goldengod

iPhone Ogling by Miss 604

Wow! I’ve only made it as far as lunchtime here at BarCamp Vancouver and so far this experience has floored me. I’ve gotta say, if you get the chance to attend a BarCamp event in your city: Do It!

So far, I’ve seen interesting presentations ona bunch of stuff, including two geo-location presentations. They’ve fired off a few photography-related neurons in the back of my brain. Here’s what I’ve ingested so far:

• The Future of a Geo-Enabled Web by Boris Mann of Bryght
• Geo-mapping Political Districts in BC by Darko Hrgovic of Agentic
• Mobile Media Creation by Igor of Handi Mobility

The afternoon is going to involve some iPhone hacking, a full hour of photography, and the future of Facebook apps. I have yet to give my presentation as part of the hour-long PhotoCamp, so I’m still nervous as all holy hell.

I’ve also shot some video of Kris Krug, which I may sling up on YouTube later. Depends on how embarrassing it is. Stay tuned!

Microsoft’s upcoming photo-browsing software Photosynth has been getting a lot of attention in the blog-o-tron lately. I’ve been interested, but skeptical. Photosynth looks gorgeous in screenshots. Unfortunately, things that look beautiful in screenshots are often brought down by poor user interfaces and slow performance.

Well, now we can find out. Microsoft’s Live Labs recently released a Photosynth tech demo. I’ve spent about 15 minutes hand-on with it and I’m impressed. The UI is simple and easy to use. The navigation is incredibly slick. Load times are less than I normally expect from Adobe’s LightRoom in Library mode.

I am suddenly a whole lot more excited about this project. If you’re not familiar with what it is, the best thing you can do is to hit up the link above and play with the demo. Microsoft has even gone so far as to make it all Firefox compatible! If you’re plugin-impaired or on an older PC, here’s a quick summary from the site:

With Photosynth you can:

• Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
• Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size.
• See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
• Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing.
• Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend.

In my mind, this is a stepping stone for all kinds of technology pipe dreams. I imagine that we’ll eventually see tools to create Second Life locations from Photosynth archives. Can you imagine what this technology would be like paired with the recently released Google Street View project? It’d be nuts!

What would you do with this technology? How would you tweak it to make it do something really outrageous and useful?

Related Entries:

• Adobe Plans to take Photoshop Online
• Polar Rose - A Photo Search Engine

Canon is reporting that they have recently manufactured a massive 50 megapixel CMOS sensor. While this thing sounds like a godsend for those looking to capture the crispness of film in a digital camera, don’t expect to see this sensor show up in your hands anytime soon. Engadget has the story:

Canon has built a 50 megapixel CMOS monstrosity, which is reportedly almost twice the resolution of its nearest competition, and is prepping it as a sort of large format surveillance camera for monitoring large, busy areas such as parking lots and theme parks, along with detailed work like factory part inspections.

The article goes on to state that the sensor was, amazingly, built in the standard dimensions of a DSLR sensor. That little detail may not mean much to you, but that suggests a lot to me. Once they get the manufacturing costs down, I have no doubts that it’ll hit the prosumer market. It’ll give me something new to drool over.

…Beats the hell out of my Canon Digital Rebel XT.

Related Stories:

• Are Megapixels Really That Important?
• Hasselblad H3D 39 Megapixel DSLR Digital Camera
• Rice University Developing Single Pixel Camera

Ceci n’est pas Photoshop by jurvetson

The photography sector of the blogosphere is in an uproar over a copyright controversy centering on Flickr’s most popular user, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir. She recently found a UK site called Only-Dreemin that was selling her landscape photos under a similar name without permission or compensation.

Rebekka’s attempts to confront the site about the issue resulted in them taking down the photos, but they did not respond to requests for compensation. Considering she could prove, with evidence, at least $5,000USD of sales on top of standard copyright violation, this is pretty serious.

Being an active member, Rebekka posted about the experience to her Flickr account along with thumbnails of the stolen photos. She received an outpouring of support from the community to the tune of 100,000 views and 450 comments in less than 24 hours. That is, until Flickr decided to delete her post without warning.

