While in London this week, I had a very stark reminder of some very old, but wise, advice about shooting with SLR cameras, digital or otherwise. The advice I’ve heard from way back in the days of shooting with a film SLR was to always keep one hand on the camera. As sturdy as they are, straps break, or just come loose. When it happens, you’ll be glad you had a hand on the camera.

As it turns out, my wife was kind enough to let me borrow her Nikon D5100. In the midst of trying to take advantage of the little free time I had while in London, I had to catch the Underground over to the Tower Bridge. With the camera around my neck, and a crowd of people heading to the entrance, I let go in order to fumble around for my pass. Of course, this was the moment that one of the camera straps came loose. Luckily I felt it coming loose with enough time to stick out my elbow, and lessen the fall. Instead of falling lens first, and fast, it fell slowly and landed on the bottom of the camera body. In the end, it was just a bit of a bump, no damage done. Obviously, this was a huge relief to me, as well as the young lady walking opposite me, who’s gasp and horrified facial expression could not be missed as this was happening.

Sometimes it’s easy to get focused on getting the perfect shot. I often worry about taking photos in a strange and busy place like London, because you have to keep your wits about you, and pay attention to the immediate environment, and not focus too much on what’s in the lens finder. While doing all of that though, take the occasional peek at the straps, and a hand on the camera body, too, ok? Let my scare be a reminder for you. If I hadn’t gotten a lucky bounce of the elbow, the only photos of the Tower Bridge I would have gotten would have been with my iPhone. And, I’d be buying my wife a new camera.

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That’s great, except for one thing. I really hate trying to type on any of these gadgets. Oh it’s easy enough for a quick text message, or short email, but longer emails to friends, coworkers, or blog posts are just difficult for me. So those things tend to get put off until I’m sitting in my office with my desk and a full keyboard to work with. One of the things I’ve since realized though, is that habit of putting those things off, has led to me not blogging nearly as much, and not keeping in touch the way I want to. I see something on my iPad that sparks an idea for a blog post, I put it off, telling myself I’ll write about it when I am next on my laptop, and then I forget what I was going to write about. Sound familiar?

In an effort to try and get out of this rut, I went out and picked up an Apple bluetooth keyboard to use with my iPad. At least this way, when I’m just using the iPad because it’s easier, if I want to write something more significant, I can pull out a small, lightweight keyboard instead of struggling with the native keyboard to iOS. I’ve already seen myself using it here and there when sitting around the house, and I used it in a hotel right after purchasing it. The big test may come this upcoming week, to see if I can pull it out at an airport, or even on an airplane, and actually get something done more than flipping through Flipboard and Facebook. We’ll see if that become my new normal.

Anyone else out there struggling with the ease of carrying around a tablet, with the difficulty of typing anything on them as much as I do? Any suggestions on how to deal with it?

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That doesn’t seem like a whole lot, especially given the higher price when compared to the old Pro accounts, which gave you unlimited storage. (I’ve yet been able to determine whether the new free accounts have the same limits to the number of sets/collections that the old free accounts had, if anyone from Yahoo! wants to comment and let me know, I’d appreciate it!) The small advantages being given for No-Ads accounts make me wonder. There’s also a Doublr account, which offers you 2TB of storage for almost $500 per year, which is straight out of the question for an amateur like me. So are they trying to encourage Pro users to pay the extra, or to actually downgrade to see advertising again? It almost seems that way, doesn’t it?

Obviously, I don’t believe a service like Yahoo! is going to simply decide one day that they should really be offering more free services, and encourage paying customers to move to free accounts, just because. They have a reason, and I truly believe the reason for this is that they either make more money from advertising than they do from the Pro accounts, or they want to leverage Flickr user’s information across their entire network, and strengthen the targeted advertising they can sell, much in the way Google already does, and continues to push by forcing Plus on all of their users across all of their tools. More on that some other time.

Given where they hired their new CEO from, I would not be surprised that this is the strategy here. Yahoo! knows that Flickr Pro account holders have gotten used to not seeing ads, and using stats, so they are still offering it, but they are making it harder to justify continuing to pay for the ad-free account, by raising the price, and limiting the advantages. That tells me they want us to see ads, not to pay for the service. How that sort of marketing plan affects the idea of using web services going forward will remain to be seen, but it’s become clear that the real money is in information gathering and targeted advertising, not in offering a paid service. We can see this playing out on social networks already, it will be interesting to see how it evolves going forward.

Update 5/23/2013: Apparently the FAQ has been updated and the Pro accounts will remain the same so long as they are recurring payments. You won’t be able to get a new Pro account, but you can keep the one you already have.

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