Reflecting on Service

Reflection of Coast Guard Cutter

I love reflections. I love photographing them. There is something about how light and surfaces interact to form reflections that captures my imagination. Perhaps it is how the reflections are changed from the original yet are still recognizable. Kind of like glancing into Alice's Wonderland for a brief moment where the mundane gets transformed or warped into something completely different. Reflections hint at other possibilities that we are not normally aware of in our daily experience. Walk down the street, catch a faint sparkle of yourself in a puddle, and wonder if that other self is as harried as your mundane life or is it in a land of wonder where imagination is made real?

More after the jump.

I also enjoy how light plays off of and through materials in a scientific manner. It obeys very specific laws and can be predicted with simple mathematical equations. Optics has always been an interest of mine. Give me a flash light, some lenses and prisms, and I will play with them for hours. Better yet, add a laser pointer and the potential fun is compounded. I guess that is why I like photography. I get to play with and capture light.

The above photograph is of the decommissioned Coast Guard Cutter U.S.S. Ingham at Patriot's Point. It sits near the U.S.S. Yorktown aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Laffey destroyer, and U.S.S. Clamagore submarine. The Ingham was the most decorated Coast Guard cutter at the time of her decommissioning including being the only cutter to receive two Presidential Unit Citations. It was built in the 1930s to combat the opium smugglers of the time, but soon found itself embroiled in WWII. It escorted supply ships across the Atlantic protecting them from German U-boats. It also served as a flagship in several Pacific Theater island landings. She provided naval gunfire support in Vietnam and rescued Cuban refugees during the Mariel boatlift in 1980. Her 52 years of service ended when she was decommissioned on May 27, 1988. Over those years, thousands of sailors served aboard her and were the key to the success of her missions. Remember that she was a Coast Guard ship, yet she served during wartime. During peace she and her crew protected the US's shores while also providing aid on the open seas. For every Ingham, there are countless other Coast Guard ships and service people that have served without recognition. The Ingham's presence at Patriot's Point is as much for those service people as it is for those that directly served on her decks.

That is what I think this photograph captures. While it is the Ingham's reflection, it also reminds us that there are others who serve in the same role with little acknowledgement.

Keep shooting.
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Photobooks

Last week I made a post with some suggestions for using your photographs as gifts. The reason that I was thinking about that particular topic was that I had ordered a couple of photobooks from Mpix.com as Christmas gifts for family members. I didn't want to say too much about the photobooks at the time because I knew that my family reads the blog from time-to-time and I didn't want to spoil the surprise. I had actually already received the books when I made the post and couldn't contain myself from talking about them. Thankfully, I managed not to spill the beans and now that the presents have been opened, I'm glad to say that both photobooks were hits.

More after the jump.

To order photobooks from any of the internet printing companies, you have to use their supplied software. The software is usually a small application that you download from the company, although in some instances it is a web application that you run while logged in to the company's website. Mpix.com's application is the download variety which makes it convenient to create books. You can work on them at your leisure and don't have to worry about loosing your internet connection.

Like most little applications of this sort, there was very little in the way of instructions. However, it is fairly easy to use once you start playing around with it. There are basically two ways to create a book in the software. You can have a fully automated layout where you tell the software what photographs you want to include and the software will create the book for you. Or, you can start with some rough templates, including a blank book, and create the layout yourself.

The software has pre-configured page layouts that you can drag-and-drop onto a blank page. Then you can drag your photographs to the picture frames. There is an undo feature if you make a mistake, and you can fine-tune the placement of your photographs after you have dropped them into the pre-set frames. If you want a photograph to fill an entire page then instead of using a page layout, you set the photograph as a background. You can even have the photograph span across two pages which is a great way of displaying panoramic photographs. Once you have a photograph set as a background, you can then apply one of the page layout pre-sets to the page to have a nested effect. For example, I had one page with a full-sized photograph where the subject was mainly on the left side of the page. I then placed two smaller frames on the right side of the frame. This gave me one full sized image who's blank area served as a nice background for two smaller photographs. The software includes background pre-sets as well should you want to use them, and also has a generous collection of frames that can be applied to the photographs.

While I did have a couple of issues throughout the process of creating the books, there really wasn't an issue that I could blame on the software itself. The issues were related to me playing with features that I didn't understand. In those instances I did use the help features and was able to correct the mistakes or learn the proper way to do want I had been trying to accomplish. Oddly enough, most of the issues I had involved creating and placing captions. Once I figured out what I was doing wrong though, I had little trouble with captions again.

