Ya-ting and James Wedding

Ya-Ting and James Wedding

James was my very first best friend I've ever had.  From the days of going to his home to play with legos, which was really a decoy to go do word problems with his dad, to running around Cornell elementary, all the way through high school, we always were good friends and I've literally grew up with him.

It was an honor to be able to witness this amazing event of his, and a bigger privilege to photograph his wedding with the wedding photographer Timothy Mak!

What a great wedding.  It was a lot of fun!

See all photos here: http://flickr.com/gp/kinetic/ScNY52

Teasers below:

The quiet moments

 

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I'm a flower girl,

 

Twirl me for the first time

 

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Sunset escape

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Sarah and Kiely - Chicago Engagement

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I've been finding it hard to find the words to describe my weekend in Chicago shooting Sarah and Kiely's engagement session.  The keywords that popped up in my head include: epic, amazing, surreal, hysterically fun, exciting.

Kiely had planned this shoot way before he even proposed to Sarah.  It's incredible the amount of preparation and planning he's put into all of this, and it really goes to show how much he truly loves Sarah.  Actually it really just shows how cheesy he is ;)

Kiely flew me out to Chicago, which is Sarah's favorite city!  What a priveledge to have witnessed the proposal (which was a huge surprise), and now such a great honor to be able to photograph their engagement session.

I consider Sarah family, a sassy little sister that always has a contagious smile and a positive attitude about her.  Seeing how happy she is with Kiely, and seeing how amazing Kiely is to her, absolutely makes the world a better place.

Friday morning, around 4am, I hit snooze on my alarm.  Of course, I had set an alarm one minute after, every minute until 4:08, which is a minute before iPhone snoozes come back on.  By 4:30am I was packed and in my car on my way to SFO.  I actually almost exited to go to my office, being so early in the morning I was on cruise control mentally.  Finally arriving at long term parking, and meeting Sarah and Kiely at our gate, I knew this was going to be an amazing trip.

Once in Chicago, I was welcomed by warm smiles, and a ridiculously piercing cold.  I can't believe people live in weather below 50 degrees F.  How do you stay alive?  I wore 3 - 4 layers every day, which included underarmor and REI polartec long underwear, sweaters, jackets, beanies, and more.  At one point, my contacts got so cold they almost popped out of my eyes.  When we went to the cloud gate at Millenium Park before sunrise (5am), I actually had my fingers turn purple on me, and couldn't feel them for almost an hour afterwards.

So all the fun outings, we got some fun shots for the engagement session!  Enjoy!

All photos can be found on my Google Plus album here: https://plus.google.com/photos/101265429413963140460/albums/5687343698041878625

Teasers below:

The night will last

 

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Keep me safe

 

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Take me

 

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Abandoned Oahu

In my wanderings in Oahu, I came upon a few abandoned buildings right off the highway of the north shore.  There's a place called the Crawford's Convalescent Home.  At the west entrance to the parking lot is a ruined building.  I don't know the history of it, but here's what it looks like on the inside:

Abandoned Hawaii

The easiest way in is to walk around to the backdoor, which is wide open.  The front door is cemented shut.  Here's the backdoor:

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There are a few warnings about not going in, but they don't seem very official to me:

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Street View and exact location here: Abandoned Crawford's Convalescent Home Building.

Across the street, behind the bus stop, there's another abandoned building.  This one also doesn't have a roof anymore.  Last I saw, there was a paddle boat in the corner of it and some cool graffiti murals.

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Street view and exact location of this building here: Bus Stop Building 

I bet if you venture around even further you'll see more cool spots.  These are just super easy to get to.  I haven't really looked too much around that area, but maybe next time I will throw on something more than just flip flops and board shorts for this excursion.

 

Jurassic Park!  I'm looking for velociraptors

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Flickr is not dead yet

Walkway

 

Everyone seems to be jumping ship and leaving Flickr to go over to Google+ for sharing photos.  I won't deny that Flickr may be dying, but it's not dead yet.

There's been a lot of talk about the death or inevitable death of Flickr for the photography community, more notably the blog post by Thomas Hawk and Google+ post by Ingo Meckmann.  But there is one big reason why Flickr won't die immediately and why there are plenty of photographers who can't just yet give up on the legendary photo sharing community: not all of us are popular hot shot photographers.

