zastica — a sometimes blog about photography, programming, web design, & usability

I recently went on a little vacation with my girlfriend up north to Orcas Island. The first night and morning we were there, a huge storm blew in. The interior bay of Orcas is big enough to be able to create its own weather patterns. By the time weather gets to Eastsound, it can be much worse than it would have been on the exterior of the island.

This photo was taken on the morning of the big storm, looking out from Eastsound to the big bay. The weather was still a little rough at this time.

This one is on the road up Mt. Constitution, early in the morning. It was a little foggy, so there were sun breaks through the fog and clouds.

Prints are available at $10 for 8×10, or $20 for 11×14. Email Me to learn more or order.

Hosting and serving images or photography, and doing it well, is one of the ‘hard’ problems of web development. Most things like serving text content is trivial, but images are another story. To do it well, you have to resize the image, make sure it’s viewable on the web, store lots of data, and deal with the consequences of tranferring large amounts of data from your server to the user’s browser / computer. I was talking with Mark Atwood, and he suggested using Flickr to host my photography.

Flickr, as you probably already know, is the most popular social photography site, and they make it incredibly easy to post and share photos. Getting data from one site to another can be a pain, but fortunately, Flickr provides an API. All I really wanted to do was create a div with a specific id, and have my site grab all the photos from Flickr and display them. I wanted it to look like this:

<div id="photoset-72157622891400543" class="flickr-photoset"></div>

To do this, all I really had to do was make an ajax call to my server-side Flickr app, and then stick the photos in the div. Then, I used jQuery UI’s dialog box to popup a bigger photo when you click on it.

Check out this example of photos from my latest vacation to the Oregon Coast: