I love the BBC. On BBC2 tonight there was part one of Wonders of the Solar System. A fact packed and fascinating documentary presented by Professor Brian Cox, who is brilliant at this kind of thing – having somebody there who not only understands the subject matter but is enthusiastic about it and wants to share that enthusiasm with us the viewer, draws you in to make the whole thing very enjoyable.

Following Wonders of the Solar System was Lambing Live. An hour long programme broadcast every night of the week which is nicely slow paced. Interspersed with some pre-recorded reports about all sort of related subjects and very moving in places when problems arose resulting in the death of a new lamb.

It’s hard to imagine any of these programs being made for any of the other UK channels these days – they’re both journeys in to worlds that are alien to most people. It’s also refreshing that neither of these programmes assume you have a nearly none existent attention span, don’t constantly repeat themselves or have long unnecessary recaps.

We should be proud of the BBC and protect it from the attacks it gets from time to time – which, to my untrained eye, seem to originate from commercial competition who would never make programs like these anyway. 

It’s taken a very long time for the big companies to finally realise how to deal with music – make it good quality, usable anywhere, good value and easy to get at. I love MP3 shops like Bleep where you can get very high quality tracks at a price that seems reasonable given that there isn’t somebody producing discs, shipping them across the country or even around the world then having the overhead of a physical shop to sell them in.

These days there are streaming services like Napster and Spotify which are good enough so that you can listen to pretty much anything for less money per month than it used to cost to buy a CD in a shop. Because of the good value of these, I pay for one of them and enjoy using it (Napster, mostly via a Squeezebox in my case).

Movies on the other hand are a completely different kettle of fish – it seems like music was when the original Napster first arrived. The movie companies doing their best to sell you a crippled piece of crap with your film in it. Because films are sold in a variety of formats with various kinds of rights management attached to them, I’m wary about buying anything because I don’t know if I’ll be able to play it in the future. I already know I won’t be able to enjoy it out of the confines of whatever the seller thinks it should be used in.

iTunes movies are a complete no no. Tied to the computer or one of their own devices. Apple still get away with this kind of behaviour with music too, iTunes really being a shop that you have to install software to buy from and that software only really working well with devices sold by Apple. Until it’s all opened up for any device by any manufacturer I won’t use it.

It should be possible for me to buy a film and watch it on anything I want to watch it on and not have restrictions like this.

I would buy more films if they weren’t crippled.

TV again is behind the times and suffering as a result. If a TV show is made anywhere in the world, usually the rights to distribute it are carved up in to different territories and people in these territories can’t view content that originates from a different one. The end result of this is that a TV show is made, appears on some companies online TV service and everyone not in that country sees a message saying they can’t watch it. It’s not the 1970’s any more.

So how about a TV programme shop, selling TV programmes from across the world for reasonable amounts of money in an open format so that people can choose to watch what they want where ever it comes from.

The actions of these companies to try and protect their media is driving proper customers away – a lot of people don’t download music and movies because they don’t want to pay – they do it because it’s easier and you don’t feel like they’re being screwed by buying some strange format thing that only works on a device they tell you it should run on in an area of the planet that they have also dictated.

Towards the end of last year, I was asked by White Post Farm to take some photos of their animals for use in their 2010 leaflet. They discovered a set of photos I had taken there last summer when I shared a few of them on their Facebook page. The two photos I shared were these:

Both were taken with a fisheye lens. I think it was the goat photo in particular that caught their attention.

When I made my first visit to take photos specifically for the leaflet, it was dry but overcast and within an hour it started raining. There were some photos I quite liked, but they all looked like a horrible grey day so I wasn’t really happy with them. I went back again in December when I was taking a mid-week day off work in lieu of working the previous weekend. It was a very bright day with blue skies! – That brightness caused it’s own problems, but that was a much nicer problem to deal with than drab grey skies.

One of the photos that was taken on that first visit during the hour before it rained was this one, which ended up being used in the leaflet…

There’s a bit of blue in the sky, but I suppose a lot of the background detail doesn’t matter that much when you’ve got a cheeky llama leaning down in to shot to steal the limelight away from the calf and look straight in to the camera!

The December was where I think I had the time to enjoy the time with the animals and take enough photos in better light.

Here’s the cow nose from the leaflet:

Here’s a few more from the December visit:

There are plenty more on publicenergy.co.uk in the White Post Farm section.

Finally, I visited again yesterday to pick up an annual pass and a copy of the 2010 leaflet, parts of which appear at the top of this post. While I was there I took a few more photos, including an addition to my 52 week self portrait series.

Here I am pictured with Darren the Goat…

The full set can be seen here: Froggatt Walk 01/10

The screen shot above is what one of my photographs looks like on Flickr when viewed in a maximised browser on a 24” monitor. Five years ago, monitors were generally smaller and the Flickr pages looked quite nicely designed and the images seemed to be a reasonable size. As luck would have it, I found an old photo that contains Flickr running on a 17” monitor. This photo was taken in 2005 which was the year I started using the site. 5 years later, the photo pages are virtually unchanged.

If I compare the Flickr screen shot at the top with what the same image looks like on SmugMug – again on a 24” browser, maximised, much more is made of the available space.

Also, clicking on the main image, does a ‘lights-out’ enlargement to make it fill as much as the browser window as possible and fading out the background.

