The famous 52 Street Photography Now instruction can be found here

https://www.flickr.com/groups/instruction00/discuss/72157627757730866/

Otherwise, I will end up always looking them again and again.

Tony Ray-Jones was a British documentary photographer, who died in 1972 at the age of 31 from leukemia

He recorded the following advice to himself on shooting street:

Be more aggressive
Get more involved (talk to people)
Stay with the subject matter (be patient)
Take simpler pictures
See if everything in background relates to subject matter
Vary compositions and angles more
Be more aware of composition
Don’t take boring pictures
Get in closer (use 50mm lens [or possibly ‘less,’ the writing is unclear])
Watch camera shake (shoot 250 sec or above)
Don’t shoot too much
Not all eye level
No middle distance

So much advice has been recorded and published, particularly on street photography. Heck, there is even a list of 52 street photography instructions taken from the book Street Photography Now. Each instruction is given by a notable contemporary street photographer and, presumably, reflects their own style and credo. Try learning and following all 52. What would your body of work look like?

I wonder if a considerably more concise – both in length and level of detail – list from someone who died at 31 almost 50 years ago is worth internalizing.

Three things

One. I have not updated this blog in six years.

Two. Past entries are entertaining and educational, and I am glad I created them. The fact that they have zero comments does not seem to matter to me nearly as much as one might imagine. I was always the intended audience, anyone else would just be the accidental benefactor.

Three. Most photos and many links I linked 6-9 years ago are gone. This is 1)unfortunate, 2)understandable, 3)not something one thinks about while creating a post in the now, 4)almost certainly something others have noticed, given thought to, and solved this issue for themselves. It is almost certainly a good idea to liberally quote relevant portions of the post being referenced — specifically to guard against the post being lost/deleted/altered in the future. And the embedded photos are almost certainly safer being copied to one's own Google drive, but that can't be a good idea copyright-wise. Not to mention it's more work and may take out the fun out of (re)blogging something that one has just learned.

The one thing I still have not learned: how to format paragraphs in published Blogspot posts so that they have half a line space after them. Adding a blank paragraph creates too much blank space. Not inserting a space makes paragraphs stick together.

PFA in an email stands for "Please find attached"

EOM

Flickr follows a 'freemium' business model, as do many apps and games

'Freemium' is a new word to me, but its meaning was instantly clear from the context when Michael Arrington, the heavyweight tech blogger and founder of TechCrunch, wrote:

Freemium business models are always hard. You have to give users enough for free that they try your service out and get hooked. Then you hit them with fees for upgraded features that make it even better. With a perfect product people don’t mind paying because they feel like it’s good value.

The main thrust of the article, though is that Flickr is more of a hostage taking model than a freemium model. I tend to agree, but unlike Michael, I do not mind using Flickr. In the meantime, thanks for teaching me a new geekspeak word.
Come to think of it, almost all "free" Facebook and iPhone apps of any renown follow the freemium model. It's good to be able to put a catchy jargon term to a universally recognized phenomenon.

CTO does not stand just for Chief Technology Officer

I have always considered the use of gels fanciful (just as I consider the use of lens filters fanciful with the exception of the UV filter and, possibly, a polarizer).  But it has gradually sunk in — through listening to podcasts, reading up and, mainly, trying futilely to correct white balance on many indoor shots — why some gels are extremely useful, perhaps necessary.

First among these is CTO: "correct to orange" or, as some would have it, "color temperature orange".

When shooting indoors with regular incandescent (tungsten) lights lighting the interior — well, they have been regular so far, but they have now been outlawed — and the strobe lighting the subject, you want to gel the strobe (flash) with a CTO gel. It will make the white light coming out of the strobe orange. Consequently, everything in your shot — both your subject and the interior lit with the overhead lighting — will have an orange tint. You then correct white balance in Lightroom, Photoshop or what have you. Done.

The alternative would be to cover all incandescent lights with a CTB ("correct to blue") gel. Then their orange light (we may not realize it's orange, but the camera's sensor does) would turn white and the interior in the shot you take with a flash will lose the ugly yellowish tint that you always struggle with in white balance correction ("If I correct the wall to white, how come the face turns blue?")

The problem with this latter approach is that you will have a considerably larger gel, perhaps several, a stepladder and a bunch of tape or clams to secure gels to every lightbulb in the room.  

While with the CTO gel, you only need one, it's small, and it may even come with a handy holder that affixes it to the flash.

(I actually learned this over a year ago, but never finished the draft of this post.)  

Fly-tipping is British for dumping waste illegally

According to Wikipedia 

The term is derived from the verb tip, meaning "to throw out of a vehicle" and on the fly, meaning "on the wing" — to throw away carelessly or casually.

Too bad, because I had it figured out as "leaving garbage as tips for flies".
And how did I find out about fly-tipping? There is a website FixMyStreet, which invites you to

Report, view, or discuss local problems
(like graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting)

And how, again, how did I stumble upon that whistle-blowing (or else tattletale) site? Glad you asked.
It was mentioned in a weekly Community Update for the OpenStreetMap project. And if you don't know about, or participate in, the OpenStreetMap phenomenon, then you are seriously missing out on the major crowdsourced, worldwide, volunteer cartography movement of our times.

While the UK-only FixMyStreet uses some klutzy map watermarked "Ministry of JUSTICE", the announcement deals more specifically with the newly inaugurated Norwegian version called, naturally, FiksGataMi. And that one uses the beautifully rendered OpenStreetMap.

The idea behind both FixMyStreet and OpenStreetMap is exactly the same: directing the energy of civic-minded individuals towards improve the surrounding world for everyone. OpenStreetMap does it virtually, by letting anyone detail or correct the map of the area they live in or are well familiar with. FixMyStreet aims to do it quite literally: by allowing citizens to drop little local "bug reports" onto the map, which are immediately routed to the appropriate municipal authorities.

Here's a representative list of what bugs the Brits who visited the site in the last few hours:

• Nuisance Alarm
• Waste soil dumping
• Speeding problem
• Rodent infestation
• Run down car park

In all, over 100,000 problems have been reported in the UK since the site launched three years ago. 3,171 of them were fixed in the past 30 days.