Yesterday I published the first daily photo on my shiny new photo blog. That’s the photo over there on the right. The blog, imaginatively named Eye Tales, is
I wanted to make it simple, both for me to add the daily photo and for visitors to navigate. I went with Wordpress because I already have blogs with them so I’m familiar with managing and editing and, if you don’t mind having .wordpress.com in the address, it’s free.
The theme is called Duotone and is specifically designed for photoblogging. It has a couple of nice features, the first is the inclusion of some of the technical information from the camera (shutter speed, ISO, camera model, etc) which happens automatically without me having to input any of the info. The other feature I like is the changing of the blog background colours to compliment the photo.
The first day was easy, we took a trip to the beach so there was plenty of photo inspiration, but already today (day 2) I had to search around my apartment looking for something interesting to photograph during my lunch break! This is good though, this is forcing me to get my camera out and be a little creative. I didn’t add any words to the first two posts but I may do that in future posts, I certainly like that the option to add words is there.
If you’re inspired to try your own daily (or even not daily; weekly?, bi-monthly?) photoblog you can sign up for a Wordpress blog (this is by no means the only option, just the one I found most convenient) and get started. Let is know in the comments how it goes!
…or whatever it is we’re calling this new decade! It’s day 7 of the new year so I’m sure many of you have already broken your resolutions but you’re still doing better than me because I didn’t even make any!
I have just decided, though, that some sort of daily photo blogging will be one of my goals for 2010. I am inspired by by professional photographer, Rachel Devine, which showcases beautiful photos of her family and life in Australia on a daily basis. I also like with daily photos, and an accompanying paragraph or so of text, from Paris. from Canada, and from Norway, are also inspiring.
What I love about daily photo blogging is not just the encouragement to get the camera out daily but also the idea that you can showcase the not-so-perfect and not-most-interesting aspects of life which may not normally be documented. I plan to start this weekend and over the next couple of days will be setting up the actual photoblog (I’m guessing that’s going to be considerably easier than finding daily photography inspiration)!
If you have advice, want to join in with your own daily photo effort, or have other daily photo blogs to recommend, let us know in the comments. Happy New Year!
Panicking over those perfect photo gifts you just can’t find/left too late to get delivered? Never fear Photodoto is here for you with some homemade photo gift suggestions.
Collage: Especially good for the college student in your life, perfect for dorm room walls, but great for Grandparents and everyone else too. Print a bunch of photos on a theme – photos of the grandkids, your daughter’s best friends, Aunt Mable’s most beloved dog – then figure out a way of arranging them together so they look awesome. You could glue them onto a sturdy backing (thick cardboard, styrofoam, or corkboard are some ideas), link them together using , or use to arrange them on a patterned background.
Poster: Head on over and use the free motivator, magazine cover, or movie poster tools. Print and put in a frame. Simple.
Perpetual Calendar: This requires photos with numbers but you could cheat and photoshop numbers onto some of your favourite shots. Basically you need photos numbered 1 -31, photos with the days of the week on them, and some photos to pad out the calendar and make it a neat shape. Arrange them in the correct order and use to hold them together. Check out this of a fantastic example of a perpetual calendar and a walk through of how it was made.
Slideshow: Take a whole bunch of really good photos and make them into a slideshow, if you like you can add music and all sorts of fancy special effects. Burn to a DVD, or if you’re feeling generous buy a digital photo frame and put it on there (granted that’s not so home-made but it adds a home-made touch to a bought gift)!
T-shirt: Print a favourite photo onto (these come in a different types for different t-shirt colours so be sure to get the correct type), follow the instructions to get the transfer onto the t-shirt (it usually involves an iron) and you’re done! If you’re making this for a child to give as a gift you can make it a bit more special by getting some fabric paint and allowing them to add their handprint or own unique artwork to the shirt (one of my favourite gifts was made this way, with a photo on the front and handprints on the back to make it look like they’d been left there by a child giving the wearer a hug)!
And as a special Christmas bonus here are three links to other home-made photo gift projects for you to try your hand at:
Yes, it’s almost Christmas and yes, there’s the tree to decorate, and those holiday cards aren’t going to print themselves, and you really should untangle those strings of lights. But winter isn’t just about Christmas so if you feel like taking a break from Santa and his friends here are a few tips for capturing some non-Christmas winter snaps.
1. Get your equipment prepared. Don’t forget spare batteries (the cold will sap their energy faster) and try and think about packing some hand warmers in your camera bag to keep your camera all warm and toasty.
2. Overexpose! One of the main problems with photographing snow is the fact it’s so shiny and white. Your camera’s light metre will struggle with all that white shininess and read it as grey. Many point and shoot cameras have a “snow” mode you can use or for a DSLR try overexposing the shots (try +1 or +2 if you have automatic exposure compensation).
