As mentioned in previous years, Flickr uses a mysterious algorithm to determine what constitute an “interesting” photo. No one seems to know what makes a photo interesting in the eyes of Flickr. My assumption is that it’s some combination of view count relative to a user’s normalized view count, some comment metrics, a dash of machine learning and magic dust.
At any rate, as we’ve done before, here are the 10 Most-Interesting photos taken this year by us as determined by Flickr.
When I was a little kid, my parents made sure that we went on adventures to see the world, or at least the world that they had the time and means to expose us to, which usually meant our home state of Texas. From our home in East Texas, we went to easy-to-reach places such as Dallas and Fort Worth, and more-distant locales, such as Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Big Bend and the Rio Grande Valley. One of the common denominators of these trips was my late father carrying around his Minolta SRT-101 SLR with the “kit” 50mm lens permanently attached.
I was always fascinated by this mechanical wonder…if you took off the lens and clicked the shutter button, you could see the shutter curtain pop open for a split second. Pushing the lever over to advance the film would reset the curtain for the next shot. Ingenious and incredibly interesting for a little nerdy kid who harbored fantasies of building robots and walking on the Moon.
(Side note: I’ve still never built a robot and my chances of ever visiting the Moon are zero)
The fact that this little metal box with a tube of glass on the front could capture memories was—and still is—amazing to me. I still have thousands of my father’s negatives, awaiting for a time when I can get around to digitizing them before they fade away. I relished every chance he’d allow me to click the shutter button and make another celluloid memory.
By the time high school rolled around, I decided to join the yearbook. The staff was shorthanded and I ended up as a photographer. Or, more-often-than-not, the photographer. I loved spending time in the darkroom, processing film and printing it in the dim glow of the red safelight.
I’d hoped to continue doing photography as a hobby after high school, into college, but the reality of the cost of film, let alone maintaining and stocking a darkroom, precluded that. I took a couple of photojournalism classes just to have some access to a darkroom, but outside of that, I rarely took photos.
Graduation came and went and I started my career as a software developer, always thinking that one day I’d get back into photography. But the cost was always a blocker. Then digital cameras came onto the scene. Pricey at first, with not-so-great quality, I kept waiting for them to get better, knowing that memory cards and hard drive storage would be a lot cheaper than film.
Finally, a bit over twelve years ago, the Canon 400D came out and was in my price range. I dove right in. And I loved it.
Going on adventures to take photos was almost eclipsed by the relaxation and zen brought on by editing the photos on my PC. I quickly maxed out my PC’s hard drive with RAW files…I’d go out on a Saturday morning and not return until late in the evening, my CF cards full and my batteries dead.
I loved taking photos, but what good is capturing images if no one gets to see them?
Since there were few avenues for sharing photos—Instagram wasn’t around yet and Flickr was just getting rolling—I decided to create a photoblog. Photoblogs were big at the time, precisely because a lot of people found themselves in the same situation as myself—lots of photos, no where to display to the world.
My goal at the time was to post a photo every day for as long as I could keep it up. Now, twelve years later, I’m still posting a new photo every day.
A lot has happened in that twelve years. I got married. Changed jobs a few times. Moved around the DFW area. Switched from Canon to Panasonic to Sony. But one thing has been consistent and has kept me sane—posting a new photo every single day for over 4300 days straight.
This year, to celebrate the twelfth year of 75CentralPhotography, I put together a barcode representation of every photo posted from August 12, 2007 until today.
Each vertical line on this image is a representation of each photo posted to the site, compressed to 1 pixel wide and stitched together via a .NET app I threw together.
I think it’s an interesting artwork on it’s own, but as a visual representation of what twelve years of daily photos looks like, it’s a great visualization of the effort and passion that I’ve put into photography for over a decade.
As for 75CentralPhotography, I don’t have plans to stop posting photos daily, so fingers-crossed that I’ll be able to continue for years-to-come.
Thank you for your support for the last twelve years…I appreciate every one of my followers, fans and visitors.
(If you’re interested, you can read more about my personal photographic history at a post I did several years ago. It’s somewhat out-of-date, as it doesn’t cover the years I spent in the Micro Four-Thirds ecosystem and my subsequent transition (still-ongoing) to Sony, but it’s still informative. Or at least I think it is).
I like to geotag my photos. Almost every time I go on a phototrek/drive/adventure/walk, I log my locations so that I can merge my geotagged data with my photos and know exactly where each photo was taken. (I swear I thought I’d done a write-up on how I do this, but I can’t seem to find it. I have posted some of the track logs in the past however…you can see them here .)
Since I have this data sitting around and it’s embedded in each photo on 75CentralPhotography.Com, I thought it would be fun for visitors to the site to see exactly where in the world each photo was taken. But how to do this?
