Claude@Munich's photostream  

"Truly all photographs are self-portraits." -Elizabeth Opalenik


Hello, welcome and thanks for your visit from all over the world!


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Five years of flickritis and still a big fan :-)

You're invited to see the world through my eyes... for me this stream is a kind of photo diary. Since I've been starting photography as my true hobby I see the environment bright-eyed and sometimes from a different angle. I see and enjoy details or small changes much more as before. Hope you like what you see and please contact me if you like to use one of my photographs in any way... thanks!

One short word to my photo descriptions: I think these add an interesting note to my photos and I remember better the moments I've taken the photo. Also I really enjoy to classify mountains, plants, animals etc. The descriptions are mostly taken from wikipedia in German and English language. When taken from another source I link them back.





I love travelling and on this map you can see the countries which I had already the opportunity to visit... but there are still lots of "white (or grey) spots" to discover for the future :-)



Visited Countries Map from TravelBlog



My cameras:

Panasonic DMC-TZ10 (all of my photos are photographed with this camera at the moment)

Pentax Optio W90 (outdoor and underwater camera - rarely in use)
Panasonic DMC-FZ8 (not anymore in use)
Kodak V570 Dual Lens (not anymore in use)
Panasonic DMC-TZ7 (not anymore in use)
Panasonic DMC-TZ5 (not anymore in use)
Nikon Coolpix P4 VR (not anymore in use)
Casio EXILIM EX-Z40 (not anymore in use)
Sony Cybershot DSC-P7 (not anymore in use)


Groups I've started:

If you like the subjects too and have some nice photos fitting the topics, it would be a great pleasure to welcome you in one or all of these groups:


Claude's Friends:
Claude's friends
This group I've started to keep up with my flickr friends and contacts and connect them. It's hopefully an active place to share intercommunity! At least we all share our love for photography and our interest to see the world from a different angle through the eyes of other people.


4 seasonal Top 20 groups:
Top 20 Spring , Top 20 Summer , Top 20 Autumn / Fall , Top 20 Wintertime


Further Top 20 groups:
Top 20 Bayern/Bavaria , Top 20 Fish&Aquarium , Top 20 Lighthouses , Top 20 Northern Lights


Some more groups:
Night Reflections , Celestial Colours , Camouflaged Creatures , Unlimited Birds , Vastness , Zugspitze ,
Geotagging Europe , Geographic Signposts , Summit Signs



Some flickr tools I like and use:

Gina Trapani has some good and useful advices for flickr users. As she says: "Photo-sharing web application flickr is like an onion: it has many, many layers to discover!"


Following Profile Widget from fd's FlickrToys can be used both for flickr members and flickr groups. It shows a selection of ten photos and some customizable statistics about your Flickr usage. It will automatically update itself every hour - so you can get your brandnew flickr Explore statistics in an easy way :-)




Create your own Explore Overview with fd's FlickrToys.
"Scout" is the quickest way to see if your digital photos are listed among the 500 photographs chosen each day for the flickr Explore page. You can get a 7-day position history and the date of the highest position by clicking on any of the up arrow, down arrow, or dot icons (legend is at the bottom of the page) for any photo.


Here you can see some of my photos that made it on Explore page:



1. Heavy horses?, 2. Red Lionfish, 3. Milford Reflection, 4. Boulder, 5. Golden, 6. Hey you!, 7. Definitly one (or two) of my favourite trees!, 8. Up to the Sky,

9. Mirror Lake, 10. Arthur's Pass, 11. Mirror Lake... no, Kinney Lake, 12. Cape Reinga, 13. Sunflower with Bee, 14. Tuatara of Southland, 15. Fall Fog and Colors, 16. In the wood,

17. I hate snow!, 18. Punta Carena Lighthouse, 19. Springtime, 20. Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria), 21. Jungle, 22. Rocky Mountains Panorama, 23. Coprinus - Ink Cap, 24. Colorful Leaves,

25. Peretshofen, 26. Greenland, 27. Puffball (Flaschenbovist/Flaschenstäubling), 28. Simmental Cattle, 29. Bowdesign, 30. Green Contrast, 31. Schloss Neuschwanstein I, 32. Owl Eyes,

33. Rissbach Gorge, 34. Here comes the Sun..., 35. Golden Birch, 36. Haines Highway, 37. Beim Schlemmermeyer, 38. Springtime in the City, 39. Iceland Lighthouse, 40. Cave Reflection,

41. The Last Rose, 42. Yellow Greetings!, 43. Colorful Curtain, 44. Calendar Blue Moon, 45. Double Rainbow, 46. Dahlia 2, 47. Audi R8, 48. White Peony,

49. Tranquillity, 50. The B I G Surprise!, 51. Deininger Weiher, 52. Dahlia, 53. In the forest, 54. Miscanthus, 55. Maple Trees, 56. Iceland,

57. Schloss Neuschwanstein, 58. Greenland - Kalaallit Nunaat, 59. Evening Mood on Lake Resia, 60. Achensee, 61. Red, Red Wine..., 62. Falcon - hovering in the air, 63. Lone tree, 64. Red!!,

65. türilü, 66. Autumnal Canola Field, 67. Marktl am Inn - the Baptistery St. Oswald, 68. Rainbow, 69. Ascholding, 70. Lake Starnberg, near Seeshaupt, 71. Ludwigshöhe - Kleindingharting, 72. Frontlighting,

73. Tibetan prayer flag, 74. Jenhausen - near Seeshaupt, 75. Ring of Fire


Further fd's FlickrToys are, e.g. Calendar (create a monthly calendar), Flickr Uploader (image upload application), Framer (frame your photos), Hockneyizer (create a unique photo collage), Mosaic Maker (create a mosaic), Motivator (make a motivational poster), On Black (view images with black background), Profile Widget (see above), Random (view a random selection of images favorited by at least one other person), Slideshow (create a slideshow). To learn more about fd's FlickrToys you should join the flickr group FlickrToys.

