Last weekend, I took my camera over to Leamington and spent the afternoon with the Leamington Spa Hoop Club. A few of the hoopers were a little wary to start with, but once they got used to me prowling around the room pointing a camera at them, I got some pretty good shots.

Afterwards, we gathered outside and the fire hoops appeared. It wasn’t really dark enough to get really effective long exposures, but I was quite pleased with some of the results – and at least the rain held off until we were packing up.

I had a really good time – a fun afternoon with a really nice bunch of people. I hope they’ll let me go back again sometime.

You can see the full set of indoor photos here, and the fire hooping shots here.

It’s traditional for the vast majority of blog posts to begin with apologies about how infrequent the posts are. My last post was in July; it’s now October. Not too bad, I guess…

I have been busy behind the scenes though – I have a couple of new iPhone apps in development, and at least one of them is now pretty much ready. I’m just doing a little final tidying up of the UI, and then I’ll prepare it for the App store. More news on that when it’s ready.

Autumn seems to be settling in with a vengeance now, and it’s a little while since we’ve had a new photo up here, so lets have one to remind us of summer.

Taken what feels like an eternity ago, with a Polaroid back on my Hassleblad. Fuji FP-100C film.

I know I’ve been neglecting this blog again, but I guess that’s just the way with blogs. I haven’t been idle though, I have been rather busy.

One of the big things that’s been occupying my time recently has been my iPhone, and more specifically, learning all the ins and outs of iPhone development – Objective-C, Cocoa Touch, XCode, Interface Builder, Provisioning, iTunes Connect – I’ve done them all.

One of the hardest bits was actually getting on the iPhone Developer Program itself. It’s not that the process was especially difficult, but boy was it long. It took 72 days from filling in the initial forms to actually getting access to the developer portal – and almost all of that time was waiting for something to happen. I don’t know what the process behind the scenes at Apple is, but it’s certainly not speedy.

And once you’ve written your application and are ready to submit it to the app store, you have to wade through another batch of treacle. You submit your application, and then you wait. And wait. And wait. The developer forums abound with tales of woe, of applications being stuck in the review process for weeks, months even, only to be rejected on a technicality – which means you then have to resubmit and start the whole process over again. In the end, I got off quite easily – my application was reviewed and accepted in around ten days. It felt like a long time whilst I was waiting, but it seems far better than many others were experiencing.

So what was this application? It is, of course, a Utata application.

For those who don’t know, Utata is an on-line community, originally formed on Flickr, but also with its own web site.

The Utata app works on the iPhone and iPod Touch (with a wifi connection), and runs happily under both OS 2.2.1 and 3.0. It acts as a showcase for the huge variety of photographic projects that Utata run, allowing you to easily browse through the entries wherever you are. If you’ve never taken the time to look through the project entries, you really should – there is some absolutely stunning photography there.

The app is free download from iTunes, and you can open up iTunes to download it by clicking here.

It’s now been two months since bought my first Mac, and I’ve spent a fair chunk of that time putting myself through a crash course in programming for OS X. I’ve spent the past few weeks up to my elbows in Objective-C, Cocoa and Xcode, and finally, my first application is ready for public consumption. It’s a fairly simple little app, it doesn’t do a great deal, and the user interface isn’t anything to write home about, but it’s my baby and I’m very proud of it.

On the face of it, it’s a simple desktop app to allow browsing of projects over on Utata. Behind the scenes, it’s a little more interesting. It consists of a couple of frameworks – the first is a general purpose REST API framework that deals with a lot of the nitty gritty of interfacing with web-based APIs such as those offered by Flickr. This REST framework can (I hope) be readily extended to build API kits that interface with a variety of web services. I’ve so far built a Utata API kit and parts of a Flickr API kit. Other API kits are planned, all I need now is more spare time.

You can download the Utata Projects app here. (Requires OS X 10.5).

I’ve been neglecting my blog again, so here’s a photo to make sure that it doesn’t feel too unloved and forgotten.

The Brooklyn Museum in New York has recently announced an API to allow the searching of its collection. The API is free to use, but you do need to sign up for an API key before you can use it.

There are currently three methods in the API:


collection.search
collection.getItem
collection.getImages


which between them allow you to search the collection and return a wide variety of data about the items held.

I’ve spent a little time this weekend playing around with the new API, and have started to put together a simple Flash-based browser to allow you to search through the collection. Try it out here.

The snow here has pretty much all gone now. Apart from the occasional small patch of grey white slush still lurking in a shady corner, all we have left are the photographs. I finally got a couple of films developed this week that were taken at the height of the snows with my Hasselblad. Mostly “meh”, but one or two that I quite like.

This was one of the first shots I took with my new extension tubes – the 10mm, I think. Sat on the back of my 80mm lens, it does a nice job of helping fill the frame.

The Flickr Developer Blog is running a “5 Questions” series, and late last year, I was picked by GustavoG as the next developer to interview. Last night Dan Catt finally hit the publish button and my interview has now been posted.

It’s only been two months, but so much has happened since that interview: the new Set Manager is still in development, but the public beta is now available to all. I’ve also started a Set Manager group on Flickr where people can discuss the Set Manager, get help on how to use it or suggest new features.

And of course, I’ve started work on a new project: Indicommons. The Indicommons site exists to help promote the Flickr Commons – the gathering together on Flickr of some of the world’s public photo collections. There’s a great team of people working together over at Indicommons, with fascinating new articles being published every day. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you really should!

Read 5 Questions for David Wilkinson

I’ve been in a bit of a photographic slump just lately. The cameras have sat on the side of my desk for weeks now, looking forlorn and neglected. Yesterday afternoon, I decided enough was enough – I finally kicked myself into action and finished off the roll that had been sat stagnating in the Holga. I developed it last night, and scanned it in this morning. There’s a couple there I’m reasonably happy with. And now I’ve at last jolted myself out of my rut, I might even go out and take some more…

I’m very pleased to be part of a new project that has just launched today. Indicommons is a new blog celebrating the Flickr Commons and its content.

indico: to proclaim, make publicly known
commons: flickr.com/commons

The Flickr group Flickr Commons was born out of one fan’s desire to show her support for The Commons. Anna Graf’s creation of this group also answered new needs, ones that hadn’t been spoken: it created a home for all those people commenting, tagging, researching, and simply enjoying themselves — somewhere to bring them all together to share their passion for The Commons. They turned up — not only regular Flickr members like us but also Commons institution staff and Flickr staff — full of ideas and enthusiasm and passion to do amazing things, and committed to actually doing them.

Indicommons (“in de commons”) arose quickly out of this new group. We wanted to let not just Flickr members but everyone know how exciting The Commons is. Today on Indicommons you’ll find an interview with the Brooklyn Museum’s Shelley Bernstein, plus examples of members’ choices from the collections, group member research into an individual photograph, then and now subcuration, and cross-Commons mash-ups – just a sampling of what we know is possible and what you’ll find here.