Tag Archives: photography

Flickr’s Holiday Gift and what it could mean for the future

December 23rd, 2012

In my recent How Flickr can eat Instagram’s table scraps. I’m Instagram’s table scraps. And so are you. piece I postulated that Flickr needed to make some adjustments and, possibly, make a new account type that was a little less expensive to compete with the free Instagram.

Well, Flickr has done something that I think could be the first big step towards doing just that. They’re giving away 3-months free of Flickr Pro to existing members. This should help bolster the usage of Flickr over the next three months in a big way. This could also help them to determine how people will use the new iPhone app on-the-go (something they have very little experience in since, until recently, their iOS app was no where near as great as it is now) and, perhaps, come up with a new model as I suggested.

Regardless of their reasoning for doing the giveaway – Flickr will be used a whole lot more over the next three months and I’m sure a portion of the people that take advantage of this deal will fall in love with Flickr all over again.

Top 10 Flickr for iPhone tips »

December 19th, 2012

Great list of tips and features for Flickr’s new iOS application.  I particularly like number 3:

3. Apply a single filter to multiple photos at once. Did you fall in love with a particular filter? We’ve made it easy for you to apply it to multiple photos at once. You simply select the photos from your camera roll that you’d like to edit then go to the filter screen and tap and hold the filter that you want for your photos. And just like that, all of your photos are Panda-ized.

I also didn’t realize that you could manage your Flickr Groups from within this application as well. This is a very feature-rich application.

Why Twitter introduced photo filters »

December 11th, 2012

Matthew Panzarino:

As photos and other media become a bigger part of Twitter’s strategy in the future, it can’t have this kind of thing completely at the mercy of a service owned by a competitor.

Instagram’s being able to simply yank Twitter’s ability to embed images inline on their site and apps is far too much control for Twitter to be comfortable with. Makes sense to me. And, as Marco said, I hope it is this reason and not to try to hurt Instagram. Because that wouldn’t work.

George Steinmetz Aerial Photography »

November 12th, 2012

PDN:

Steinmetz photographs from a motorized paraglider which he describes as a “flying lawn chair”. Using the slowest and quietest powered aircraft in the world, he is not only able to take off and land without an airfield or government permission but is also likely to land in someone’s yard and be invited in for tea, becoming the talk of the town.

His work is amazing. PDN has 10 photos on display for an upcoming book release. Be sure to check out his site for more.

/via James Duncan Davidson.

Follow me on Instagram. Or, why web profiles are a big deal for Instagram.

November 9th, 2012

Instagram recently released web profiles for all users. Of course, your Twitter stream has probably been full of people linking to theirs recently*. Oh, here is mine. You may have seen so many people mention their Instagram web profile that you’re sick of it.

But don’t underestimate the importance of this feature to Instagram’s growth. Think about how many times you’ve seen people say, on Twitter or Facebook or their blogs, “Follow me on Instagram, I’m cdevroe.” Celebrities, with tens of millions of Twitter followers, had to ask their audience to launch Instagram, go to the search users pane, and type in their usernames there. And some usernames aren’t so typing friendly. Obviously some did that, but some didn’t.

Now, though, anyone can link to their Instagram profile. And rather than only a small percentage of people from Twitter following them on Instagram they will probably get a much larger portion of their audience to do so. This is big. And it isn’t just about follows either. People can like and comment on photos from these profiles too. So interactivity on Instagram is skyrocketing.

I think Instagram’s growth rate will increase with these web profiles in place.

* Instagram, like many other wildly popular social networks, released this new feature to all users over the course of about a week. There are many reasons for doing this not the least of which is the computational power you’d need to generate 100 million web profiles. However, I also see this as a sly way of having your users trumpet a new feature for you. It is free marketing. If everyone got their shiny new web profiles on the same day Instagram would have gotten one days worth of press about it. By releasing them over the course of a week they got a full week’s worth.

Hipstamatic was playing the wrong game »

October 15th, 2012

Austin Carr in a retelling of the Hipstamatic story for FastCompany:

“By March of 2011, when Hipstamatic hired its new designer, Laura Polkus, Instagram had already rocketed to 2.2 million users, and was growing by 130,000 users per week. But Polkus says the team largely ignored Instagram. “There wasn’t a whole lot of attention paid there,” says Polkus, who was later let go. “The conversation internally was, ‘Well, we’re completely different. They are a social network, and we are not. Who cares what’s going on with them? We’ll just continue to do what we do.’ But from the public’s perspective, that’s obviously not the way things were seen.”

I’ve seen this in many companies. I’ve been guilty of this stance myself. It is at the brink of competition that one resists it the most. When the world begins to compare what you’re building with what someone else has built you immediately reject that idea, trying to tell anyone that brings it up that you’re different or will be different or want to be different.

But the fact is, the world doesn’t have time to figure out why you’re different on their own. You need to show them. And in order to show them you may need to come off of your existing product roadmap and work on marketing. It isn’t fun – at least not for builders. To take a break from building things in order to make sure that your messaging is right? Eeek. Gag. But that is exactly what you need to do. You need to show the world how you’re different so that there isn’t a question.

But some will go down in flames rather than strive to make this distinction in the marketplace. Using Hipstamatic vs. Instagram as the lens for this argument you can see how the world viewed the two applications in general terms; a camera app that lets you add filters to your photos and share them with friends. Instagram won because it was free, was much easier to use, and had a social network built into the app and didn’t rely on using a social network you’ve built elsewhere.

So, one could say that Hipstamatic lost to Instagram. But that is because they were playing the wrong game. (And, if you read the FastCompany article you can see they spent rather lavishly and had very little regard for running a good business.)