Flickr Uploadr 3.2.1 to drag in photos or video from your computer, add titles, tags and other metadata and upload it all to flickr.

The Great Flickr Tools Collection with lots of infos and advices.


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Greasemonkey and Userscripts:

Greasemonkey allows users of the Firefox web browser to create or download user scripts which modify the content or behavior of web sites. It provides a powerful way to personalize the web. The scripts are written in JavaScript and have access to many of Firefox's features.

A large collection of prewritten scripts can be found at userscripts.org/tag/flickr/.

Flickr Greasemonkey Scripts is a huge collection of scripts that modify and enhance flickr for Firefox Browser.
Steeev's absolutely essential collection of Greasemonkey Scripts with, e.g. Multi Group Sender, Groups List Sorter, Groups Organiser, Contacts Organiser, Rich Edit. You can find more about this in the flickr group FlickrHacks.
Further useful Greasemonkey Scripts of "mortimer".
Quite a good collection you can find in this thread: www.flickr.com/groups/flickrhacks/discuss/72157594375803802/.


Greasemonkey scripts that I've installed to enhance my firefox browser for flickr:

quick links (adds some shortcuts to links you access regularly to the top of every page on flickr, you can edit the links to suit your browsing habits)
more menues (inserts new sub menus to get faster access to some of your pages)
multi group sender (lets you send images to multiple groups, absolutely essential!)
flickr PM (adds easily accessible icon links to users Email, Favourites, most Interesting photos, Photo Archive and Profile)

Commenting Tools:
easy photo post (the easiest way to post a photo In comments or discussions threads)
quick comment (adds a select box with pre written comments)
add referrer into comment (auto comment the place where you come from) ---> this script doesn't work at the moment, but try this one (was posted in a discussion thread of the group "flickr hacks"): www.flickr.com/groups/flickrhacks/discuss/721575941598937...
move comment form up (moves comment form above all the existing comments - directly below photo)
invite photos to the group (inserts a link to photo comment section to help you to add a comment of invitation to the group easily - doesn't work together with "move comment form up")

Enhance additional information section:
move additional info on top (moves photos additional informations on top of the group/set list)
more exif info (displays more information from the addition EXIF data directly on the photo page)
photo rank (displays photo rank - if the photo can be found in 1000 most interesting photos of the day)

Tagging Tool:
auto tag (allows you to save combinations of tags and quickly reuse them)

More information about new contacts:
new contact more links (inserts more links and info in mail about a user that added you as contact)

Group Tools:
groups organizer (does only work with Greasemonkey 0.7)
pool date (displays when a photo was added to a group pool)
show all in pool by user (adds a link to let you see all the images in a group pool by a particular user)
group pool cleaner linker (adds a link to FD's cool group pool cleaner tool to each group pool page)

Ipernity:
flickr 2 Ipernity (for one photo)
www.ipernity.com/apps/gm (for all photos)


Take note: too many Greasemonkey scripts may slow down your browser!

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Geotagging is fun, so: How to geotag?

To come into the subject first some interesting threads in the flickr help forum which attend to the theme "geotagging":
www.flickr.com/help/forum/26704/
www.flickr.com/help/forum/10977/

Interesting for me was a good description of the terms "latitude" and "longitude" by John Bell.


Geotagging Tools
maloXP describes here three fine tools for geotagging: loc.alize.us/, maps.yuan.cc/ and localize Bookmarklet.
Sorry, the description of maloXP is in German only.

My absolute favourite is Sumatoo's smart localize Bookmarklet that enables mapping, geocoding and (of course) geotagging directly in your Flickr photo page and works with all common browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera) without the need for any extension. It's really easy to use: you search the location by name or coordinates and point to where you have taken the photo - that's it!

Some freeware which you can use offline and which automatically inserts geodata in your photos metadata so they can also be used with any 'geocode aware' application like Picasa/Google Earth, Flickr, loc.alize.us, etc.
GeoSetter for Windows Use this tool by myself... love it!
GPicSync Didn't use it by now. Is a Google Software.


After geotagging you'll find all your geotagged photos on the google map which you can activate by the "map" link in the "Additional information" section below your tags. You'll find your pics also in the map of flickr Organize.


How to find locations resp. coordinates?
A good way to get coordinates - maybe when you are looking for an address of a place of interest in a foreign city - is wikipedia. You'll find the coordinates - now quite often - on the right upper corner of the site. Now you're able to put them into the search functionality of the localize bookmarklet and... Bingo!

Furthermore a short overview of databases full of coordinates:
www.tageo.com/index.htm
jan.ucc.nau.edu/~cvm/latlon_find_location.html#Other (maybe useful for United States)
www.spot-on-sundials.co.uk/latitude.html


Further maybe useful links:
Trippermap With the free service of Trippermap Geotagger you can easily add geographic information or "geotags" to your own flickr photos.
Travelr Travelr is a free photo gallery viewer that you can put on your own site. Travelr lets you display your flickr photos geographically on a world map.
UltimateFlickrTools Not only geotagging tools but also a bunch of really great flickr stuff.
The same with The Great Flickr Tools Collection... not only geotagging tools.


For me it's very interesting and much fun to fill up a map with the pics I've taken on various places on earth and to compare them with photos taken by other people.

So please feel free to join my brandnew flickr group Geotagging Europe. Show us your geotagged pics, share your experiences and tips. If you've a question, so hopefully you get there an answer and... let's fill up our group map!


So try it too and enjoy :-)






Thanks to Spell with flickr





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