Macworld iWorld 2014 Wrap-Up

Join Michael Portis and I in our Macworld/iWorld 2014 Wrap-Up discussing what and who caught our eye at the Expo this year.


Products Reviewed
Square Jellyfish
PoweRocks
Pocket Tripod
Contact Patch
Studio Neat

and a BIG personal thank you to:
Michael Rose
Jack Hollingsworth

If you would like to join our community, please visit http://smartphone-photographers.com/ 

Evening, Javelina!

All this time living in Arizona, I have never seen Javelina up close, until now. I was leaving a client’s home Thursday night and it was around 7:45 pm. I was accelerating up a small hill when I had to hit the hooks as they were just congregating in the middle of the road! They scurried up the side of the road and continued their little meeting and I just had to stop the car and marvel at them. It was really hard to photograph what I was seeing with just my iPhone. It didn’t help that I was kinda of scared that they might charge me or that a car could come up behind me at any time. Instinct told me I should not get out of the car, but I admit I was very tempted! I decided they were a safe enough distance away from my car, so I took a deep breath, picked up my iPhone with one hand while rolling down my electric window and keeping my finger on that window button, my left foot on the clutch, right on the break, paused the podcast I was playing, brought up the camera, enabled the flash while trying to reach up with my thumb to tap the screen in an attempt at focusing on the peccary then snapped 2 photos. The super bright flash from my LED flash startled them and they began scurrying away. The photos I captured were pitch black and I was disappointed that I couldn’t capture the moment. I rolled up my window, put the phone back in my dash, engaged in first gear and slowly drove off in amazement of having witnessed these nocturnal animals. I was glad I got to see them with my own eyes.

While organizing my photos for this evening, I decided instead of discarding these back blobs that I’d try and edit them in iPhoto. It turns out I was able to get something out of one of them and as you can see here, you can almost make out the shapes of the Javelina. You can make out 3 or 4 of them in the shadows.

This is what I absolutely love about smartphone photography: the thrill of the moment. Your heart beats in your chest and you feel alive in the moment.

So many times I feel guilty because I am always snapping photos of every little thing. “Melissa, how can you be present in the moment when you’re always behind the camera?” Well, maybe everyone’s way of being present is just not the same. I felt very much alive trying to capture this moment. Not only was I present then, but I can recall that moment now any time I like and feel a sense of pride. Is this not being present in the moment?

Smartphone Photographers Point and Shoot Weekend Edition for 11-23-2013

Check out this lively discussion on sharing your photos online. We discuss apps, services and philosophies along with tips for integrating them with your photo sharing needs.

Smartphone Photographers Community Hangout for November 21, 2013

This was another fun Hangout On Air with the Smartphone Photographers Community.
(That link will take you to the Google Plus page until there is a more official link which I'll update if that happens!)

If you click this link it will take you to the part where we discuss my "Butterfly Kiss" photo at the 36 minute mark. (Otherwise watch the show from the start below.) I had fun talking discussing this photo and the other suggestions that were made sound like another cool challenge for me to try! I really enjoyed learning about High-key photography technique from Michael Sweeney and I'm looking forward to trying out the effect.

An iPhone app called FX Photo Studio was discussed and I wanted to let you know it's on sale at the time of this posting so go grab it because it looks like a winner. I haven't yet had a chance to play with it, but it's got lots of recommendations so far. There is also an HD iPad version:


What do you think of smartphone photography? Come join us sometime.

Here is the "Butterfly Kisses" image I posted. I have several more eye images I'm working on and I'll post more once I process them. You have heard of a butterfly kiss, right?

Have Fun

Children remind us of what is simple and most important in life: have fun, the rest will follow.

Playing With The Sun

A play on words and a play on, well, play. There is this awkward time on certain days of the week in between errands and appointments, specifically about an hour before I need to go pick up Lucian from school where it's not enough time to nap or really go anywhere, so on this beautiful fall day, Keagan and I got on the floor to play. We had some little squirt guns that had been gifted to the boys over the summer. Normally I don't allow them in the house, but Keagan was being impossibly cute with the asking so I caved. I figured I could at least have some fun with it if I set some ground rules about where he was allowed to squirt the water. I set up some little targets for him to aim at and as I was showing him how to shoot the targets, the sun was coming through with such intensity so, I decided to do some shooting of my own with my iPhone 5s — also my idea of a good time. I was able to catch a rainbow AND lens flare in one shot and I'm really pleased with the results. The only editing I did was in iPhoto; just some cropping and a little bit of bumping up the contrast on this first shot. I played with some other effects in the other two shots as the challenge was all that sunlight with which to work.

I love all of the elements in this shot: lines, curves, curls, shadows, rainbows, sun rays, color, highlights, the way my son's little lips are formed while he's making little sounds or thinking about where to aim.

