Sorry, didn’t mean to disappear like that, I was hit by a virus and today is the first day I’ve felt like myself in more than a week.

So, what’s been happening? Well, I bought a new camera with the last of my holiday money and I’m absolutely loving it. It’s a Sony Cybershot DSC-H3 and it’s so much better than my little Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01. When I was in Australia I completely hit the limitations of the Panasonic and was finding it frustrating that I often couldn’t get the shots I wanted because I didn’t have enough zoom.

I’ve also realised that I take a lot of indoor shots and close-ups and while the Panasonic is OK on macro, it sucks in poor light. That’s not to say that the Panasonic is a bad camera: if you want to photograph groups of people outdoors then it’s a great choice. It’s light and small enough to easily carry in a pocket and has a proper wide angle lens, which is unusual in a compact digital of that size and you can even use it underwater if you have a special case for it. I think it’s a nifty little compact; it’s just not a good fit for the kind of photography that I do.

The Sony has 10x zoom compared to the 3.6x of the Panasonic and a noticeably better macro setting. The lens feels like a higher quality to me and I can see the difference in the photos I’m taking. It’s larger and heavier than the Panasonic but still light enough to carry around with me, which is hugely important. I looked at a couple of larger cameras with even better zooms but realised that I would end up leaving them at home half the time. There’s an old photography saying that ‘the best camera is the one you have with you’ and it’s so true.

I don’t have a card for the new camera yet so I’m relying on the internal memory and it can only take 14 images before it’s full. Usually I take as many photos as I want and then decide which ones I like once they’re on my computer screen. I generally only junk images directly from the camera if they’re obviously blurry or bad. But when I went out for a walk today I had to delete quite a few decent photos so that I could take better ones. In a way it was quite freeing because I was having to look at each image and make a conscious positive decision to keep it. When you can only take 14 images, each image has to really work to earn its keep! I can see how this could be an interestingly disciplined way to take photos but I’m still looking forward to my memory card arriving.

OK, that’s enough yakking about the new camera, let’s see what it can actually do…

Kirsty Hall: Sunlit Puddle, Bristol, April 2008

Kirsty Hall: A Watery Window, Bristol, April 2008

Kirsty Hall: Manhole cover, Bristol, April 2008

Michelle wrote in the comments on the Alt Images post:

Very informative post, Kirsty. One question: is there a place to learn how to create alt tags? The article is clear about what they are, but not how to make them. For those of us who are coding-challenged (or coding-averse, more accurately!), this would be vitally valuable information! Thanks.

No problem, Michelle, I’ll have a go at explaining it.

I’ll use this image as an example:

Kirsty Hall - art, photograph of Broken Cup Handle With Shadows

It’s actually pretty simple and you don’t need to be scared of it. OK, if you look at the code on your linked image, you’ll see something like this:

initial code here=”tt-flickr” href=”big long string of code”> img class=”tt-flickr” src=”a different bit long string of code”
width=”500″ height=”305″ alt=”Broken Handle 01″ /> closing code here

Please note, I’ve replaced the actual code with the helpful words ‘big long string of code’ and ‘initial code’ and ‘closing code’, so that we can see the code instead of just getting the picture again (working out which bits to change took me quite a while, since I’m pretty code impaired myself!) The code may also be in a slightly different order depending on how you’ve linked the photo. However, the only bit you’re interested in is the bit that says, alt=”whatever” /> and that will always appear somewhere towards the end.

In this case it originally said alt=”Broken Handle 01″ />, which was just the title of the image in Flickr. Now Broken Handle 01 isn’t very informative, it doesn’t give you my name or much about the image, so I changed it to: alt=”Kirsty Hall - Photograph of Broken Cup Handle With Shadows” />

Basically, whatever you put inside the two sets of quote marks between the = sign and the /> code will be what Google and the other search engines read as the alternative text for the photo.

If any of you are more technically minded than me and are smacking yourself on the forehead and yelling ‘dammit, that’s completely wrong’, then please do get in touch and I’ll change it but I’m 99% sure that this is right.

Making that text searchable and relevant is how your work winds up in Google Images so, you should be adding your name and keywords that are appropriate to that particular work, i.e. ‘oil painting’, ‘landscape’, ’sculpture made from pins’, etc. Apparently using keywords in alt tags can boost your general Google results too, although I’m not too sure how (magic Google dust sprinkled by the Google fairies maybe?)

