Articles by Sami Serola (inactive)

Thanks to my ipernity friend Fred, I had a look on old but still available Picasa 3 for Windows. With Picasa you can rather easily add geolocation onto images and export smaller copies for web. Do notice you can use Picasa only to add the geolocation. You don't need Google Earth for that. What you need is to download and install Picasa . Start from light blue button saying "Latest version". That seem to be reliably web site enough. The installer I downloaded was virus free according to com…

Currently on ipernity 'Photos' pages the following notice is shown on right margin: "It is recommended to have GPS data in the meta data (EXIF) of the images before the initial upload." The reason why this recommendation is given is that the Google Maps quota may become exceeded easily if many users search and use it get geolocation for already uploaded images. To avoid this it would help if more people would start to define geolocation before uploading the images. How to do that d…

A private image turns out public if and when shared on a public group. An example If I share a private image on a public # NEW # group like this: https://www.ipernity.com/doc/serola/48401028/in/group/278937 Then the image becomes also accessible to all via it's direct URL address: www.ipernity.com/doc/serola/48401028 For me the image Authorizations, license says " Visible by: Me only ", but anyone can still open the image at that address and sees " Visible by: Certain…

You may have used to get spell check on your browser. For some reason it does not seem to work on ipernity blog article editor. To enable spell check, click the 'Source' button on blog text editor toolbar before you publish the article. Do not mind about HTML code tags. Click 'Source' again after you have corrected the misspelled words underlined with red. And if you for some reason don't already have spell check on your browser yet, then go to browser settings to get one. On…

Microsoft is planning to include the controversial NewsGuard on its new Edge browser. Where the world is going? I have noticed Google has started to do something similar, and warning users about insecure actions, like writing this on non secured web page (http). And before someone comments anything on that, please remember: Ipernity login and subscriptions use and have always used secured connection (https). So, if someone hacks me while submitting this blog article, that is no problem. I was…

Make sure you see especially the last three: Edit in 16-bit, correct the horizon, and have a break before you publish! GIMP users probably need to update to latest 2.10 version to get their hands on 16-bit mode under 'Image > Precision' menu. That is definitely useful advice for me, because I have used to edit JPEG only, and have suffered because of banding a lot.

Because some find the z.gif annoying, I discovered a way to get rid of it on 'See all sizes' section. I added few lines on my Ipernity Dark style 2018 v1.0 . When using that dark style, one can right click on the image to open and save image. In order to use that dark skin, one of course need a browser cabable to run Stylish extension (e.g. Chrome, Firefox), and then install the mentioned dark style. And if someone finds this as "hacking", indeed it is. But keep in mind the "old" over…

Every now and then I check through the YouTube recommendations. Today I discovered Elizabeth Kenny introducing the baroque theorbo.

There are some interesting observations on this video article, like people not necessarily realizing how wide angle close up shot distorts the perspective, and how a "professional photographer" may see things differently than less experienced ones.

Lately I have given a great deal of time and thought for what is commonly called as "street photography". It is more or less a genre of taking images of people one does not know. Usually it is about images of people in urbain area, but it can be any human figure seen anywhere. Please have a look at this Jamie Windsor's video 'Why you SHOULDN'T do STREET PHOTOGRAPHY' and give it a thought. So far street photography that includes human figures have never been my genre, and I guess it…

½ liters of water ½ tablespoon of salt (1 teaspoon of syrup) 1 bag of dry yeast (or half bag can be enough) 7 dl of rye flour 2dl of wheat flour The video is in Finnish/Swedish and made rather entertaining, but watch it for useful tips! Some experiment is maybe needed to find your own way ;-) Mix yeast, salt and (syrup) into water. Add the flour and stir well! Let the dough rise several hours, or even over night. Use rolling pin and plenty of flour to make 8 mm thin flat cake.…

For the inspiration of any sort... Hydro-Fold by ECAL/Christophe Guberan from ECAL on Vimeo .

Useful to know ... =)

Enjoy! =)

Music by Pekka Streng & Tasavallan Presidentti (1970) "Back To The Stream To the beginning of my time My face keeps turning into countless new ones My color changes, my race changes when I float back I reach the past time characters Back to the stream, to childhoodtime I will be born and I will die I may live the elderhood again I'm an indianwoman or a baby child The centuties keep turning, everything is transforming Back to the stream... the dark bird of the night arises on it's…

Ipernity supports only UTF-8 characters, and this is why we don't have the basic unicode emojis familiar today in our use. So, only way to get them is cumbersome "manual" way. First you will need a set of emoji pictures to work with: Then you have to crop, resize and save a single tiny image for every emoji you wish to use. For example like this: Then you just need to copy the HTML/BBCode of the emoji you wish to use from your album and paste it a…

If you are using GIMP photo editor, you may want to test G'MIC plugin . I am not sure what it is good for yet, except for example giving multiple artistic and film replication effects, but you may see some experiments on my photos from now on. Here's a short how-to-install tutorial for Windows and some examples.

... with English subtitles =D