Aside from the innovation Flickr is lacking in terms of presenting photos, a lot of the other features are still incredibly important and still absent from the newer sharing platforms.  Thomas Hawk says he interacts with the community way more on Google+ now, in fact he doesn't have any interaction on Flickr anymore.  This works because hundreds, if not thousands by now, have added him into their Google+ photography circles.  This doesn't work for the majority of Flickr users out there who don't have his level of popularity.

New and upcoming photographers, or those who aren't the type to really market their personal brand, don't get the same influx of photo fiends giving them good constructive criticism on their photography on Google+.  It's also impossible for them to grow a photography centric network on Google+ alone.  Instead they just get the same old Facebook effect where all their friends exclaim how awesome the camera is, and asking them for help with their choice between a Nikon Coolpix vs. Canon Powershot.

Flickr is (currently) the only service putting lesser known, and perhaps equally as skilled, photographers into a constructive arena that nobody else has duplicated yet.  Flickr allows photographers new to the world of online photo communities a way to grow and expand.  It's also a good playing ground for those who are fine with just moderate interaction with a few photography friends.

New services now are sharing with your more general network of friends.  Instagram is sharing with your usual network that may be partly built off of your Twitter followers, Google+ from your email contacts, Facebook is really everyone you've ever talked to in person.  What Flickr did and does different is, put you in a community of a photography-centered community.  Yes, there is overlap with your general friend networks, but there are plenty more that would never make it to your Facebook friend list.

More popular photographers will be able to grow their network utilizing their personal brand to grow their new Google+ network until they hit a nice critical mass, where they do no extra work to keep getting more people to add them into photography circles.  Everyone else, which I believe represents a much larger number of photographers, will not have the same ability.  In fact, it would be so hard to get to the level of what Flickr already offers, that it's just not worth the effort.

That is why Flickr is still alive for many.  That is why I can't see the path to Google+ as clearly as some.

That being said, I want to see Google+ pull something off that will totally negate the need for the Flickr community for all photographers.  So far the only contender that has something to offer right now is much more modern Flickr clone, 500px.com.  What do you have up your sleeve Google+ team?

I don't see cloning Flickr communities straight off being the right thing to do with Google+.  Google+ Circles can't allow for people to add themselves, request invites to, etc.  All you can do is comment and beg people to add you, to deem you worthy.  It is currently impossible to be discovered through Google+ alone.  Recruiting is a huge undertaking.

Hopefully I can make it to the next photoshoot that is organized where G+ members show up so I can express the frustration of leaving the lesser-known photographers behind.  Or maybe they can be convinced to go on some photoshoots with the SFBAS group.

Thomas Hawk: any thoughts on how Google+ might improve discovery of photographers not on the A-list?

By the way, if you guys have it in your heart, add me to your Google+ Photographers Circle so I can start getting some of the same benefits as Thomas Hawk on my photos, and I will return the favor as well!  Here's my profile: http://gplus.to/arthurchang

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Baby Willa

Warm Summer Night

My sister had baby Willa on August 19th, 2011!  Willa is only two weeks old, so we weren't able to have any great conversations yet.  So instead I took some pictures and a video of her.  I got to try out Pete's Nikon D7000's video capabilities with Issa's 35mm f/1.8G lens.  Pete, Yiyi, Brinkley, and Willa live in Montreal, Canada, which is actually a beautiful city!  All my photos are on Flickr: http://flickr.com/kinetic

 

Pete and Willa

father and daughter

 

Yiyi and Willa

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My Mom and My Niece

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My dad and Willa

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First time in a restaurant, she did great

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Brinkley giving Willa little kisses

puppy kisses

 

Tummy time

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Caching in development is important

Almost a year ago, I wrote about how to override caching when developing here, and only turning caching on when testing.  As it turns out that might not be a great idea.  Too many times I have had strange bugs on production that I could never figure out locally due to caching issues.  Only after a few hours of debugging did I realize it could have to do with caching.

There's also a really big reason why nobody's written an easy way to turn off caching in development, mainly because it's bad for you to see different behavior in development vs. production at any time, especially with queries and fragment caching.

The kind of caching you do want to turn off is class/controller caching for the sake of avoiding restarting your server just so it will pickup your new code.  

config.action_controller.perform_caching = false
config.cache_classes = false

So run memcached, do your fragment caching in development, and you should be good to go.  No reason not to cache queries or view renders.

