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Ever think to yourself, you know, I really like the photos on Hudin, but I could do without the articles? Is there some way that I could just have access to new photos when they're posted and not have to bother with actually reading anything?       Well friends, I now give the option to just have a feed of the photos I post, because after all, they are something like 95% of my traffic it seems. You can just subscribe to this feed or you can click on the RSS icon anywhere in the photos section.       It's clean. It's fast. I give it to you. Soon there will be a dump of quite a few more photos in there, so stay tuned to all that's good from Hudin.

Yeah, I was out there with all of the rest of them; the observers. We all had our cameras and we were ready for the action that was San Francisco Pillow Fight 2008. It's in its third year for the city and has grown to a pretty sizable event. I slacked out last year and didn't go, but managed to walk the five minutes from where I was working to see it this time around.       It's a fun thing and a great way to work through any Valentine's Day angst before going out for the evening. People enjoy themselves and they bash the crap out of each other. But, by and large the one thing that I saw was the ring of people that were taking photos on cameras or cellphones (ergh...), and people filming the thing. It seemed like there were more spectators than there were participants. Number One Fan and I were planning to participate, but couldn't find any pillows that we felt like destroying, because destroyed your pillow will become. I was shocked as to how many pillows blew up and then of course with the explosions, came the feather down which was nasty to say the least. It ultimately didn't matter as everyone was really enjoying it despite the inability to breath or see.       But still, there's the issue of all of us just watching, which admittedly cuts down on the potential fun that everyone could be having. Scoring this point home so eloquently was a fellow walking around in a purple outfit saying, "Bloggers! This is not a spectator event! Get a pillow and get in there!" He could not have been more right, especially as I'm proving now by racing home to put up a 2008 Pillow Fight Gallery and write this article about it. And yes, I do see the irony in this. I'm a blogger and thusly I spread irony on my toast for breakfast.       In the end, I find the blogging aspect a fine endeavor, but there's a simple way to cut down on the amount of photographers and videographers like this guy and that's to have the fight an hour later. The light was pretty sketchy at 6, but with a huge aperture and 1600 ISO you can still get off good shots. But in just 30 minutes or so, it all goes to crap and you've got to use a flash, which just doesn't work well on fast moving, large crowds like this. Toss in all the feathers floating around and you get some really lousy shots which would hopefully equal more people fighting. Of course, without the voyeurs watching them, would you lose the participants as well? It's a funny society here these days.       Next year, if I go, I think I'll leave the camera at home and pillow-up early on. I'm just a littler terrified because there are folks who come fully masked up (I laughed when I first saw them until I couldn't breathe), padded out, and armed with some nasty, stanky pillows and even leather couch cushions, which I think is unfair. There are some rules to Pillow Fight, to which I would add a sixth: 'If you come to Pillow Fight, you have to fight."

Well, one of my goals for the recently passed year was actually met. I managed to get all of my trip photos online. This probably doesn't seem like much of a big deal, but when you're talking about sorting through, resizing, uploading, and adding witty commentary to 8,000 photos, it's quite a process. It the last four months to finally get it done in fact.       I was going to list all the galleries in chronological order in this post, but the minute I started with Spain, I shrugged this off. Instead, there are just a couple that I'd like to mention as being my favorites: Sarajevo, Belgrade, Šibenik, General Montenegro, La Sagrada Familia, and of course Barcelona.       In addition to these, the Dogs, Cats, Tourists, and Praving galleries have all ground a great deal in the process. While these don't have what I'd consider to be my most technically amazing shots, they are some of the more amusing, especially Tourists and Praving which I started taking great interest in, towards the end of the trip. Seeing too many churches and concrete beaches will do this to a person.       Anyways, hope those who enjoy will enjoy more and keep coming back for all the Hudin goodness that is this site as there will be plenty more photos to come in the near future. I just hope it doesn't take me a third of the year to get them up.