3. Try a graduated filter. For grey-sky days a graduated filter can give the sky a bit of colour and make the pictures look a little less overcast. The advantage of a graduated filter is that it’ll leave the foreground of your shots with the natural lighting.
4. Snow looks pretty by moonlight. Yes, it’s even colder if you go outside at night but snow can look especially pretty by moonlight or the reflection of outdoor lights. Wrap up warm, grab a tripod, and give it a shot!
5. You don’t need snow to get winter shots. If your area doesn’t get snow that doesn’t mean you can’t get good winter photos. Often winter skies make for interesting shots, and ice or frost can also be great subjects.
The negatives I sent to have been scanned! For those of you who haven’t been following along, ScanCafe is a negative scanning service I am testing anonymously with a shoebox of wedding negatives I’ve had lying around since 1997. I sent my negatives to them on November 9th, scanning in their India facility began on November 30th, and the scans were ready for review on December 14th.
Last week I received an email from ScanCafe letting me know that my scans were ready. But when I went to the site, only about half of the negatives I sent in were scanned! That was scary. My initial reaction was that they’d lost half of my negatives. Unfortunately, I can’t give high marks for customer service since it took about 4 days before I could get an explanation. This may have something to do with communication between ScanCafe headquarters and their scanning facility in Bangalore, but I’m just speculating. Ultimately, the missing negatives were scanned. Here’s the explanation I received from ScanCafe:
First of all we apologize for the delay in responding to your issue. We just receive a confirmation from our Imaging center that all your images (189) are now uploaded to your account. The problem you faced was due to an error while uploading your images to your account which is now fixed. Please login to your account to view your scans. We apologize for the inconvenience caused and appreciate your patience.
It was a stressful four days waiting to find out if my negatives had been lost forever.
Once that was out of the way though, the rest of the process worked flawlessly. Previews of all of your negatives are available for review. Delete the ones you don’t want (you can undelete them if you change your mind) and pay the balance due. I ended up discarding 15 of the negatives. I would have liked to have seen larger previews. On some of them, it was difficult to see the small differences between similar shots so I ended up buying both scans.
In total, I spent about 1 hour of my time getting all of these scans, mostly spent at the preview stage. Before I sent my scans to ScanCafe, I sent a few to Brian Auer at (a film and scanning do-it-yourself expert) so that we could compare scanning quality of the equipment and time spent. We tried our best to simulate the ScanCafe level of service (scan, dust removal, white balance, limited retouch) and Brian found that he was taking about 12-17 minutes per negative. Even if doing it myself only took 10 minutes each, that would have used up over 31 hours of my time. So, it cost me $185 but I saved 30 hours of my time.
Once I get the scans back we’ll be able to look at the scans side by side and see how ScanCafe fared against Brian.
Screenshots below.
Your images are online and awaiting your review
Scans are organized into albums
Preview your scans and delete the ones you don't want
Total price for scanning 189 medium format negatives in TIFF format (with 20% Halloween discount coupon)
There’s less than two weeks until 2009 turns into 2010 and over at The New York Times they’re looking for photographs to document this first decade of the 21st century. If you’ve got photos that you think capture important moments of the last 10 years you can submit them over and maybe you’ll start the new year by having your work published by The New York Times! You can submit up to 5 photos and a short essay to go with them explaining why you think they fit the bill for illustrating the past decade. If nothing else it’s a good excuse to look back through your archives with a nostalgic smile!
Looking for a little break from trawling websites spending too much money on Christmas shopping? Try heading over to the National Geographic for a few minutes and check out some of the awesome high def photos. From an to a close up of a , they’re all available to download for free and use to beautify your desktop so you can give yourself a little early Christmas present. The photodoto favourite? !
The next few weeks will provide plenty of opportunities for most of us to whip out the camera and snap a few portraits. From candid shots of visiting friends to the carefully composed holiday family photo, the background is almost as important as the subjects. Poorly composed backgrounds detract from the faces you want the focus on so to help you get some good portraits this year here are a few tips for getting good backgrounds.
1. Think about the background. Ok, so that one seems obvious but many people don’t give the background of their shot any thought until they’re sitting at the computer trying to crop parts of it out. Of course for candid shots you may not have a lot of control over the background but taking a quick glance before you press the shutter will give you a chance to take a step to the left and crop out that overflowing kitchen trash can.
2. Get up close. If the background is undesirable, but you can’t fix it get in close and let your subject fill the frame. This can work especially well with kids who look extra-cute close up.