If you back up a little and look at this same argument using App.net vs. Twitter as your lens you can see this same situation happening in reverse. Twitter; free, easy. App.net; costs money, is seemingly the same service. But there is a catch; App.net doesn’t need to “beat Twitter” to be a success. Hipstamatic didn’t need to beat Instagram to be a success. They just needed to clearly define the differences between the applications and aim to be a great, paid alternative.

I don’t pretend to know what the differentiators should have been between Hipstamatic and Instagram but I can say that not being owned by Facebook would have been an excellent start.

Camera+ adds iPhone 5 low-light support »

October 4th, 2012

Scott Meinzer at Camera+:

“Apple has added the ability for the sensor in the iPhone 5 to take pictures at 4 times the sensitivity. If you’re a camera buff this means the ISO can go from a limit of 800 before, up to 3200 now!”

Camera+ was always too slow to use on my iPhone 4. Since upgrading to the iPhone 5 Camera+ has made its way onto my main Dock. I’m glad for this update.

One quibble, though, would be that I wish Camera+ would save its photos directly to my Camera Roll rather than to its own Library.

A reminder of why we love photography »

October 1st, 2012

James Duncan Davidson:

The light did its thing a few times. For a little bit, it looked like the sunset was going to get lost in clouds rolling in from the west. But then we got a reprieve and sunset kicked in in a wonderful way. We all picked a bit of a different thing to focus on.

This post by Duncan is a reminder of why we love photography; many times it isn’t so much about the images as it is about the experiences.

Be sure to catch Rick LePage’s post as well.

A fork of the Recent Photos widget by Asad Iqbal for WordPress

September 19th, 2012

I’ve been planning on figuring out a simple way to show the latest photo from my mobile photos category on the sidebar of my site for a while. Today I did a quick search for a plugin that would simply add a widget that I could drag/drop into place to do exactly that.

I came across the Recent Photos widget by Asad Iqbal. Asad hasn’t updated the plugin in a little while so it didn’t work for me out of the box. I also made a few slight revisions for my use (mostly removing a bunch of inline HTML). I’ve created a fork in a Gist of the widget and I plan on making a few more revisions. Feel free to use the code or fork it yourself if you find it useful.

Using Dropbox as a photo management app »

September 17th, 2012

This is intriguing. Stephen Hacket took a que from Frederico Viticci on ditching iPhoto/Aperture and just using directories stored on Dropbox as a way to manage photos.

After reading it, I started to think about why I continue to suffer with use Aperture. I rarely use it edit my photos, and really prefer it over iPhoto just for the organization in to projects.

Suffer is exactly the right word. Using my Macbook Pro without an SSD with Aperture is really an exercise in frustration. Even if I create brand new libraries for each month of photos that I take it is still entirely too slow to be useful. Closing Aperture takes about 8 minutes. And I’m with Hackett. I only use Aperature to easily manage/find photos later on. But clearly it isn’t working for me.

In fact, iPhoto and Aperture have the opposite effect on me. Rather than making it easier to manage and edit photos it is actually much, much harder. So much harder that I’ve taken less and less photos with my DSLR over the last few years. In spite of really wanting to take more and more.

I’m going to do a little more research into the method that these two have laid out but I’m going to consider ditching photo manager applications for a straight directory structure.

/via Stephen Hackett.

Rick Poon takes out his iPhone, and not his SLR, in Maui »

July 24th, 2012

I’d take the time to link to the innumerable tweets and blog posts I’ve read about photogs being burnt out and fed up with carrying tons of photo equipment. But we’re all feeling this. We’re all sick and tired of lugging around these monstrous bags full of our lenses, filters, lights, and bulky cameras and we’re opting to shoot only with our iPhones because it is quick, convenient and the results are nearly good enough.

Rick Poon took some amazing shots in Maui using his iPhone. Here is what he had to say after he returned.

You know, when times were simpler, and all we wanted to do was shoot everything that caught our eye? If you haven’t already noticed, I’ve been a bit addicted to Instagram. The spontaneity that it cultivates has really brought back a little bit of that lost passion, and I find myself excited to shoot and share the things I see. Kind of like the old days.

On the same note, traveling with an SLR, lenses, and such has become more of a hindrance. I don’t have those 2o year old shoulders anymore, and whipping out a big heavy camera every time I see something interesting isn’t really my idea of spontaneity.  When I spent a week in beautiful Maui last week, I did pack my trusty 5D with a sparse three lens kit. But I already knew it was a lost cause. Instagram and my iPhone had already ruined it for me. The 5D never made it out of the bag.

In a nutshell here is what every amateur photographer really wants – they want control over how their image will be processed. They want depth of field, light sensitivity, and color saturation to be adjustable. It is why we purchased a SLR, a few lenses, a few filters, etc. Because we want this control. And we were willing to give up our covienience in order to get that control.

Then comes the iPhone. With a little bit of software and a marvel of lens technology we can control what parts of the image are in focus, process the photo using software, and even share that photo instantly if we choose to do so. The iPhone with an app or two has a very similar level of control as a SLR with the added capability that an Internet connection affords.

The only way I can see Canon, Nikon, et al competing at this level would be to create their own apps for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone. Surely they’ve got the expertise and in-house genius to come up with some of the very best ways to take advantage of the lens technology in these devices.

Oh, and by “processing” I don’t mean just Instagram filters (although they are convenient and quite good). I’m talking about apps that let you edit the image without presets. It is pretty obvious that Rick Poon’s photos of Maui were not processes using Instagram alone. They are absolutely gorgeous.