Picture this

Last month, my grandmother reached her 100th birthday.  I haven’t talked about it much, mainly because I’m in the process of writing one big whopper of a post about her, in honor of the event.  And sometimes good things take time.  Last thing she deserves is a half-assed post about her, because she ain’t a half-assed kinda lady.

We’re having a birthday party for her in mid-April, when the weather is hopefully better than early March, and at the time that her 90+year old sister is visiting from Florida.  Here we stand about 2 weeks away from the party, and in typical IT Girl fashion, I’ve now gotten the bright idea to create a book for her made from her family photographs over the years.  Mother of IT Girl dug them out for me this weekend and I have begun scanning them.  This is a project of some magnitude.  So what if Little IT doesn’t get picked up from a playdate, or IT Boy starves?  I’ve gotta scan. 

I tell you, it’s not a chore at all.  It’s quite a joy.  There’s something about these old photos that you just can’t replicate.  Even if the people in the photo below weren’t my grandparents, I’d still think it was an amazing picture.  Knowing them, and knowing they were on their honeymoon makes it even more special.  Walking the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, circa 1932…

The best part is there are tons of photos like this, although this is my current favorite from the batch I have been working on.  Scanning them allows you to blow them up, to identify people that you might not have been able to from the digital print.  It also serves to hopefully preserve these family moments for my kids to view. 

I’m interested in hearing from others who have taken on projects like this.  Like I said, I’m kinda in a half-assed last minute effort, but I’d love to take the time and do them right.  How did you name/tag the pictures?  What did you learn about organizing them?  What services did you use for output, whether prints or a photo book?  Right now, I’m looking at Blurb (although I think you really have to take the time and do it right on Blurb, and that’s not going to happen for me in two weeks) with Snapfish (old reliable) as a standby.  Vote early and often, all comments appreciated!

 

Photo Effects - Who Knew?

I’ve blogged before about Wiley author Erin Manning and how I learned more about how to get the most out of my point and shoot camera through talking to her and reading her book.  So this is going to be another one of those name dropping posts…beware.  But you might get some useful photography tips out of it, so don’t run away so fast.  Net net, you have camera with automatic settings.  But through some knowledge and very little fiddling, you can select custom settings that will give you way cooler photos. 

When I was with Erin last year, she was showing me some great pictures she had taken on her camera.  This was in the context of a discussion about adjusting the white balance, which she pointed to as the cause of my neighbor looking yellow in pictures taken in and not adjusted for fluorescent lighting.

She had taken a picture off the balcony of her cruise ship, and the water and sky were a beautiful but not true shade of blue.  This was because she didn’t adjust the white balance for outside.  It was incredibly gorgeous, and I wanted to remember that effect for when I had the opportunity to take a picture of a beautiful seaside.

Flash forward to last month in Florida.  I’m playing around with my Canon Powershot, and I notice a setting called VIVID.  After taking some pictures of the Intracoastal Waterway outside my father-in-law’s condo, I take some more using VIVID selected to vivid blue. 

Before, no vivid:

After, with vivid:

Same day, an hour or two apart, but notice the difference.  Sure, the first one was more true to life, but if you are going for artistry with your photography, bring out the blues!

I noticed a couple of sections of Erin’s book that talk about these kind of photo effects and using the color wheel to select the right colors to enhance.  I may go back to these.  I fear the color wheel, but again, a little bit of knowledge is going to give me better pictures.  The next IT vacation is for spring break next month, so I have to be ready!

 

Def Scrapbookin’

Last week I was talking to my sister in law.  She was extolling the virtues of Snapfish scrapbooks, where you insert pictures into a layout and they come up with a printed book.  They’re nice - I’ve done them before and they’ve come out great.  But in truth, they don’t quite do it for me.  Confession - I have become a full-fledged scrapbooker.  There’s something about sitting down with a bunch of pictures, stickers and the like, arranging them into an eye-pleasing layout, and combining them with other pages in a book of memories.  I’ve always shied away from the label “scrapbooking”, but in truth it’s something I’ve been doing since elementary school.  I used to clip magazine headlines and artwork to put with pictures of my friends and family in an album.  If that isn’t scrapbooking, what is?  It’s just something I did before it had a trendy label to it. 

