I do love Flickr and Creative Commons - yet another of my photos gets used by a blogger. I love that! Please use more! :) Thank you Lee Robertson at epiblogger - and the post linked above is well worth the read as well, on the concept of “social proof”.

The above photo is a crowd at Sea World in San Diego, by the way.

Like most things in life, to get better at photography you just have to get out there and do it. Take pictures. Experiment. Play. But above all else, keep a camera with you and just take a lot of pictures.

I know this, and yet have had a hard time with the discipline around it. I take loads of kid pictures, but would like to try to mix it up some, learn, get better. With time at a premium (did I mention I have 3 kids?), finding some of it to play with my camera has been ridiculously hard.

So I finally took the plunge to force myself into it with my own Project 365 - take one picture a day, of anything, but ideally something that captures a bit of what that day was about, and post it. Every single day. For a year. The guy who originally (far as I can tell) came up with the idea, Taylor McKnight, wrote up some simple reasons why:

• Imagine being able to look back at any day of your year and recall what you did, who you met, what you learned… (Often we find it hard to remember what we did just yesterday or even last night, let alone a whole year ago!)
• Your year-long photo album will be an amazing way to document your travels and accomplishments, your haircuts and relationships. Time moves surprisingly fast.
• Taking a photo a day will make you a better photographer. Using your camera every day will help you learn its limits. You will get better at composing your shots, you’ll start to care about lighting, and you’ll become more creative with your photography when you’re forced to come up with something new every single day

He also set up a Flickr Group pool with 4,700+ members and 180,000+ contributed photos, an inspiring collection especially after you read some of the discussions attached to them. Each picture is supposed to include a caption to tell the story and, a year later, remind you what exactly you were doing.

So I just wrapped Day 3, and am taking my camera on a business trip to Ohio this week to try and keep the promising start going. You can follow my progress on my Project 365 photo set. My first 3 are posted below. Wish me luck and some discipline!

Day 1: Cool blue colors with the camera on the floor of the hallway in the WaMu Theater, Qwest Field Events Center, Seattle. Kathy, Emma, and I attended the Go Diego Go! musical.

Day 2: Grace up close on a “peaceful” lazy Saturday, with her sister Sarah looking on.

Day 3: An afternoon at the pool - looking up from our chairs past the umbrella to that rarest of sights, a cloudless Seattle sky.

Last week there seemed to be something of a brouhaha about a company making the entire Flickr catalog available as cellphone wallpaper, regardless of license applied to individual photos. Not the smartest thing, but as I don’t make a living off my photos and put them all out under CC Attribution Share/Share Alike it’s not something that affected me much.

What was cool was right afterwards, firing up my ego feed, I find that a couple of my pictures from Maui have been used in a travel blog (another from Zihuatenejo got picked up last month as well). They used proper attribution and all, a minor and delightful surprise.

Beyond flattering, it was a happy Creative Commons moment for me, seeing it used how it’s supposed to be. The photos, for your viewing enjoyment and my own kicks:

On a sanity break between hammering PowerPoint slides in preparation for the launch of our new site in a few weeks, I decided to drool a bit over all the new iPhone apps coming out or being announced. The most exciting so far available - Evernote, Facebook, Mobile Flickr, and Twitterific - and I really haven’t even begun to look at the real possible productivity enhancers (and sweet time wasters!).

All was well, until I saw a reference to this:

Oh so sweet. I’ve been using the Wordpress mobileadmin plugin off and on via my ipHone, and while nice, it’s great to see Matt and team come out with something official.

Occasionally you find one of those depressing stories that illustrate some of the unfortunate realities of modern life. This is one of them:

GREENWICH, Conn.

Vincent Provenzano, 16 years old, experienced his Kevin Costner moment one Sunday afternoon in May after a thrilling day of Wiffle ball in a friend’s backyard. He came home, gazed at a field of weeds, brush and poison ivy in an empty lot off Riverside Lane, turned to his friend Justin Currytto, 17, and proclaimed: “If we build it, they will come.”

After three weeks of clearing brush and poison ivy, scrounging up plywood and green paint, digging holes and pouring concrete, Vincent, Justin and about a dozen friends did manage to build it — a tree-shaded Wiffle ball version of Fenway Park complete with a 12-foot-tall green monster in center field, American flag by the left-field foul pole and colorful signs for Taco Bell Frutista Freezes.

But, alas, they had no idea just who would come — youthful Wiffle ball players, yes, but also angry neighbors and their lawyer, the police, the town nuisance officer and tree warden and other officials in all shapes and sizes. It turns out that one kid’s field of dreams is an adult’s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present.

When you read the whole story, you can easily see both sides - the property owners who are understandably upset at the encroachment on their very expensive land (this being Greenwich, CT), the town government needing to ensure local laws are respected, and also the feeling by the kids and others that something is just wrong when the mere idea of putting together a ball field to play with the neighbors and <gasp> not sit in front of a Wii all day is stymied by the morass that is our legal system.

In the end, the legal argument will likely win out over the nostalgic, the logical over the emotional. But it does at least make you shake your head and think maybe there is some kernel of truth to the old saw that it “was different back then.” Sigh.