Once you have finished the book, you then upload it to Mpix.com, create an account if you don't already have one, and complete the order. The books arrived just as quickly as the prints that I have ordered from them and are just as high quality. The books that I created had custom covers which means that I was able to place photographs and text on both the front and back covers. Mpix offers other covers such as cloth as well, but those do not allow the placement of photographs of them. One thing I do wish I could have done that wasn't allowed is that I would have liked to have placed a title block on the binding edge so that the book could be identified when it is sitting on a shelf. However, this doesn't seem to be a problem with just Mpix's software. I have not seen it available on any of the book printing services thus far. Perhaps I missed it if it was available.

If you want to give a unique gift or if you just want a quality reminder of an important event, then I do recommend Mpix.com's photobooks.
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Let it Snow ...

Winter Storm, Jan., 2008

The picture above is from last winter. Today we had a high near 70 degrees F. I hope to actually see a White Christmas one day. It doesn't look like it will be this year though.

Also a note about my photo-hosting service, Zenfolio. They are constantly improving the service and adding new features. Most of them have been behind-the-scenes kind of things to make managing your galleries better or stream-lining the print ordering and fulfillment process. However, this week they added something for visitors. You can now leave comments on the photographs posted there. There is a "guestbook" feature where you can leave comments on the home page or individual gallery's start page. You can also leave comments on individual photographs. I have turned this feature on throughout the gallery site. You don't have to be registered with Zenfolio to leave comments, but I do get an email notification when a comment has been made and can moderate them if needed.

Anyway, I hope your holiday preparations are going well. My son has had a few Christmas events this week and I am now sorting through those photographs.

Keep shooting.

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Photography and the Holidays

Oh, the weather outside has been frightful,
and the central heating is so delightful.

Cold and rainy. That's what it has been like the past few days. I just haven't been that inspired to do any shooting recently. So instead of talking about a photograph how about something a bit different?


Now we photographers are usually proud of our images. We go to a lot of effort to get the perfect shot. Then we spend a lot of time with the image on the computer processing and editing it until it is as perfect as we can get it. What do we do with them afterwards? Some of us have web galleries to share them. Some of use will make prints from out desktop printers. Sometimes one might make it's way on to a computer display as a background. Others might display them with an LCD "frame". Mostly we horde them away on our computers where no one sees them again.

Well, this time of the year is the perfect time to bring out some of those locked away images and share the memories that they captured with those we love. Many of the on-line photo print services have products that give our images new life. Did you take a great portrait of your children or of your family this year? Why not turn that picture in to custom postcards and send it to your family? Of course, people have been doing this for many years. Now you have a bit more control over the design and final image quality.

Did you take some amazing landscape photographs on your vacation or road trips this year? Do you have a family member that loves seeing images of new places? Why not give them a hardcover book of your best photographs of the year? There are many on-line print services that will allow you to create your own high quality "coffee-table" photobooks for a reasonable price.

Do you have an athlete in your family? A new product that I have been seeing printing companies offering lately are life-sized cutouts. They will take your photograph of a person, blow it up to life-size and make a cutout image of just the person. Some of the cutouts that I've seen are cardboard stand-ups, others are plastic wall clings.

Coffee lover on your gift list? Have a coffee cup make with one of your images. What grandparent wouldn't love a set of coffee cups with all of their grandkids' pictures?

There are many other gift ideas. Good quality prints, particularly mounted and/or framed, will usually be favorites. Some printing companies offer novelty items such as keychains as well as other off the wall (or on the wall) products.

I personally use Mpix and have had great experience with them. They are not the only company out there. There are many to choose from with some offering quite unique and specialized products.

This holiday season why not use those photographs you have locked away in the bowels of your computer and create some unique, memorable and lasting gifts.

Keep shooting.

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Photosynth

A couple of years ago, Microsoft presented a public demonstration of a new technology they were working on called Photosynth. What it does is analyze a collection of photographs from one particular area and then combines them into a psuedo-3D presentation. It is almost a combination of a slideshow, a gallery, and a 3D model. You can "move" around an area, and the system will then display the photographs of that area. When you zoom in, it will zoom in to any photographs taken of the details of that portion of the area. It is a very cool idea and implimentation.

Earlier this week, I saw a new video presention where the research team explained some new features they had added recently. Those features included maintaining an object's position as you rotated around it so that it didn't jump back and forth. They added an "on-the-fly white balancing" feature so that photographs taken by differnt photographers and cameras would blend in together better. Plus, they added the ability for the system to distinquish between night-time and day-time photographs so you could select one or the other to view.

What took me by surprise yesterday, is that Microsoft has rolled Photosynth out as part of their Live web services. In other words, you can now make your own "synths" as they call the 3D presentations. Currently, Photosynth requires a download that installs two components. One component is a browser plug-in that allows you to view the synths. The other is a small applet that starts the process of making a synth. There is no client-only version yet as the process requires the server power to generate the synth presentations. Another downside is that it seems to be limited to Widows XP and Vista at the moment.