In high school, I was editor of the yearbook, and what is a yearbook if it isn’t a huge scrapbook.  I take pride in how the layouts came to be, and feel that the final version reflected a lot of my personality (there were only 17 of us in the senior class, so that’s not an egotistical statement - there weren’t that many of us to contribute personality in the first place.) 

In college, I worked production for the student newspaper, constantly walking around with paste up glue and line tape all over my clothes, that is when I wasn’t pulling an overnight shift in the newsroom.  I loved the feeling of creating something by hand and then seeing it produced and printed.  I’ve never gotten the same rush from something online.  I’ve worked in Photoshop and with Scrapblog, but it’s just not the same as sitting down and getting your hands dirty. 

My first project was a scrapbook for my mom of the past year - the kids, holidays and our trip to Disney World.  My friend helped get it started - 12 x 12 paper, stamping, scrap paper, etc - but I gladly finished it.  Next, I did an IT Boy book.  I never kept up with his baby book - writing down his milestones was weighing on me when he was late with them - so this was a great way to remember his first year. 

At first I was obsessed with getting someone with neat handwriting to write captions in the book, else I was going to print them out on the computer.  Then I realized that it was a way to add a piece of myself to the book.  I remember when my mother-in -law passed away and we were going through the jewelery that was left to the grandchildren.  She wrote a little description of how she got the piece and where it was worn, which was very personal and sweet.  That inspired me to put my own chicken scrawl into the book, and it ended up looking just fine.  I’m now doing a second boy book and by popular demand will work with the Girl on one about her for her.   There are tons of photos to go through in the basement, and endless possibilities for more books, keeping my hands busy for a long time to come.  I would even relish attending a scrapbooking party.  It makes sense, getting together, sharing ideas, stickers, and papers.  I just wish we could find a more trendy name for it.

 

Another entry for the Hall of Geek

Finally, I downloaded the pictures from Vegas and came across this gem.  Hanging with a Klingon, no better way to turn 40 I alwasy say.

In any case, I was working this weekend on getting some of the hundreds of Gerstein photos into some semblance of order, and I came across a couple of gems.  I got so excited seeing them, but strangely, the rest of the family just didn’t share my thrill.  So, I decided to start a Hall of Geek…a place to catalog some of the most memorable, where people like me will appreciate them.  It will include:

* My photo in front of Stephen King’s house in Maine.  Of course, I was utterly incoherent when moments later he drove into the house on his motorcycle.  Didn’t get any pictures of THAT because I was too busy jumping up and down and muttering random noises like “Ooorgh” and “Heeeeytherenow”.

* Photos from our visit to Wizards of the Coast in Seattle.  I posed with a Storm Trooper replica, a photo that is currently being held by some folks in Indianapolis for blackmail potential.  Some day, it will pop up in a presentation or on a populated web page - just waiting for the joy of that.

* A photo of my Dad and I where he is wearing his Spock shirt.  You have to see this one - it explains a lot.

* A shot I took in the driveway of the Gates estate in Medina while it was under construction. 

And so on.  It will take me a little while to do the scanning (I’m not really all that good with the scanner) but when I’m done, I’ll throw it up on flickr where others in the Geek brother/sisterhood can admire them. 

 

I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish

I volunteered some time ago to start a blog for Little IT’s brownie troop.  It’s a new thing for the parents, to use a blog for info on upcoming meetings and events, and to see pictures of the aforementioned post event.  So, as you can imagine, our page views are minuscule, especially since it’s locked to all but the parents, but I feel it’s an important activity and will eventually help drag people kicking and screaming into the world of the web.

Recently, the troop participated in a Halloween party.  We had a bunch of pictures, and I said, sure, ok, wonderful, let’s post them to the blog.  Well, on any service, easier said than done.  Usually, I put them up in SmugMugand then put up a hotlink to the SmugMug album. I didn’t want to do that this time. I wanted to have them all listed in the post for people to review right then and there. No time for linking.

Easier said than done, and I was quickly overwhelmed with single and bulk loading of 100 pictures. There has to be a better way.  Looking for an alternative, I tried Flickr, but it too failed me. I didn’t want to pay for an account (even though I gladly do that with SmugMug) so I was limited to the amount of file size that could be uploaded.

