The world as frankps sees it!
About Me
Well, from time to time things happen with me.
What happened yesterday on Flickr?
I normally have inbetween 100 and 200 views of my pictures a day. Best day before yesterday, was a day with 700 views. Yesterday I had stunning 5,823 picture views. I had to check if there was an article on my blog that suddently had gotten equal lots of hits, but no. Flickr’s own statistics also show that no particular photo had gotten more then 3 views.
So what happened?
Facebook Cards
Tired of dull business cards? Thought so! MOO is a great company specializing in doing great looking business cards. A friend of mine has already gotten her personally designed cards from them and they are looking smashing. In fact, they have the best prints I’ve ever seen for business cards.
Now MOO has come up with the great idea of doing Facebook cards. Well, they are just business cards pulling information from your Facebook page, but to get these cards you must have activated the new Timeline functionality (a blog entry I did in Norwegian).
To get the Facebook cards business started MOO is doing a promotion of 200,000 free packs of 50 cards is on a first come, first served basis. However the offer is capped at 5,000 orders per day (that’s 250,000 cards per day) in order, Moo says, to ensure a “strong ethos of customer service and to make it fair.” They even pay for postal fees. After the promotion the cards will cost £10/€15. Yesterday I managed to order my free pack:
I’ll be getting the set of cards beginning of February.
Spotify with inbuilt apps
2 months ago
Spotify recently published a public beta of an upcoming version of their app. This major update will introduce a redesigned user interface. The new main page gives you a better social overview, as for example what your friends are listening to, both of songs and playlists. Search has been reimplemented with predictive search results. Just start start typing in the search bar and Spotify will suggest possible tracks, artists, albums and playlists. The Buddy List now shows what your friends are listening to right now and you can also see and hear your friends’ starred tracks, as well as the music they’re adding to their playlists. OS X Lion users can enjoy the new Spotify as a full-screen app.
Another major new thing in Spotify is their app store, called App Finder. The new Spotify comes with an improved Last.fm support. It is now not only limited to scrobbling, it now also give you recommendations. There are also apps for newspapers that review music, and funnily enough the first Norwegian newspaper is already present:
The Dagbladet app is beautiful and I have both read reviews and at the same time listened to the albums being reviewed. Hats off for Dagbladet, as they have made one of the best apps available in App Finder and I hope that they will have great success with it. Another Norwegian app is Soundrop, but I’m still trying to figure out how it works 
The songs on the album is descretly put on the left side of the review under the album cover, and you can easily add songs to your favourite list of music and to other playlists as you are used to.
Other applications to look out for are the one from Guardian and Rolling Stones magazine. They are both not in the same league as the one from Dagbladet, but both provide great music suggestions and that is what it’s all about in the end.
A 500px Review
1Development of Flickr seems to have more or less stalled. Another problem with Flickr these days is that it takes hours to find good pictures. Flickr is becoming more like Facebook. Lately I’ve seen lots of photographer migrating to Google+ with Picasa. What’s cool with Google+ is that there are lists of Google+ registered photographers. And there’s lots of them and it’s easy to subscribe to their feeds and pictures are presented in a nice way. Google+ has so far not become the success Google wanted it to be, but it fast became the preferred social network for photographers.
But there’s now a new kid in town, a online portfolio site called 500px.com. It’s only aiming for your best photos, and is in my opinion not aiming to store your family or holiday photos. Nor does it have privacy functionality, like only letting your friends/family see a photo set. But except from that, I am really impressed. 500px has nearly mastered the essential features that I am looking for as a photographer wanting to share my work and explore the work of other photographers. It’s design makes it pleasant to browse through, and isn’t overwhelming by keeping features to a minimum. The vast majority of work displayed on 500px.com is high quality, similar to photos you would see in magazines or art galleries. Because they are targeting a professional level audience they are able to stand out from competitors.
500px is a company based in Canada so they are bound by Canadian Copyright law which is very close to US Copyright law. In other words, the terms of use is pretty much the same as for Flickr.
I’m for now only using their free account, and they are letting me upload 20 photos a week free of charge. The system is easy to use and works well, so long as you have a supported web browser. Safari and Internet Explorer work fine, but I have some issues with Chrome when it comes to navigating the portefolio view. The images are presented in a beautiful way, and there is great rating system for those who want to use that.
I have not had the chance to look at the PRO version of 500px (Awesome account), but you upgrade to many more services including unlimited everything, personal domains, etc. for US$50 per year.
The social nature of 500px will attract many people. The images posted on 500px are available for rating and comment. The rating system could be better in that you should be able to see who rated your images. You should also be able to disable ratings or block people that you don’t want to interact with.
500px has a basic search functionality, but this could probably improved to include search in the EXIF metadata. I would like to be able to search after photos taken with specific cameras and lenses. I also miss that you cannot add location to the photos you have taken.
I’ve saved the best for last. The reason why I started looking in to using 500px, was it’s iPad app. I have never seen photos been presented in a better way on a tablet. The first week I was only browsing through others photo, but the last days I have started uploading photos. Only bird photos for now. There is also unofficial 500px apps for Android.
The Cranes on Hortobágy
04 months ago
Preparations
I have been a long time follower of Sakertour, both on Facebook and their blog. And when I saw a possibilities of visiting their hides, I made contact with János Oláh. He was of great help, and together we went through traveling route and booked a bed & breakfast for two nights. There is also an hotel in the area, if you prefer that over b&b.
Cranes to Tower: We're coming in for landing
Most Scandinavians would probably hired a photography hide at Hornborgasjön (Lake Hornborga) in southern Sweden. Interested can contact Falköping Tourist Information.
How can anyone land here?