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What photo discovery isn't

49/52 California Beauty

Flickr had it, Instgram has part of it, Facebook is close, 500px almost has it, but listen, there's a lot more to photos than simply "popularity."  The most widely used algorithm, as far as anyone can tell, is based on a few simple properties:

  • Quantity of views
  • Quantity of actions taken
  • Quality of person who viewed or acted (based on their own accumulated algorithm results)
  • Time (recency)

This works great in the early stages of photography communities, where not one group has a huge lead over newcomers.  When everyone has just about the same amount of followers, and almost all the same actual followers, any algorithm crunching the data above will surface some amazing photographs from everyone.  As soon as you start seeing discrepencies that will easily leave newcomers in the dust, you start having a problem.

Photo discovery isn't about popularity.  It's far from it.  Photo discovery should be about surfacing photos based on how absolutely awesome it is.  Composition, emotion, story, and reach.  It's lazy and incorrect to just chalk up popularity on quantity and influence.

If Ansel Adams, who we should assume hypothetically isn't famous yet, joins Flickr today, he will not make it to the Explore page.  Here's a few reasons: he's not in the group of Thai middle school kids who are incredibly influential now on Flickr, he's not taking pictures of hot chicks, and he doesn't post pictures of cute puppies... and most of all, he isn't posting unrealistic colorful HDR photos.  The only way to have your photos discovered when first joining Flickr is to stand out as a thumbnail in a Flickr Group you've posted to.  Best chance is he can post his photo in the B+W landscape only Flickr group.  Actually I take that back, he should post a full color photo of a hot chick holding a puppy in the B+W landscape only Flickr group, tagging all the Thai middleschoolers in the photo.

On Instagram if you're a celebrity on Twitter, you're good to go.  Otherwise you'll be buried and never make it to the popular page unless you have the qualities of a girl who does a ton of self portraits, or have a funky designer mutt that is named after household appliances (to be fair, kevin rose's labradoodle is pretty freakin cute).  I know plenty of amazing photographers who never get on popular, yet I see iPhone note screenshots make it up there.  Usually these notes are from girls or influential tech founders leaving tidbits of knowledge.  yah, these are interesting, fine, but you're still not discovering the greatest photos.  What Instagram does have right, is being able to see what photos people you're following are also liking and commenting on.  I think exploring this route as something more primary than simply popular photos would really be beneficial.  Probably not perfect and interesting as it is today, but what your friends have discovered and passing it on would be a step in the right direction.

500px has an editorial section that worked great early on to surface some otherwise unknown photographers into the limelight.  Unfortunately, they just can't keep up with the scale of photographers now using the site.  I've seen people who are influential on Flickr ask their Flickr communities to help them bump up their numbers in 500px.  They need to fix this otherwise they will fall to the same demise of Flickr Interestingness woes.

Instead of going on and on about this, you can clearly see a pattern.  Photography discovery has a long way to go, yet there hasn't been a lot of innovation on this front.  You can't simply take simple stats to surface the best photos people will care about.  There needs to be a level of heuristics involved.  The problem is that there's no clear logic to figure this out just yet, and you can't just go 80% and expect it to work well, you need to hit at least 95% accuracy or higher, which is hard.  People who work on natural language processing live in a similar world.  If the NLP is only 80%, it can be impressive, but won't work enough for people to keep coming back.  The last 20% is exponentially harder and seemingly even more time consuming.

Some good things to look out for: image recognition, meta information tied with current issues, crunching interests with photographs, and putting more emphasis on photo referrals from friends.

Image recognition can go far.  It's similar to natural language processing, and I guess you can even call this image processing.  If you can programatically come up with a way to know how awesome a photo is based on composition, quality, etc., then you can easily come up with a bunch of meta information to crunch into an algorithm based on interests and so on.  This is a hard problem, Face.com is closing in on facial recognition, and Facebook has already implemented a easy way to suggest tagging faces in your photos.  If you can take a few photo properties, like color depth, image size (if an image size is larger within the same dimentions as some other photo, you can probably accurately assume there's more detail and higher quality, which isn't always better but useful), see if it uses the Rule of Thirds and Golden Ratios, has boobs, has cute fluffy ears, you can really revolutionize photo discovery.