WordPress—the backend system for the site—helpfully provides a function to store EXIF data (basically the metadata in a photo that shows interesting things like shutter speed, aperture, ISO and a ton of other stuff) but only stores the basics, whereas the EXIF standard has scores of datapoints (colorspace, exposure bias, YCbCr positioning—whatever that is—to name a few). Unfortunately, this means that they don’t include location data as part of this limited scope.
Luckily, some kind soul has already solved part of the problem for us with a built-in function in PHP (WordPress’ programming language). This function, exif_read_data(), will let us read any part of a photo’s EXIF data and use it how we want. In this case, that would be to link to Google Maps and show a place marker of where the photo was taken.
Here’s how I leveraged that function to add a link on each photo’s page to the related location on Google Maps.
First, we need to get the photo’s EXIF data. Since exif_read_data() will only accept a local file as a parameter, we need to get the local path to the image relative to the page where we are executing the code/displaying the link. Fortunately, WordPress has us covered with a couple of functions: attachment_url_to_postid() and get_attached_file().
attachment_url_to_postid takes the URL of an attachment (i.e. a photo attached to a post) and returns the ID of that photo. To get the attachment’s URL, we use our old friend catch_that_image(), which resolves the URL of the first photo on a post (and, since we only ever post one photo at a time on the site, the only image on a post). Then, we take the result of that function and pass it to get_attached_file(), which returns the aforementioned local path of the photo file:
$attachment_id = attachment_url_to_postid( catch_that_image() );
$fullsize_path = get_attached_file( $attachment_id ); We then take this local path and pass it to exif_read_data() for parsing of the photo’s EXIF data:
$exif = exif_read_data($fullsize_path);This function returns an array of values where the first value is the EXIF data label and the second is the EXIF data itself (you might think of this as a keyset). So, a particular photo’s data might look something like this:
| Key | Value |
|---|---|
| Equipment Make | SONY |
| Camera Model | ILCE-7RM2 |
| Camera Software | Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 8.2 (Macintosh) |
| Photographer | Matt Harvey |
| Maximum Lens Aperture | f/2.8 |
| Focal Length (35mm Equiv) | 44 mm |
| Horizontal Resolution | 96 dpi |
| Vertical Resolution | 96 dpi |
| Image Created | 2019:02:16 21:03:14 |
| Exposure Time | 1/80 sec |
| F-Number | f/4.5 |
| Exposure Program | Normal Program |
| ISO Speed Rating | 100 |
| Lens Aperture | f/4.5 |
| Brightness | 7.2 EV |
| Exposure Bias | 0 EV |
| Metering Mode | Pattern |
| Light Source | Unknown |
| Flash | No Flash, Compulsory |
| Focal Length | 44.00 mm |
| Color Space Information | sRGB |
| Exposure Mode | Auto |
| White Balance | Auto |
| Scene Capture Type | Standard |
| Contrast | Normal |
| Saturation | Normal |
| Sharpness | Normal |
| Latitude | N 33° 3.9174′ |
| Longitude | W 96° 58.2118′ |
| Resolution Unit | i |
| Exif IFD Pointer | 266 |
| Compression Scheme | JPEG Compression (Thumbnail) |
| Horizontal Resolution | 72 dpi |
| Vertical Resolution | 72 dpi |
| Resolution Unit | i |
| Offset to JPEG SOI | 1044 |
| Bytes of JPEG Data | 19487 |
| Exif Version | 2.3 |
| Image Generated | 2019:02:16 07:52:16 |
| Image Digitized | 2019:02:16 07:52:16 |
| Shutter Speed | 1/80 sec |
| Focal Plane Horiz Resolution | 2164 dpcm |
| Focal Plane Vert Resolution | 2164 dpcm |
| Focal Plane Res Unit | cm |
| File Source | Digital Still Camera |
| Scene Type | Directly Photographed |
| Digital Zoom Ratio | 1 |
| GPS Info Version | 2.2.0.0 |
| Latitude Reference | N |
| Longitude Reference | W |
In the context of this project, we only care about two elements of this data: Latitude and Longitude. So, to extract individual data points, we use a couple of functions to extract the coordinates and convert to decimal:
$lon = getGps($exif["GPSLongitude"], $exif['GPSLongitudeRef']);
$lat = getGps($exif["GPSLatitude"], $exif['GPSLatitudeRef']);Which calls:
function getGps($exifCoord, $hemi) {
$degrees = count($exifCoord) > 0 ? gps2Num($exifCoord[0]) : 0;
$minutes = count($exifCoord) > 1 ? gps2Num($exifCoord[1]) : 0;
$seconds = count($exifCoord) > 2 ? gps2Num($exifCoord[2]) : 0;
$flip = ($hemi == 'W' or $hemi == 'S') ? -1 : 1;
return $flip * ($degrees + $minutes / 60 + $seconds / 3600);
}
function gps2Num($coordPart) {
$parts = explode('/', $coordPart);
if (count($parts) <= 0)
return 0;
if (count($parts) == 1)
return $parts[0];
return floatval($parts[0]) / floatval($parts[1]);
}So we finally have a specific photo’s GPS location. Our final step is to verify that we have valid data for GPS (i.e. neither the latitude or longitude are 0, because that’s what’s returned when no GPS data is available and there could be, but shouldn’t be, photos on the site without location data). If the verification passes, we link to Google Maps with our coordinates:
if($lat <> 0 && $lon <>0){
echo '<a href="https://www.google.com/maps/search/?api=1&query='.$lat.','.$lon.'" target ="_blank" title="Location data may be innacurate or fuzzed in certain cases">View This Photo\'s Location on Google Maps</a></br> ';
}Note that we added a title element to the anchor tag for the link that states that photo data may be inaccurate or “fuzzed” for some photos. This is because some photos were tagged “after the fact” instead of using an actual GPS log or were tagged en masse with a fairly-accurate location or were tagged with a general location to preserve privacy (i.e. photos I’ve taken at home or other people’s homes).