Getting to Hortobágy
Just as the migration of the cranes in the autumn, I fly also in the direction Hungary. The only difference is that I fly comfortable with Norwegian. From the Ferihegy airport I took the intercity train to Debrecen. Tickets can be bought at the airport, and remember that on parts of the trains you will need a seat reservation as well. The time schedule to Debrecen can be found at MÁV-START. In Debrecen you change train to Balmazújváros, a town only 27 km away.
A crane that has just landed
Balmazújváros
A characteristic town of the Great Hungarian Plain with 18,800 inhabitants, located 25 km from Debrecen at the north-eastern edge of the Hortobágy National Park, bordered by the tourist area of Hajdúszoboszló-Debrecen-Hortobágy. The settlement gained the privileges of a market-town already in medieval times.
A pair of cranes at the riverside
Darassa Puszta, which is the most valuable and colourful part of the Hortobágy National Park, is situated near the town.
Look! I'm bigger then you...
Tourists are attracted by the all year round open medicinal thermal bath with 6 pools and the growing number of places for private accommodation. The hotel were the photographers are accommodated is next to this bath and only a 100 meters from the railway station. Visitors of the hotel have free access to the thermal bath, a good thing if you are staying for more then one day!
Stop, you have to stay with your parents
Hortobágy
Hortobágy is both the name of a village in Hajdú-Bihar county and an 800 km² national park in Eastern Hungary. It is the largest continuous natural grassland in Europe. The area became a national park in 1973. A major part of the area of the National Park is formed by natural habitats, alkaline grasslands, and meadows, smaller and bigger marshes enclosed between them. Some artificial wetlands covering a much smaller area are of considerable importance: these are the fishponds, situated on 6 thousand hectares. The marshes and fishponds are breeding habitats of birds and important sites for the migrating birds.
The fish I saw was this big!
The system of fishponds of Hortobágy-Halastó covering 2073 hectares was created in 1915 in a alkaline grassland area called “Csúnyaföld” (Bad Lands). Formerly there were seventeen ponds, while now seven are out of use being covered by reed or other marsh vegetation. 14 bird lookouts can be found here. The appearance of 340 bird species has been registered in Hortobágy, of which 160 species nest in the National Park. Among them are the Common Crane, Dotterel, Stone Curlew and Great Bustard (The Great Bustard programme). It cannot be doubted that one of the most spectacular sights is the migration of the cranes in the autumn. Tens of thousands of Cranes, which is also the symbolic bird of the Park, can be seen every October as they fly above the grasslands to their overnight roosting places. The Hortobágy Great Fishponds are considered as one of the most important waterbird habitats in Europe.
There's nothing like a crane fight
The Hortobágy National Park has been inscribed on the World Heritage List by UNESCO on the 1st of December in 1999 in the category of cultural landscapes, since the Hortobágy Puszta have been used by humans for grazing their domestic animals for more than two millennia.
Chilling it!
The Hortobágyi Bridge
A great stone bridge makes the symbol of the watery puszta (great plain). It was built between 1827 and 1833, and can be said to be the nerve centre of Hortobágy. The bridge has 9 arches and is 167,3m long. The stones for the construction were delivered fom Tokaj. It served as a significant commercial route from the Middle Ages regarding salt and cattle trade, and connected Transylvania and Pest-Buda.
The bridge is often photographed, it is extremely well known in the country, to such an extent that every year on August 20, a Bridge Fair is held here. This major event is the chance to rediscover the traditions of fairs dating back to the last century.
Take a bath or not?
The Crane Hides
Sakertour has three crane hides, two mobile hides and the roosting hide. I stayed in the roosting hide for a day. The hide is 125 cm wide, 250 cm long and 125 cm high. The size of the photo-through window is 210 cm by 40 cm. It is comfortable for two photographers. I saw at once that the hide was made by Bence Maté.
Suddently half of the cranes were up for their daily bath
The roosting hide has a strict regulation on its usuage, as the cranes are very shy birds. The hide cannot be abandoned during the day. I could enter the hide at 07:30 pm, and first leave it the next day at 16:30 am. That allowed me to take photos of the morning fly-in and the afternoon fly-out.
Do you want to pick a fight with me?
The Cranes
The migration of cranes (Grus grus) is a memorable late autumn experience. The number of cranes passing over the Hortobágy in October can be as high as a 100.000 birds.
Several cranes gathered
The cranes arrive from North Europe to Hortobágy. Their most important breeding sites are in Sweden and Russia, but can be found in other Baltic states, in Norway, Poland and in Germany as well. Cranes once used to nest in Central Europe, but due to the deterioration of their preferred breeding sites, such as large and undisturbed wetlands, the breeding population disappeared from the region. Cranes most probably nested also in Hungary until the middle of the 19th century.
A crane getting ready for departure
In Europe cranes use a western and an eastern route for their autumn migration. The cranes migrating on the eastern route have a rest in Estonia and Hungary (the western route leads to Spain and Portugal). Depending on the weather, they stay in Hungary for about 2 months, preparing themselves for the rest of their migration route to their wintering sites in Nothern Africa. In the southern part of the Hungarian Plain smaller flocks remain also for the winter. About 700-1000 individuals spend the entire summer here.
Cranes in sunset ready to leave the riverbanks
The Bonus
Sakertour lists some other birds visiting the hide: Great White Egret, Grey Heron, Greylag Goose, Greater White-fronted Goose, and the White-tailed Eagle.
A crane family flying away, with a farm in the background
A Few Words About Sakertour
I thought I should end this blog entry with a few words about Sakertour. The company has specialised in birdwatching and hide photography, and has over 30 years of professional experience in habitat conservation, biodiversity research and ecotourism. Sakertour is university based and led by János Oláh. They organize birdwatching trips in Hungary, Slovakia and Romania.