Photos of Three Odd Things

Most everybody has a camera with them these days. I use my phone camera exclusively but there are still times when I forget to take a picture although the device is right in my pocket.  Here are a few recent things, that did prompt me to pull it out.

   

On Saturday, at the Canadian Superstore in Coquitlam, we always get a shopping cart from the closest covered outside storage area. The one above was the next in line. It appeared to the the only one with unique, racing handles. It didn't help navigate in the slightest.

Below, you can see a pile of snow today that I took in Queen's Park. I knew it wasn't. Before the winter season, preparations for the ice rink, always produce a few snow piles like this. A park guest was walking a large black lab that just loved it. I watched him sniff and dig. 

On the bottom is a picture of some berries. I also took this today as I was getting in a walk as exercise. I had the car plugged into the DC fast chargers for one hour today! I never usually let my EV get that low. It turned out well as I wanted to get in an hour of brisk walking. I'd never noticed berries quite so purple before.  I looked it up and the purple fruit is a bush called an American Beautyberries (Callicarpa americana).  I read they're not harmful but aren't very flavourful.

 

Unconnected to Reality

I find it hard to believe that I've been playing with AI-generated images since August 2021. For more than three years, I've experimented with the awesome power of the new technology. And boy, did it improve over the time of my involvement! 

Stunning conceptual, artistic, or authentic-looking images can be created with short text prompts. We've have never been able to believe photographs but now even that concept has become amazingly archaic today. 

It surprised me that I've saved over 1400 AI-generated images in some online Flickr albums. I think it's time to take a little break and cancel my Midjourney subscription. I will undoubtedly get back to see what happens in this space in the future. But for now, at least for over the winter months, I shall give it a rest. 

Five random recent images are included here just so you can look at a few.

 

A Different Space and Time

In this blog posting today, I have decided to share two scanned photographs taken at around the same time but in vastly different locations.  

The first snapshot was taken in Sunapee, New Hampshire during a college summer. I am leaning against a car. The picture was taken in front of The Harbor Gameroom and originally came from a copy that Bret took.  The old Ford Pinto was still on the road but it was in pretty poor shape after its roll-over.

 
The next photograph was taken in Colombo, Sri Lanka.  It was shot at the Hotel Janaki. The year was also 1979. Four employees are in front of a Sri Lankan mural in the hotel's restaurant.  Jay, who's standing second from the left, was working at his first job with these friends.

 

We didn't meet for another six years when I joined him by working at the same company in Taif, Saudi Arabia. Since then, we've been hanging around together in many different places for over 39 years.

Looking Back at December 3, 2008

We just checked in for tomorrow's flights to Vegas. We return on a direct Air Canada flight but going down we have to stop in San Francisco for a connecting United Airlines flight. 

Of course, this trip inspired me to check out the last time we were in Las Vegas, Nevada. It doesn't seem possible that it was sixteen years ago! (This is when old people start asking inane questions like, "Where does the time go?") Of course, I had to check my Flickr account to see what I could find in the deep recesses of their data warehouses.  Sure enough, a number of pictures were still sitting in my album created that year.  Long live JPGs!

 

Some of the images were from a morning trip out to Hoover Dam.  We rented a car from the hotel and drove towards Boulder City to see Lake Mead.   This was before the bypass bridge and any highway called Interstate 11.  When we were there, the road ran across the top of the dam.

Oh yeah, and the rental car was a Dodge Caliber.  That helps prove that 2008 was a long time ago.  We are not planning a return visit to Hoover Dam this time around.

  

Pictures of Everyday

 

I snapped this photo when we were up in the mall today. It was cool this morning and we wanted to walk a bit in a comfortable environment, even though we only bought a few things in the Walmart. 

I've said it here before in different ways, but I wish I'd taken more pictures in my life. Sure, I do have over 43,000 images on Flickr but they're mostly from this millennium. My past is sadly lacking as it was a time when photos were rarer and more precious. Now I can snap multiple images per day, easily and for free. That was not always the case. 

In fact, this afternoon Jay and I were talking about our years in Bahrain. I was thinking about where we bought groceries and came up blank. I'm sure between January 1989 to July 1991, we ate.  Even with front-row seats to the Gulf War, food is never really optional.  Still, I have no pictures of markets or grocery stores.

 

My First Photo Upload to Flickr

Some things come and some things go. This is espcially true of the World Wide Web. It even looks funny to see those words spelled out in 2024. 

I had my own domain name registered in the 1990s and an active personal website. I let that go decades ago when social media and blogging came along. It was popular enough so that when I abandoned paying the annual fee, a reseller company grabbed the domain.  It remains active to this day. I swear its present form has nothing to do with me! I don't speak Thai nor do I gamble.

