Nat Geo Travel Photo Contest Winners

Below are a few of the fantastic photos that were chosen as the winners of the National Geographic Travel Photo contest. The contest is open to anyone and the full gallery of submissions and winners is pretty amazing. The photo immediately below of a small fishing village in Greenland is just beautiful and one of my favorite photos.

Fishing Village in Greenland
San Francisco Airport On A Windy Day

2nd Avenue Subway

A pretty awesome compilation of photos (including the one above) from NYC’s MTA and their official photographer Patrick Cashin (I wonder if he’s related to Wall Street ‘soundbyte’ legend Art Cashin).

The 2nd Avenue Subway line is a project that actually goes back some 90 years but has been rife with delays and issues. Finally, the city is making some serious progress on the project. For anyone who has taken a ride on the 4-5-6 Lexington Ave. line during rush hour, the 2nd Avenue line can’t come soon enough.

Color Photos From 1930s-1940s

[Sylvia Sweets Tea Room, corner of School and Main streets, Brockton, Mass.] (LOC)The corner of School St. and Main St. in Brockton, MA in the 1930’s

A set of color photos from the 1930s and 1940s on Flickr from the Library of Congress. No, the above photo is not from Instagram or Picplz. :)

Here is a view from “today” of the same corner as above at School and Main Streets in Brockton, MA

Flickr Album Maker

Found this out on delicious. Its an amazing Flickr Album Maker that generates either a photo album/gallery or a slideshow simply by putting in different paramaters from your Flickr account. The super cool thing is that you can select photos that have multiple tags (steve AND/OR ond05). This is something I’ve been looking for to manage the multitude of photos on my Kids’ site. I guess the only downfall is that it does not automatically update when I post photos to Flickr since the HTML is static. Need to look into this.

The Brilliance of Flickr

I don’t know how else to put it. Flickr is just a brilliant application. The reason for its brilliance is how easy it is for anyone to tap into its API in order to create new, innovative, and just amazing “add on” applications and features. Similar to how Google Maps has spawned combination applications like Housing Maps which combines Google Maps and CraigsList Real Estate listings, Flickr is spawning an entire sub-set of amazing photo sharing applications and features. Here are several that I have come across:

Flickr Album
Flickr Tag Browser
Spell With Flickr
Flickr Magazine Cover
Flickr Photos on Black Background
Flickr Badge Maker
Flickr Screen Saver
Create A Photobook of Your Flickr Photos

And here is a list of many more such extensions of the Flickr application

I know there are many, many other such applications out there and I am sure I will add to this list in time. To think that I spent hours upon hours building my children’s web site and managing all the photos on that site. If Flickr could only have been around 3-4 years ago, I would have saved a boatload of time, energy, and headaches. At least I was able to teach myself how to build a web site out of the experience!