Flick(e)ring through the Flickr

What a great gadget or rather another window to the world! I have gone for the sentimental journey and have visited the most beautiful place on Earth I have ever seen - the Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island. One of the pictures on Flickr is named "Beyond beautiful" and how true this name is. The gardens were created in the early 1900's on the site of an exhausted limestone quarry which gave this place its unique features (rocks, ridges, etc.), wonderfully and skillfully used to create the beautiful display of all possible miracles of nature. My attempt to re-create it in my own garden failed totally. There is a little taste here of this paradise (photographs from Flickr). If you ever are somewhere near Vancouver it is a MUST to visit. Unfortunately the best pictures of it are not available for blogger publishing under Commons licencing, but they are available online on Flickr. Highly recommended for garden lovers.

From Vancouver I travelled (or flickerred) through half of the globe to come to the second place I would like to share with other bloggers. This time it is going to be something calmer in colours and more interesting for librarians, I hope. Most probably not very many people from Cambridge have seen this before - a new(ish) garden library (something like a garden city) of Warsaw University. It is a living (!) proof that libraries don't have to be dusty, they can be green, in- and outside. This particular one in the centre of the city, built mostly of glass and copper, is covered (yes, covered - on the sides and top of it) by a huge garden. For the readers it's not just a library (spacy, full of light) but also quite a big commercial and recreational complex. For tourists - a wonderful place to visit, to rest, to have a bird's eye view of the town (and a glimpse of the library inside through the glass roof), and then perhaps to twitter about it.

Finding pictures on the site was a great pleasure (I am afraid I have and still do spend lots of time looking at all sorts of beautiful things there, more than I bargained for; addiction?). Not being able to download some of them - disappointment, but trying to sign them (title, photographer's id) - a nightmare. Finally I used the TEXT tool in the Photoscape and/or in Adobe Photoshop and somehow managed to get the right position of the text under the photo before adding it to my blog text. Trying to sign the pictures in blog text itself and to keep these signatures in the correct positions was not possible. At least not for me. What am I doing wrong? Or is it the only way to do it - by saving the picture together with its description on the added canvas?

No matter how frustrating photoshop was, flickr and flick(e)ring was a great pleasure and fun. I will be going back there a.o.a.p. (as often as possible).