Playing With The Sun 

Target Practice

At this time I am reminded of a newspaper clipping photo I once saw of my Grandfather as a middle school-aged child shooting a rifle at target practice during a class. I believe he was in some type of rotary gun club at school in the 1930s. Upon seeing that photo is was no wonder he later became a sharpshooter for the military during WWII. It's hard to imagine that there was ever a time when guns were in schools as a source of education if perhaps some sort of early military inculcation. 

This day, however, I chose to set those negative thoughts aside in order to have some simple fun with my son and some plastic toys that shoot water. He is innocent and unaware, just having a good time knocking little bottles and medicine cups off of triangles with water and studying the trajectory. I am not innocent, but somehow I managed to have fun with this time all the same.

Spritz

Smartphone Photographers Point and Shoot for November 7, 2013

Join my comrades and I for an informative discussion on smartphone photography tips.

Household Critters

Living in the southwest, it's not uncommon to find different types of critters inside your house. Geckos commonly show up at our front door, on top of it or scurry out from under a chair. They're quite cute and less troublesome than mice or other bugs I experienced out east.

Last night was a bit different because we discovered a snake for the first time! The boys and I could barely contain our excitement over observing this little creature that crawled into our home.

Here is my Flickr photo set of some various shots I took and these are my favorites.

Curious Keagan

Wrapped Around My Finger

Perssssssspective

My New Love Affair With Lentils

Say Hello to My Little Friend - Dustbunnies Are Goin Down

If This All Works Out, I Rock

Drat! Foiled Again by the Elusive Tri-Wing Screwdriver!

Touch

Interpretation

Wait Your Turn

My Turn

Enlightened 2

Enlightened 1

Watering Hole

Wrong Date or Time Stamps on Photos & Videos & How To Archive Them

Hand-Made Mac Tip No. 13
Wrong Date or Time Stamps on Photos & Videos & How To Archive Them 

I was archiving some audio files today and discovered some of them had the wrong date stamp in the Finder's list view when sorted by "Date Created" so I thought I'd share this tip.

You just never know when the OS is going to bork your time/date stamp. It happens periodically and sometimes the time stamp does not transfer properly when burning files onto a disk or transferring to an external hard drive. Sometimes some of the data has become corrupted but is still perfectly useable. You can view the photo or video just fine, but the metadata – or time stamp – is wrong — REALLY wrong, like Y2K wonky! Sometimes it's the operating system, sometimes devices are not properly configured by the user, for example, in the case of a digital camera.

I discovered this when my mother-in-law got a brand new digital camera last year. She was so excited about it and started using it right away and was trying to learn about all the features as she went along. That's how I do it — manuals??! we don't need no stinking manuals!!

In our family, we always swap our camera chips/SD cards so that we all have the same collection of photos taken by each other when we get together for special occasions where all the cameras are out snapping away. This way there's a backup of everyone's precious memories all over the place — and at different ends of the country sometimes. Most all of us have a MacBook of some flavor with iPhoto so it's very quick and easy to download the photos and videos off the chips and be on our separate ways.

Right around the holidays, my mother-in-law and I were exchanging files from our camera chips. She had captured some really cute video footage of Lucian at his preschool holiday party. After I finished importing the files, I went to go view the photos and video in iPhoto but couldn't find them! I thought I was losing it. I could swear they imported properly! Usually, the newest photos and videos show up at the top because I've specified that I want it to view that way. I looked up and down, but these recent imports were no where to be found.

Luckily, I do not store my video files in iPhoto permanently. After some time I usually go back through my iPhoto library and move all of the videos to my Movies folder into the appropriate year folder. Then, I go through and manually rename the file names to the date and use a short description of what the movie clip is about. If it's a clip about the same thing, I add 01, 02, 03, etc. to the end. It's also much easier to navigate and locate clips in Front Row because they list nicely in a hierarchy by date and description. I use iPhoto to view & present photos and Front Row to view and present video.

When I archive the videos, I copy them twice. Once onto an external drive partition separate from my Time Machine backup partition. I repeat this process on another drive partitioned the same way located off site. Once I label them green, that means they've been archived twice on two separate drives and it's safe to remove them from my local hard drive on my laptop if I choose to do so to save space.

I don't bother to rename most all of my photos because I feel iPhoto does a decent job of managing everything for me and I can usually find what I'm looking for quickly by scrubbing through my Events. I'm fairly anal about it. There are some times where I may need to rename a file and for that I can use the batch feature in iPhoto or export them and do it manually in the Finder.

Now, in the case of the missing import from my mother-in-law's camera, the search feature in iPhoto is what saved the day. I was able to just type "movie" as the search term and this way it narrowed the results because I only keep a small amount of movie files in iPhoto before they get archived. I was able to locate the few movies that had been recently imported and that's when I discovered the date stamp was wrong which is what caused them to become buried in the 2009 files when I was expecting to see something in the January 2010 section at the top. It turns out, her camera was not properly formatted for the correct date nor time zone! Sometimes new cameras are formatted with the current date and time, but most times, you must set it up yourself. If you leave the date stamp on your photos where it shows up in the lower right corner, you might notice this, but that's not always on by default either.