Much has been written about this already, so I’m not going to go too in depth. Here is what’s been said so far:

• Yahoo Mirror of the original post on Rebekka’s Flickr
• Thomas Hawk’s first post on the incident with Only-Dreemin
• Rebekka writes about Flickr’s deletion of her content
• Thomas adds to Rebekka’s post with his own outraged thoughts
  
• Rebekka posts protest photo, Flickr mods apologize
• Flickr mods respond to community, claims that it was an “error in judgement”
• The rest of the blog-o-tron gets in on the action
• Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield provides an extended apology and clear explanation

One of the more interesting things this incident highlighted for me was the drastic difference in the ways people view personal rights on the Internet. Some see Flickr’s deletion as fair, since we all signed a EULA. Others see everything fall under the mythical Internet umbrella of free speech.

License Agreements and Terms of Use documents have become so draconian and prevalent in the last two decades that we no longer think of them as valid, enforceable, or even worth reading. Large portions of Internet users instead see the overall values of freedom on the Internet as being more important than the usage agreements. Legally, this makes no sense. Most users put it in the same social category as jaywalking and file sharing though; everybody does it.

I’m not the happiest with Flickr’s overall behaviour and response to this, but I’m not going to be leaving my account in protest or anything silly like that. Mistakes were made and Flickr is still the best on the block. I just hope they can avoid becoming too Yahoo-ized. If that happens, people will leave.

I have, however, abandoned my JPG Magazine account over the recent takeover by the CEO. His actions with regards to kicking the founders out and trying to rewrite the history of JPG have made me not want to participate in that community any more.

clouds over hills by vs

Last month, I showed you how to find free photos for your blog using Flickr’s Creative Commons search. I was overwhelmed by the response I got and the enthusiasm for the next part.

Well, here it is. I’m going to show you how to use them to improve the look and feel of your blog, while following the rules of the Creative Commons license.

Ways of Incorporating Photos into Your Blog

There are two common ways to jazz up your blog posts with photos. I call them the ‘article’ method and the ‘front-page’ method. Both are pretty straightforward adaptions of the way images are used in newsprint and magazines.

The front-page method is a bit ‘in your face’ and is best used sparingly. It uses a larger image that takes up the entire width of the article column, with the text starting beneath it. The advantage of this is that with a larger image, it’s more likely to ‘grab’ the reader. Keep in mind that if this is overused, the effect is lost and it can get irritating.

(dis)appearing rooms by pfig

The article method is what I use here on goldengod; smaller images aligned to either the left or right with the article text wrapping around them. I find this method is a lot more pleasing and works better with the overall layout of my site.

I try not to post photos wider than 200-250 pixels. If you’re using my previous advice about Creative Commons photos on Flickr, use the ’small’ size to get this effect. This is not a hard rule for all blogs, you can vary that based on your own personal layout.

Try both methods and see what looks best based on your template.

How to Add Photos to Your Blog

Here is an example of the code I use to add Creative Commons photos into my blog posts:

<div style=”float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 2px”><a href=”http://www.asiteyouwanttolinkto.com” target=”_blank” title=”A relevant title for the link; use keywords“><img src=”Direct link to the source of the image” alt=”Same as title above” style=”border: 2px solid #000000″ /></a>

<div style=”margin-bottom: 3px” align=”center”><span style=”font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px”><a href=”Link to the Flickr individual photo page” target=”_blank”>Title of photo</a> by <a href=”Link to photographer’s Flickr page” target=”_blank”>Photographer</a></span></div></div>

This covers all the bases; it gives you tastefully integrated photos, optimizes for search engines, and provides two photo credit links for the photographer. I have no doubt that there are a number of you out there with better html skills than mine. If you have a better alternative to nested divs, go ahead and add your own code examples in the comments.

This Will Help Improve Your Blog

Following these steps and adding quality images to a blog will help boost your traffic, search engine rankings and add to the overall look and feel of your site. From a technical standpoint, it’s long been thought that outgoing links, image alt tags, and link title tags are all taken into account by Google’s patented SEO magic. The source I’ve provided you with should take all of this into account without being inappropriate.

Wasserspiegel by froodmat

Blogs with images are more popular than text-only blogs. This means that you’re likely to see an improvement in the number of readers you have, how long they stay on the site, and how likely they are to comment or link to you. Compare your stats between a month without images and a month with, with no other major changes to the site and you’ll see the difference.

