22 Photo New Year’s Resolutions for 2009

Every year most people I know - myself included - make those ever so useful New Year’s Resolutions. I think I’ve only ever followed through with one or two in my life!

Photojojo has a great little article titled 22 Photo New Year’s Resolutions for 2009. There’s quite a few good ones:

Get Organized
1. Weed out the chaff
2. Clean up your act
3. Back up!

Show Off
4. Put more photos up
5. Make a book
6. Enter some contests
7. Share your pictures online

Try Something New
8. Use a new technique
9. Switch teams
10. Borrow some new gear
11. Get a different perspective

Do Some Good
12. Donate your old gear
13. Volunteer your talents
14. Teach somebody what you know

Challenge Yourself
15. Go on assignment
16. Do something difficult
17. Brush up on your history

Start a Project
18. Start a year-long project
19. Pick a new project every month
20. Start a new tradition
21. Make a time capsule

Take your camera everywhere
22. Take your camera everywhere

My biggest thing that I need to do is to get organized and get things up and running including revamping this site and setting up a portfolio/sales site. I’m going to be ambitious and see how many of these I can hit this year. I think my first “year long project” will be the new 100 Possibilities Project on Flickr - 100 photos of the same item. It can’t be that hard to take 100 different photos of a laptop can it?

I’ll keep you all posted on the rest!

Tags: flickr, laptop, photography, Photojojo, resolution

flickr Fave of the Day : If only you were here…

Originally uploaded by M.Gruber

I must say, I’ve been following M.Gruber’s stream for quite some time now, and he continues to amaze! Having completed the first year of a 365 days of self portraits projects, he’s trundled on to a Year Two and is continuing to raise the bar!

Great shots the last couple days man - keep up the great work!

Tags: fave of the day, flickr, m.gruber, matt

The Flickr Collection on Getty Images

Interesting post on the Flickr blog yesterday… sounds like they are teaming up with the Getty Images stock photography site to promote Flickr users photos and hopefully make it easier for Flickrites to get there images up on Getty.

Team Flickr has long wanted to create a way to make it easier for those who use photos in the digital publishing industry to do so in a way that respects the talent and rights of our members.

The great folks at Flickr and Getty Images are joining forces to build a platform that will enable the creation of a first class collection of royalty free, rights ready, and rights managed photographs that will debut later this year.

Maybe they can use some more stock golf images? Supposedly coming later this year. Should prove interesting. I sure hope they don’t use the Magic Donkey to determine what is Getty Images worthy!

Tags: flickr, foot, getty, golf, grass, images, partnership, photography, stock

1000 Views in under 24 hours…

I know there are those of us on Flickr who complain about the Magic Donkey, also known as Explore… I mean really, how can a computer algorithm really tell us humans what is interesting?

Thing is, when you get in - and high enough, I might add - it really does work… the photo above I uploaded to Flickr Sunday afternoon around 4:30pm local time… by 1:00pm Monday it had over 1000 views. The highest Explore position was #8… in my opinion it’s not even the best photo from the set I took that day (in fact, this sat in my upload folder because I was hedging for the past couple weeks if I should even upload it), but who’s complaining? Not me! Thanks for all the views, comments and faves - and whatever else it took to reach that high on Explore.

Tags: alberta, church, comments, cultural, explore, faves, flickr, hdr, heritage, rural, ukrainian, views, village

Portfolio Updated!

Just a FYI, updated the images on the portfolio page.

As always, you can view the rest of my portfolio and images over at Flickr.

Tags: flickr, pixelens, portfolio, update

flickr Fave of the Day : Lake Beauvert by elementalPaul

Lake Beauvert Originally uploaded by elementalPaul

I had the pleasure of hooking up with Paul while he was in town. I’ve always loved his HDR stuff and it’s really cool to see his treatment of locations I’m familiar with.

I absolutely love this treatment he has given this shot that he took in Jasper.

Tags: alberta, elementalPaul, flickr, flickr Fave of the day, hdr, jasper, lake, landscape

Ghetto lighting…

I often receive comments and questions about low lighting in my self portrait shots. The Ghetto Lighting group over on Flickr defines ghetto lighting as:

If you use desklamps, your window, candles, whatever else I have not mentioned, then you my friend, use ghetto lighting.

I never really thought of this as “ghetto lighting” when I first picked up my Canon Digital Rebel XTi/400D back in November of last year, I was just using what I had on hand. Because of the season and the early sunset I really had no choice but to use what I could, and my favorite weapon of choice was, and still is, my IKEA Expressivo desk lamp. And it’s cheap!

Initially, the basic process I followed was to set up my shot, take a couple shots on the default setting to see what the camera “thought” I should be shooting at. Based on that, I’d crank up the shutter speed and/or the aperture setting until I received the desired level of dark/light that I was after. In other words, if the default settings took the shot at 1/8s at f/1.8, I’d adjust the shutter speed to 1/20s and go from there, increase to 1/30s if needed or decrease to 1/13s as desired.

Sure I could use Photoshop curves and levels, but I find more satisfaction in trying to do as much as I can in camera.

Tags: flickr, ghetto lighting, lamp, low light, self-portrait, tip

How to Geotag Images

Over on the Digital Photography School blog, there’s a new article about Geotagging images.

In this post Colin Spencer gives us a good introduction to how to Geotag images. You can see some of Colin’s images here and learn more about him at the conclusion of this article.

When I first started using flickr, I mapped some of the images I’d taken. The main issue I had with this was that my ONLINE version of a photo was tagged, my OFFLINE version wasn’t. I started geotagging my offline images a few months ago, unfortunately I don’t have a GPS device to automatically do it, but I found a cool freeware program called GeoSetter that does a wonderful job!

Check out How to Geotag Images over at DPS, and check out my geotagged photos on Flickr!

Tags: colin sepncer, digital photography school, DPS, flickr, geo tagging, geosetter, geotag, map, mapping

Textured Petal Abstract

Really like the added touch textures add to some images. This is a macro detail of some tulip petals with a texture added in Photoshop set to overlay layer mode.

Free texture was made available by Joy on Flickr.

Tags: flickr, flower, free, joy, texture

If You Put That Picture On The Internet I’ll Call My Lawyer

Saw this image via Thomas Hawk on Flickr.

Photo taken by Jeremy Brooks
Uploaded to Flickr by Thomas Hawk

Seems his friend Jeremy Brooks, had a minor run in with this guy while out shooting some photos.

However, Mr. Angry Overreaction Man decided that he now had a problem with me. He confronted me, demanding my camera. Of course, I refused. He got in my face and started threatening me, telling me that I cannot take his photo without his permission. I told him that yes, in fact, I can. He then walked up and bumped into me, trying to act tough. I told him that one more touch and I would call the police.

As I mentioned on Thomas’ photostream, it is well within our rights to photography in public places (unless you live in Quebec)… ask me nice and I’ll be inclined not to post it - or send me a cordial e-mail if you see an image of you that I’ve taken and I’ll likely remove it at your request - be a jerk or worse and it’s going to go up for sure.

Check out Jeremy’s accounting of the incident on his blog.

Digg Jeremy’s original blog post.

Tags: anger, flickr, jeremy hall, photographer, Portrait, rights, thomas hawk