Tag, you’re it.

I didn’t know what was meant by fourth file, fourth photo, so I chose to do Fourth Set, Fourth Photo in Flickr.

This is JenOne at Takashi’s. We had an unhealthy habit of going out to eat A LOT, sushi was obviously a common occurrence. Interestingly enough, we hung out for the first time in 10 months on Saturday.

Dear Mr. BlurryCam

I have a handful of professional photographer friends. One teaches at Weber, one shoots everything from random objects to local city events, one doesn’t shoot as much as she used to, but taught me a lot about the fundamentals of photography. These three have helped me the most in my pursuit of photographic success. All three are incredibly talented at what they do. I find myself constantly seeking advice from two of them nowadays as my basic skills have developed. Which lens would be the best value, what’s a good technique to shoot like …this…, when is a good time to shoot at this location, etc. etc.

The teacher (Barrett) will also take pictures with me from time to time when I need to do something at work. Last week we took to the roof to get some ideas about some sunset pictures. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky so it was more of a training, lighting and timing exercise than it was anything else. With that in mind we hauled my secondary tripod (craptastic) and took a couple of test shots. Barrett quickly noticed that I had my camera set to autofocus. What ensued was something about me being a pussy and how real photographers don’t use autofocus when doing landscape, something, something, something. He quickly switched it to manual and we set it for infinity focal distance due to the occasion and went on about our merry way.

Fast forward to last night…

My brother and future wife decided to have a co-bachelor/bachelorette part a week before their wedding. Suffice to say, it was an awesome time, with one little caveat. I didn’t really man the camera so I let everyone else take photos with it. Needless to say, Mr. BlurryCam showed up due to the previous setting from earlier in the week. All the pictures that were shot, turned out blurry.

Despite Mr. BlurryCam it was an awesome party and I found one of my favorite pictures of my brother in the set. His smile is infectious and I’m so excited for the life he is about to start…

63 Years Later

Against the Grain (Updated)

I used Vimeo instead of YouTube… much better quality. Also, my mom says it’s funeral music, but I was going for introspective folk music… oh well.

battle royale

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.