You might not think this is a big deal, but when you're swapping digital files between family members, it helps when your camera's are synched up. Imagine five years from now, you're trying to view a collection of photos and videos of a family member's birth — or wedding and reception. You're scrolling through a beautiful slideshow but it gets confusing because the photos are out of order! The first couple of photos are in order — there's the baby getting weighed, there's the baby in grandma's arms, there's the baby — wait....why are these photos next ??— that's from the baby shower? Huh? The next few photos jump back to the hospital and then another few are from a different time. This is particularly annoying when looking through wedding photos that are out of order.

Now, imagine there are three different cameras being used on that special day. The first camera is set to the current date and time zone because the user went through the camera settings and configured it properly. The second camera was taken out of the box and never tinkered with. The third camera belongs to a family member visiting from the other side of the country where the time zone is three hours different and that camera has been configured to their local time.

Do you see what's happening here?

Many times it's just not convenient or even proper to school your 78-year-old Aunt Henrietta who barely speaks English about her fancy new gadget. You're lucky she even handed you her camera to pop out the chip so you could download it and you were able to convince her that you didn't just break her camera and no, there really isn't any film inside of it.

I have no idea why these voice memos from my iPhone did not save the correct date in the Finder listing but it's not helpful when I go looking for something and my search criteria or sorting is by date and time. Luckily the default file naming nomenclature IS date/time, albeit an ugly version of it that uses punctuation, which is why I clean up my file names removing the special characters. It's a habit from my days as a pre-press technician when I used to preflight files for printing service bureaus. Either way, I had no idea what these voice memos were about without listening to them. Now that I've renamed them, I'll know what to look for when searching later on.

This is why I take it upon myself to manually name my movie files using date format soon after the event because you never know if the data will reflect the true time stamp. I also try my best to name, tag, and comment on photos in iPhoto as much as I can and back up my iPhoto library on a regular basis. It's a practice I'd encourage you to try. It's best to try and manage the data right away rather than discovering problems with it years down the road when you no longer remember what happened and when. Maybe you won't even care, but maybe, just maybe, you or someone else will.

So now, my mother-in-law's camera is set to the correct date and time. When we swap chips, our photos are in the correct order. I can tell which ones she took versus mine because hers is a Kodak and mine is a Canon and they prefix the filenames differently. I can use the batch comment feature in iPhoto to make a note of which photos she took because I believe credit where credit is due.

I hope this may have cleared up a little bit of the mystery surrounding time and date stamps on media files and what you can do about it.

Be a thinker. Don't be afraid to tinker!

O Christmas Tree

Have you ever heard of Light Painting?
It's a lot of fun and the results are unpredictable — which is just one part of the fun.

One result I did NOT expect was to have my photos featured on another blog — and not just any other blog — Robert Lachman's Photography and the Mac.com photography site! I was very honored when he asked me if he could use my photos in a slide show on his site for a post on Improving Your Holiday Photos. Robert gives great tips about photography and his blog has really been inspiring me lately to dip back into my passion for the art. Robert's impressive history and experience with the art of photography really shows in the unique moments in time he's captured throughout the years. Check out his portfolio.

My Christmas Tree Became a Paintbrush
The other week I was pretty proud of how nicely our tree turned out this year after I decorated it and I wanted to photograph it all lit up. I love the way it looks in the middle of the night, when I'm still up finishing up tasks around the house. Everything is quiet and it's just me and our Christmas Tree. (I never imagined how hard it would be to get stuff done around the house with a toddler constantly under your feet at all times!) I waited till Nate and Lucian went to bed and set up my trusty old tripod and started to experiment with the settings on our little old point-and-shoot digital camera.

Fireworks are an example of "painting with light." It is tricky to get really good photos of fireworks because it involves longer shutter speeds and having the correct exposure for low light. If you've ever tried to take pictures of fireworks using the standard setting on your point and shoot camera, then you know what I mean.

Here are some examples of my process.

BEFORE
Here is your average, ordinary shot of child in front of Christmas Tree. Boring. Not very lively or expressive.



AFTER
Here is almost the same shot only this time, it's lit up. See the difference?



Dancing With Lights
Here is where I had some fun with my Christmas Tree decor! This is my favorite shot. You can click on the link below to check out the rest of the album and also read the captions. I basically experimented with different movements of my camera while the shutter was open and "recording" the light show. Sometimes I kept the tripod stationery on the ground and just moved or jiggled the legs or adjusted the handle to change the angle. Other times I picked up the whole tripod and just moved it around.

From O Christmas Tree

Here is an embedded slide show of all of the photos I took that night and the experimentation with different movements while leaving the shutter open for longer exposure times. I've written details about the shots in the captions.