Some great books on digital photography
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Tag Archives: photos
Upload photos to a professional site
I have written before about how to back up and store your photos online and about how to make a buck or two at the stock photo sites, but this new Sydney based site established recently by Andrew Coppin looks extremely interesting.
It is called Ph.Art and is intended for the better photographers to display and perhaps sell their photos, but you can store a few megabytes worth of personal photos as well.
It offers the ability to upload your own gallery, browse and buy photos, exhibit and sell photos, share and rate photos and enter competitions.
You can also join an online digital photography course to complete at your own leisure (it costs), access tutorials and tips and tricks, join the forum and read the blog. You can even submit videos.
Backing up your photos
- Image via CrunchBase
While the bushfires were raging in Victoria, Australia, I’m sure many of us were thinking what would we take with us if we were in a hurry and we knew our house would probably burn down. Many think of their photo albums, but these days most of our photos are on the computer. Of course one could run with the hard disk, but rather bulky when you only have minutes to get out. An alternative is to have an extra external hard drive which would be easier to take.
We used to have CDs to back up our photos to and we still do, but how to find them in a hurry unless you are well organised? We also now have USB memory sticks but these items are also ones which cannot be in the house if you don’t have much time to get out.
The answer is to store them on someone else’s server.
If you have your own self hosted blog or web site, you can easily upload them via FTP (Filezilla is free) to your host, depending on the plan you have and how much room is there. They don’t have to link to your web site or blog; just let them sit there. Create a folder called ‘photos’ on your host’s server. Of course, if you change your host remember to download all those photos to your own computer again. I lost quite a few photos by forgetting that once.
Then there is Flickr You can store as many photos as you like here and you don’t have to show them as public photos.
Everyone has an ISP. Most of these allow you to make a small web page for free. You could use that.
Also there is Google’s picasa - you can upload to this and make your photos private.
Off-site, online storage is really your best bet. Now, all you have to do is upload!
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The problem with digital cameras
When I first got my digital camera, after having used an SLR for years, I couldn’t work out why people were holding theirs way out in front of them. I soon worked it out.
The LCD lens on a digital camera is pretty useless on a bright day. All you can see is black and you take photos blind.
My camera does have a viewfinder but it isn’t any use when I’m taking a zoomed image. What I see is not what I get.
There are cameras you can get which overcome the problem. The Sony W and the Canon G9 are just two of them. They have viewfinders which act like the ones on SLRs.
Or you can buy a Delkin Pop-up Shade which sticks to the back of the camera, protecting the LCD and which folds out to shade the screen.
My source here is Terry Lane in the Green Guide, The Age, 27 March, 2008
Testing flickr plugin
I can get the plugin to work for the posts which contain photos, but it takes an age to load if it ever does. I didn’t wait to find out. So I deleted that and relied on the widget alone. No luck there either.
I think the problem is that my server is not using PHP 5+ to support my blog. I have also emailed PicLens.
If you too cannot add this to your blog, what you can do is download the piclens Firefox add-on. Then on other sites you can click on any image where an arrow appears and that will open up your browser so you can see the slideshow of any one else’s pictures.
Piclens plugin for word press
The PicLens Plugin for WordPress makes it easy for you to provide your readers with an immersive slideshow experience. Visitors simply click a “start slideshow” link to activate PicLens Lite, a slick filmstrip-style presentation console. From there, they can play or pause your slideshow, or better yet dive into a full-screen mode. Optionally, you can also enable our sidebar widget to display a mini slideshow of images from throughout your blog.
I am about to download it myself. My next post should contain some photo slideshows.
Microsoft's free image viewer
Photosynth is Microsoft’s new image viewer which is still in beta stage and can’t be used for your own photos yet, but it’s quality and facilities look very exciting. You need to download it and install it. Then you will see images already there. You can zoom in and out retaining great clarity, move along, create a 3D image of it, pick anywhere to view what has been taken.
Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
I personally can’t wait to be able to use it myself, although it means taking a lot of photos in the same area.
Graphic headings for blogs or web sites
The header you see above is my own photo, taken when I was in NY at the Guggenheim Museum. I cropped the photo so that only a section of it appears here.
Now you too can customize your blog with your own header at least. For word press, I copied the graphic which was there and in a graphic editor I worked out its size.
I then cropped my own image to the exact same size.
Then you simply upload via FTP to header.jpg or gif. In my case I substituted 4 headings with the same graphic, but you can override that later with other graphics you like.
By the way, I’m happy for anyone to copy my header and if you want me to make another type from more of my photos, just contact me with the dimensions you need.
Cameras and photos