Got a better way of doing it? Want to show off your shiny new photo-filled blog? Leave a link in the comments; I promise to take a look at each one of them and I’ll comment with feedback for you.

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You Can’t Flickr This by missrogue

David Hobby at the Strobist is writing an excellent four part series about online photo sharing service Flickr and the future of commercial photography.

The first part focuses on the success story of Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, arguably the most popular photographer on Flickr. The popularity of her stark, surrealist self-portraits attracted serious attention from Toyota.

Rebekka netted a lucrative photography contract and an impressive amount of exposure in the mainstream media. I first heard of this while reading the Wall Street Journal, of all things.

The second article centers on micro-stock photography agencies and how they relate to the commercial future of Flickr. This has been a really hot topic on the more business-oriented photography sites I read. Sites like Thomas Hawk, John Harrington, and Dan Heller’s Business Photography Blog have been writing about this for months now.

Zooomr, a Flickr competitor headed up by Hawk, hopes to add the features of a stock photography agency with their upcoming Mark III update. It will be really interesting to see how this performs, as it will probably give us some insight into how successful Flickr’s inevitable venture into stock photography will be.

The article also addresses the issue of accessibility on Flickr; how to stand out from the crowd by optimizing your photos with proper tagging and descriptions. You can have the best flower photos in the world, but if they don’t show up when people search for ‘flowers’; it doesn’t help you.

The first two parts of the series are available here and here. Part three of the series on photo sharing is due later this week. Speaking of sharing photos, I’ve just uploaded a couple dozen new shots to my Flickr account a couple nights ago. Go check them out; I crave your approval!

One of the most common gripes I hear from bloggers is that it’s impossible to find good free photos for their blogs. In some cases, this means a lot of text-only blogs. In most cases, it means blogs hijack other people’s work without permission.

Both of these options suck, particularly for a blog that’s just starting out. I’m going to show you a better way; how to find some free high quality photos you can use on your blog.

Where to look

Knowing where to look is just as important as what you find. I know most people’s first instinct is “Google Images!” Ignore that instinct. Google Images is useful for some things, but not really for this. There’s too much of a legal quagmire regarding usage rights and let’s be honest, the photos you find are pretty lame.

Irvine Beach by mike138

Flickr is the first place I look when i want a good photo for my blog. The field is massive, searching is top notch, and the quality is nothing short of outstanding. You can’t just grab any photos on there, there are rules that you should abide by. In order to legally cover your ass, and respect the work of others, you need to be aware of these rules.

Licensing

The rules are simple: Every photo on Flickr has a license and there are two ‘major’ categories of license: an “All Rights Reserved” license and a “Creative Commons” license. A photo that’s marked “All Rights Reserved” means hands off!

You can ask the photographer for permission to use it and some will likely just ask for photo credit or a link. Some may ask for money, which you probably don’t have if you’re reading this. I don’t ask the photographer for permission very often because it’s time consuming and stressful waiting on someone else.

What is a Creative Commons License?

On the other hand, a photo marked “Creative Commons” is the best thing you can hope for. It means that the photographer has reserved some of their rights, but lets people use their photos for free under certain conditions. Each Creative Commons license can be different, but there are 4 major components that you can mix and match. They are Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivative Works, and Share-Alike.

Based on what you’re doing with the images, you need to keep the restrictions of these images in mind. The most important restriction is that you can’t use Non-Commercial images on a monetized blog. The Attribution component is always part of a Creative Commons license, so you will always need to provide credit for the photo with a link to them. I’ll show you how I integrate these photos and links into my blog next week.

How to Search for Creative Commons Photos in Flickr

Sunset by iessi

I use the Flickr advanced search feature. Make sure to check the box stating that you only want Creative Commons photos to display. If you make money off your blog, you also have to check the box to look for content that can be used commercially. Plug in your keywords and it’ll bring up a page with an immense number of results.

By default, the photos are ordered by ‘relevance’. Flickr’s relevance search is pretty useless. So if I’m writing a post about something that’s happened today, instead of sorting by relevance, I’ll sort by “most recent”.