Don’t restrict yourself to using alt text just as a promotional technique though. You should also make sure that your text is clear and descriptive to make your site or blog more accessible to disabled internet users. Text browsers can’t detect images but can detect alt tags and will translate them into spoken text for visually impaired web users. People in countries with poor web access may also have their browsers set to text only and they’ll see little written blocks of text instead of your images. Bear this in mind when you’re writing your tags. This article has more details on the level of helpful descriptiveness you should be aiming at.

It’s a shame that Flickr seems to turn the photo title into the alt text since I can’t quite bring myself to label all my Flickr photos with my name (I think it would look way too pushy, weird and tacky). Manually changing the alt text when I post images over here seems to be the only solution right now but I will do a bit of research over on Flickr to see if there’s some wonderful way to add hidden alt text to the images without putting it in the titles.

However, if you’re uploading images directly into your Wordpress site, rather than linking from Flickr, then you can set your alt text very easily. Simply go to the section where you upload images and type the description you want in the box that says ‘Title’. I imagine that other blogging software probably has similar options but fortunately changing the code isn’t too complicated - just make sure you don’t accidentally erase those all important little quote marks.

I hope this makes things a little clearer, Michelle. Oh, and if it makes you feel any better about the subject, I’ve just this minute realised that I have 235 envelope images to change over at The Diary Project. Someone shoot me now!

EDIT: on the advise of Gyrus, I’ve changed the term ‘alt tag’ to ‘alt text’ as the later is apparently less confusing and more accurate.

Gyrus also points out the following:

Sometimes you might not get the alt text come up when you hover the mouse over an image (it doesn’t come up on Firefox, for instance). Properly, the alt attribute value is “alternative” text, i.e. to use if you can’t see the image (either it’s a text browser, images are turned off, or it’s a speech browser reading the text out). That little “tooltip” that pops up, if it’s there at all, is technically supposed to come from a “title” attribute on the img tag. The title is optional, though. Just thought I’d mention this in case anyone gets confused on Firefox with the alt text not popping up when you mouse over it.

Kirsty Hall: Valle Crucis Abbey, North Wales

Ooh, nifty. My lovely web designer, Steve, has added a little Flickr plugin to Wordpress. It puts your Flickr Photosteam directly underneath the editing text box in Wordpress and to add an image to a post you just click on the photo of your choice. I can’t believe how quick and easy it was. Let’s just hope it actually works when I hit publish!

Isn’t it funny, before today I hadn’t thought that going into Flickr, picking up and resizing an image took too long, but of course, now I do! You know, I remember the days when it took web pages five minutes to load and I was happy to wait in anticipation of what wonders would appear (why yes, I am old!) and now, I make tutting noises if a page takes more than 20 seconds. Sigh, the faster things get, the more impatient we all become…

The image is from Valle Crucis Abbey, which I visited on my recent long weekend in gorgeous North Wales - just click on the image if you want to see more of my pictures of this rather spectacular ruin.

The Guardian had a small piece about photographer Idris Khan today. I can’t find that particular piece but here’s a long, more reflective article that they did on him last year. I hadn’t seen his work before but I think it’s wonderful. He scans and layers photographs to produce beautiful blurred, mysterious images that seem to relate as much to drawing as photography.

Idris Khan: every… page of the Holy Koran, 2004

This image is every page in the Koran scanned and layered. Khan grew up as a Muslim and apparently he made this work to reflect the importance that the Koran had in his childhood. It took him 2 months to make and he followed the correct procedure for handling the Koran whilst making it - I love the implied ritual of that. I think it’s an amazing piece, I particularly love the blackness in the centre of the image. Even though that’s obviously an artefact of the scanning process it makes me think of the mystic void at the heart of spirituality - the ineffable nature of the divine.

Here’s another piece called every… stave of Frederick Chopin’s Nocturnes for the piano.

Idris Khan: every… stave of Frederick Chopin’s Nocturnes for the piano, 2004

When I look at this piece, I get the sense of the number of times it’s been played. It seems to take the ephemeral experience of making or listening to music and fix it in time.

beige, originally uploaded by Maditi.

Maditi takes absolutely exquisite polaroids and medium format photos.

She also has a great blog over at Maditi Likes - she describes it as “a collection of things I like, no words - only visuals” and it’s full of inspiring images by lots of different artists and makers. Well worth a look.

Heather Smith Jones of Drawing On The Walls is doing a daily Polaroid Project during the month of August.

It’s nice to see so many other artists working with the idea of a daily project. If you know of any others, let me know and I’ll link to them.