Category: Photography

My online photography club

I’ve written before about photographer, author, and editor Derrick Story and how much I enjoy his podcast. He took things to another level back in May (this post has been stuck in “draft” for far too long) when he started up The Digital Story group on Flickr where members can share their photos, critique those of others, and post questions and answers in the discussion board.

I joined the first week and the group now has over 400 photographers as members. I haven’t found enough time to go through them the past few weeks and want to make a better effort at doing so. I don’t know when Derrick finds time to sleep.

More Ichetucknee Springs tubing photos

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It’s been a good couple of weeks that have found me going tubing twice. Will something happen to make it thrice? I don’t know. But here are some more photo sets:

  • Tubing with the Byrneses and Kinseys – 31 July 2007 – One of my best tubing trips ever (but is there such a thing as a bad day tubing?) when my out-of-town cousins came to town and we did the whole thing on a Tuesday, one of the slowest days of the week during Summer.
  • 2nd Strays Ichetucknee Triathlon – 11 Aug 2007 – The most-crowded day I have ever seen there, probably because it’s one of the last weekends before school starts in most counties around here. I went with a group from my cycling club and we rode and picnicked before tubing. I have never before seen the river so crowded. When we were ready to tube at about 1 p.m., the mid-point shuttle had already closed for the day. And when we exited the river, there was a tremendous queue to wait in for the parking lot shuttle. I think I got some cool people photos.

I guess this post could be titled, “It was the best of times and it was the worst of times,” but as I asked earlier, “is there such a thing as a bad day tubing?”

I once again want to give a shout-out to Aquapac for their awesome waterproof case. It seems that every time I break it out in public lately, someone asks me about it and thinks it’s cool.

Related: Ichetucknee Springs tubing photos.

Meeting the Governor

Meeting Governor Charlie Crist

I spent Thursday and Friday of this past week working at the Florida Press Association/Florida Society of Newspaper Editors Convention held  at the Sawgrass at Ponte Vedra Beach resort. Florida Governor Charlie Crist came to the convention on Friday at lunch time to give a speech, get an award, and sign a bill (but not to eat lunch with us). He loves to have his picture taken and had many taken while he worked the room prior to the speech. He saw me standing there (I was on the ready to get photos of him with my bosses as he approached their table) and came to me and chatted me up. Gary did the honors on this picture.

This is a great example of why you should always have a camera with you.

Ichetucknee Springs tubing photos

Since, based on web traffic reporting, there’s so much interest in Ichetucknee Springs tubing (and why shouldn’t there be?), I thought I’d collect links to all my photos on the subject in one place.

The first set of photos was taken with a Fuji waterproof disposable film camera with processing and scanning to cd-rom by a local lab. The latter two sets were taken with my old, reliable Canon PowerShot G1 inside an AquaPac case.

Update (12 Aug 2007): Links to new tubing photo sets.

My favorite podcasts

One of the main reasons I bought my iPod last year was to use it as a portable hard drive to backup my photos from my laptop during my trip to Britain last year. Another reason was to consolidate the CDs in the car. I wasn’t buying the whole podcast thing, not quite.

A year later, what do I use it for? Listening to podcasts while driving–more on out-of-town trips than commuting. This morning I am loading it up for a trip to Mom’s. Here’s my top six:

  • The Digital Story – O’Reilly author and editor Derrick Story is building a cottage industry around his “online camera club.” I have a draft of another blog post about this. If you want to improve your digital photo skills, listen to this.
  • Science Friday – Ira Flatow’s NPR news show on the hot stories from the world of science that week. Listen and learn.
  • News from Lake Wobegon – The weekly update segment from Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” radio show. Last time I was at Mom’s, I played a bunch of these for her.
  • Living on Earth – Another public radio program, this one showcasing environmental stories. The producers do a great job of giving balanced coverage to the issues they cover. This show and Science Friday have both had very good coverage of alternative energy issues of late.
  • To the Best of Our Knowledge – Yet another public radio show, this one featuring authors of books. The official summary says it’s about “new ideas.”
  • This American Life – Mostly funny stories, both first person and fiction, hosted by Ira Glass. Sometimes the humor very dark. You have been warned. (Yes, it too is a public radio show.)

Looking at the list, I guess I get what I want from public radio when I want it. Another thing you may notice is that almost all are done by radio professionals. The common thread is high production value.

I read somewhere a while back that production value is what keeps people coming back to a podcast. I know I tried listening to one or two where a newspaper columnist basically read a printed article into either a small digital audio recorder or a computer microphone. It was almost unbearable.

Most of my CDs have yet to be ripped and copied to the darn thing. My headphones hardly get used either–that might be different if I flew more.

Feel free to leave further listening recommendations in the comments. I don’t know when I’ll get to them though. I seem to have a backlog. Maybe I’m not driving enough… or I need to fly more.

Another camera shopping tool

If you’re in the market for a new camera, Flickr has a great tool to help you decide what to dent your credit card with. They’ve introduced a section called the Camera Finder that allows you to browse all the photos on the site–or at least those with intact EXIF data identifying the camera–by the camera they were taken with. So, if you have your eyes on a new camera, check out what other owners have done with it. I imagine this won’t work very well for brand-spanking-new models, but cameras that have been in the market for a while ought to have an ample supply of images. And within the camera model’s page, you can also view groupings of photos by style such as landscape, macro, portrait, etc.

If you want to see what others have done with camera models I own (or have owned), check out:

Yeah, yeah, you all know I’m a Canon snob when it comes to digicams.

Normally, I use “Save for Web” in Photoshop when prepping my images for uploading, but I should probably start using “Save As…” instead because I believe it will leave the EXIF data instead of discarding it like “Save for Web” does.