If you are interested here is a link to the Photosynth website. It has been quite a bit more popular than Microsoft expected, so the site has been up and down with heavy traffic loads. Once that gets ironned out, I do plan to give it a try this weekend. So, look for a post with my first attempts in a couple of days.

This technology has the potential of changing quite a few ways of displaying and presenting our photographs.

As always, keep shooting.

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The Power of Photography

Rather than post another shot from my archieves, I found something better to direct your attention too. Over on his blog, photographer Joe McNally has an inspirational article about how he helped a father fighting MS achieve the photograph he had in his head but couldn't shot himself. It is a good read. It shows how photography can touch and inspire us no matter who we are. I have nothing better to say about photography today.

Blogging from Both Sides, Part One by Joe McNally

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Getty Licensing Flickr Images

Yeah, I'm up late at night with a touch of ensomnia. I just checked my feed reader and noticed that there were a couple of new posts over on Strobist. Cool I thought. One of them was about a new program that Getty Images is startign with Flickr. Head over to the Strobist's site to read all about it.

Maybe I should start putting photos up on Flickr.



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Preserving the Faces of 9/11

I'm a fan of Joe McNally's work. One of his most significant projects was photographing the heroes of 9/11 with the world's largest Polaroid camera. The camera is a truck trailer and captures life sized images. He has a book compiling the photographs, and has had a couple of shows displaying them. However, he has been having to store and care for them himself. He has a post on his site about that and how New York camera retailer Adorama has agreed to help him with those expenses. It is a moving and inspiring post that anyone with an interest in photography would like to read. These photographs will be a piece of our history. They should be preserved and displayed.

His post is on his blog. Here is a link to it.

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What I Use: Part III

Once we have captured the photograph with the camera and processed it in our software of choice, we usually want to display the fruits of our creative labor in some way. Today I will discuss what I currently use for presenting my photographs and images.



As we are in the digital photography age, there are quite a few ways in which we can display our imagery. Prints are of course the long standing method of showing our photographs to people as are slide shows. I remember watching shows of photographs that my father had taken on slides with his old Yashica SLR/Rangefinder. I have a particular fondness for the slides taken from the Kennedy/Canaveral Space Port. That was back during the Apollo age when space exploration was an exciting event that spurred the imaginations of children.

Of course there are also new ways we have of displaying our images. Online sites like Flickr have expositionally expanded the potential audience of our imagery from family members, close friends and co-workers to anyone with a computer around the world. Here are the services and ways in which I’m sharing and presenting my images.

Online Storage and Gallery

My primary gallery is located at Zenfolio. When I started taking digital photographs a year ago, I looked at several of the common photography sites. Flickr is by far the most popular. It is as much a social site as it is a photographic gallery. However, I found that I didn’t like the fact that everyone’s galleries seemed to look the same. Sure the photographs were different, but there didn’t seem to be any way to individualize the look of your site or a particular gallery. So I looked to other options.



What I found were a group of sites that positioned themselves as more about presenting your images in a creative way than simply making them available for on-line viewing. Sites like Pbase, SmugMug, and Zenfolio in particular caught my attention. These sites distinguish themselves from Flickr by trying to be a little more upscale or professional in their presentation. As such they do not generally have a free storage option. Thus, you have a small annual subscription fee for a certain amount of storage capacity. I didn’t find that their subscription fees were particularly unreasonable for the service provided, so the fact there was a fee didn’t immediately put me off of them. I am not one of those people that thing everything on the internet should be free. If someone creates a good service or product that fulfills a need, then I feel they deserve the right to make a profit for their labors. Of course, it can go the other way as well as there are those that try to make too much of a profit for the services they provide.

As I researched the galleries of photographers on these sites, I really liked the overall style of the Zenfolio gallery templates and services. There seemed a good variety of gallery styles, layouts, and access controls. The basic subscription rate was $25 US per year for unlimited storage. Some of the other services had limited capacity for a similar price. Zenfolio didn’t have the social features of some of the other services such a commenting on galleries and photographs, but that wasn’t a feature that was particularly important to me. Thus, when I weighed the pros and cons of the services, Zenfolio came out ahead. I have been using them for about a year now and have been very happy with them. They have provided regular updates to the gallery features and expanded the types of services available through them. For example they now have a higher subscription level, the “Professional” level, which allows the photographer to sell prints through their printing partner with mark-ups. In other words, it can now be used as an e-commerce site by professional photographers to sell their prints world-wide. Zenfolio has also expanded their offerings with their printing partners so that a wide range of print sizes and framing styles are available to potential buyers. Which leads me to the next sections …



Prints

There are two ways of getting prints of your digital images. The first is of course printing them yourself. I have an HP Photosmart C6180 all-in-one printer at home. I have been quite happy with the prints I have gotten from it. Most of the prints have been on HP Premium Plus Photo Paper, High Gloss. The main reason I got this printer was because it was a wireless all-in-one unit. The only cord I have attached to it is the power adaptor. It connects to the home network wirelessly via the wireless router. This allows both me and my wife to use the printer without one or the other computer having to be left turned on or getting bogged down due to processing the spool-queue. The printer uses six individual ink cartridges one of which is a large black cartridge for text printing. It has printed very nice, full page images (8.5 inch by 11 inch).