It's a fact that the vast majority of the information on the internet is written in English. Even a site that pulls together all this information like Global Voices still uses English as its main language. This is a shame. It's not a shame because it's using a single language, but that English has become so dominant on the web. It was somewhat inevitable as the vast majority of the components that drive it are in English. I mean, if you look at the code driving any page, you'll see all these English words in there. So, it's a given that to be able to set up sites, you'll need to be able to understand some degree of English.       I think it's this last point that really was excluding a great many people for a good long time. But now that there are so many packages you can use where you don't need to be a native English speaker to have a blog. Tossing up an installation of Wordpress or using a pre-fab system like Blogger or even Livejournal is possible by a great many more these days.       Unfortunately we still come back to the point that English has become so dominant in the world and if you're a native English speaker, you're bound to not know very many if any other languages. So, what do you do if you want to be informed about the rest of the world? Simple. You revert to the method of our ancestors and use pictures. Yes, it's primitive, but still quite effective. It's on this point that I'd like to point out a few blogs that are either wholly or partially photo-based and something that most native English speakers can follow. If not, fire up a little BabelFish and get a funky translation that might see you though.       Фотографоманство ('fotografomanstvo' in the Latin alphabet, which I think just means, 'photomanie') is a very compelling photographic journey by a girl living in Minsk, Belarus. The media is extremely controlled and the people there live under what amounts to an autocracy, so being able to see someone's daily life from the area is really interesting. The girl also has a very good eye and she was the winner of the Best of the Blogs.       A Best of Blogs winner for French, Cédric Kalonji is the life of Cédric in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Again, this is a nation without a free media, so his view from inside the country is quite interesting. Unfortunately for English speakers, we need to either dust off our crappy French skills or hit the Fish as most of it is in French.       Lastly, a friend named Timothée Rolin documents his life in Paris, France. Tim's site is almost completely photos and quite thorough about his life, so anyone can appreciate it and the partying that he seems to do non-stop when he isn't eating at La Fée Verte. If you're any kind of fan of The Real World or other crap reality TV shows, you'll probably get hooked.       Of course, there are a great many more blogs out there that people can follow. These are just some that I got turned on to which you may or may not know about and will hopefully enjoy.

I'm no expert at photography. I've only taken about 25,000 shots which sounds like a lot until you realize that most pros take millions--each year. In fact, I don't really think that you can even call yourself any kind of a professional until you've taken at least 100,000 and sold some of them. Naturally, there are those natural born talents who don't need all this practice, but they are far and few between those of us who do.       Even though I am still, for all purposes, a hobbiest when it comes to photography, I have developed a very discerning level for what I consider to be a good shot. This ultimately means nothing as photography is an art form and art by its very nature is completely subjective. So, a shot of someone's family where the heads are cut off and it's out of focus may be a masterpiece to them, while I think it's garbage. But, being this as it may, I realize that I like photos where what they've photographed seems like it is artificial because it's so good. When the scene is just hanging there and you can imagine what happened before and what will happen afterward, that, in my mind, is perfection. It doesn't even need to be technically perfect for me to find it a perfect shot, just so long as there is an emotion to it.       A good example of what I'm talking about is a shot that is below. It's from the San Francisco Chronicle's website and is part of an article about the wildfires happening in Malibu currently. Skip down to take a look at it if you haven't already. See what I mean? Those chairs sitting there and the still smoldering ashes in the background just make this a great shot for me. Sure, you could read all kinds of garbage art school stuff in to it like how it's a statement of this or that. But all that is secondary nonsense. The photo stands on its own and just happens in such a way that it almost seems fake because it's so real.       A good example I've seen recently of where a photographer goes too far and makes a work too artificial, was at the Open Studios in San Francisco. There was one photographer there who had photos of Burma, but these photos were ridiculous. While technically quite sound, they were so posed and so fake looking that they would have worked better as cologne ads, as opposed to a work of art for the home. Now, some people may be in to this, but for me, posed and staged photos are for the most part dull (portraits being an exception) and they feel so commercial that any hint of artistic depth is wiped clean away. But, this is ultimately just me two cents and that doesn't really buy that much these days now, does it?

It was the case in my most recent trip that the two midrange camera lenses we were using both started to freak out. One, which was a Canon 28-135mm EF series lens started have some auto focus problems. The other, a Canon 24-70 L series lens had its zoom ring completely crumple. This is never a good thing to have happen as these are the lenses you use all the time, but what made this worse was having it happen in the middle of a four month trip.       Thankfully, the 28-135 started to act a little better once we got in to cooler climates, but the 24-70 was pretty much hosed. I had to manually pull the damned thing in and out to get the right focal length. It was either that or run around with the 70-200 on all the time, which is a lovely lens, but really intimidating to people, because like the 24-70, it has a 2.8 aperture which means a lot of glass.       Upon getting back home, I sent both of them off for warranty work. The 28-135 was about 8 months old and the 24-70, a mere 2 months old when this happened. The result was that the 24-70 came back in two days after they got it. The 28-135 took two weeks! And the repairs done to the two were very similar. It turns out that the 28-135 had a similar problem, except without the busted up zoom ring.       It's at this point that I should mention that the 28-135 cost $400 and the 24-70 about $1,200. Hmm, curious that the more expensive lens got fixed faster. I mean, it's great how fast they fixed that one, but if they're dragging their feet on cheaper lens, that's ridiculous.       Canon really doesn't need to sell us on the fact that their more expensive lens are worth the money by slowing own repairs. You can feel and without any doubt, see the difference between the lower end and higher end lenses. I just think that they should either repair them all at the same time or offer crappier warranties on the cheaper lens to encourage people to buy the more costly ones.       Maybe I'm wrong and there was some reason that the cheaper lens took longer, but from where I'm sitting it looks mighty suspicious.

