Adam Howitt's Blog

From Microsoft to Yahoo without the pain

At : 10:20 AM | Link | Photography | Comments (1) | Send | 563 Views |

The online photo market has been saturated for some time but the most frustrating part was the lack of interoperability between the disparate systems... until now.  I had lunch with a Microsoft employee just the other day and we discussed how Microsoft is trying to redefine the culture from a "not built here" to working with clients to deliver integrated solutions. 

This morning I was flicking through my RSS feeds in Google Reader when I came across a post from the Microsoft Photography Blog to say that Windows Live Photo Gallery (Beta) now allows you to publish pictures to Yahoo! Flickr.  This is an outstanding achievement in my mind and I hope to see other companies follows suit like Google's Picasa tool.  My workflow with photos is usually

• Download off card
  
• tweak with Picasa
• save a finished version to a folder
• drag the folder contents to Flickr then tag, title and add descriptions quickly before anyone gets my RSS feed of updated titles. 

I know you can mark them as private but using a web application to tag and title so many photos seems painful to me.

How much easier would it be to move to this workflow:

• Download off card
• tweak with Picasa
• tag, title and add descriptions (with auto-suggest titles)
• publish to Flickr. 

I know it's not a technology issue causing the disconnect here - it's the "not built here" mentality and it needs to change.  Why would I switch from Flickr to Google's service when I have 6 years of photos invested in the Flickr service?  Not to mention that Flickr's service and social networking is best of breed.

Digitally Entwined

At : 1:35 AM | Link | Photography | Comments (0) | Send | 608 Views |

I'm glad to say that the details are all coming together on the Chicago Flickr Meetup group's first gallery show: we have our youtube promo video ready (with excellent soundtrack by recent Today Show guest Yvonne Doll and her band The Locals), the site is launched and the press have all the details.  If you live near Chicago and want to come and see, the opening night is Friday 2nd March at 7pm.  Upcoming.org has an RSVP mechanism and for anyone who wants to be added to the evite, let me know in the comments.  Full details on the site.

Photo critique

At : 2:58 PM | Link | Photography | Comments (1) | Send | 530 Views |

I have been taking lots of photos lately since I received a Canon Rebel 35mm camera for Christmas and have really dug in to the Flickr community.  One of my favorite features is the combination of comments and the groups you can join where you get honest feedback about your photos to help you improve. Sometimes the comments are really unhelpful and say things like "boring" without explaining what they would have done differently. I have tried really hard to add as much value on my comments to not just say "I hate it" or "I love it" and mention good and bad points. 

I would really like to try my hand at stock photography and came across a site called dpchallenge.com which offers regular challenges to shoot on a given topic and hence broaden your horizons as a photographer.  I found a great comment from a member called fotomann_forever where he broke the comment down to the key elements of critique.  I have reproduced it here from a critique of a cool Rubics Cube photo in an 80s challenge for future reference.

First Impression - the most important one:
It is a good image and stands apart from all the other Rubik's Cube photos in that it is torn apart ... something I quickly learned to do ;-)

Composition:
Pretty strong. I like the fact that the in focus parts are in the positions they are in. However, I think that using two blocks in the foreground has crowded the composition a bit.

Subject:
Clean, clear crisp and stands out welll.

Technical (Colour, focus, and light):

Colour- White balance seems to be a bit warm. But, overall colour is good.
Focus - Sharp and good use of DoF.
Light - No harsh shadows, evenly lit. Pretty good, but somewhat flat.

To grow its vote?:
The Rubik's seems to have been an obvious choice for this challenge. In that, you may have gotten quite a few votes that were low, because voters had seen too many Rubik's Cubes. Also, strenthen up that composition just a little.

Summary:
Pretty good photo, definitely not a bad photo.