Life has been busy with me lately so I have not had time to make new posts. Recently I have completely transformed  my website and gallery. Thanks to iweb and a clear creative vision my website took a weekend to revamp. I am very pleased with how it turned out ( www.ckphotoonline.com )

My gallery took a little bit longer. I was very dissatisfied with apple’s web gallery services. Customers would complain of extremely slow loading times, I had to keep all the photos that were on the web gallery on my hard drive which started taking up a huge amount of space. So I started exploring my options. I tried SmugMug and instantly fell in love with it. The main features that sold me were the fast loading times, ability to save the originals and download them back to your computer, and call me crazy but my photos look sharper! Sharing, tagging and titling are a breeze. I highly recommend SmugMug accounts to anyone who wishes to share their photos and have backups of them. Yes is does cost money but you get what you pay for.

http://ckphotoonline.smugmug.com/

I can honestly say I feel much safer with my photos secured on Smugmug. If anything were to happen to my computer or external hard drives I can still get my photos!

We are pleased to announce that we can now offer you “MetalPrints” as an option for your photos. We have been using these for our photos for awhile now and they are stunning. It is an eye-popping way to display your favorite images.

Look over the following for more information about MetalPrints.

MetalPrints™ represent a new art medium for preserving photos by infusing dyes directly into specially coated aluminum sheets. The high gloss coating takes on an almost magical luminescence. Because the image is infused into the surface and not on it, the archival qualities of this unique process are unparalleled. You’ve never seen a more brilliant impressive print before! Colors are vibrant and the luminescence is breathtaking. Detail and resolution are unsurpassed. To compliment this unique printing method, we have also developed a variety of ultra-modern ways to hang and display your Metal Prints.

Durable archival prints without glass
Brilliant luminescent images
Ultra-Hard scratch-resistant surface
Waterproof/weatherproof
Can be cleaned easily with any commercial glass cleaner

If there is a Music Man5 Photo image that you would like to order in MetalPrint just contact us through the website and we can make it happen for you.

A few days ago I entered a contest at MCP Actions for a new web design and a year pro subscription to SmugMug.

Here’s what I wrote -

“My heart longs for creativity and learning and teaching. As I am nearing the end of my college career I want to find a way to merge my love for photography and the ingenuity that goes into it while serving others and helping. I want to make it so that a portion of my profits goes to charity. Each month I plan on highlighting a Non-Profit so I raise awareness. I feel that using my craft, which attracts attention, to show what is happening in our neighborhoods, our cities, and our world, could better those around me and myself.

I would love the help of fusing this into a cohesive and thoughtful website that would make it much more appealing so I can reach more people. Thank you for doing this giveaway and good luck everyone!”

Now, I need your help to win this!  I would greatly appreciate your vote at http://mcpactions.com/blog/2009/11/15/vote-for-the-most-deserving-of-a-custom-website-25-off-smugmug-pro/

And because every post (even if it is a shameless self plug) is better with some photos, here are my beautiful friends Hannah and Leah.  These were taken a little while back, but I love them.

Now, go vote!

With love,

Rachel

So I blog, twitter, facebook, Linkedin, flickr … here’s another site to add to my social-media internet website addiction …

www.ClaireWolf.smugmug.com

I’m going to use this site to display any photos that I take, hopefully will keep it up to date , and maybe will try to make some money from this one day. This is just the beginning.

Enjoy!

Here it is … Camera 47’s 2nd Annual 20 Photography Gifts Under $100.  Of course, there are plenty of other holiday gift guides out there – so check back – and I’ll try to get a list of those posted soon.

And if you’re looking for more ideas – the 1st Annual list can be found here.

So, without further introduction – here you go – in no particular order – 20 ideas for your favorite photographer:

