Check out Zivity – 30 days for free

Filed Under Art, Photography, Websites | 2010-02-22, 15:56


The internet is awash in adult content, we all know that. And there’s a lot of just plain crap out there that was made to make a buck. But occasionally the adult content mixes with art and something great comes out of it. Zivity is one of those examples.

For those not familiar, Zivity is a site where photographers and models get together and shoot some amazing photos. The site is decidedly Not Safe For Work (NSFW), so go check it out when you’re at home. Just to be clear, you’re not going to find your run of the mill porn there. Zivity encourages “photographs of women that promote their beuaty, show them respect, and meet [their] standards of tastefulness”. One of my favorite things about Zivity is the way their revenue is handled. Rather than paying a flat fee to photographers and models and then making bank off of their shoots indefinitely, they pay the photographers and models based on votes. As a user of the site, you buy votes for $1 a piece and you can then vote on your favorite models and photographers. For me personally, it’s a small way that I can help friends make a little bit of money making the art that they enjoy. The pretty pictures are an added bonus!

So enough of the sales pitch type talk. For the record I don’t currently receive any commission on anything from Zivity (other than an account on the site), but I recommend it to people who are into this sort of thing. Cyan, the founder of Zivity, was kind enough to offer free 30 day trial accounts to readers. All you have to do is email geeked@zivity.com and ask nicely for an invite.

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Thunder and Lightning in SF

Filed Under Photography, SF Bay Area, Video | 2010-01-19, 17:34

The way that Twitter blows up during large thunderstorms, you’d think that lightning and thunder in the Bay Area is rarer than earthquakes.  Well, I’m not sure of the stats, but it just might be.  Early this morning I woke up gained some semblance of consciousness as thunder rolled through San Francisco along with storms that have continued on and off all day.  

After seeing the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder half a dozen times, I decided to setup my Zoom H2 audio recorder and Flip video camera to see what I could capture.  Only three minutes later lightning struck again.  My Flip video camera isn’t quite up to the task of recording lightning, but you can see a flickr and hear the thunder (along with some guy on the street yelling).  The audio recorder is slightly better at it’s job, picking up the echoing thunder as it traveled across the city.

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And of course, once the rain tapered off, it was up to the roof with a camera to catch the awesome light as blue skies returned.
The sun will come out...

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Sights and Sounds of the Blue Angels

Filed Under Photography, SF Bay Area | 2009-10-09, 13:01

Blue Angels and Sutro Tower

It’s Fleet Week again in San Francisco, and as usual the debate over whether the Blue Angels are awesome or that they just represent war rages on Twitter and elsewhere online. Everyone has their own opinion, but politics aside, I love the technical aspect of these incredibly powerful jets flying over our city with talented pilots. Having roof access I went up and snapped a few pics. Additionally I grabbed my audio recorder and was able to capture a fly-by. Wondering why people are complaining about the noise? Turn your speakers way up and check out this MP3 to find out.

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I love the Garmin eTrex Vista HCx and Geotagging

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Geek, Photography | 2008-01-06, 03:19

Garmin eTrex Vista HCx GPS

I love GPS receivers. There’s something great about knowing exactly where you are, plus being able to track where you’ve been. They come in handy while hiking, walking around a city, or driving. And I have a very long history with these things. I used to have a carputer that combined a GPS receiver with software long before it was standard on cars. My carputer consisted of a shoebox+miniITX+LCD imported from Hong Kong. I’ve used a handful of GPS receivers that are meant to interface with laptops, but up until recently, have only owned one handheld receiver, a Garmin eTrex Legend (unless you count the Boost Mobile i415 or the Helio Ocean). I loved that little device, it got me into geocaching and was primarily bought for that purpose. I used to also enjoy taking it on plane flights and tracking our flight across the country. It also rode shotgun with two other GPSrs during my cross-country move from Chicago to San Francisco. But I always felt like it was lacking. With only 8mb of internal memory, I could barely load enough maps for trips. I couldn’t even squeeze the entire Bay Area on it. And the monochrome screen? So 2002. I’ve been meaning to upgrade for quite awhile, and prompted by a New Year’s trip to Joshua Tree, I finally caved during a last minute trip to REI.

I picked up a Garmin eTrex Vista HCx unit for $299.99 (you can get it cheaper, but I love REI’s return policy). It’s almost the same size as the old Legend, just a little shorter and fatter. The screen on it is gorgeous though. It’s amazing how much easier it is to read maps with colors. The best part about it though is the sensitivity of the receiver. With the old Legend, I had gotten accustomed to having to leave it on the dashboard in the car or carrying it in my hand while walking. It consistently complained about needing a clear view of the sky in order to lock onto satellites. The new Vista HCx scoffs at these needs. It was able to pick up satellites while stashed in the seat back pocket in the middle of my car! Amazingly it was also able to pick up a signal while inside! So armed with my new toy, we headed out to Joshua Tree. I basically left it on for the entire drive and most of the time we were out in the desert and it did a spectacular job of hardly ever losing a signal. It came in handy when trying to find our campsite that was a little over a mile from our cars and hidden amongst desert foliage that all looks the same. It also allowed me to keep tracks on where we went, whether it was climbing a mountain, scrambling over boulders, or even just wandering away from camp to *ahem* dig a hole.

This tracking all came in handy when I got back home and wanted to geotag the photos I had taken out there. I loaded up EasyGPS to download a .gpx file containing the tracks and then used gpicsync (a Google Code project) to stamp the GPS information into the EXIF header of the actual image files. From there I uploaded the photos to Flickr, which automatically interpreted the GPS coordinates and placed my photos on the map. The other cool thing about gpicsync is that it will create a Google Earth file that will let you load up Google Earth and fly around the world, seeing where your photos were taken. Quite awesome when you’ve been taking photos in the mountains and you can actually see which ridge you were on in 3-D.

So I highly recommend the Garmin eTrex Vista HCx. And no, they aren’t paying me to say that. :) Although, if you do want to pick one up, use this link: Garmin eTrex Vista HCx and Amazon will give me a few bucks. They’ve actually got a damn good price for it there.

And yes, it comes in handy when you need to mark a waypoint to point out where you found your girlfriend’s toothpaste when you’re practicing “Leave No Trace” camping. ;)

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Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, News, Photography | 2007-11-20, 20:08


Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card
Originally uploaded by edrabbit.

Finally got a minute to setup my Eye-Fi card. I must say I’m very happy with the finished product so far. I was very very glad to have both the options to upload directly to Flickr as well as to upload to a folder on a local machine. I was stuck with just Flickr support in the past and didn’t like how every single blurry photo got uploaded, not allowing me to pick and choose. Now with it uploading to my laptop via wireless, I can sort through them (organized by date even!) and pick which ones warrant the Flickr stream. All in all definitely worth $99 in my opinion.

This could definitely change the way photos are done. Imagine being at a protest or gathering. You snap some pictures of some sensitive stuff, the authorities confiscate your camera and destroy it. What they don’t realize is that all the pictures were wirelessly synced to your laptop in the car that has a wireless AP running. I can also imagine this being convenient to photographers, who can upload photos while they’re doing a shoot, so they can be reviewed instantaneously. I’m also trying to think of other projects where this could be fun. Mella and I have talked about putting together some portable cameras that this would be fun to work with.

So far there are only two things I wish the card could do. Have another 2 gb of space to match my 4gb (although I may be able to survive with space for 780+ photos/17minutes of video), and have a setting where I could tell it to connect to open networks that don’t require a password automatically. Oh, and add a third to that… support for RAW images would be nice!

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Flickrvision

Filed Under Photography, Websites | 2007-05-14, 10:26

Because we all know you aren’t wasting nearly enough time with Twittervision, along comes the even cooler, flickrvision. Thanks David Troy.

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24 Hours of Flickr

Filed Under Art, Photography | 2007-04-26, 19:36

There’s a new group over at Flickr, everyone’s favorite photo sharing site. The plan? To capture on day, 24 hours, in the life of the global Flickr community. On May 5th, 2007, they are asking everyone to grab their camera and document their day via photos. If you’ve got the ability to toss in the GPS info, or the time to map out the images, that’s even better! Only photos taken on May 5th are allowed, but you’ll have till the 21st for your lazy butt to get them uploaded.

The whole thing is going to be commemorated with a book to go along with the day. The book will be comprised of photos chosen from what promises to be thousands of photos that are submitted to the group. In addition, they’ll be using the photos to show at different events. Sounds like a fun time, and far less demanding than the 365 Days project.

More info over at the Flickr group

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