Spring At Last!

Spring in San Diego is a beautiful sight to behold. For most of the year, this lovely city is usually blanketed in a layer of brown and tan, due to the fact that we normally have very little water to let things grow. With the high amount of rain this winter though and a general warming trend, things have started to sprout. This is a perfect time to get out and photograph the green and rainbows of colors blossoming all around.

This photograph, though taken in August 2008, reminds me of this time of the year. It's a great example of using bokeh to enhance an image, and is one of my favorite stylistic tools for general use in photography. It was captured in Julian, California behind the Julian Pie Company restaurant on Main Street.

Idée Multicolr Flickr Search

I've seen quite a few Flickr API mash-ups, but this has got to be one of the most creative. Idée Inc. has created the "Multicolr Search Lab" that uses a collection of 10 million Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr to match photographs to a user-selected color palette.

As the user selects up to ten colors from the palette on the right, the mash-up searches an index of matched colors and pulls up results in the form of thumbnails, each linked to the image's Flickr page. Not only is this just plain fun, but because of Creative Commons licensing, an artist can quickly find images to use in a project (as long as he/she gives credit and shares alike). Idée's Piximilar, the engine behind this app, seems to be a very powerful and groundbreaking image analysis system. It will be interesting to see how this algorithm is incorporated into future projects. For now, you can check out Multicolr at http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/.