Kayakers on Clear Creek in Golden

Last Tuesday I went to shoot some pictures of the Kayakers that are stunting on Golden's Clear Creek most of the summer. These people are fun to watch. I've tried Kayaking before but was constantly bailing out because contrary to quiet water, I could rarely get myself upright again after flipping in even slightly more rapid stuff. Fun, but cold sport. I shot all in jpeg on my D300 and as always focus and exposure were basically perfect everytime. Quite amazing. This is just a tiny subselection of the images I shot:











There are far more images on the smugmug gallery. See the whole set here as a slideshow on smugmug.
If you're a flickerite, a subset is found on my flickr pages here.

Flickr video

Here is the same timelapse that you can see in glorious HD on my smugmug page but in a little flash movie generated by flickr. Much lower quality indeed, but I can at least embed it! It's stuttery the first time around so just hit play again to see it smooth.

LR export plugins for flickr, smugmug and zenfolio

Jeffrey Friedl who previously wrote some excellent writeups on color management, just released some direct export plugins for Lightroom 1.3 using the newly released SDK for that program that upload directly to your flickr or smugmug accounts. I've tried the flickr one and it works perfectly.

A flickr h-index, the f-index.

In science, one of the recent trends is to characterize people's careers by looking not just at number of citations and such but at what's called the Hirsch-index. The number indicates how many papers you have published that have received at least the same number of citations. So, if you have an h-number (that's where I am now) of 17, you have 17 peer-review publications that have been cited at least 17 times. The existence of this number comes from the observation that if you rank publications according to their number of times cited, you get a power-law series and the h-number basically is it's moment. Now, where does photography come in you ask? I just had an interesting observation in looking at the number of page-views my images get on flickr. If you rank them in a similar way, according to the number of image-views, it turns out that my stream has a very similar power-law behavior:


This is a powerlaw with an approximate power of -1/2. It looks remarkably similar to the distribution I get when plotting the number of citations to my scientific papers. In fact, many social phenomena are known to be distributed in a similar power-law fashion. A good example (from Murray Gell-Mann's famous book on chaos theory, the Quark and the Jaguar BTW) is the distribution of populations in US cities.
If for my flickr stream, you do the same analysis on this distribution as the h-number (on flickr you just go through your most popular sorted by views pages until you find the one where the number of views equals the ranking number) I get a f-index (instead of h-index) of 65! This is the turning point image:


What's your f-index?

My most popular flickr images

One of those interesting things about flickr is that you can check which of your images are most watched. For my flickr stream, the following 10 come out on top:

	#1: Boulder and Blue Lake • 830 views
	#2: It's alive! • 493 views
	#3: Dawn at the tip of White Crack at Canyonlands National Park • 477 views
	#4: Precipice • 433 views
	#5: Dune clouds over the front range • 357 views
	#6: Lake Haiyaha in the mist • 332 views
	#7: sunset 11/20/06 • 286 views
	#8: Blue Lake reflection • 284 views
	#9: workflow • 279 views
	#10: Rushing into the sunset • 268 views

What I find interesting about this list is that #9 is an image I put up for this blog and whose only way of being viewed is people clicking on it on the blog. That's great and must mean it is being read. It is probably just because it is a post about lightroom ;). Also interesting is that the most popular image (also the most favorited) is made using my old film camera. Strangely in the interestingness series, different photographs show up than in the most viewed or most favorited series.