Clear water, blue sky, Silver Gull

Silver Gull, Tasmania

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Gloomy Kookaburra

August '08 photos re-uploaded! To mark the occasion here's a Kookaburra. It isn't laughing, 'cause it has just realized how long it takes to track, move, re-upload and swap 500 (five hundred) images. It's a lot of work for someone who has already worked hard all day :(

Laughing Kookaburra, Tasmania

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Re-uploading and updating :(

I'm starting to re-upload and update old posts to resolve the compression/image quality issue. It will take me a while.

Quality of uploaded photos

I have noticed that about a month ago the quality of blogger thumbnails degraded drastically. It wasn't until today that I realized they were re-compressing and ruining our photos during upload. That must have happened around the time when Blogger albums became Picassa albums. This is a real shame and a very frustrating discovery for a photo blogger.

I did a test, uploading the file directly to Picasa and then linking here. You can see the difference:

above: Uploaded directly to Picassa, this is the file I intended to publish. This is how I wanted it to look like. (294k)

above: Uploaded to Blogger, this is the soft crap that the new upload algorithm produces (142k)

My question: Is Google running out of disk space? Are they trying in despair to save 100k per image? My usage meter shows that I have used less than 10% of my storage quota, but my photos have been ruined for over a month!
Has anyone else noticed this?

The solution at this point seems obvious and easy, yet fiddly. I will identify when the genius of jpeg 'optimization' got his job with Google. Then will re-upload all those destroyed photos and update the old posts. How exciting! #@&*$!!!

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Just hovering

It may as well be a kite. I just can't see the string :)

Silver Gull, Tasmania

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Social life II

Some photos easily and with no hesitation qualify for the 'selected' label. I get one of these out of 1500 or 2000. That makes them quite special and me -- quite happy!

Silver Gull, Tasmania
[edit: I swapped the photo with the one from the post above]

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This time of the year

There is a lot going on in Seagull-land. It must be this very special time of the year when there is more to life than just finding food.

Silver Gulls, Hobart

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Kelp at lunch

Well... I know that most people wouldn't waste their film on seagulls, but I enjoy watching them at my lunch time. And I'm not wasting film as my camera is digital. Yeah, I know shutter's life is not endless. But I find Pacific and Kelp Gulls (and even Silver) amazing. Later I'd sit and watch for minutes such a photo admiring the detail and structure of the wings.

Immature Kelp Gull, Tasmania

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