

I’ve also posted the two photoimpressions above, along with my “words” version, from the post below, over in flickr to let you see the detail, Just click on the images to see them larger.By the way I adopted the term photoimpression back in 2008 to describe my approach to creating photo mosaics, I note a growing number of, phone apps, software packages and websites now also use the term, and my techniques have nothing to do with any of these.
Created by sampling a photo with a custom brush using the alchemy plug-in and Corel paint, Click on the image to see a more detailed version over on flickr, so you can read the words
Aviary is a damn good on-line photo editing suite, and now a lot of its features are available for your phone. Ok not all phones, my HTC wildfire is still running android 2.2 and thus not compatible. Aviary’s focus in making this release now is supporting developers, and the photo editor is intended to be a quick and easy way for them to evaluate the aviary product before integrating it into their own apps. Even if you are not contemplating developing a phone applications it is worth having a look at this slick photo editor.
I am trying hard to keep the ancillary contents of my new Lowpro backpack to a minimum, to give extra room for cameras and lenses. Sounds easy but modern digital camera come with a range of extras, some vital others less so. This is a collection of things I always carry. Most importantly I have spare batteries. I also have a few spare SD cards, not a surprise. I have found keeping a small USB universal card reader very handy. I usually have two 4GB USB keys on hand, one blank the other has a number of photo oriented portable apps and utilities. which are great if the only computer around is a cyber cafe. One big hassle is always cables, you seldom need them but then they are always tangled. I found this mess bag with a zip is a great way to keep my contents tidy and generally tangle free. The other important item is a small portable backpack style hard drive, with a 500GB capacity to keep backups updated (each day). At the end of the month I archive from it and clean it up to start a fresh for the next month.
I have an HTC android phone, which has become not only a camera in its own right but also a very useful support accessory. In particular it is the GPS source when I wish to geotag my photos but it also has a number of useful photography oriented apps. It lives in my pocket.
Not shown is my laptop, which does live in the Lowpro backpack as well, and all the charges and power supplies which I don’t carry around in the backpack but fit in my case when I travel.
One thing that has been worrying me for a while has been the behavior of RAW files in Picasa. Sometime ago I had set both my Pentax and Canon EOS to store images in both the camera’s RAW and JPG format. It does use extra space and takes extra time to write both images, however I wanted to get a feel for the difference each format provided. Well a strange thing was happening. Whenever I loaded the files the .jpeg and raw files always looked the same, but after a while, particularly if I looked at the raw file. The two images inevitably looked quiet different,even when I had not made any changes to exposure etc. At first I suspected it was something to do with the .CR2 (native Canon RAW format) and .PER (native Pentax RAW format) Codex used on the computer.Then I began to suspect that RAW files would be brighter compare with a slight underexposure of the jpeg, but there were plenty of exceptions. Lightroom 4 avoids this little conundrum because when it sees a pair of raw and jpeg photos with the same name it only “imports” (links to) the raw file.
Well the explanation, is pretty simple. Both cameras do create thumbnail of the photo, in jpeg format using the cameras default jpg processing settings and embed this inside the raw image. It is this thumbnail view that you see when you first upload your photos. Then as picasa gets a chance to process the photo further it does read the actual Raw file and does its own best attempt at processing that RAW file, making its own new jpeg thumbnail. This might be quiet different to the cameras settings. Unfortunately it is a kind of Auto-fix for all approach and often not really what you want. For example in this photo I was after a kind of moody winter sky. Tweaking the RAW files a little gave me the effect I was after, and its quiet similar to the original camera jpeg. Once you make some adjustment to the RAW file in picasa (which you now can do by the way) the thumbnail does reflect those changes.
If you look closely lightroom does a similar thing. The image displayed in library view might change once you view it or develop it and it goes through the loading… delay. After that the thumbnail you see in lightroom is what ever you do to the image with lightroom. Picasa and lightroom are both “non destructive” systems so the original raw photo file remains unchanged.
If you use an apple computer, iPhone &/or iTunes chances are you may also have started using some of the MobileMe services (they were one of those bloatware products that managed to install itself along with other software, you should realize you are using these mobileme services because they are subscription based offerings, ie costs you a yearly rental). Apple have announced that mobileme will be shut down on June 30th 2012.
Much of its automatic synchronisation functionality will be transferred to iCloud (which is largely free). I guess the rub is that some of the services people actually used and liked are not being offered under iCloud, these are the features which offer on-line storage, iDisk (an on-line “hard drive”), iWeb (web publishing platform) & Gallery (web based photo sharing). I gather this is because apple doesn’t see themselves as a storage business (I read this to mean they don’t believe there is the money in it)
I’m sure apple will warn customers (but a quick ask around indicates they may not have here in Australia yet!) but you only have a couple of weeks to retrieve your works from Apple’s mobileme Gallery. So where else can you store your photos to share on the web? Well there are lots of places, here are some of the more popular ones, flickr, photobucket, smugmug, Picasa web albums (aka google+ photo) even facebook. The downside is they are not exactly well integrated down into all apples portable devices, but there are plenty of individual apps to provide the synchronisation into these services. Probably the most popular service for iphone photos remains instagram.
Good luck trying to get a refund!