Perhaps because I turn 65 in a few short days, I'm thinking in terms of Internet longevity. I upload photos and images to Flickr.com most every day. I have nearly 43000 online there now. However, I wanted to show you the very first image I ever uploaded.

 

This was taken along the Crow's Nest Highway in southern British Columbia on June 21, 2005. Six guys had gone on an Okanagan road trip in a big rented van. I came home wondering how to best share the pack of images. I had owned a digital camera for three years at that point, but sharing photographs was a messy situation using email. 

This picture has been hosted at Flickr since June 26, 2005.  The website was a local company at the time and an offshoot of a Vancouver online gaming community. I've seen it change hands and locations a number of times.  However, my initial image has always gone along for the digital ride. 

The very idea of online photos seemed appealing to me and many others in 2005. And rightfully so, for over 19 years later, I can still share it here with ease.

Penguins and Penguins II

On Monday for Canada Day, the first image in my blog post shows a photo of Jay and me at the Vancouver Waterfront. We are not big fans of selfies. Of course during most of our lives, we had to ask strangers to take our photo if we were both to be in it. That type of shot always emphasizes the location. It also give one a chance to actually talk to someone who one doesn't know. Asking for or accepting help is a human trait. This is a skill that Gen Z has never learned to do in person. 

--- Anyway, sorry for getting sidetracked.   I keep a Flickr album with pictures of Jay and me over the years.  Interestingly, it only has around 125 pictures in it.  So, I added the Canada Day photo as the most recent one. While looking through the album, I noticed that two images had something in common. 

One was taken in 2007 and the other 2022.

 

This image was taken in Hollywood, California.  We were inside the Dolby Theatre back when it was known as the Kodak Theatre.  There was some sort of blue-screen arrangement and we were able to get this free Polaroid snap.  Obviously, it was when that particular original, animated movie was being promoted.

We didn't know that fifteen years later, we'd be standing among real penguins.  During December, we were on a cruise that'd left Miami and went through the Panama Canal and down the western side of South America.  After rounding the Cape Horn, we headed straight for the Falkland Islands.  We'd arranged to go to Volunteer Point in a 4-wheel-drive vehicle.  It was an amazing day among these quirky creatures.  We continued onwards for our extended winter stay in Buenos Aires.

My Return to AI Imaging

Last month, during our trip to Central Europe and the Baltics, I took 589 photos with my phone. That meant, I was too busy to spend time creating images with artificial intelligence. 

Now, that we're back in BC and a bit caught up, I have gone back to using Midjourney to move some of the ideas from my head onto a computer screen.  This technology is amazing and has improved immensely since I first got interested in it in the fall of 2022.

I enjoy creating photo-realistic images.

 

 

I also find it rewarding to make images that just couldn't be true.

 

I'll Add a Few Pics and Images Today Too

Day 71 - Flickr is the photo-sharing website on which I store all of my photos and AI images.  I mentioned on Facebook earlier in the week that I had uploaded over 41,300 files to the site. Of course, it did take me a while. I joined Flickr in the summer of 2005. 

It takes me just a second to do a search for a picture of my grandmother, or the time Jay and I walked among penguins in the Falkland Islands.  I can find the album of a trip to Cambodia or a picture of the car I drove in high school.  I do like having all my life stored in one simple-to-use location.

At the end of each calendar year, they now produce a statistical graphic for sharing. During 2023 I had less than one million total views.  

 

Appreciating the Flickr Website: It Holds My Life.

Wow. A kid born on the day I joined Flickr would now be old enough to vote!

 

I joined when Flickr was based locally in Vancouver, BC, Canada.  My initial pictures made the move down to San Franciso in the summer of 2005 when the site was bought by Yahoo.  I managed to stay with Flickr even when it required a Yahoo ID.  More recently, in 2019, my pictures made the migration to AWS cloud services after being acquired by SmugMug.

This is one of the first two pictures, I uploaded to my Flickr account.  Jay and I had just returned from a trip to the BC Okanagan with friends.  I was looking for a robust place to keep images on the Internet.  Thanks for letting it stay online for eighteen years, Flickr!

Burrowing Owl Winery - 2005 

Standing at the top of the 'Burrowing Owl Winery" in British Columbia. 