1. The best photography book I read in 2009?  DuChemin’s Within the Frame.  Read the review here.  And if the photographer on your list already has that one – here’s his new book – VisionMongers.
2. Another great book – Photographer’s Eye.  You can find the review here.
3. Hot Shoe Diaries has become one of the hottest photography books of ‘09.  Why?  Because McNally has nailed it with this great book on minimalist lighting.  You can find my review here.
4. Moleskin notebooks – the small size.  Perfect for all of those in-the-field note taking moments.  Easily fits in the back pocket or in the camera bag.  Conveniently, it’s a 3 pack.
5. A Kenko extension tube in your photographer’s favorite mount.  One of these in the bag could save space and dollars – replacing the need for a dedicated macro lens for those occasional micro opportunities.
6. Cool, hip travel / photo vest from Scottevest.  I haven’t had a chance to try this out yet – but it’s receiving great reviews.  Check it out here.
7. And to keep all of those great back-at-the-desk notes – a Maker’s Notebook.
8. B+W neutral density filter to help with those landscape photos (just make sure you get the right size).
9. Blackrapid RS-4 strap – lightweight and room for a couple of memory cards – or you could try the newest model – the RS-5!  Bottom line – the RS-4 hasn’t left my camera since July.
10. Via from Starbucks. Why?  Because this is more than just the best instant coffee I’ve ever tried – it actually tastes good.  It has solved my backcountry java dilemma – and it’s good for an emergency cup in the office, too.  It comes in Colombia or Italian Roast.
11. The updated Digital Photography series from Scott Kelby – now goes to 3!
12. The retro-styled seatbelt camera strap – from the same folks who brought you the Super Secret Spy Lens – Photojojo (who else?).
13. Lowepro shoulder bag… Stylish, discrete, well made, and convenient (and just a small bit over our $100 limit).
14. And speaking of stylish, discrete, and convenient – check out this new setup from Mountainsmith.
15. Cap from his / her favorite basketball team.
16. If your favorite photographer already has a Lensbaby Composer – the 0.42x wide angle lens attachment could be a great addition.
17. One year of Smugmug – to share photos with friends and family near and far.
18. OK – another one that exceeds the $100 limit – but seriously – it’s an opportunity to learn lighting from Zach Arias.  Very cool.
19. Wacom’s new Bamboo Pen and Touch tablet – making it easier to work with those photos.
20. For the panoramic shooter in your life – from the Photojojo folks – The Perfect Pano + The Level Camera Cube!

And, if none of this fits the photographer on your list – get ‘em an In-N-Out t-shirt!

(just typing that out makes me hungry for a Double-Double – “animal style” – of course)

Black-Crested Titmouse ©jmillerphoto.com

My current job has been keeping me really busy on the weekends so I’ve been unable to get out and make any images, but I have found some time to go through some of my images that have been in my “To Do” pile.

This image is a Black-crested Titmouse, found this fall in west central Texas.  These birds are normally very skittish so I was lucky to fire off a small burst of images of this guy as he was looking for some morsels of food.

This image was the definition of easy to process.  Exposure was good from the beginning.  I nailed the depth of field, managing to get all of him in focus but to blur out the background.  I made a couple tiny tweaks here and there to compensate for what the camera couldn’t, and it was ready to go.

I have posted this guy for sale online.  It is available in 5×7, 8×10, and 11×14.  I will entertain also making him available in 16×20–the file size is big enough that it will probably hold up just fine.

Sorry for the late notice, but we will be using our weekly scheduled maintenance window tonight beginning at 10:00pm PST. We should only be going into read-only mode, and will do our best to keep it short. Please check back here for updates.

22:05 PST – read-only mode begins

00:00 PST – all clear! Tonight we did some minor database maintenance, thanks for your patience!

Engelske Livedrive søsætter samarbejde med Lifeboat Distribution, som har et større netværk af resellers på det attraktive amerikanske marked. Livedrive har mere end 300.000 betalende kunder og deres løsning kan du bl.a. bruge på de sociale netværk som Facebook, Flickr og SmugMug. Livedrive koster $55.95 p.a. for 100 gigabytes.
Danmarks billigste Online Backup her

I discovered smugmug and then re-discovered some old images.  The work in progress can be found here:

Notmanhattan.smugmug.com.

Here’s a sampling:

A critical part of our infrastructure failed this morning and its backup is having issues as well.  Our engineers are looking into it and will restore service as quickly as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience.

07:26 PDT – we’ve identified the problem and were able to fix it. now to bring everything else back online, sorry for the delay

07:45 – we’re in read-only, verifying everything is OK before we put everything back

07:50 – sorry, spoke too soon. a few components still need attention before even read-only. we’re working as fast as we can, sorry for the continued delay

10:09 – all clear. sorry about that. we’ve identified several areas of improvement to avoid this in the future.

I’m coming up for renewal again of my photo hosting sites and I’d thought I’d write down my thoughts which should help me decide what to do. At the moment I’m using the following sites:

• SmugMug – Paid for (http://halesy.smugmug.com/)
• Flickr – Paid for (http://www.flickr.com/photos/halesy/)
• Picasa – Free (http://picasaweb.google.com/halesy)

Each has it’s own advantages but none of them has all the features I’d like.  So here’s a quick comparison…

Smugmug - Great looking site (ignoring my photos ).  There’s plenty of opportunity to customise your home page that the rest of the world sees.  It’s also relatively quick and the album views are well organised.  My paid for version gives me unlimited space.  The downside for me that there’s not a big community feel around Smugmug.  I’m sure SmugMugers might disagree but I’ve not found it very interactive, although maybe I’m not active enough myself.  And while there’s a number of print options available, they’re all US based services (I’m in the UK).