3. Use your aperture. Aperture can be used to control depth of field and depth of field makes nice blurry backgrounds so even if the kitchen trash can is in the shot it’s not so distracting. Essentially a wider aperture makes a blurrier background and a small f stop number gives you a wider aperture. For a more tips on aperture click .
4. Check out your neighbourhood. If your own home doesn’t really lend itself to providing a good background you may find that there’s somewhere nearby that does. It might be an open field or it might be a graffitied wall, that all depends on the photograph you have in mind but a short stroll with camera in hand might give you a bright idea.
5. Increase the distance between your subject and the background. This is another way of increasing the blurriness of the background and can be especially effective if you don’t have control over your aperture setting.
Like anything practice makes perfect so get out there and play, and if you find yourself with a portrait you love but the background still needs work check out this . Happy holiday snapping!
Scanning progress continues. The process may be going slowly—although, I personally don’t care… these negatives have been in storage for 12 years—but ScanCafe does an excellent job of keeping you in the loop. They let me know that a technician had opened my box and was actually starting to scan my negatives.
I got this email today:
We have assigned a technician to digitize your images and in the process we found that you have sent in negatives to us that needs to be cut into strips of 1 to 2 images in order to process them. Kindly confirm if you are fine with cutting the negative strips so that we can process your media. However, if you do not wish to cut them, we will not be able to scan them and therefore will ship them back to you as is.
I sent them medium format negatives in strips of 4 frames. I told them to cut them—carefully—as needed for the scanning process. I really appreciate that they asked first although it would have been nice if they’d also mentioned it on the ordering page. I can imagine that some people, for whatever reason, don’t want their negative strips cut.
Photodoto reader sent in some very helpful and detailed responses to my plea for help regarding my (which is still proceeding although I haven’t updated the sidebar in a little while). Here are his excellent responses to my questions (and you can read more on his blog). Thanks, Geoff!
If you’ve got a great system for organizing and archiving your growing photo collection, share it in the comments or email me a guest post for publication here. Maybe we could make a regular series of it… Thanks!
Question: As soon as I tagged my second photo I realized that I need a common taxonomy for my tags. I can’t tag some photos “Bird” and others “Birds” and still others “Winged beasts.” I need to pick a definitive tag and use it for all of my photos. How do I decide? Should all tags be plural or singular? Does it matter? Also, while I’ll be the main user of the archive for now, one day my children or grandchildren will inherit my collection, so the tags will need to make sense to other people besides myself.
You’ve already had someone pointing you to the Controlled Vocabulary site, which is an excellent resource. While I don’t use the CVKC itself, I have based my vocabulary on a sample of the CVKC that ships with the DAM application that I use: IDimager. That, together with the CV of the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus forms the basis of my tag taxonomy. See my answer to your second question for more detail.
Question: Tags don’t have heirarchy. But I’d like to group related tags together. People, for example. Is it better to tag photos of people with just their name? Or something like this: “People:John Watson”. Or use multiple tags like this: “People, John Watson”? The idea being, I’d like to see all of my photos of John Watson (handsome fellow) but I think sometimes I’d also like to see photos of all of my people.
A hierarchy is essential, in my opinion. More background on what I’ve done can be found in my blog entry on Tagging: Tagging Digital Photos – Part II. Depending on the DAM you choose, you may also be able to use synonyms and implicit relationships. I use both (although sparingly)
Question: Do you have an opinion on where the metadata should be stored? As I see it there are two choices: in the photo itself or in a central database. There are pros and cons for each method. Searching is much faster if you have a database. Compatibility with future DAM software is better if you store metadata inside the photo. Some people advocate not altering originals at all, not even the metadata. If you store metadata in your images, how do you alter your tags if you decide to rename one or you want to combine two similar tags into one?
I’m in the “The Truth is in The File” camp”, i.e. metadata belongs with the file. This means that the IPTC/XMP and EXIF metadata is central for management of my photo library. Having metadata held outside the image files may be necessary for performance reasons, but the content must always reflect the metadata in the files themselves.
A rather good analogy that I came across is this… Imagine that you have an album of family photos. It’s full of photos of members of your family stretching back several generations. Underneath each photo is a handwritten description of who is in the photo – that is the metadata for the photo. It’s a marvellous resource for you and your family – a record of your family history. But over time, the glue degrades, and the photos become loose. Worse, many of them become unstuck. What do you have then? A pile of loose photos, and an album with blanks where the photos should be – and no way of knowing which photo should go where. The metadata has become separated from the photos.
What’s the solution? Well, what should have been done in the first place is to write on the back of every photo who is in the photo before sticking the photos in the album. In other words, the metadata should be directly associated with the photos themselves. Then it doesn’t matter if the photos fall out, the album can always be reconstructed. Indeed, a new album can be made when the old one falls apart.