Most of the time, I use the “most interesting” search filter. If you’re not familiar with Flickr’s concept of interestingness, it shows you popular and/or high quality photos. Flip through the first five pages and I guarantee you’ll find something that works!

Other Options

Other photo storage websites, like Thomas Hawk’s Zooomr, also allow you to search through Creative Commons photos. I haven’t tried the search on Zooomr myself, but I have seen photos on there that are every bit as good as what you’ll find on Flickr.

Transparent
by Jurek Durczak

Another option is the free stock photo agencies, such as everystockphoto or stock.xchng. I have no experience with either of these, so I can’t vouch for their usefulness. My friend and fellow blogger Greg G. of DingoRUE swears by free stock photo agencies, but I’m not sure which ones he uses off the top of my head. If you use either one, feel free to let me know what you think in the comments.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you’ll find that people have a more positive opinion of your blog. When the quality of your images goes up, that helps bring up the quality of your entire blog. Also, Flickr photographers will sometimes link to your site when you use their photo. This can help you get more exposure by increasing your Technorati rank and the number of sites that link to you.

Where do you get photos for your blog? Have I made missed anything important? Comment and humiliate me in front of everyone!

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Montmartre by John Cohen

Adobe has unveiled plans to offer a version of their famous Photoshop software as a browser-based online application. Adobe hopes to get a jump on competitors like Google with their stripped-down version of Photoshop that will be available online for free.

Adobe has already tested this market using Adobe Remix, an ad-supported video converter available to users of popular image storage site Photobucket. Like Remix, the new service will be free and supported solely by advertising revenue.

There are already a number of players in the browser-based image editing market, but Adobe is expected to crush most of them using their immensely powerful brand name. The question is whether they can retain the reputation for ultra-high quality editing while stripping out most of the features they want people to pay for.

I’m not sure how much more stripped down it can get than Photoshop Elements, but I already consider Elements to be Photoshop’s tragically quadriplegic younger brother. I’ve never had quite such a… limiting experience while trying to process an image before.

Not that Elements doesn’t have a market; sales show it’s got a pretty decent slice of one. I’m just not part of that market. I much prefer the power and control over a photograph that I can exert with the Real Thing. I have begun to work Adobe Lightroom into my photography workflow though. It makes an excellent RAW converter.

If you can’t wait until this comes out, try Picnik in the meantime. Let me know what you think, I haven’t had a chance to give it more than a cursory glance and it looks decent.

Leica IIIf by selva

Researchers at Rice University are currently working on a single-pixel camera, designed to correct the inefficiencies of modern digital cameras.

I’ve written about the Megapixel Myth before, but you’ve got to be thinking that a solitary pixel is a tad small. A recent BBC article provides an explanation of the project:

Instead of taking the light from an object through a lens and focusing it on a pixel array, we actually reflect it off an array of mirrors. This digital micromirror device, as it is known, consists of a million or more tiny mirrors each the size of a bacterium. From that mirror array, we then focus the light through a second lens on to one single photo-detector - a single pixel.

As the light passes through the device, the millions of tiny mirrors are turned on and off at random in rapid succession. Complex mathematics then interprets the signals assembling a high resolution image from the thousands of sequential single-pixel snapshots.

(found via SCI FI Blog)

The Unseen Video is more engaging than a triple digit group marriage. The project is a weather-controlled dynamic music video created by Daniel Scheibel and Ferdinand Weinrother.

Made for the song “You Make Me Feel” by Canadian photographer and musician Mike Milosh, The Unseen Video represents a new type of interactive media. The video, built in Flash, changes how it looks based entirely on weather data it gathers online.

Every element of the weather, from current P.O.P. to when the sun rises, will have an effect on what you see. The website has a sizeable chart mapping out the relationships between the visual elements and the related weather conditions. The temperature outside will affect the colour, scale, and quantity of ornaments and flowers seen while the sunrise and sunset affect the overall brightness.

Why did they create such a thing? For school, of course!

theunseenvideo is the final year project of Daniel Scheibel and Ferdinand Weinrother. The work was generated during the summer term of March-July 2005 at the Department of Design, University of Applied Sciences Augsburg, Germany.

This is a brilliant final project for a design degree. Hell, for anything. I’ve already lost a sizeable chunk of my time watching it so often, take care the same doesn’t happen to you.