Two:Thirty AM

I have to start by saying I am just as guilty as anyone when it comes to this subject, but I have finally seen the error in my ways. Over the last 3-4 years of making digital images I have migrated between a few different cameras. From cheap to mildly expensive. From film to digital. I have by no means “seen it all” but I have a good taste of what’s out there. As with a lot of new hobbies that you start, it is easy to get wrapped up in the gear and tools side of the hobby, which is normal because you are not only learning about new things, but you get to play with them too! Over the years I have ooh’d and ahh’d over certain camera bodies, lenses, tripods, etc. In your head you know that buying a newer, more expensive, body or lens doesn’t make you a better photographer, but maybe it will help right? I think a lot of us feel this way when starting out, “if only I had X, I would make such better images.” Often times, the shiny part of the new piece of gear overtakes logic and you end up with the new item, and yet your photos remain unchanged. How could that have happened?

I recently took a Black & White film photography class at a local college. This class was my first real experience with film. After shooting various assigned projects, we went through the steps of manually processing the film, and then making prints in the dark room. Shooting film was a whole new world; you were still making images, but in a very different way. With digital cameras, the camera does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, but when shooting film, every single aspect of your end result print is 100% your doing. From manual focus, to shutter speed, to proper processing times with the chemistry, to exposure times for photo paper, it’s all you. This class was the beginning of my “new vision of photography”. That sounds kind of weird and deep, but what I mean is the way in which I approach photography as an art form.

The Internet and the age of digital has opened the flood gates to everyone to be creative (or not so creative). I have taken a lot of inspiration from fantastic photographers and artists that I would never know about if it weren’t for places like Flickr and SmugMug. This also means that “competition” is vastly increased when it comes to people finding your particular images interesting. This is where technique and style come into play the most. Anyone can pick up a cameras and press the shutter release, but it take someone with a highly tuned and developed eye to make that image wonderful. No piece of gear will help you tune your creative eye. The next time you are going to do research online about a new tripod or camera body, go outside instead and shoot 10 or 20 photos of things you would never normally shoot.

Longish story short, gear doesn’t matter; forget about it. Anytime you find yourself saying that you could make a better photo if only you had XYZ piece of gear, you are only making excuses. Trust me, I am speaking to myself as much as any of you, so don’t take it personal. I even removed all the gear I was lusting over from my Amazon wish list. I am going to focus on developing my skills over the next 12 months, and just make the absolute best images I can with what I have!

Film. Digital. $20 camera. $20,000 camera. 1MP. 50MP. None of these will change your images, only your vision will.

(@alcedine helped me (did most of the work) with this little mockup!) :)

Do you live in a state that requires a bluetooth headset while driving? Do you simply just need one to be safe? Or maybe you just want one? Well no matter the reason, I have a first gen jawbone I no longer use/need. Just leave me a comment below saying why you need it and I will randomly pick someone to give it to! That’s it.

Fine print: unfortunately due to those pesky things called “laws” I can only send it within the USA.
You will get the Jawbone headset and charger.

Google Voice - http://www.google.com/mobile/voice

Mint - http://www.mint.com

Remember The Milk - http://www.rememberthemilk.com

“Photo Manipulation Apps”

Google Docs - http://docs.google.com

Miro Sync - http://www.getmiro.com

WordPress - http://wordpress.org

Google Navigation - http://www.google.com/mobile/navigation

Amazon - http://www.amazon.com

Qik - http://qik.com

If you are a photographer that shoots with an SLR, you know why you prefer that to your typical point and shoot style camera. Control, picture quality, low light capabilities, etc. Unfortunately, carrying your bulky SLR around with you everywhere does not always cut it. You may be at a party, concert, or just out and about; there are times when an SLR just doesn’t work. You want something more compact that will fit in a pocket and is hassle free. Generally, point and shoot style cameras have too many trade offs to make them desirable to the SLR shooter. I thought the same, until I came across the Canon PowerShot S90. This small point and shoot changed the way I thought about point and shoots. With its wide variety of manual controls, wide aperture, and control ring, I was sold.