But until someone builds some robust image proccessing library, there's plenty of things to be done with suggestions from friends, newcomers who are influential in other networks, editorially picked photos (on a massive scale, like mechanical turk), and pulling out more meta information that's available.  I haven't seen anyone do this just yet.  Dedicate a team to photo discovery as well as the usual photo sharing/virality team.  It is a huge factor in long term success and not just a passing feature you poke at once in awhile.

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Nic and Christy have one on the way

Nic and Christy with One on the way, Claire!

 

Do you remember this couple? It was already quite the honor to attend their wedding, and I had the honor today of photographing their maternity shoot. (Wedding photos: flickr.com/gp/kinetic/A0596g/). Nic and Critty are great friends of mine that are just an incredible couple. They are always happy, smiling, and laughing.

Nic and Critty got me out of a recent photo slump. These two have reminded me what photography is all about. I can't express how much I enjoyed shooting these two and processing the photos. It's been so long since I've laughed out loud while processing the photos, and my smile muscles have had quite the work out.

This is why I do photography, so I can be with amazing people, and capture the emotion and lives of the people I love. I can't thank them enough for making photography awesome for me. Their friendship is priceless. Here's a link you should check out with all the photos: flickr.com/gp/kinetic/o94N57

Teasers below:

 

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Substantiate Product Ideas with Deadly Sins

Cove

 

When substantiating product ideas, make sure you can clearly bucket the main features into at least two of the seven deadly sins.  The deadly sins are firm reminders of what people innately constantly surpress, things that are undeniably evident in our lives yet religious and societal morals have deemed them to be traditionally evil.  But if you want to know if your product is something people want, there is no better guide to turn to than one that spells out what is sinful.

Some of the most successful products fall heavily into one of the seven sins.  Let's take Facebook for example.  It has almost all of them: Vanity, Envy, Lust, and Sloth.  You post status updates about how cool you are, vain.  You snoop around at people's successes and failures in their relationships, envy.  You stalk your crushes in hopes they mention you or post some hot photo of themselves, lust.  And you just post a happy birthday message on a friend's wall rather then taking the effort to going to their home to give them a proper celebration, sloth.

Of course, this is not a catch all procedure in validating any of your ideas.  Still do the usual due dilligence of listening to your users, eating your own dogfood, and be generally aware of the realities of the problems in society.  This is just another tool to add to your regime of product development.

So the next time you're thinking of the direction, focus, and primary features of your product, take a step back and think if you can easily and clearly bucket those features into one of the deadly sins.  It's a good sign if it's a no brainer to which sin it could fall under.

 

photo: taken last weekend off the coast of California along Highway 1 in Big Sur.  It doesn't really relate to this post.

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How to alert engineers

47/52 Clarity

 

Good way to text / ping your engineers:

Got an email saying server x.x.x.x is down. I checked the site and it still seems fine.  Let me know if there will be long term problems affecting business.

Bad way to text / ping your engineers:

What happened?  Is the site up?

At no point shall non-engineers ping engineers responsible, without knowing what they might be responsible for.  Never report an issue without doing as much investigation as possible, because abstract questions will only make things worse.

On the flip side, engineers should do the following

Site is down, will affect business until further notice.  We're all working on it now, no need to call or text or freak out, it's being worked on.

Giving everyone else in the company a warm fuzzy feeling, engineers should also report:

Earlier today we had a few alerts, these did not affect any business, we were working on things behind the scenes and no related issues will occur.

Combining the two efforts you get a much better communication channel between engineers and non-engineers within the company.  Let's discuss further the benefits of the good texts.

Non engineers doing due dilligence on an issue will prevent engineers from scrambling from what they're working on, which may be much more important, and running countless tests to see what in the world might be going on.  The overhead here is magnitudes greater than if the person reporting the issue gives context and enough information to help engineers know right away.

On the flip side, engineers have most likely already gotten those same alerts, if not more.  If there really is a big issue, engineers should notify those who need to know (or care) about what business is being effected.  If there are no problems affecting business, then there really isn't a need to notify.  If a non-engineer does the due dillegence, gets no alerts from engineers, and notices business could be effected, then tracking down an engineer with the right information is warranted.  They might have missed it, they're sleeping, or whatever.

The bad and lazy ways of pinging engineers is the absolute worst.  It's a bad habit that will only make the world a more devastating place.

Non-engineers and engineers both have the responsibility of being clear in reporting issues.

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