09-21-11 – Airborne

There are a lot of photos I like in tonight’s contest, but there’s one I want to call out because it also made me laugh (at work even, which was very needed today). The seagull entry from iwanttoeatyourchildren gives a nice sense of the “essence” of an opportunistic scavenger. But it could also be the caption ’cause the look on that bird’s face definitely says “I would eat your children if I was bigger”. Nicely done!

As some of the Facebooking farktographers know, I recently had the blue and red flashers behind my vehicle while photographing two water towers right next to a federal prison. That dude was there in, like, two minutes. It all turned out OK but it was uncomfortable.

CSB: Last Sunday I was walking around the Army base where I’m stationed and taking pictures of the birds and wild flowers. One of the rent-a-cops stopped and asked me if I had permission to take pictures. “Yes, I do. I’m the unit public affairs representative for the LMT.” He was speechless. I continued on my walk. A second guard drving past me stopped and said hello. I waved at a guard in a tower and he waved back while I walked along the boundary fence line. Then the MPs arrived to inform me that I’m not supposed to be “outside the berm”. They were cool, and I showed them my pics which they thought were good, and then they gave me a lift to the PX. Sharing the morning’s story with some coworkers, I found out that I’m not the only one who wasn’t told that the outer road is off limits.

Els, when you look at the current Scarlet R for henryhill, you might want to check his other entries. The other two are from Book of Armaments. They don’t show up in the Scarlet R page because the file names aren’t an exact match, but they differ only in a trailing “_z”. I don’t use Flickr and therefore don’t know it’s link naming conventions, but I suspect that just means that they point to a differently-sized version of the same file.

Here are the filenames in the current contest:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2470/3838299609_99c64cabe5_z.jpg
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2654/3838375053_2cd7fbcfec_z.jpg

And here are those from Book of Armaments:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2470/3838299609_99c64cabe5.jpg
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2654/3838375053_2cd7fbcfec.jpg

aspidites, your work is amazing. I dread seeing what you’re going to come up with for “Wild Things.” Actually, I don’t dread seeing them, just going up against them in the contest. 🙂

I think if you had’ve entered that second eagle B-side (_X0U7896Eagle.jpg), you very likely could’ve been looking at tied #1’s.

You mentioned shooting for a calendar – is photography your career?

aspidites, your work is amazing. I dread seeing what you’re going to come up with for “Wild Things.” Actually, I don’t dread seeing them, just going up against them in the contest. 🙂

I think if you had’ve entered that second eagle B-side (_X0U7896Eagle.jpg), you very likely could’ve been looking at tied #1’s.

You mentioned shooting for a calendar – is photography your career?

Thanks CauseISaidSo and Pope_Larry_II

Nope it isn’t my career, just a hobby that luckily is paying for itself now. I work as a computer software developer full time.

I was working with 2 Nikon contracted photographers on a part time basis for their workshops in the Smokie Mountains. I went to Yellowstone in the winter and I got to photograph a tiger on an abandoned airfield in Minnesota with them.

I have recieved contracts from people that have seen my pics on BetterPhoto.com. That was how I got the calendar job. A VP from Nationwide Insurance saw them and contacted me to do 2 calendars wildlife and scenic and wanted to know if I could come up with 26 pictures for them. Funny thing is I was working for Nationwide as a programmer at the time. That turned into 2 calendars for 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. That contract paid for better camera equipment, trips to Alaska for the eagles, Canada for polar bears, and lots of trips to get landscapes. I put 14,000 miles on my car in 2005 just for photography trips. I was on Fark then but didn’t have a lot of time to participate.

Sorry for the long winded response 🙂

Good call on the other two…they were definitely the same shot sized differently!

Thanks. Catching those made me re-look at the repost checking code and realize I needed to compensate for the variations in flickr links and remove trailing parameters (everything after the “.jpg” in the link) when comparing links. Doing that reveals about another 30 reposts over past contests that I missed when I first cleaned the data (including one more in this contest – sorry, LoveSandwich :(). The good news is that it’ll automatically catch these kinda things in the future.

Eventually, I’d like to move to a non-link-based dup checking mechanism (something like what schnee called “eigenimages”). But that’s likely a very long ways down the road…