The Canon S90 weighs in at just a touch above 6 ounces, and you can pretty much fit it in any pocket. It has a beautiful 3 inch LCD viewfinder on the back complete with intuitive controls for camera settings. You have a large selection of shooting modes as well, complete with aperture priority (Av), shutter priority (Tv), and even full manual mode (M). The S90 has an f/2.0 – 4.9 lens with 3.8x optical zoom, and Image Stabilization. This puts the lens at about a 28 – 105mm focal length. At 10 megapixels, Canon decided to opt for low light capabilities rather than high megapixel count. This is fantastic for photographers, and casual shooters alike. One of the really innovative parts of this camera is the Control Ring. This ring is around the lens and allows you to customize what it controls (aperture, focus, shutter speed, etc.) for all types of creative shooting.

A few other features of note include: built in flash, HDMI out, video mode, and low light scene mode. If you are looking to shoot HD video in addition to making great images, then this is not the camera for you, as it only shoots SD video. However, if you are mainly interested in still shots, then absolutely take a look at this camera.

Pros:
- f/2.0 lens
- Control Ring
- 10.0 Megapixel
- Large beautiful LCD
- Ability to shoot manual
- Turns on very quickly
- Shoots RAW format
- Macro shooting mode
- Low light performance
- Battery Life

Cons:
- No HD video
- On the high end of the price scale

Retail Price: $399

Short answer: No

Long Answer: No, I don’t.

By now you have all heard of Facebook. You may use, love, adore, hate, or want to stab it. Either way, the point is, you have heard of it. I never really saw a use case for it that fit anything I wanted to do online so I never signed up for an account. This changed about a month ago when I decided I would give it a shot and see what all the craze was about. I got a lot of pressure from friends on Facebook, saying I “needed to be on it!” Apparently all of the MANY other ways I exploit myself online were not enough. I signed up and was quickly reminded of why I had not signed up for this in the past. The interface alone is enough to make you throw up. The layout is hideously cluttered with everything you don’t want to see or care about. I am no “design expert” but come on already with the horrible ad selection and lack of page layout preferences.

Over the past few weeks it has been hard to read any news without seeing something concerning Facebook security and privacy issues. This may be due to Facebook mis-coding a lot lately, or more than likely, people are finally becoming aware of exactly what is going on with Facebook. I believe the majority of users were blindly using the service assuming the privacy settings they were using were adequate. They really had no reason not to think Facebook was doing things that were in the user’s best interest. That combined with the fact that I think people tend to turn a blind eye when it comes to something they really like.

Facebook, to me, seems to be trying to become the AOL of 1996. They seem to want you to come into Facebook’s world, and once there, never leave. Ever. If what you want is not something tied into Facebook, you don’t really need it. A walled garden, yes. But depending on the type of walls and what the “graden” looks like, that can also be described as a prison. Anytime someone is trying to lock down any part of the web, there is cause for concern.

The fact that Facebook did not seem to solve any problem I had, combined with the fact that they seemed to be doing all they could to give out everyone’s data which the users thought was private, I decided to just get rid of the account before I got burned. I went ahead and went to my account preferences and chose to close my account, or “deactivate” as they called it.

Deactivating turned out to not be the same as deleting. It would seem as though Facebook would like to trick you into thinking you have removed your account when, in fact, you have not. When you “deactivate” your account, all that has been accomplished is that your profile is no longer visible. You are still a user and linked to everything you were linked to before. This is very annoying, and if you want to actually remove your account from their system you have to follow another path. By going to http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?showform=deleteaccount and filling out the necessary info, including captchas, just in case nasty robots try to delete your account! sarcasm

I am by no means saying you should absolutely go delete your account right now. If you find Facebook useful, then keep it. Just be aware that what you think is private online, most likely is not. If you don’t want anyone to see it or know about it, don’t put it online. Have you seen the t-shirt that says “I Read Your Email.”? Ya, that isn’t really a joke. Be careful out there.

It’s time to get creative with the camera that is with you every second of the day. Your cell phone camera! It may not be the best quality, or the fastest, or most versatile, but what it is, is available. It is rare you go anywhere without your cell phone, and it is even more rare that a cell phone does not have a camera. That being said, let’s get into it!

There are tons of apps out there for various platforms that are awesome for doing filters and effects on your camera phone photos. The problem is that no one app is available for everyone. What is available to everyone is a physical filters placed in front of your cell phone camera.

I recently stumbled upon a product called Jelly Lens at http://www.jelly-lens.com/. These awesome little filters fit just about every make and model of camera phone. They have a filter on one side and a round sticky circle on the other side so you can just stick the filter over your camera lens on your phone. The sticky material is re-usable and does not leave any marks on your phone.

