I’ve been a Flickr user for a few years, but over the past year or so I’ve barely given it more than a glance.  It’s not for the lack of a quality service – Flickr works very well for posting pictures online and allowing other people to see them and comment.  It’s due to Flickr not meeting my needs or wants for photo sharing anymore, through a lack of some features, the level of photography that it seems to draw, and the lack of my community of people with whom I engage.

Just to be clear, I’m not deleting the pictures I’ve already put there.  I don’t believe in removing content from the web that’s been publicly available.  That’s akin to throwing out public records – it’s a piece of history, and you never know when it might be needed.  I’m simply stating that I will no longer be paying for Flickr Pro, and won’t be posting any new pictures there.

The single biggest reason I’m leaving Flickr behind is the features, or lack thereof.  When I first started using Flickr, I uploaded every single image I had stored on my computer.  My thought process was that, at the time, I had no backup of my pictures, and putting them on Flickr would ensure that they were safe and resistant to any loss from crashes or failures on my computer.  As a result, I started deleting old pictures from my computer to make space.  I didn’t think it through though, because Flickr has no native support for exporting your data.  This in itself is a deal-breaker for me.  If I can’t get out my own pictures from a service in a more efficient way than downloading each picture one by one, I’m not going to support that service.  They’re my pictures, what right do they have to prevent me from getting them back?  I understand that Flickr isn’t meant to be a backup solution, but at the same time they should allow you to download your own pictures in a simple process.  They don’t, so I’m not giving them any more of my stuff.  They also don’t have very good Android support.  As an Android user, this is a pretty big obstacle.  Up until recently there wasn’t even an official Flickr app for Android.  I downloaded their app a couple of days ago, and tried to log in.  This is what I was met with:

I can’t log in, because their login page doesn’t exist. So much for putting pictures from my phone on Flickr.

I don’t take a lot of pictures, and when I do they’re mostly of things that are either informal and not very interesting, or they’re of personal events and things with friends & family.  In other words, they’re not exciting to people that don’t know me.  The trend on Flickr seems to be that it’s a place for professional or amateur photographers to share their work, or for companies to share imagery from their endeavours.  That’s not the kind of photography I do, so it’s not much benefit to me to post my pictures there.

That brings me to my other reason: the community.  My community hangs out on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.  I can post pictures easily to all of those places through either their respective photo sharing services or an integrated third party – or even through a link to my own site.  Flickr doesn’t really benefit me in any of those situations.

Currently I use Picasa as my primary photo manager.  It integrates beautifully with Picasa Web, Google’s competitor to Flickr, and that in turn integrates seamlessly with my phone.  Combine that with the recent features added through Google+, and anything Flickr may have had over Picasa before is pretty much gone for me.

So that’s my Flickr situation.  Time to move onto the next photo thing.

The Westboro Baptist Church picketed this morning at Meade High School.  As I discussed in a post the other day, they based today’s demonstration on claims that the school has a large number of homosexual students.  When they announced their intentions, a surge of counter protest movements fired up, and the result was impressive.

We got there around 6:30am and were already there was quite a crowd.  The police closed off the road where the protest was being held, and kept the WBC & counter protesters on either side of the road.  There were 5 or 6 people from Westboro Baptist Church:

Which was dwarfed by the crowd on the other side, which must have been at least 500 people.

There was plenty of press coverage, both of the counter protest:

And of the Westboro demonstrators.

While the signs held by demonstrators from Westboro Baptist Church were offensive and inflammatory on their own, the thing that perhaps made people the most infuriated was their dancing on the American flag, often smiling while doing so.

My mom made large signs which got quite a lot of attention, and I thought conveyed a great message of peace and tolerance,

But perhaps the license plate on the car next to ours described the entire situation best.

One thing’s for certain: as frustrating and bothersome as the WBC’s message may be, they managed to bring together a community in a peaceful way around a common cause of respect and affirmation of positive feelings toward people of all races, genders, creeds and sexual orientations – all of which were well represented this morning.

You can watch all my videos from the protest in the playlist on my YouTube channel.

This video was taken by John Frenaye of Eye on Annapolis:

This week, the Queen Elizabeth 2 visited Southampton, England for the last time ever.  The cruise liner is making its final voyage before coming to rest in Dubai, United Arab Emirates to live out the rest of her days as a floating hotel and museum.  You may have heard in the news that she ran aground on her way into Southampton, but sustained no damage.  She departed Southampton with fireworks and ceremony, a proper farewell for a ship of such notoriety.  The picture I chose for this week’s Photo Of The Week is of the QE2 as she heads out of Southampton, back out to sea on her way to Dubai.

I took this picture this morning from my room, which is why the picture quality leaves a little to be desired.  However, I wanted to seize the opportunity to get the shot, since they’re keeping the new name covered up until the ship is christened as the USTS Kennedy.  So, enjoy this “sneak preview” picture of Massachusetts Maritime Academy’s training ship with its new nametag.

If you’re a little confused as to why there’s a new name on the bow, take a look at this post.

This week’s Photo of the Week comes from Flickr user OneEighteen, a Houston ship pilot.  The photo is of a tanker in the Houston ship channel, the Sanko Blossom.  I thought it was a cool picture because of the sheer massive size of the ship, and the way that’s really emphasized by the angle from which the shot was taken.

I haven’t gotten any new photos this year around campus.  If you have any photos you’d like to submit for Photo of the Week, please e-mail me.  Thanks!

Anyway, this week’s picture is actually one I took last fall after being at the Academy for only a few weeks.  It’s probably one of my top three favorite photos that I’ve taken of the Enterprise so far.  I really like the way the sun hits the ship, making everything light up & glow.

I’ll try to continue this segment for the next few weeks until I go to boot camp, but since school will be out next Tuesday it’ll have to all be old material like this one.

While it’s not a photograph taken on the MMA campus or of a ship, it still has relevance to maritime activities.  My family has a summer place in Maine on the Sheepscot River, which is the body of water shown above at sunset.  In addition to the river being a large lobstering area, it also happens to be one of the heaviest concentrations of lighthouses in the United States – 4 or 5 of which are all within a few miles of each other!

One of the activities they had at Emory Rice day was the jousting platform.  My room mate (on the left) spent plenty of time on it, as he seemed to be the reigning champion.  In this round, he was battling our platoon leader, which made it even more entertaining!

Survival suits are an integral part of a survival plan after a maritime disaster. In conditions where an unprotected person might have mere minutes to survive, they can provide many hours of survival time, and even keep somebody alive indefinitely. Because they are so effective, we have extensive training in the proper donning and operating procedures associated with survival suits.

I certainly hope that I get to do this my senior year!

If you have a photograph that you’d like to submit for Photo of the Week, please contact me with either a link to the photo online, or let me know that you’d like to e-mail me one.  Thanks!

Nobska Light in the Fog: Lighthouses are a significant part of the maritime industry, as well as the Coast Guard. Since this one is so close to MMA, it seemed like a logical one to pick.

Sidenote: browse all the Photo of the Week entries.

Since I’m planning on going into the Coast Guard, I get pretty excited when I see Coast Guard vessels and aircraft around campus, and this was no exception.

This is a RoRo (Roll-On Roll-Off) vehicle carrier ship, passing the Mass Maritime campus transiting the Cape Cod Canal. Notice how, even from my elevated angle on the 04 deck, it towers over everything on campus, including the Bresnahan Building (the one with the glass front), with a height of more than 3 stories!

I took this photo while on board a similar vessel doing snorkel tours of various points of interest, including a sunken German freighter.

If you have a photo you’ve taken of something at or relating to MMA that you’d like me to post, please e-mail me to let me know.