of course most collages wouldn't have this many pictures, but I thought it was cool.  I need to do some randomizing.  I'm filling from the upper left corner in diagonals for reasons you'll see when I get it working the way I want.

I've also been playing with some client-side Flickr stuff using XmlHTTPRequest to dynamically load images for a slide show type thing like MSN spaces has.  I might upload an example of that later.

Whew, what an ordeal.  I finally got my Adobe Photoshop CS in the other day, and last night, I created a "Droplet" for batch converting all my raw files from my Canon Digital Rebel. Droplets are a really sweet feature that lets you create a little executable from recorded actions for batch operations.  So, I burned through about 2000 images, creating big jpgs suitable for uploading to my newly upgraded Flickr account.  It was getting pretty late, so I fired up an uploader an set it to upload my 1GB limit (roughly 900 pictures).

This morning, I checked my account, only to find that none of the metadata had been uploaded.  All my images appeared to have been taken on Feb 11, 2005...uh oh.  So, I set out to find out what happened.  Turns out, Photoshop saves the metadata in it's XMP format within the file. XMP is simply an rdf encoding of the data in an XML payload within the file.  It's actually pretty cool, but Flickr doesn't read this data yet.  So I set out to "fix" my pictures, since I can't upload anymore until next month and I have lots more to upload.

After looking at lots of libraries and Adobe's XMP SDK, I decided it would be easy enough to pull the data out myself.  So, I built a little app using my FlickrApi library I just created that would blast through my uploaded pictures, find the corresponding image on my local pc, pull the xmp data out of the file, and set the "date taken" on the Flickr site.  That way, I can at least organize them more easily.

It worked perfectly.  It blasted through about 900MB in less than a minute.  Look for the pictures as I tag them, annotate them, and change them from private to public.  I'll have to see if there's a way to have Photoshop preserve that data next time because I'd really like to have the rest of the metadata available.  I'll probably make my XMP parser available as well if anyone's interested.  As far as I know, there is not another managed implementation available.

Last night, I made alot of progress creating a .NET API for Flickr.  There doesn't seem to be alot of activity on the Flickr.NET project, and I don't like some of the decisions they made in the design.  They seem to have taken a direct wrapping approach to it rather than designing an API that fits in the .NET world.  It's amazing how spoiled you get when you're used to using good API's.  You start saying things like, "You mean I get an array back from this method?  Eww."  or "That's a silly name for that member."  Of course, it's probably appropriate to note that Flickr.NET seems to have been created with an emphasis on uploading.  I'm more interested in sifting through the metadata.

Anyway, I've got most of the functionality that I'm interested in implemented, and I'll be doing the rest a little at a time.  I've used the design guidelines fairly strictly, and I think I'm coming up with something that's really approachable for .NET users, and is still correlated enough to the Flickr API documentation that the parallels are easily discoverable.  You may notice some bizarreness here as I play with the different kinds of integration I have planned for my blog.

A colleague at work turned me on the Flickr the other day.  I had looked at it before, but didn't really get it.  Since my dad set up his MSN space, I've been jealous of the nice photo sharing integration, and I've been disappointed in my gallery software, nGallery.  Development seems to have stalled far short of the features I would like to have.  It does alot of cool stuff well, but it's organizational and social features leave much to be desired. (difficult to read comments, poor RSS support, etc.)

I went ahead and created a flickr account and uploaded a few of my best photos.  The organizational features are really cool, and it's got alot of social features, especially for other flickr users.  For those of you browsing on my actual site rather than RSS, you can see I'm playing with some integration with my site.  Speaking of RSS, flickr has deep RSS/Atom feed support.  For instance it's really easy to use the organization features of flickr to create an RSS feed of hamster pictures.  Here's my photostream RSS, although the Atom feed seems more streamlined and includes my buddy icon.

I think I'll keep my gallery around for some things.  I really like nGallery's features that let you order prints directly from the gallery.  But I'll probably let flickr be my artistic outlet.

If you're interested in photography, you might be interested in the comments that Jerry left on my wishlist entry, especially if you've got a Canon Digital Rebel.

Jerry, I think the stabilization will help with my indoor problems.  I'm sure you know the situation I mean.  The light is just perfect on a sleeping cat, so you don't want to destroy it with a flash, but you can't capture it at a low ISO setting without camera shake and the tri/mono-pod would take too long to find/attach/adjust before the cat wakes up and ruins everything.  So I think the longer range becomes more important.  I enjoyed your lens quite a bit, so I think that's the one I'm going to aim for.  Besides, at wider angles, the low light problems become less prevalent.

BTW, I picked up the battery grip very soon after playing with yours this summer.  I love that thing.

I think you made a copy/paste error on your sweet bag url in your comments.  What was it?  I couldn't find it in the short time I searched. I'm going to add that too.

I've updated my wishlist accordingly.

I finally got the rest of the good pictures from our vacation up on the gallery [password: marklio].  I put them all under one main album with sub-albums for each category.  I tried to keep the album sizes under control.  There are way too many Busch Gardens pictures.  Enjoy!

[UPDATE: 03/09/2005] The gallery is no more.  I have removed the link.

I just uploaded the cream of the crop pictures from our 2-day Busch Gardens adventure to the gallery (as always, password: marklio).  Enjoy.  I'll have more from the rest of the vacation up at a later date.

[UPDATE: 03/09/2005] The gallery is no more.  I'm using Flickr to host my pictures.  Here's a link to the photoset for the Busch Gardens pictures.