Date Taken: June 22, 2005 - 10:31:47 

Date Uploaded: June 26, 2005  - 22:16:29 

EXE Data: 

Olympus C40Z,D40Z
ƒ/8.0 7.5 mm 1/650 100 Flash (off, did not fire) Hide EXIF
Compression - JPEG (old-style)
Image Description - OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Make - OLYMPUS OPTICAL CO.,LTD
Orientation - Horizontal (normal)
X-Resolution - 72 dpi
Y-Resolution - 72 dpi
Software - v553u-76
Date and Time (Modified) - 2005:06:22 10:31:47
YCbCr Positioning - Co-sited
ISO Speed - 100
Exif Version - 0210
Date and Time (Original) - 2005:06:22 10:31:47
Date and Time (Digitized) - 2005:06:22 10:31:47
Components Configuration - Y, Cb, Cr, -
Compressed Bits Per Pixel - 5
Exposure Bias - 0 EV
Max Aperture Value - 2.8
Metering Mode - Multi-segment
Light Source - Unknown
Flashpix Version - 0100
Color Space - sRGB
File Source - Digital Camera
Scene Type - Directly photographed
Interop Index - R98 - DCF basic file (sRGB)
Interop Version - 0100

Camera ID - 721

Camera Type - Point and Shoot

A Picture as a Perfect Pick-Me-Up

It is 1:00 pm and the dining table lamp is still on from the early morning.  Outside it is foggy and still raining.  We've been under the influence of our first tropical weather system of the year.  The storms line up off the Pacific and continue dumping rain in the Lower Mainland for days at a time at this time of year.  The positive part of these systems is they bring in warm air from Hawaii.  We often have practically snow-free winters in Vancouver.  However it's gloomy presently.

So, finding these images on my phone felt fantastic.  Generally, I upload images to Flickr nearly immediately and delete the original from my devices. A collection of over 40,000 images stands as my single lifetime depository.  Just now, I added a dozen more to the easy-to-organize collection there.  I put eight of them in this post.  

These were from our last evening, on June 27th, before we headed back home the next day.  I kept putting off uploading them.  Better late than never!  Oh, and it turned out perfectly as I needed a little mental boost because of today's weather.

We spent the month of June in Nice, France.  We stayed at a VRBO and used the city as a base to see the Côte d'Azur. This week, a friend posted pictures on Facebook from Italy and I commented that I really liked that country and the whole Mediterranean coast. We found it easy to live for a month in Nice.

Photo from My First Digital Camera

Jay and I travelled to Sri Lanka in 2004. It was a two-month trip and the first belatedly chronicled right here in the same space I'm writing today. Click here to step back 19 years to past posts that are in reverse order.  The information is on a number of different pages from October 25th going back through September 2nd of that year.

Things do change.  Three in the following photo are no longer with us.  Jay's dad and brother-in-law passed away as did Auntie.  In the photo, taken in Kandy, Sri Lanka, Babby hadn't gotten married nor had she moved to Cyprus.  We were standing in front of one of the most famous Buddhist temples in the island nation.  A tooth relic of the Buddha is kept there.

 

In less than five weeks we'll be heading back for most of the Canadian winter.  

Tipperary Park, New Westminster

This morning, I drove uptown.  I ordered three enlargements at London Drugs. They are duplicates of the first image I used in my blog post the other day. I paid for the original image from the onboard photographer on the ms Volendam.  I decided to gift these to the fellows who were on our recent Alaskan cruise. 

It's been so long since I did a photo order that I went to see how the fiberboard backing and lamination actually looked.  Sometimes it's best to see something in person. The staff member wasn't helpful as the store didn't have examples of their own products. Therefore, I continued with the same online order I had already half-completed on my phone. 

After that errand, I drove down the hill and turned on Queens Avenue.  I stopped by the picnic tables behind the 'New West Tennis Club'.  I took out the drone and flew up to about 40 meters and snapped a few images.

 

Things We See

 

Day 29 - This is our last weekend on the French Riviera. We have a mid-week flight, but the end feels near. I usually find myself trying to snap a few photos to help me remember things about our stay. 

For example, we've left the main door of our building to walk to the outer gate more times than I can count. We marvel at the growth of the plants, especially as there is a profusion of a flower Jay calls the 'four o'clock plant'. That's when the flowers open each afternoon and he knows it from Sri Lanka. The white ones look like this:

 

The view from the door looks like this. The street is a dead-end so there's never traffic on it.

 

So often we've simply walked down Avenue Jean Médecin, the main route of Tram #1.  The wide avenue is only for pedestrians and trams and is so walkable!  People are always there.  Then, the avenue opens up directly into Place Masséna and the Fontaine du Soleil.  Next to that, a large fountain area was being used mostly by kids cooling off from the warmth of a June evening.

If one walks just a block through a park one arrives at the Neuf Lignes Obliques.  The artwork of nine, 30-meter pillars  It can be seen from all along the beach side of this city.

We've grown used to seeing these things.  It'll feel strange flying home after just 30 days of living here.