And in this analogy, “new albums” means “new software applications and operating systems” The one thing we can guarantee in computing is that hardware and software will change rapidly, but industry-standard metadata specifications such as IPTC will move more slowly, and the standard can be re-implemented in the newer generations of software.
A word on IPTC vs XMP. I note that you said that you would “start with IPTC and convert to XMP later” By IPTC, I assume that you realise that you are referring to IPTC-IIM. Actually, I’d suggest that you start from day one with IPTC Core, which is based on XMP. The reason is that some tools do not handle both well, and this can lead to interoperability issues if you use a variety of tools in your workflow. Picasa, for example, does not support XMP at all, and only supports IPTC-IIM. Five years after the IPTC organization said that IPTC-IIM was, in effect, dead, and advised everyone to move to implementations of IPTC Core, Picasa/Google still haven’t got the message.
Question: How do you organize your photos? How do you find photos when you need them later?
I use IDimager as my main workflow tool. During the workflow I will tag and assign other metadata (e.g. creator info and Creative Commons licenses) to my images. Once the final images are ready, they are copied to my Windows Home Server. All our home PCs connect to the WHS. Other family members use Windows Live Photo Gallery to browse the photo library on WHS (so do I if I want to quickly find a photo, rather than firing up IDimager). Because WLPG understands IPTC Core and XMP in general, then each WLPG on the connected PCs will reconstruct the tag taxonomy automatically from the photo library.
Over the course of the years, I’ve tried a number of (Windows) applications to manage my photos:
Cerious Software’s Thumbsplus (version 5)
Microsoft’s Digital Image Suite 10
Google’s Picasa (versions 2 and 3.5)
Microsoft’s Windows Photo Gallery (bundled with Vista) and
Windows Live Photo Gallery (available for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7)
Adobe’s PhotoShop Elements (versions 3 and 4)
Picajet 2.5
Adobe’s Lightroom 1.1
Microsoft’s Expression Media
IDimager Personal (versions 3 and 4)
IDimager Pro (versions 4 and 5)
My groundrule for managing photo collections:
I insist that any software used in the digital workflow (transfer from camera to computer, image selection, digital processing, cataloguing, publishing and asset management) will respect any EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata that may be stored in the image file itself.
I stopped using some of the above applications because I found they did not follow this groundrule. Some of the others had issues with their handling of image metadata. For example, Picasa still does not handle IPTC and Exif data satisfactorily, and does not even know about XMP metadata. The much-vaunted Face Recognition feature in Picasa 3.5 is also a disaster – all the metadata resides in Picasa’s internal database (unique to every PC), instead of being stored as XMP in the files themselves (as WLPG does with its Face Recognition feature).
I’ve ended up with IDimager Pro as my main tool for Digital Asset Management, and Windows Live Photo Gallery as the tool used by other family members for browsing our photo collection. Both of these tools follow the groundrule, and, because of this, both share the same tag hierarchy for ease of management.
Yesterday I published the first daily photo on my shiny new photo blog. That’s the photo over there on the right. The blog, imaginatively named Eye Tales, is 
Panicking over those perfect photo gifts you just can’t find/left too late to get delivered? Never fear Photodoto is here for you with some homemade photo gift suggestions.
Yes, it’s almost Christmas and yes, there’s the tree to decorate, and those holiday cards aren’t going to print themselves, and you really should untangle those strings of lights. But winter isn’t just about Christmas so if you feel like taking a break from Santa and his friends here are a few tips for capturing some non-Christmas winter snaps.
The negatives I sent to have been scanned! For those of you who haven’t been following along, ScanCafe is a negative scanning service I am testing anonymously with a shoebox of wedding negatives I’ve had lying around since 1997. I sent my negatives to them on November 9th, scanning in their India facility began on November 30th, and the scans were ready for review on December 14th.
There’s less than two weeks until 2009 turns into 2010 and over at The New York Times they’re looking for photographs to document this first decade of the 21st century. If you’ve got photos that you think capture important moments of the last 10 years you can submit them over and maybe you’ll start the new year by having your work published by The New York Times! You can submit up to 5 photos and a short essay to go with them explaining why you think they fit the bill for illustrating the past decade. If nothing else it’s a good excuse to look back through your archives with a nostalgic smile!
The next few weeks will provide plenty of opportunities for most of us to whip out the camera and snap a few portraits. From candid shots of visiting friends to the carefully composed holiday family photo, the background is almost as important as the subjects. Poorly composed backgrounds detract from the faces you want the focus on so to help you get some good portraits this year here are a few tips for getting good backgrounds.