Online Observations

Awesome pet photography

There are many people who can take excellent photographs of their dogs or cats or other pets. They know how to put in the correct lighting, the right shutter speed, the correct angle, the good pose, the time of the day when the pets would look best, and so on. And their photographs do come out very well. Then there are people such as John Hallam. I don’t think I need to say too much about his brand of pet photography. Here are some of the photos of his two dogs: Ollie and Rufus. Judge for yourself on why he is so different from your ‘normal’ pet photographer.

With each photo, he has a caption that makes the photo complete. I have included the caption below the photo. Clicking the photo will take you to the photo’s page on Flickr.

Can we go Ollie? it says there are real animals! Hang on Rufus, it says here visit our cathouse! dad told us never to go in a cathouse, don’t know why.

You don’t scare me Rufus!

Ollie! What are you doing to Rufus?

No sign of any chickens yet Rufus. just sit on them for another couple of days. I just love chicken Ollie, are you sure this is going to work? Sure it will Rufus, remember we watched it on TV but that was a darn great eagle Ollie! 

And his photostream on Flickr is full of photos like this. He is an excellent photographer otherwise also. Have a look at some of his macro shots. To get to his photostream just click here.

The world is full of awesome people.

Amazing chalk art on sidewalks

I am not sure if I have blogged about this before, but even if I have, it deserves another go. Some people are so talented that you don’t know how to describe them – genius as a word is inadequate.

Take a look at some of the images below. These are all made only using chalk, and a sidewalk. Yup, they are purely two-dimensional even though they may look like they are sculptures rather than drawings on a sidewalk.

And if you thought that these were cool, take a look at a whole lot more here: http://gprime.net/images/sidewalkchalkguy/. Now I would love to see who this guy is and write a bit more about it. If anyone can help point me to him, I would gladly connect with him to do an interview. As I said, even genius is not a word enough for talent such as this.

A perfect match, IMO

Google’s acquisition of reCAPTCHA is a thing that was bound to happen. reCAPTCHA’s technology has been working for identifying printed text from old books by combining them with recognized words in a dual word CAPTCHA. Google of course is spending big money towards books and newspapers, and so it makes perfect sense for them to acquire a company which is already working on digitizing old printed text which cannot be managed reliably through OCR.

Good show reCAPTCHA.

Google releases Chrome version 3, but still no plugins

The latest release of Chrome sneaked up on me (I didn’t notice it update on my computer), but it was a pleasant surprise. I first noticed it when my “New Tab” page started showing a new look. And I like it. It is completely redesigned, and for the better I have to say. One of the newest things that got added to Chrome is Theme support. There is a decent themes gallery which can be used to customize the look and feel of your browser. Here’s a screenshot of the Theme gallery.

There are other improvements and bug fixes, and the browser is supposed to be faster now. However, the one thing that is conspicuously missing is support for plugins.

Yes, there is no plugin support still.

I think till that is available, there will be no major shift to Chrome, especially now that FireFox 3.5 is so much faster in rendering pages.

Twitter makes it clear that spam and bots are not welcome

Last week Twitter released new Terms of Service for its ever popular service. Here’s a blog post by Biz Stone Twitter’s new TOS describing the new terms of service in a rather interesting manner. One of the main things to notice about the new Terms of Service is that there are specific sections dedicated towards usage of API, storage limits, mail bombing, viruses, etc. This sends out a clear message to people who have been using the API to their own selfish ends. I am pretty happy with this because Twitter was getting to be a real pain with all these marketers, bots, and spam.

Now, THIS, is photography

Anyone can click a photo, and then there are some who actually have an idea about what color is and what light is; and how to change shutter speed or aperture to get the right shot. But then there are those select few, who go beyond the basics of how to use a camera and make the subject so interesting that one can’t help but say WOW. I keep seeing such photos every now and then, and in order to appreciate art, you need to talk about it so that others can appreciate it to.

I present to you some of the work of Romain Laurent. You want to see these photos, and then you want to make sure that you visit his website to see the rest (or if you want to see these ones in a bigger size).

There are a bunch of these tilt photos. I just wonder how he did these. But I wonder the same about all his photos. Here are some more to see before you run off to his website.

Well, enjoy his immense talent.

Blog to WordPress from your iPhone

Do you have a blog on WordPress.com? Or do you host your own blog using the WordPress blogging system? On top of this, do you own an iPhone? Well, if it’s yes for the above, then it would be cool to be able to blog from your iPhone using a native iPhone app. And that is exactly what this post is about. WordPress does have a native iPhone App.

You can download this application from the App Store of course. To gather more information about this application, you should visit the WordPress iPhone site. I am about to install it on my iPhone as well as on my iPod Touch. Mobile blogging in its finest form, I say.