There has been somewhat of a perfect storm over the last month with the events that have transpired in my life. I think it all began with my birthday, continued on through a fateful night at the W, a trip to California, and then a return to SLC with friendships degraded and upgraded all at the same time. I feel like all these events have methodically transformed my life for the better. Becoming less dependent on alcohol as entertainment has been a large aspect, and dialing in the signal to noise ratio with friendships has been another.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tired of the Salt Lake scene. Worse yet, I feel that I scooped it up the last 8 months and shoveled it into my mouth without thinking twice whether or not it was healthy. In essence, I think I OD’d on Salt Lake. Salt Lake is an interesting place, small enough where everyone knows your business, large enough to get into trouble. For the first time ever, I’m starting to wonder if Salt Lake is right for me… or even if I’m right for Salt Lake. Pair these thoughts with snippets of an opportunity in another state, and you once again have a classic Chris scenario.
One often overlooked aftershock of moving to Idaho was an ability to drop ties on a dime. The friendships I built over the course of growing up were left behind with little thread to hold them together. Within 6 months of moving I was transfered to another jr high and my first Idaho friends were again dissolved into mere memories. Two days after high school ended, I again, up and decided to move to a completely foreign state/city. With the exception of 3 Idaho friends, I never talked to high school again. Heck, I never even picked up my senior year book… yay for being detached! Post-College was a return back to Idaho, where I had 3 friends that would ultimately become my longest known friends. Removing myself from Arizona would also signal another dissolution of relationships. Without the advent of Myspace I probably wouldn’t keep in touch with the two I keep in touch with. After a year stint in Idaho it was time to pick up my shit and move again. Salt Lake seemed to be the perfect place, move in with brother, smaller than phoenix, bigger than pocatello. All in all I feel like I have lived five completely unique lives. My California life, my Idaho life, my Arizona life, my second Idaho life, and my Salt Lake life.
Each experience has represented an entirely different social circle, five independent islands with massive bodies of water between them and nothing more than this raggedy old puddle jumper to fly between them. The questions I have for myself are whether or not I see another island in the distance, and whether or not my trusty, tattered, plane will be able to get me there. Will passengers fall out just as they always have? Have I learned enough to start building bridges in lieu of my trusty plane? Is it worth the time and effort? Right now I’m only seeing a few volunteers, and I honestly don’t know if I would have it any other way.
Somehow I’ve been branded the family photographer. As such, I tend to upload a lot of photos, and I tend process a lot of photos. Aperture + Flickr is usually my weapon of choice, however this weekend I decided a slightly different approach.
The goal was to make an online viewable Ken Burns slideshow by the two available methods. Aperture + iMovie + YouTube VS Aperture + Photatobug. I won’t cover the utilization of Aperture, that’s an entirely different topic, but this is more about the idiosyncrasies of the hosted site and on making the slideshow.
Here’s the breakdown…
Aperture + iMovie + YouTube
Pros
Photo processing done on local machine, fast
Slightly faster overall than the other solution given upload times and processing
More control over individual slide duration
Cons
YouTube compression, you might as well not color correct your photos
Quality, again horrible considering the competition
If you’re not used to iMovie, creating the movie can be daunting.
Rendering time
Aperture + Photatobug
Pros
GREAT quality photos
GREAT Slideshow Engine
Clean Simple Interface
Easy to register and login, probably the most painless I’ve ever seen.
Seems to keep ICC information intact even on previewed photos
Con
Slow uploads… 42 images were painful to upload… at only 6MP too.
The clean interface is marred by annoying usability issues…
Click a button with no feedback on what is happening, or buttons simply don’t work after other actions have been taken
Photos uploaded had no rhyme or reason for organization (NOT by file name, NOT by date taken), had to re-organize to get correct order (by filename AND date taken).
Everywhere says “preview slideshow” which makes you believe you have to hit a save button somewhere… no “view slideshow” and not from main screen
Can’t click on your slideshow from the account page, even though you can click on normal photos (to preview).
Seems to be geared towards sharing slideshows and not photos, no clearly marked way of how to share a single photo that is NOT the original size.
Photatobug’s Ken Burns apparently hates portrait photos
Costs money for more advanced features (Your own music, more storage, more themes).
In the end, my ultimate solution would be for photatobug to sell their slideshow engine to Flickr. This would not only create perfect slideshows, but it would eliminate my little nit picky difficulties that I currently have using the existing interface.
YouTube really isn’t even an option for quality sharing, it’s more of a necessary evil to get the photos you want and the music you want all in the same place without paying for more or having duplicates of your photos on a myriad of different photo sharing sites.
I drove up to Idaho tonight to go day camping with the parents this weekend. Driving up during the sunset always proves to be a great photo opportunity. I will be adding some more features to the new layout, but it does already achieve some of the design goals I had when I started this site.
Everything was uploaded, color corrected, and templated out in just under a half hour… so there is still much work to be done. I look forward to exploring white-esque on black-esque with this new layout.
An aggregator of gMail, new stories, recipes, day in historys, and “interesting photos of the day” which in the words of gentoo, “this shit fucks me up.” in relation to this photo and story…
I guess they just recently met in person and finally took shots together.
