bikes and things

News has just broken from the US that Yahoo have relaunched and redesigned Flickr. No more old, tired looking Flickr and new full screen design. Looks stunning and they’ve obviously been working seriously hard since Marisa Mayer joined.

I saw this news start to break and then got a Tweet from Olly Wainwright saying:

@andymatthews did you see you just appeared in Flickr’s presentation in NY?

So, click through the link and what… yes that’s my photo being shown live to millions of people, below a picture of Barack Obama! See 5:27:33, or as below. I’m thrilled that my photo was shown in this context!

So how did this come about? Well a while back I bitched and moaned about Flickr and the lack of development. This got a few retweets and some traffic to my site as well as catching the attention of two Flickr engineers, pkingdesign and spierisf. The former was the one who contacted me with the offer of a t-shirt. Shortly after this a series of improvements were made as well as a new iPhone app.

But today is a series of even bigger and better improvements, I’m still looking around it but first glance it looks incredible. I just wish I had chosen a different URL all those years ago!

I’m thinking of changing the title of this blog to “Via Lawrence” or maybe I should just set up vialawrence.tumblr.com. It seems like a lot of the content on here comes from him that I almost feel bad at adding the via thing at the bottom of the post. Anyway here’s the latest one which made me crease up at work.

Infectious in the extreme but as with most things, Partridge does it better. Watch and enjoy!

partridgegetslucky.com

Real time tracking of bubbles with lasers to Daft Punk. No idea why you’d do this but it’s pretty awesome.

Scary stuff. I need to disconnect more and relax / read books / learn to concentrate again.

Yes y’all. Quite shocking and ultimately hilarious but you have to wonder if this is a spoof. Unfortunately it looks like it isn’t.

Also don’t miss the second instalment.

Via Lawrence.

Lovely to see the Quentin Blake‎ exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge last weekend. The museum is completely incredible and literally stuffed to the gills with art. Too much for us to take in but we’ll definitely be back.

We were both really looking forward to the exhibition but it was a little sad to only see one room of his work and also mainly work from the last five years. It would have been great to see some of his Roald Dahl work. I always remember his illustrations from those books, in particular George’s Marvellous Medicine which was read repeatedly to me by my father. My favourite line in the book being:

Grandma had a face like a puckered up dog’s bottom.

But still great to see his wonderful work and even his paint palette.

Great to get a weekend out of London. Plenty of food, beer, dog(s), great company, cycling and the usual trip to the centre of town. Bloody love it.

We managed to get a ride in the countryside with Snoopy which was great. We were worrying about tiring the dog out on the ride but needn’t have. As soon as he got back to the pub he still found the energy to play ball with everyone.

Top to bottom of the Heron Tower by Lawrence.

It’s far more rapid than you might think too.

I often get asked this and my reply usually is “How much do you want to spend?“. The discussion inevitably ends up with a Nikon mid range DSLR camera with a crop sensor. But then at this price range the kit lens is always going to be completely crap. I’m not the only one who thinks like this it seems.

I’d go further and suggest that you shouldn’t buy an SLR if you only ever plan to use its kit lens or an inexpensive zoom lens. Kit lenses and low-end zooms produce blurry, distorted, drab images — they can look decent on blogs or phones, but the flaws become apparent when you see them on big Retina screens or printed at larger sizes.

I always recommend that people buy a 35mm prime lens, which is roughly the equivalent of a 50mm lens on a full frame camera. Before I went full frame I had a D300 which I used a Nikkor 35mm ƒ1.8 which is a complete bargain at £150. It’s sharp, compact and unobtrusive, fast and is one of the best ways of improving your photography in my opinion. Whilst it suffers from a little vignetting wide open and a tiny bit of pincushion distortion these are both easily corrected for in the latest version of Lightroom with the tick of a box. It’s also one less thing to distract you from actually taking good pictures. Zooming around trying to improve the composition seems to be fatal to progression. Zoom with your legs and just take more bloody pictures.