Flickr - Interface just is not as good as Smugmug as there’s little customisation available.  While there’s some neat features there (I like the Collections approach), you can’t create a custom home page for others to see (apart from selecting between pictures, sets and collections).  I’d like it if I could put my tags and Collections on the front page, and select which pictures are shown first – all of which I can do on Smugmug.  However where Flickr does win out is the community aspects, I’ve had random (nice) posts about my pictures which is good.  This is helped by the fact I know more people who use Flickr.    I’ve also got unlimited storage with Flickr

Picasa - Well Google isn’t the best at everything!  While Picasa is free it misses out on the best features discussed above.  The home page is not readily customisable and there’s not much of a community to it either.  The Picasa software however is good, although I don’t actually use it (still on PSE5).  The Picasa software does however provide online sync’ing which is useful (still working on this though).  The free account has 2G storage and you buy more, but I won’t.

So ideally I’d have the Smugmug interface with the Flickr community!

One of the issues I have though is keeping my photos in sync.  These sites don’t really provide FTP access which is my preferred option, easier to keep things in sync.  So instead I use Fireuploader which is a really useful Firefox extension.  With more than a few hundred pictures uploaded it would be great for these sites to support some type of sync’ing, Picasa being the best option.

A final point of this though is about Photobox, if you’re in the UK and want to print photos I can highly recommend them.  I have to admit though that I also use them for hosting my pics, which I’m probably not meant to really do.  I think you’re space is limited based on the number of orders you’ve placed, but as I’ve been with them for years that not a major for me.  The interface for Photobox is pretty nice, although a bit slow in comparison to the others here.  You don’t get the same community either, although they do use Facebook (which I haven’t really bought into myself).  They are pretty active on Twitter as well which is a good way of keeping up to date.  Of course the other advantage of Photobox is that you can sell your photos online, for a suitable margin .

We’ll be using our scheduled weekly maintenance window starting at 10pm Pacific (PDT) this Thursday, October 8th.  We’re continuing to work on the storage maintenance that we were working on last Thursday.  There are a few outstanding issues that we were unable to resolve in out allotted outage window, and we’re hoping to resolve these issues this week.

Like last week, we hope to be able to make our changes with minimal impact.  Site performance will definitely be affected, and we may have to go into read-only mode.  Should any issues arise, the site may go offline while we resolve them.

22:15 PDT maintenance beginning, going into read-only

23:27 – out of read-only however maintenance is not complete quite yet. we’ll let you know when we’re done, we are likely to have at least one more read-only.

23:38 – we’re all clear, thanks for your patience.

I’ve spent a bit of time lately trying to decide on whether to build a website and what I might want out of such a site. Having had a few enquiries about buying my work, I wanted at least something that would showcase some of the more frequently requested items as well as a way of ordering from me (even if that was only email contact). I also wanted something that was easily maintainable, easy to upload new images to, and which would allow some sort of protection to my images.

To address the first 2 points, pretty much anything would suffice – and I’ve set up a photobox pro gallery as a quick means of allowing friends and family to buy prints and gifts : http://www.photoboxgallery.com/kajophotography

However, it’s not as ‘pretty’ as I’d like, and I’d like a bit more control over the printing and presentation process for larger/more expensive orders (i.e. be able to do that myself).
To address the ‘easily maintainable’ aspect, having made the effort some years ago to learn some HTML and javascript, I decided that life was too short ot design and build my own, so a ‘template & host’ type package would be what I wanted. Several companies offer this service, particularly zenfolio, smugmug and photium.

Over the past month or two, I have trialled all of these, and found pros and cons to all of them and spent most time with Smugmug and Photium:

Smugmug is a dream to use, i like the ‘upload from picasa’ feature, and is a great community, but they don’t offer watermarking on their basic package (so you have to watermark yourself before uploading). That said, i really liked the look and feel of smugmug : http://katejohnson.smugmug.com.

