August 22nd, 2008 at 10:28 am
PYWP Monthly Assignment: Rural Architecture, originally uploaded by Sheba Wheeler.
Participating in online photography assignments is a great motivator for getting you out there in the field with your camera. You can choose how active you want to be by shooting for weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly assignments held in various forums, including Flickr and Digital Photography School just to name a few. I even host a monthly contest through my blog at Picture Your World Photography to challenge my readers to “Get Out There!” and shoot regularly.
I love this concept because you will often find yourself shooting things you might not have noticed before as you try to interpret a given theme. You see things in a new light and you challenge not only your own creativity, but the ability of the viewer to see things the way you see them, too.
I took this shot of an outhouse in Pine Junction, Colorado, for my blog’s August assignment: Rural Architecture. I changed the color image to a sepia tone and completed some contrast and tonal adjustments. I used controls in the Lens Vignetting section of the Lens Correction tab in Camera Raw CS3 to create the white vignette. Increase amount to lighten the corners, or decrease amount to darken them. Decrease midpoint to apply the adjustment to a larger area away from the corners, or increase midpoint to restrict the adjustment to an area closer to the corners.
August 9th, 2008 at 6:00 am
At first glance, you immediately wonder “How did they do that?”. This question is either immediately preceded or followed by “Wow, that is pretty cool.” I didn’t take the photo, but I think I have it figured out.
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August 7th, 2008 at 6:00 am
December 15th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
It can be difficult to upload, organize, describe and create tags for hundreds of digital photos at one time. But the new revamped Flickr Uploadr 3.0 introduced last week made this an easy process.
The first time Uploadr is started, users will be asked to authorize it with Flickr, but you don’t have to do this now. Version 3.0 lets you work offline, adding and organizing photos until you are satisfied before the actual uploading begins. I would recommend authorizing from the start because the process seemed more streamlined to me. When you are ready, click “Sign In,” and you will be directed to Flickr.
Photos can be dragged into the Uploadr individually or in large numbers. My first batch contained 171 photos. Click the “Add” button in the upper left hand corner. When the window opens, navigate to your photos. I selected all of my photos and hit “Open” to place them in the Uploadr box. Once the pictures appear, select a photo (or as many as you like), and start adding titles, tags and descriptions. The Uploadr also allows users to choose who can see the photos, define safety levels and content type, and create sets. Hit the large “Upload photos” button on the right hand side of the page.
At this point you can walk away and do laundry or something. It could take a while, depending on the speed of your internet connection and how many photos you are uploading. The cool thing about this new Uploadr is that you can go ahead and immediately add and organize more photos — all while the first batch is still loading to Flickr. I added three sets of nearly 500 photos. Out of those, only two images weren’t uploaded, which is pretty amazing if you ask me. A message comes up saying, “Darn! Some photos didn’t make it.” The culprits are shown in the Uploadr screen. Just tell it to try again, and the remaining photos will join the rest.
Need more help? Check out the official forum thread for tips.
December 14th, 2007 at 10:59 am
For all the fans of Flickr who happen to have a Pro account it’s time to get excited! Just announced was the new Flickr Stats for Pro users to get a nice visual of the stats for each photo.
You are presented with a nice graph for each photo with info on where traffic is coming from, who is viewing your photos and most visited photos in addition to several other categories of interest. Good stuff!
While you have to activate the stats on your account and a warning screen says it can take up to 24 hours for your stats to appear my stats were available in about 30 minutes.
Flickr is about the most popular photo sharing site on the ‘Net due in no small part to its ease of use and ease of sharing amongst friends, family and complete strangers. While regular free account holders are left out of the statastic fun, a Pro account is only $24.95 a year. Pretty darn cheap for unlimited storage and bandwidth.
