Today is the first really spring-like day of the year in Amsterdam. A hazy but sunny day, temperature about 19 Celsius (about 66 F), so it felt nice for my wife and I to take a stroll for an hour or so around our neighbourhood with my camera this afternoon.
I snapped quite a few pics, real amateur snapshot stuff. Some crocuses in bloom here, some daffodils there, plus quite a few of the buildings and architecture of the World Trade Center and surroundings.
I’ve uploaded those photos to Flickr where you can view them as a slideshow. Contrast these views with the winter snow scene from just a few weeks ago.
One thing you’ll notice from the photos is that the area where we are in Amsterdam – the Oud-Zuid district – isn’t the typical Amsterdam scene that might spring to mind. Most of the residential buildings in this area were build between 1900 and 1935, so relatively modern constructions. So it’s not an area of pretty 17th-century canal-side houses – for pictures of those, see my TypePad photo album of last year’s Gay Pride Parade in August, with photos taken along the Prinsengracht downtown.
The other thing is that this is the first time I’ve really used Picasa to any extent. This really is an excellent photo management and manipulation application, and its free. What I especially like is that I just insert my camera’s memory card into the PC; Picasa opens and loads all the pics, I fill in some details in the dialog box and that’s it. It then deletes the photos from the card which then goes back into the camera ready for next time.
The collage pic you see here was automatically created by Picasa from the ones I took today. Neat! A much bigger (1600×1200) original image than the one I have here (I used Paint Shop Pro 7 to make this smaller-size copy).
How easy it all is.
Edit: Oops. Yes, it is all easy as well easy to not pay attention. That collage pic was just too big (400 pixels width), so I’ve replaced it with one at 300 pixels width.
Don’t forget that any pictures you take Monday can go in the “Day in the Life of” group of Flickr. And if you add the tag “DILOMar05” to all your photos taken that day, people can browse through that tag and see what the world looked like that, viewed through the lenses of the Flickr members.
Thanks for that tip, Eric.
I took a look on Flickr and saw that there’s just two other photos with that tag. Just two out of the whole of Flickr users!
But I’ll bear it in mind!
Doh! That’s because it wasn’t March 21 yet when you looked, methinks, or jsut a few minutes into the day at most.
I see Flickr was bought out by Yahoo! Hopefully that won’t mean the interesting part of Flickr dies out.