Chicago Pictures

I went for a walk earlier today and promptly got lost as I tried to return to work. I walked down Wells St. to Congress, instead of walking one block the other direction to Washington.. *doh* On the way I took a few photos..


This is the Chicago Board of Trade and a very famous landmark in downtown Chicago. There’s a similar (but much better) night time view of this building hanging in the corridor at work in Cork. I’ll have to get a tripod and try and replicate the night image.


This is where I work, right at the top of the building, floor 38! How high is the County Hall at home?


Chicago people have been very helpful any time I needed help finding directions. Some go out of their way walking with you and explaining the names of the surrounding streets. I spotted this woman as she was talking to this tram driver and obviously lost as she was carrying balloons in the financial district.. 🙂

Sony DSC-F717 – tried it?

I spent an hour yesterday between Microcenter and Circuit City comparing prices of laptops and cameras. I came to the sorry conclusion that there’s not much to differenciate them. Best Buy is about the same price range. They’re still cheaper than Irish prices though! Especially in the digital camera market. I saw so many laptops and cameras yesterday my brain got a bit frazzled. I’ve decided to forego buying a laptop at this stage (as I might be able to get a loan of one..) and one camera that caught my eye is the Sony DSC-F717. Reviews are for the most part favourable even if the camera isn’t perfect. There was an auto-focus issue with earlier models that was almost 10 months ago. There’s some good prices to be found, but I’d like to hear if you’ve had experience with this camera. I’d also love to hear of sites offering accessories at more reasonable prices!
Update! Here’s an excellent review from photo.net

Miaow!

This is a demo of the customfield used to create a “photoblog” of sorts. In my “Picture” field I have the names of my 3 images, seperated by “;;;”. A Smarty foreach loop then runs through the list of images. You can find more information in your “Custom Fields” administration page.

imgSeek

imgSeek is a most useful application! I’m importing my photo collection in there. That’s taking a while, as there’s a few gigs of data to work through! Sketching is fun, and could be useful as you can refine your sketch and it’ll keep updating the matching photos. Selecting an existing photo, and looking through the similar photos it like the first time you went online.
You find a photo, it displays “similar” ones, right-click on another photo and find similar ones to that which displays more photos.. It’s a nice way to look through a huge collection of photographs!
What are you still doing reading this, go try it out now!

imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image you supply (or an image in your collection). The searching algorithm makes use of multiresolution wavelet decomposition of the query and database images.

(via Ice Walkers)