To view any photo’s location on the site, go to the individual page for a photo and click the “View This Photo’s Location on Google Maps” link under the photo’s tags.
If you find any bugs or photos without GPS data or have any ideas for improvements, please let me know at matt@75central.com.
As I’ve done in past years, I thought I’d share the 10 most-interesting photos from 2018 that I published on 75CentralPhotography.Com. To figure out what are the 10 candidates, we rely on Flickr’s “Interestingness” algorithm, which doesn’t actually seem to work very well, as I feel like I’ve published a lot of other photos that are more interesting than those chosen by Flickr. Oh well…here you go:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
To end the year, we made a video montage of every photo published on 75CentralPhotography in 2018. Thank you for a great year and best wishes in 2019. Enjoy!
As you might have noticed, I hadn’t blogged in a while. In fact, for a long time, there wasn’t a link to the blog up there on the menu bar. A couple of reasons for this, though no excuse is really good enough for not sharing anything but photos.
At any rate, I’m going to start blogging and sharing interesting things again. It will still be somewhat-seldom, but at least I’m doing it.
That said, the migration is mostly-complete. We’re still fixing some borked links and re-uploading some media that was lost in the transition, so please be patient. If you find anything weird, shoot me an email at matt@75central.com.
Thanks!
Ten years ago, I started the 75Central.Com photoblog as a creative outlet to show my photography to the world. A lot has happened since that first photo went up on the Web on August 12, 2007. I met and married my wonderful wife. I adopted a dog. I’ve worked my way through five cars. I’ve been all over Texas, through the deserts of Nevada and California, to parts of Canada I’d never visited in the past, sailed to Alaska and the Caribbean, switched to Mac, partly switched back to Windows, loved and took care of my wife while she faced a life-changing illness, moved a couple of times, advanced both my photography and non-photography careers, made new friends, lost old friends and so much more. Most importantly, I learned to love life and not take it for granted. If an opportunity presents itself, take it. As I begin the second decade of sharing my work with the world, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who’s been a fan or a friend or just took a moment to admire on of my photos. It’s not always easy finding the motivation to select and post a photo every day, but I do it because I hope that at least one person appreciates it.
To celebrate this milestone anniversary, I put together the below video montage of every daily photo from the photoblog from the last ten years. Enjoy!
As you may (or may not) have noticed, this last week we slightly reformated 75Central.Com in as far as image sizing. Before, images were 950px wide and now they’re almost twice that size at 1800px wide (or, in the case of square or photos with portrait aspect ratios, 1200px tall).
Why?
This has actually been underway for several months, as we’ve been secretly publishing images at this new resolution but using CSS to constrain the sizes as we worked to get a decent backlog of images resized and republished. Unfortunately, as we’ve published a new image every day for almost 8 years, there are over 2800 photos in our back catalog. As of now, we have almost two years of our archives resized and published at this new resolution and are continuing to delve further and further into the archives to get every photograph published on the site resized to this new standard, which is why you might encounter smaller images if you go back far enough or start clicking through on the random link.
There are a couple of reasons for this new sizing standard:
In the coming weeks and months, we will continue to resize our archived photos as well as publish a new photo every day as we have since 2007. Thank you for your patronage and happy shooting!
Last year, I posted a year-end recap for 2013, so I decided to continue this year with a 2014 year-end recap.
The Earth has taken another long loop around the Sun and 2013 has come and gone, so I thought—like so many other media outlets—I would take a few moments to jot down a year-end recap of the world of 75Central Photography.
And, just for fun, here’s a link to a set of our 25-most interesting (however that’s measured) photos of 2013 on Flickr.
So, that was 2013. Let’s hope 2014 will be a great year as well. From 75Central Photography, Happy New Year!