While the HP printer is handy, if I want larger print sizes I need to use a lab or printing service. For that I use Mpix.com. They are Zenfolio’s primary printing partner. I have gotten 12 inch by 18 inch prints from them that are stunning. They have three types of Kodak paper to select. The Kodak Metallic Paper is absolutely fantastic for photographs with a lot of rich colors in them. The metallic sheen really makes the colors come to life. Mpix.com has a variety of mounting options from just standard prints, to mounted on matting boards, to framed, and even gallery wraps. Zenfolio has recently expanded their partnership with Mpix.com to include all of Mpix.com’s offerings. Mpix.com also takes orders from their website, so I highly recommend trying their services. My orders have been delivered timely and the quality has been superb.

Blogging

It might be strange to discuss the blogging platform I chose, but it is an equally valuable part of presenting digital photographs. I chose Google’s Blogger/BlogSpot as it seemed the simplest to use, the most widely used, and the most likely to still be around in a few years. Plus, it is free. You get a lot of service for the money. When I was first setting up the blog, I did have some initial issues. Chiefly, I had to research how to add the “jump” feature so that only a post’s introduction would appear. I knew that I can get wordy at times and I didn’t want long posts clogging up the front page. The “jump” link I had seen on so many other blogs was something that I knew I would use. The problem is that there isn’t a “jump” feature built-in to the Blogger templates. I had to research on the Blogger support site to find out how to do it. The process involved hacking the CSS HTML/XML. Luckily, there are a couple of Blogger power users that have good posts to walk non-coders through the process. In the end though, I suppose that it does help to know how the unseen, code-side of the blog is structured.

Others

As I take a lot of photographs of family events and trips, I also will make CDs/DVDs for family members. I have even given CDs of school events to my son’s teacher and school for them to use as well.



I hope this post was helpful to get an idea of the services and products that I use to share and display my images. The services which I selected are the ones that have appealed to me the most and provided the service level that I have expected. Therefore, I feel safe in recommending them to anyone that is looking for such services. However, there are a lot of services available to today’s photographers that provide exceptional value. The other gallery sites such as PBase and SmugMug are examples of services that I would recommend to anyone. They have some offerings that Zenfolio doesn’t have and vice-versa of course. In this case, I simply found Zenfolio more suited to my style than the other two services. Perhaps you would prefer SmugMug or Flickr more. Each of the services should have a free trial period so you can test them out. Give the services and products that interest you a test run before commenting to them. What works for me, might not work for you. The good thing about the internet these days is there is probably something for everyone’s particular sense of style or need.

Thanks for reading and keep shooting.


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A Good Holiday Weekend

I’m back from the Memorial Day holiday. I hadn’t posted anything because I’ve been processing photographs. I’ve also been busy with some non-photography things. We went to visit my sister’s family. They were having a big 50th birthday for my brother-in-law. Lots of BBQ and lots of their friends came out. My sister had put disposable cameras out on tables for people to use, but no one did. So, I ended up being the only photographer for it. My sister also has a lot of flowers in her yard which made for nice photo subjects We also had a small family celebration of my son’s and my nieces’ birthdays since we were all together for once.

The next day we went out on their boat to Lake Moultrie and the Cooper River. We had a lot of fun and I got a lot of photographs … almost 600 just from the boat. The shots ranged from landscapes, to wildlife, to sports, to architecture, to family snapshots. Later that evening after dinner we went back to the Lake Moultrie shore and I took my first sunset photographs; one of which you see above.

You can see the Lake Moultrie photographs here.
The flower photos are here.

A few more of the photographs after the jump



A Tern Landing


Lining Up


Mystery Heron


Vogueing Anhinga


Banded Watersnake


Waterdrops


Red Sky


That's it. Go to the galleries for all of the shots.
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A Memorable Day

Yesterday was a memorable day. I started up this blog. I was quoted by a famous photographer on his highly read website. Plus, I sold my first prints. One you see to the side there. You can see it larger by clicking on it. The other two after the jump.





These photographs were taken at Falls Park in Greenville, South Carolina. One of my favorite places to take my camera. The park is centered around some scenic waterfalls, there is interesting architecture, a unique suspension, footbridge, and the park itself. It is a very compact area with lots of photographic opportunities.


The person that bought these prints is a long-time friend and co-worker of my wife's. She only wanted 8x10s from my inkjet, but still a sale is a sale. You have to start somewhere.


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