A couple of months ago, I entered a number of images into a photography competition associated with the 2011 Illuminate Yaletown festival held around Vancouver’s inner-city Yaletown suburb.

Coinciding with the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics 1 year anniversary celebrations, the colourful, vibrant event consisted of 18 locations featuring an array of light art installations and interactive displays. A selection of these locations were designated as competition subjects which entrants were required to photograph as creatively as possible.

From the few images I submitted, I’m proud to say my photo (above) of Nathan Whitford & Konstantinos Mavromichalis’ “Data Queue” was selected as one of this year’s winning entries.

Yay!

For more images from the 2011 Illuminate Yaletown festival, check out my blog entry from the event here.

Until this morning, I’m somewhat ashamed to say, I didn’t really know what Flickr “Explore” was.

I’ve since learned that “Explore” is Flickr’s daily collection of the best 500 shots submitted by the site’s estimated 32+ million active members judged by an “interestingness” algorithm which draws on a combination of factors such as WHO views, WHO comments and WHO favourites a photo. Here I was thinking it was simply based on how many favourites and comments your images receive, but it seems it’s more important that you have influential people looking at, and liking your shots. Interesting.

Anyway, for whatever reason, the right people seemed to be paying attention to the above photo after I released it as the Day 20 candidate for my year-long photography project. It’s a 2 second exposure of the underground Skytrain tunnel on Vancouver’s “Canada Line” that, in all honesty, was just a nicely executed fluke. As of right now (typing this out), my shot is at #80 of 500 on the Explore list for January 21, 2011, thanks to some 1,100 views, 38 comments and 78 favourites.

You can view my full collection of “project365″ images on my personal blog masey.com.au, and on Flickr.

Lastly, if you’re keen on checking out Flickr’s best of the best “Explore” photos for yourself each day, I highly recommend the site FLUIDR. It’s awesome!

Have you ever come across a blog or photography tutorial that showcases stunning artificially lit shots that are explained in a caption following the image, usually using a volley of technical terms and lighting types and brands positioned at angles and distances that are hard to picture in your mind?

Well this has happened to me countless times this week alone. So I went looking for a solution… and blow me down if I didn’t find EXACTLY what I was looking for. Now I don’t do a lot of shooting of this type myself… yet. But I hope to get more into it in the coming years and you can be sure that to help you all out in visualising the shots that I create, I will use something like “Sylights”.

Sylights allows you to create stylish lighting diagrams online using an intuitive interface that makes it really easy to create accurate and simple diagrams in no time. All the tools are at your fingertips to produce helpful diagrams which you can add captions and descriptions to, and then save and share with your friends and peers as well as the Sylights community.

To make your Sylights experience worthwhile, you will need to sign up for a free account, but thereafter the sky’s the limit.

No excuses anymore photogs. Make it easy for your devoted army of followers/fans, and give Sylights a go.

URL: www.sylights.com

K. Simple one this one. If you need to check out the fonts installed on any computer you are using without the use of any locally installed software, check out wordmark.it. It’s the perfect online solution and seems to do exactly what it purports.

Simply rock on up to http://www.wordmark.it/ and hi the “load fonts” button. In no time you’ll have a visual display of all the fonts installed on the machine you are on. If you want to see a particular word displayed, just type it into the central text box at the top of the page. Also available are controls for switching between positive and negative displays, and also to increase and decrease the display type size.

Simple. Clean. Perfect.

URL: http://www.wordmark.it/

It looks like 2011 is set to become a big year for me photographically. Yes, I have made the commitment to conduct a photo-a-day project throughout the entire year, funnily enough called project365.

The idea is that it will serve as a self-development exercise which will hopefully render me a better, more rounded photographer at the end of it all.

I’ve just released the first image (January 1st, shown above) and published an entry over on my personal blog detailing my motivations for taking on the project, and also explaining how you can easily keep an eye on my progress.

Who knows, if it all goes well and I remain disciplined enough, there may be a pretty slick coffee table book at the end of it all.