Flickr Adds New "Geofences" Feature

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As you may know, Flickr is my photo-sharing site of choice due to its institutional community among geeks going back for more than 5 years. However, many of us geeks are often disappointed in Flickr's inability to evolve ever since Yahoo took over, with the site stagnating in design and features for years. Due to this, I'm always hopeful when I do see them add new features because I become optimistic that perhaps Yahoo is putting more focus on development at Flickr. Today's announcement from Flickr introduces a new feature they're calling "Geofences". From their annoucnement:

Geofences are special locations that deserve their own geo privacy settings. For example, you might want to create a geofence around the your “home” or “school” that only allows “Friends and Family” to see the location of the photos you geotag in that area. So the next time you upload a photo with a geotag in the radius of a geofence, it will follow the default geo privacy you’ve designated for that hotspot. That way, you can easily make sure that only people you trust can see the location of photos taken inside your house or any other sensitive areas while still showing the world exactly where you had those amazing cheese covered duck fat fries. If Flickr can continue to hold onto their community as it stands today, and with the further proliferation of cameras with GPS capabilities, I think features like this could be very powerful for users.

Stand Your Ground

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Stand Your Ground:

Six photographers are assigned different areas of the City to photograph. Some use tripods, some go hand held, one sets up a 5 x 4. All are instructed to keep to public land and photograph the area as they would on a normal day. The event aims to test the policing of public and private space by private security firms and their reaction to photographers. All six photographers were stopped on at least one occasion. Three encounters led to police action. This is how it happened.

Andrews Joint Service Air Show

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My lovely wife and I went to what was previously known as Andrews Airforce Base, now called Joint Service Base Andrews for the annual Air Show and Open House. All branches of the military were there showing off their hardware and I brought my cameras along. Steff and I had been wanting to go for several years but kept forgetting to or would have other plans already made on that weekend when we found out about it. We managed to have a free weekend this year and decided to go. We came back with over 650 pictures and a nasty sunburn (72 degree day + cool breeze makes one forget about the sun). You can view the entire set of 680 photographs but first scroll below to see some of what I think are the best shots that I embedded here. Also, if you scroll entirely to the bottom, you'll see a video I put together from some clips of the Air Force Thunderbirds show that I shot on my iPhone.

Video of the Air Force Thunderbirds show.

In Focus with Alan Taylor

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It has come to my attention that not everyone has gotten the memo that Alan Taylor, creator of the fantastic The Big Picture photography blog over at Boston.com left the site several months ago. The Atlantic was smart enough to make him a good enough offer to bring him over to their site, making him a Senior Editor and allowing him to start a new photography blog there, called In Focus. Alan has said previously that this move has allowed him full editorial control in a way that he never had at The Big Picture, doing things like increasing the resolution the end-user is allowed to select for the photos. In Focus allows the viewer to select either 1024px or 1280px width images. In Focus has been a wonderful source for powerful images from Japan in the last week since the earthquake. This particular image, below, was particularly moving to me. REUTERS/U.S. Navy/Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Dylan McCord You should subscribe to In Focus. It's good.