It’s not just the layout of the pages on Flickr that are well overdue for an overhaul – here’s a list of other irritations:

• The speed of the site. It can be painfully slow sometimes, it sucks the joy out of browsing photos because of how long it takes to flick between pages and images.
• The UK satellite maps are dreadful. When Flickr first introduced geotagging, the Yahoo maps they chose to use had really rough looking barely detailed maps in most of the areas I was interested in. Years later they are still like that – virtually unusable.
• The attitude of Flickr towards their customers. It’s hard to know if this is all Yahoo these days or what – but there are countless tales of people having their accounts marked unsafe, or even deleted without any kind of discussion or right of appeal.
• The popularity of the site has diluted the community aspect – This might be a bit of “this club was better before it was popular” type of thing – BUT – there is a lot to be said for smaller and well managed compared to catering for the millions. The help forums and a lot of the groups are depressing to read these days.
• Unable to retrieve your complete data – It’s possible using third party tools to re-download your photos should you wish, but, it’s much harder to download your photos and also the information that was added after it was uploaded to Flickr. For instance, extra tags, possible extra geo-data, people in the photo and the comments. It really ought to be possible to download an offline archive of your photos with this extra data.

So, for various reasons I have a few years left of paid Flickr account use. I’m gradually sorting through my photos that were uploaded to Flickr and putting them online at http://publicenergy.co.uk using SmugMug to make it work.

My plan is to wind down what gets posted to Flickr and use publicenergy.co.uk as my main online photo storage site. notsowildlife.com will continue to serve as my animal photo specific site.

I have no intention of actually deleting my Flickr account – although I’ll review that decision when my pro account expires in a few years time. For the time being I still need to keep tabs on friends uploading photos there, and it might be inconvenient for the small group of other Flickr users I really care about to keep tabs on my photos.

For me, my favourite part of this whole photography hobby is actually going out and taking the photos – it is nice when other people see them and like them of course. The not so wild animal thing has had lots of nice feedback from people. Comments left on photos are one thing, but it’s the odd comment from people who have really reacted that I’ve enjoyed the most. People telling me that they’ve had to put one of my cow photos up in their new born daughter’s nursery for example. Somebody telling me their student produced a painting based on one of my cow photos. Being asked how close I get to ducks! or how I clean chewed up grass spat by llamas from my camera! These are enjoyable reactions I won’t forget.

Flickr has been good socially too – I know quite a lot of good people as a result of Flickr meetups – I think that these events peaked a few years ago too – the love for Flickr is vanishing – so I’m glad I was around at the best time and still have a lot of friendships as a result.

We’ll see how it all goes!

I was recently asked to take some photos for White Post Farm. What they wanted was some extra photos in the style that I’ve kind of gotten myself in to over the last few years – i.e. fairly silly close-ups that hopefully show some of the animal’s personality.

I had two visits – the first one was very quick because it chucked it down about an hour after I arrived. The skies were quite dark and grey too so I wasn’t that happy with the resulting photos. I got the opportunity to have a second visit on Friday and the weather was lovely. A very low winter sun posed problems of it’s own, but it was preferable to dark grey skies with poor lighting overall.

There are a number of shots of that one llama who used every trick in the book to get food out of me – mostly successfully!

When I phoned back, I had to listen to all of the same stuff, despite telling the person that I’d already listened to it before – this was extremely tedious but I was glad to be eventually shut of them.

Unfortunately cancelling the contract puts me on the list to be called back to go through this again. I explained to the first caller yesterday that everything  was already sorted, I had no need of the contract or any other offers – but she continued to try the things on her script. I had to stop her again and tell her that she was wasting her time because I definitely didn’t want the number or the contract at all – so it didn’t matter how cheap it was or what offers they had.

The next day I get another call with the same kind of questions being asked. This time I explained to the man that this was the fourth time I’ve been through this script with somebody and each time I’ve explained that I have no interest in any of the products.

He said “I understand that” – and then carried on with the script!

I said excuse me, did you understand what I just said to you? Because you’ve completely ignored me and carried on trying to sell me stuff. He said yes and carried on again!

By the end of this I was raising my voice.

I don’t think good customer service is ignoring everything the customer says in order to try and sell them stuff – but throughout my life, all of the dealings I’ve had with any mobile phone company has led me to the conclusion that they’re all bastards!

If they phone back again, I might say something rude ;)

Positive Point

• The Interface is very nicely done.

Negative Points:

• The quality of the streaming is really bad (it’s also bad on the PC player)
• The selection of channels in the online subscription can only be described as shite – If you think of Sky TV, most people would probably want the big programmes that get stuck on Sky One – they are nowhere near this bizarre selection of bottom rung channels.
• Even if you do find something on there worth watching – you might get a notice saying that the programme isn’t being broadcast online – you’re told this in a VHS rental video  ‘upcoming features’ style – it looks so nasty and amateurish.
• The initial offer when it became available via the Xbox was for 3 months for the price of two – this seemed like a cheap way to lock people in to 3 months of the service before they could escape.
• The Zune Marketplace can quite happily stream films at 1080p with Dolby Digital sound – this makes the Sky service even more of a joke as it shows it up, raises it’s leg and pisses all over it.

So, reading between the lines there, it’s safe to say I didn’t like it. It’d need a big channel like Sky One, streamed in HD to the quality of the Zune Marketplace to make it worth considering. At the moment it’s just awful.

I’ve done some tidying up on notsowildlife.com recently. Since I decided to rip out all of the text only posts and move them here, I had to make sure that notsowildlife.com looked ok with just the image posts. So I started with the latest release of the theme and re-applied the relevant changes from before. I also ended up moving things around because it was just the images, so I think it’s better now and seems tighter.