Then, I found Slide. I already use it in Facebook, but I didn’t realize until I saw it on another site that you can upload a slideshow to display in a blog post through them. It took no time at all to upload. You can change the captions to not be the file name (I didn’t). There are a myriad of choices for display options (I picked Album) and gimmicky add-ons (I selected none). With one click, they give you the code to upload to Blogger (where the Brownie blog is) and I was on my way! Mission accomplished! The display is pretty decent for little effort, as you can see below. I put my Police show pictures into an album below to demonstrate it’s functionality. I recommend Slide for a quick show that looks decent with very little effort. I’m not really cheating on SmugMug, as I will still use them for most everything else, as the final product is pretty cool, but Slide is good for a quickie.

 

What do YOU want to do better?

Working at PhotoPlus Expo last week, I had the pleasure of working with Ashley, one of the PR folks who I don’t often get to spend time with.  Ashley has quite a strong work ethic, and was in the booth working it for most of the show.  She, unlike me, never had to take a “moment” at the end of the aisle and get off her aching feet.  I’d like to add in my defense that she’s younger than me, but you probably guessed that.

Anyhow, Ashley told me her “sales pitch” to customers coming in the booth looking at our books was “What do you want to do better?”  Not only did she serve to engage the customer in a dialog (most of these attendees were die hard NYers, who don’t dialog unless forced to) but she immediately connected them with a promise for our books.  Most of them said they wanted to take better pictures - often of their kids, or of scenery on an upcoming trip. 

It got me thinking.  Shouldn’t that be a promise fulfilled of any of our books?  That you want to do something better, and we show you a way to do that?  It’s simplicity defined, but I cannot count how many times I’ve evaluated a book project or picked up a new title and haven’t immediately been able to articulate how the book was going to help someone do something better.  If I can’t figure it out, the customer probably won’t be able to either.  It’s got to be at the root of every sales pitch, every proposal.  It’s the reason that we do what we do, and it’s going to be a mantra of mine for some time to come. 

I for one want to do a lot of things better.  I want to take better pictures of my kids.   When Little IT turned one, my co-worker/good friend’s husband came to our house to take portraits of her.  I was a little wary, since his primary profession at the time was tabloid paparazzi.  In spite of that, or maybe because of that, his pictures were fun, moving, whimsical and utterly endearing.  One shot of her in front of a blue/pink muslin background hangs as a 30 x 40 print in my bedroom.  I want to be able to do a print of similar quality of IT Boy.  I have access to the equipment, now I need the knowledge.  I’ve got the new Photoworkshop books on my bedside, so it’s time to get cracking. 

So I ask you - what is it that you want to do better, and how are you going to do it?

 

What I learned from Erin Manning

Erin Manning, who I mentioned in an earlier post referring to her new book Portrait and Candid Photography Photoworkshop, is my photography hero. No, seriously, I may be biased, but 5 minutes with her convinced me of several things…

1. My new digital camera (a Canon PowerShot A630) was not engaged in a conspiracy to make everyone look like they had orange skin. There’s such as thing as WHITE BALANCE, and these cameras can adjust the white balance for different lighting conditions.

2. It is possible to take pictures in low to no light and not make everyone look like Casper the Friendly Ghost.  Slow sync flash…who knew? It allows ambient light to come into your pictures. Without it, would I be rocking amazing pictures like these (taken at Legend Weekend at Philipsberg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, NY)?

I honestly have no idea why a pirate is included in Legend Weekend.  Ichabod Crane, the Headless Horseman, and a pirate guy.  Whatever.  He was cute and entertaining, and made for a spooky ghostly picture.

What about this one?

Now we’re rocking some historically correct action.  It was hard to take this shot, as the friggin horse kept bouncing all over the place.  He really didn’t understand the concept of “stand still, the tourists need to record you digitally.  Plus there wasn’t low light, there was NO light, so the flash could have overwhelmed.  Next time, I’d like to see more horse and less fence, but I’m a rookie, so be gentle with me.

This is my favorite….spooky and ghost like:

I love that she looks so ghostly.  Really cool.  I was amazed by how great my ghost shots came out.  Casper who?

And all this from 5 minutes talkin’ digital with Erin.  Imagine how great my shots are going to be after I finish reading her book!