User:Jim.henderson/Photo lightning
I'm Jim Henderson, Wikiphotographer. Originally just a word editor and I had two hobbies, bicycling and Wikipedia. One outdoors, one in. Early in 2007 a relative was throwing away her old, obsolete, broken digital camera. I took it and partly repaired it. Wow, digicams are easy to use. Oh, all right a really good picture is a work of art, thus difficult no matter what the equipment. But any fool with a little digital camera can snap a somewhat acceptable picture.
So, who wants pictures? Wikipedia, obviously. Most articles have no illustration. Pictures of what? People are a good topic, especially famous people who haven't released a Public Domain picture. But, meeting those people is probably difficult. They move around, and if famous, must protect themselves from fans and other common folks.
So, what's easier? Bridges. They just stand and wait for me. No appointment necessary. And anyway I've always been a fan of infrastructure. And buildings. Beautiful thing about buildings is, many thousands in the metro area have an article or at least a mention. They are mentioned, in part, because some government agency or architectural association or other group outside the Wikimedia establishment puts them on a list of notable things.
Except in Manhattan, articled buildings are mostly a big fraction of a mile apart, up to a few miles. Walking photographers have already got to the majority in closely packed Manhattan, but all I have to do is pedal across any bridge and chances are, I'm suddenly the best Wikiphotographer in town. So, now I don't bike just for fun. Now when I'm out on a beautiful day, I'm on a mission! Serious stuff.
Meanwhile I've been learning a little about what I'm photographing. That is, architecture. A fellow editor requested a picture of a spandrel. So, what's a spandrel? Another editor chimed in with, well, you know Jim's a biker, so spandrels are those tight black pants they all wear. No, I wear baggy shorts with plenty of pockets, but anyway I looked it up and realized, the previous year I had snapped a splendid spandrel by the Harlem River. So, now that picture illustrates the article that explains what spandrels are.
So, coming home in my baggy shorts, I copy the pictures to the computer and process them. First the selection. Usually I have several of the target and sometimes don't like any but must choose the least bad. Then the location. Use Google Earth the find where I was standing. Coordinates into the file. Then fire up GIMP to edit. Adjust the tilt. Crop away the boring parts. Adjust the brightness and contrast.
Finally I upload the pictures. Usually the locations are a little off, and sometimes the descriptions, categories and other details are. So, I must do many corrections after the upload. Here's some slides of the way I adjust the locations. Same method when a picture has no location. That's when I do detective work, figure where the camera was, or the easel or whatever. Pretty often I see pictures from a previous century, and nail down their location.
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Slide 7
Commons has millions of pictures. Thousands are uploaded every day that no article will ever use because they aren't well categorized, located and described. So, I sometimes patrol New York and New Jersey categories. Can't do much about pictures that are completely uncategorized, but if they have rough cats I can find them and document them far enough to make them findable. I trickle them down to year, neighborhood, type of building, category of person, whatever. And tag them with the geocoordinates. Sometimes a location can't be done because it doesn't really exist because a painter freely adapted different landscape elements. Sometimes I'm too ignorant about architectural or commercial history to pick up on the clues. But it's fun, for a fan of local history.
| NW | N | NE |
| W | 0 | E |
| SW | S | SE |
| 25 | 26 | 39 |
| 37 | 38 | 57 |
| 55 | 56 | -- |
| -- | -- | -- |
| -- | 0 | -- |
| -- | -- | -- |