As of this writing they have 14 different filters you can buy (I bought them all!). The best part? They are only $5 each! And for that 5 bucks you actually get a pretty damn good result. In some cases it actually improves the quality of an image you would get with just your camera phone.

Available Filters:
1. Wide Angle
2. Stretch
3. 6 Image Mirage
4. 3 Image Mirage
5. Heart Frame
6. Blue Filter
7. Star Frame
8. Sepia Filter
9. Polarizer
10. Close Up
11. Soft Lens
12. Starburst
13. Vignette
14. Spark

Short Youtube how-to from @alcedine:

What smartphone do you use? Careful, some will judge you heavily based on your answer. The cell phone as we once knew it is dead, it’s all about the smartphone now. It is getting to be more and more rare that you see the flip phone of years past, and much more common to see a smartphone in its place. At first glance, there are a ton of options for the average consumer. You see advertisement after advertisement touting the superiority of one phone vs. another. The fact of the matter is, however, there are really only a few true contenders. Much like the raging war of the desktop platforms, the same is happening the mobile space. It comes down to four; Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s WebOS, and Blackberry. This may go to five if we ever see a Windows Phone 7 Series. To be honest, the rest are merely sub-par knock-offs of these.

With the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, the game was officially changed. This marked the smartphone revolution. I was, of course, one of the many in line on day one to spend $600 for a phone that, when you look back, didn’t really do very much at all. With the introduction of the iPhone, we all expected the competition to step up and show us some really amazing devices, but sadly, this was not the case at all. The scene turned into a bunch of companies trying to make “iPhone killers” by simply copying features, and usually not very well. No one was innovating. To be honest, I don’t think they were even trying, relying more on false advertising and trickery to move these crappy devices off the shelves.

In October of 2008 Google decided to throw its hat into the ring and compete in this space. They released Android running on the G1. This was potentially the first true competitor to Apple and its iPhone. “Potentially,” being the keyword there. The G1 was met with somewhat positive reviews and attention; however it was obvious that Android in its initial release was very beta and was going to need time to get up to popular demand.

In January 2009 at the Consumer Electronics Show we were shown another company step up to the challenge. Here we saw an announcement from a company that many forgot about or gave up on, a company that was struggling to stay afloat, a company that needed a home run or would risk certain death. That company was Palm. Palm had been hard at work on their new platform, and on that day, they unveiled WebOS. Along with this announcement came new hardware, the Palm Prē, and an amazing new accessory, the Touchstone charging station. This charging station was the first mainstream consumer charger to acheive wirelessless charging through the use of electromagnetic induction; with the added bonus of not needing to house your beautiful phone in a nasty, and very bulky, third party case. All of these announcements were very well received and caused quite a stir of excitement. Unfortunately, the story did not end as well as it started. With a poorly planned launch time (a few days before the iPhone 3GS), low stock count in the stores, somewhat flakey hardware, and a carrier that really didn’t seem all that excited about the product (Sprint); WebOS and the Palm Prē were quickly dismissed and swept into the gutter.

A year later, Palm was back at CES to announce a refreshed line of hardware and updates to the WebOS platform. They announced the Prē Plus and Pixi Plus, with revved up internals and a better build quality. These freshly updated lines also got carrier upgrades, moving to Verizon, and later AT&T as well. Even with the new hardware updates, software updates, and added carrier choices, people are still failing to recognize what this platform has to offer.

I truly believe that the WebOS platform by Palm is the best thing no one knows about. When every other company is spending 90% of their budget on marketing and 10% on innovation of the product, it feels as though Palm did exactly the opposite and spent 90% on innovation. Every aspect of the platform and phone feel as though someone actually thought it out and used it before committing. The user interface of WebOS is such a pleasure to use and navigate. You get exactly what you want every time.

On all the other platforms I always found the need to hack/jailbreak/root the device to make it truly what I wanted it to be. This never ended well; it was always a pain to update to the latest software builds, and usually made the phone less reliable. With WebOS, there is none of that. Palm embraces developers and open source like no other company I have seen. Android says they are open, but compared to WebOS, they are as closed as the iPhone. With the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android, the operating system feels as though it was not built for you. WebOS, on the other hand, feels very organic, like it was made to be a true extension of you. WebOS works for you, rather than against you. WebOS makes using a smartphone a joy again, rather than a constant headache. If you are not 100% happy with your current phone, there is a way to be: give WebOS a try and see what the world of smartphones is supposed to be like.