Okay, so I've made some changes to the site which have taken away from my normal writing time. This explains why I haven't been writing as much, or for the more critical out there, why my latest entries sucked. At any rate, there will be more to come as I have juicy bits from Serbia and Bosnia Herzegovina.       But, in getting all this together, I realized that the galleries were getting out of control and too lengthy. So, I integrated in the option for me to classify them in to larger sections, like Croatia or San Francisco. It's good stuff and a whole lot easier to manage, so I hope that everyone enjoys.

I just had an interesting experience in regards to selling stock photos. A major travel book publisher contacted me interested in purchasing some of my photos that I have of a specific area in San Francisco. They were very energetic and given that they were a well-established brand, I realized that they were serious about getting some photos. So, I quoted them a price of $500 a photo for full reproduction rights. This is below the standard rate which, based upon my publishing experience, is $750, $1,000, or more depending on what the subject is or who took the photos. Once I emailed them the rate, they flat-out refused. I wrote back telling them I was willing to reduce the price, since this is not something I rely on for a living. To this, they responded that they found photos they could use for free. For free! Now, why on earth would anyone do this? This is a group who will probably sell tens of thousands of copies of the book that they're going to use these in. Well, here's the answer to that: you get some name recognition and in an ever-widening sea of no-name amateurs, that's worth something to some people.       I don't mention the name of this publisher because from what I've heard from friends, they all do this and they can because everyone is a "professional photographer" these days. Obviously that's not really the case, but it is a fact that professional equipment has gotten so cheap that it's in the range of most people here ($2,000 gets you a good, basic setup.) And you see this in the fact that any event you go to, there are one of us goobers that has a fancy Canon or Nikon or Sony Digital SLR and is running around with this grandiose seriousness to get shots. It doesn't make any of our photos less good, but it does cheapen the worth of the photos of a place or event when there is much more supply than demand and the net result is that publishers can get images for free.       Toss in to this the fact that I know of a certain well-known magazine publisher who will download stock images from photo libraries like Getty Images and then not pay for them. Yes, they're most definitely supposed to pay and if they ever got caught, they'd be in a lot of trouble, but they're not worried about that, just their bottom line, which does not include a line item for the real cost of stock photography. Once again, they're not alone in this.       I have no idea as to the quality of the person's photos who gave them to this travel book publisher. They might have been worse, they might have been much better. I suppose that the lesson in all of this is that you're most likely not going to make a decent living as a stock photographer these days. If you get hired specifically for an event like a wedding, then it may be possible to earn the rent. Otherwise, think of it as a hobby first.

I just noticed that it must have been in the last batch of photos I put up where the number of photos has outpaced the number of articles. As of this article, I have 825 of these "nuggets". In Photos, I've got 831. Probably doesn't seem like a big deal to most, since we all know how many photos we take these day (I've got several thousand from just the last two years.) But, I've been writing since 2003 and only adding photos since about 2005.       I'm not really sure if this has any particular merit or proves any important math theorems, but it was rather inevitable given how much photography I do these days. Anywhere that I go, my Timbuk2 with a Lowepro and my 30D tucked safely inside go with me.

Yeah, things kinda look a little different right now. No, it's not goofed up, I'm just trying to accommodate having photos that are 600 pixels wide instead of 400. If you haven't ventured there yet, take a look, they's a bigger and I have to say, definitely better.       So, what's a web geek to do when you want a bigger image? Shift the whole site around of course. It's a bit of a work in progress and I might change things here and there because I'm not quite sold on it just yet. This would be about version 5.2 or something of the site which is now prominently displayed there now because you gotta know if I've effed something up and when it was better. The real deal will be when I get version six up and running and someday I really need to work more on that design. It will work a lot better with the bigger photos format which is admittedly shoehorned in there at present time. Still mighty big though!       Unfortunately because I don't really have time to deal with properly reformatting all the pictures that came before, I've done a very hacky, very Old Web thing and re-rendered photos that had already been rendered. So, anything that's a bit older does not look as good as it could. Someday or perhaps just as I find time, I'll work backwards and fix up all of the old stuff. It is pretty funny to look through it as I go back and see some of my old photos. Nice to see that at least one art form in my life is still making some progress.