Photium, although perhaps more limited in the templates available, offers watermarking, right click protection and all sorts of other features in it’s basic package. The basic package *is* more expensive than smugmugs, but it does offer a lot of features. I was particularly taken with the superb, personal, customer support, domain name registration (within 2 hours of setting up my site and emailing them), watermarking of images, and an ordering and payment system. From my experience so far, I would 100% recommend photium, purely for their customer support. My site on photium so far is http://www.kajophoto.co.uk

We had a brief outage starting at 09:25 Pacific, and ending at 09:48, after a database component became bogged down. Unfortunately this came at a shift change, so we were a little slow in addressing it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

После сытного обеда, мы позабыв про закон Архимеда, который велит поспать или покурить, мы с моим товарищем Ержаном, решили забраться на крышу гаража здания, где живём, и поснимать закат.
Сегодня, наконец-то, добрался до этих фотографий, и смотрю, что же есть интересного. Всё-таки, с монитора компьютера смотреть приятнее, чем с трех-дюймового LCD фотоаппарата. Приятнее, и конструктивней, т.к. на маленьком дисплее все фотографии кажется, что “ах” да “ох”! Напротив, на среднестатистическом (15 дюймов и больше) мониторе сразу понятней, что идет в корзину (не в фокусе, не в тему или тупо не нравится как выглядит), дабы не занимать эти мегабайты на жестком диске; а что может послужить хорошей (в моем понимании этого широкого слова) фотографией.
Открыв, все фотографии, сделанные тем замечательным днём, не вижу ничего интересного с WOW-фактором. Просматривая дальше, воостанавливаешь картину дня: как мы туда поднялись, где снимали, с какого ракуса, откуда брали замеры света, о чем думали и что пытались запечатлеть. Не знаю как у Ержана, но у меня особо ничего не получалось. Там же, стояла какая-то парочка, и очень хотелось сделать фотографию их силуэтов, о чем мы их и попросили. К сожалению, не хватило техники, чтобы всё получилось так, как мы задумали, и мы быстро ретировались с того места. Когда подходили к машине, Ержан что-то замешковался с камерой, а я увидев его отражение в зеркале, не промедлил с кадром.
Вот, что получилось:

В большом разрешении, и напротив черного бэкграунда можно увидеть эту фотографию тут, в моём Smug Mug’е.
На мой взгляд, самая удачная фото того вечера. Может быть Ержан, прочитав этот пост, решит добавить что-то своё, но это уже не моё дело

Мои постоянно обновляющиеся галереи можно посмотреть на следующих сайтах: на smugmug и на flickr‘e.

Комментарии и конструктивная критика приветствуются!

Flickr o Smugmug? O magari tutti e due? Io sono iscritto da un bel po’ ormai a flickr, e vi ho depositato in quattro anni più di undicimila fotografie; lo considero principalmente come un sistema di backup, e secondariamente come un modo di reperire le mie foto in rete se mi servisse un link da qualche parte. Non sfrutto se non in minima parte le potenzialità di social network che permette flickr e che sono la sua forza. (Sarà che sono orso di natura, ma non mi trovo a postare nei gruppi ed a commentare, e lo so che mi perdo qualcosa…)

Tempo fa sono venuto a sapere dell’esistenza di un sito concorrente, Smugmug, che si focalizza invece sulle caratteristiche che più fanno al caso mio, vale a dire il salvataggio delle foto con la possibilità di archiviare anche i negativi digitali in formato raw, e la creazione di gallerie web sicuramente più accattivanti del classico bianco flickr.

Mi sono iscritto sfruttando il periodo di prova gratuito ed ho iniziato a costruire qualche galleria, sfruttando un magnifico plugin per firefox che trasferisce in automatico le foto da flickr a smugmug.

Dopo qualche tentativo mi sono reso conto di un difetto che probabilmente non è tanto grave in sè, ma per le mie abitudini di lavoro in flickr è invece totalmente bloccante: non è possibile impostare il livello di privacy della singola foto, ma unicamente a livello di galleria, ovvero di gruppo di foto.

Dato che le foto dei familiari le voglio mantenere visibili solo per amici e parenti, e le altre le possono vedere tutti, in flickr mi basta impostare adeguatamente i livelli di ogni singola foto, e lo posso fare in automatico con il plugin per lightroom di Jeffrey Friedl; in questo modo nello stesso flusso di foto gli utenti normali vedranno le immagini pubbliche mentre i privilegiati – si fa per dire naturalmente – vedranno anche quelle impostate come “famiglia e amici”.

In smugmug non è possibile questo approccio, come mi è stato anche confermato dall’ottimo supporto che risponde rapidissimamente alle email, e pertanto dovrei per ogni viaggio, gita, gruppo di foto in genere, creare due gallerie distinte, una con tutte le foto e l’altra con le foto pubbliche.

