I’m breaking my “no more Julia pictures” rule for this one since you can’t really see her anyway. Cat caught this one of a very dejected Julia. I don’t know what terrible event sparked this episode, but those slumped shoulders and little hands are fairly representative of a classic Julia mope.

My wife, knowing my desire to learn more about photography, paid for me to have some classes at the local Wolf Camera. I was dubious at first, especially of the very first “How to point your camera at something and push the button” class but it was actually informative. It taught me some things about apertures and focal lengths that I sort of knew but didn’t have down in any particular, logical way.

This past Saturday was the second class wherein a bit more detail was discussed and I learned a very important thing. I’ll run through the scenario and see if you learn the same thing as I did.

“So, here’s an example of a photo I took during a storm [the above isn’t the actual picture he used but it’s very representative],” said the instructor, a rather whimsical and slightly wacky fellow. “Did I get lucky and happen to actually snap the picture when 4 bolts of lightning struck?”

Confused faces around the classroom of about 50 people of all shapes, sizes, and technical specifications.

“No, this exposure was done over a period of about 20 minutes,” he continued. “Now, I can’t leave the shutter open for 20 minutes with even the smallest aperture size as it would just get overblown with light.”

Everyone nodded sagely.

“So, what I did was get a piece of black, non-reflective material and hold it over the lens so no light could get in. The shutter stayed open the whole time, but now I’m manually controlling the exposure. Make sense?”

Here comes the important tip.

“So, how did I capture the lightning bolts? I used… thunder. I sat there in the dark and waited until I heard the thunder then moved the sheet out of the way. Because we all know what happens once the thunder comes,” and here he wildly gesticulated with his hands in a downward slashing zig-zag motion, “TCH-TCH-KOW!”

Everyone nodded sagely and started writing this valuable tip.

So, I learned something important that day: America is doomed.

Flickr recently upgraded the benefits of both their free and pro accounts. The free accounts got limits increased a bit, but the truly exciting stuff was saved for paying members. Now you’re no longer limited in your upload quotas! This was my biggest pet peeve with the previous featureset. I’ve got gigabytes of pictures of Julia that I wanted to upload for relatives to browse through, but I had to do it piecemeal each month. I was always careful to leave a bit of quota left over for new pictures from the current month as well, since we take pictures often and the relatives want to see the new ones too.

I’m sincerely tempted to dump the entire picture archive into Flickr as an off-site storage mechanism. My only real caveat is that we’ve been using the now discontinued Adobe Photoshop Album to organize our pictures, carefully tagging them so as to make finding pictures easier later. There is no existing mechanism for leveraging those tags when uploading to Flickr, so it would require a lot of work to perform the same organization. Were I to have enough time it would be tempting to utilize the Flickr API and a bit of reverse engineering on the Adobe file formats to extract the tags for each photo from Photoshop Album and upload and tag them at the same time. Maybe even create sets on the fly, too. Tempting indeed.

Social networking in all its varied wonder arrived too late in my life to make much impact. I don’t need to connect to a thousand people, I don’t need a level of sharing in my life that social networking espouses. This may ring hypocritical given that you, dear reader, are reading these words in a blog. I understand that and, frankly, can’t explain it. Maybe I’m a one-way communicator, flinging thoughts in the form of words and not caring to make a connection. Maybe I’m full of shit. Either way, I choose what I choose… I’m past trying to explain my erratic, nonsensical whims.

I’ve heard the growing clamor over the various photo sharing sites and ignored them. I’m relatively private. That’s why you’ll struggle to put a real name to “ColdForged”, why I don’t have an easy way of contacting me, why my domain registration is private and why I’m not a “celebrity blogger” type of personality — well, it’s one reason anyway, aside from the fact that my readership is low and my output is, shall we say, irregular if not dry, staid, and ultimately irrelevant. My wife contributes to this as she is fiercely protective of our family and especially of Julia. Any type of unnecessary public exposure — like this blog, for instance — causes her concern and pause. I don’t blame her, to be honest. While the possibility of some weirdo targeting our family based on this blog seems remote, it obviously does increase our level of risk. If this place simply didn’t exist, there would be one fewer avenue of gleaning information about us.

Therefore, I limit Julia discussions and pictures. Some people relish the public eye (e.g. Dooce) and make the most of it. Admittedly I have to have some amount of the same desire or I wouldn’ t be doing this, but I think I walk a fine line between nothing and too much.

So why on Earth would I need a Flickr account? Much less a Pro account?

Relatives.

We all have them unless they’re dead. I have lots of relatives. And they all want pictures. All of them. Worse, they want pictures all the time. There hardly a day that goes by that someone doesn’t say “why haven’t you sent me any new pictures of the baby?” There’s a load of excuses but it got us to thinking about how we could make it an easier process for Julia’s family to see her growing up.

Enter Flickr! I’ve uploaded maybe an eighth of the known Julia pictures in the wild so far — there are roughly 3,800 of them at last count… yes, we love our girl — and continue to do so when I get the chance. Only Flickr’s upload limit of 2GB per month will come into play. Once they’re all up, we can simply make a Flickr upload a part of the picture workflow for new pictures and all the relatives can get whatever they want, whenever they want. And we get to keep control of the privacy of the pictures.

Here’s my Flickr page where I’ll make public photos available. Right now there isn’t a whole lot aside from some simply horrible shots we got of Glen Wesley and The Stanley Cup. Hopefully there will be more interesting things there someday.

Continuing in the Julia picture theme I had to share this occurrence from this morning. In the epic battle between Baby and Mascara, Mascara usually comes out on top. Innocent bystanders fared no better as the beloved Piglet (”Pitty” in Julia parlance and something, like “frog”, that we absolutely refuse to correct) received some collateral damage. Click for larger version where the damage is more obvious.