Ho lasciato quindi con rammarico scadere il termine del periodo di prova su smugmug, ed ho risposto alla loro gentile email che chiedeva i motivi della mancata conferma spiegando la mia necessità.

Mi hanno detto che passeranno il suggerimento a chi di dovere, vedremo, intanto per un anno ho rinnovato l’abbonamento a flickr, mentre rifletto sul modo di gestire smugmug se non dovessero togliere questa limitazione.

Most of us who are photographers either professional, hobby or enthusiast have an account with a photo sharing web site. Whether it be Flickr or Photobucket or Smugmug or still another we all seem to like sharing our photographs and that’s a good thing. I’ve learned a lot simply by looking at the work of others. Photography is neat like that – you learn as much by looking as you do by reading or listening.

For those who enjoy sharing their photographs we also enjoy when someone comments our photos or adds one of our shots as a favorite. Doesn’t it feel good to get comments and “faves”? Or course it does. Doesn’t it then stand to reason to return the good feeling to another photographer? After all they are called photo sharing sites for a reason so finish the sharing part and comment and fave other people’s photographs.

When you leave a comment make it at least 12 to 15 words. Tell the person why you like their shot and what you like about it. A comment of “nice shot” isn’t much of a comment. Neither is “good job”. You have thoughts in your head so spill some of those thoughts down to your fingers and keyboard.

I confess to not being a good sharer and ask you to join me in my goal to be better at being a good sharing photographer.

As a rule from now on I’m going to hand out as many comments as I get. If some adds one of my photos to their favorites I add one to mine. It may or may not comment or fave a shot by the same person who commented or fav’d me but that’s not the point. The point is taking photo sharing the rest of the way and give what you get.

I admit to liking comments and being fav’d and I think being the good photo sharer will only result in more of those “pats on the back” we all like so much.

Hi Everyone,

Kaynak: LetsGoDigital

Amatör bir fotoğrafçı olarak çektiğim kareleri online olarak bir yerde saklama ve paylaşma fikri, 2004 yılında yeni aldığım digital fotoğraf makinam ile çektiğim – yaklaşık 2 aylık -  fotoğrafların bilgisayarımın sabit diskinin bozulması ile kaybolması sonrası ortaya çıktı. Tabii gerek fotoğrafları depolayacağım online alanın sınırlı olması gerekse gizlilik nedeniyle çektiğim tüm fotoğrafları online olarak saklamak mümkün olmasa da, beğendiğim kareleri bir araya getirmek istedim. Bu yolla; hem bu kareleri disk yada depolama birimi arızası gibi nedenlerle kaybetme riskini ortadan kaldırıyor hem de bu fotoğrafları paylaşabiliyorum.

Fotoğrafları online depolama hizmeti sunan pekçok site var. Picasa, Flickr, PhotoBucket, SmugMug vb… Ben bu amaçla Google’ın Picasa Web Albümleri‘ni kullanıyorum.

Picasa Web Albümleri’nin önemli artılarından biri kendi sahip olduğu yazılım: Picasa.

Picasa hakkında detaylara web sitesinde bulabilirsiniz; bence fotoğrafçılıkla amatör olarak uğraşan ama Photoshop benzeri gelişmiş yazılımları öğrenmek için zaman ayıramayanlar için sahip olunması gereken yazılımlardan biri.

Peki…

Gelelim asıl konumuza, işte benim Picasa Web Albüm‘e ise buradan ulaşabilirsiniz.

Our engineers are investigating an issue, more when info here once we get it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

12:55 PDT – looks like we’re back, sorry again

This evening at approximately 11:30pm Pacific, we need to take the site into read-only mode for an emergency update to our edge routers. It should only take approximately 15 minutes as we implement the necessary setting changes. We will do our best to keep as much functionality available during the maintenance, however it is possible a full outage may occur beyond read-only.

We are confident that this should help prevent the routing instability we saw earlier this morning. Sorry for the inconvenience, please check back here for updates after 10pm.

21:09 PDT – pushing back to 11:30pm tonight

23:57 – still have not been able to start due to a problem with one of the related routers that we can fix in the background. Hope to start shortly after this is complete. Sorry for the continued delay

03:05 – we’ve completed the troubleshooting and will be going into read-only shortly to start/complete the fix.

03:24 – reload complete, staying in read-only for a few more moments to make sure we’re good to go. routers are all happy!

03:38 – back out of read-only. thanks for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience