Winter of 2008 at EWU

Today's snow reminded me of the winter of 2008. Here are a few winter shots I captured while at EWU. I shot these with a pretty ancient Nikon D1X.

Merchants Use flickr to Feed Sites

Here is an example of an online merchant that uses flickr to propagate their web pages. In this instance Bike Mate uses it to feed a flash rotator. Using this technology, a business could make an online catalog of current products using item numbers as metadata tags within flickr. You could start with an excel spread sheet of current products with quantities and item numbers. You convert the spreadsheet into an html table and have the item numbers pull in the photos.

URC Architectural Details

Here is a photo I shot yesterday while walking around campus. I was asked to get photos of architectural details for the back cover of our alumni magazine. The concept is to use small thumbnails of various buildings to form a grid. Then the reader must guess where the photo was taken.




Here is a shot of Monroe Hall. The giantic Sugar Maple towers over the hall.

Ivana

Here's a shot I took of a Music faculty member. Strobist info: two Norman strobes shot through Chimera soft boxes and a Balcar Mini Z1.

Fitness Center

This is one of my favorite frames from a recent shoot I did at the Fitness Center at EWU. Using Lightroom 2, I color balanced the light and reshaped the tone curve to give it a more industrial look.

New flickr Widget

Get this widget at roytanck.com

I found this cool widget at roytanck.com. It is pretty cool although it did take me a minute to figure out where to get the RSS of my photostream. I resized it to 400 pixels square to better fit this blog. The rotation of the globe is affected by mouse-over also. Pretty cool.

Definitely Worse Than My Bark

Here is a photo I snapped during a recent photo shoot at one of EWU's Summer Dental Camps. It is a mounted in the dental chair and is used to educate students on proper use and technique of dental instruments. I think these things bleed less than the human equivalent. The bokeh, the greenish tint and the polished shine of the gums make for an interesting photo.

Web Shooting

I have been working on a series of marketing photos for my employer's new website which is several years in the making. The images are to be used for the rotating flash banner. The banner is to have it's graphic element on the right side. The banner is 960 x 321 pixels. Subsequently the Rule of Thirds is out the window. I am basically shooting "Halves" where I cut the photo down the middle and stuff on the right is in focus and the stuff on the left is a blurred out.

In my camera cabinet I found a truly great lens. It is a Nikkor 85mm 1:1.4. I had the University pick up a Canon FS-72U lens filter set with a ND 8 neutral density filter. With the combination of the super fast 1.4 aperture and the ND 8 I can get extremely tight depth of field. Here are a few examples.

StumbleUpon as a Marketing Tool

Yesterday after implementing StumbleUpon tools including the Firefox toolbar I decided to do a little test. I picked one of my photo from a trip I had to Cannon Beach in January of this year. The light was great and the Nikon D60 performed admirable for its first time out of the box. I clicked on the "I like it!" button on the StumbleUpon toolbar. The results the next day were remarkable.



One great thing that flickr does is analytics on referring websites. This makes StumbleUpon a unique marketing tool that is measurable and trackable. You can clearly see just how effective StumbleUpon can be below. Similar to YouTube in it concept of channels, a user can tailor their stumbles to their own likes. Similarly your online content that you refer to StumbleUpon will be viewed only be users who have made a conscious decision to see content similar to yours.



The process I am developing is to incorporate this involves creating interesting, compelling assets then throw them out to social networks via facebook, twitter and StumbleUpon and ba-da-bing you have a pseudo-viral marketing campaign.

Stainless Steel Eagle Logo

20090413CampusTour009.jpg
Originally uploaded by ewuphoto

Here's a photo I took yesterday on a campus photoshoot. I cropped and color corrected the photo in Lightroom 2. I think the added vignette and intense yet muted highlights compliment it well.

Pat McManus speaks at JFK

20090331PatMcManus079
Originally uploaded by ewuphoto

I shot this yesterday at the Pat McManus reading in the Kennedy Library on the Cheney campus of Eastern Washington University. The turn out was exceptional with approximately 350 people in attendance. The lighting in JFK is horrendous. Mixed lighting with overcast daylight streaming through the windows and a nasty mix of tungsten and fluorescents. I just picked a white balance that would give him the best skin tone. Pat McManus to see the rest of the set. for more photos.

Slideoo is the BOMB!!!

This handy slideshow from Slideoo is simply awesome. I can think of all kinds of marketing and branding opportunities for this puppy.

Embedded flickr Slideshows Increase Visiblity

A few months ago we placed a link to a embedded flickr slideshow on the University's home page. The concept was to provide a quick glimpse of life at Eastern without spending a lot of time programming it. After researching several different flickr enabled slideshows we settled on flickr's own. It is clean and easily re-sizable and loads very quickly. Another great asset is the full-screen mode. Our Admissions reps can show this to a group of prospective students with a projector. This is a great tool for small businesses. It is up to you to create good perceptions of your business and enable others to see them.

To date we have recorded 1,787 visits to our Photo Tour page. That is fairly significant as it makes up 5.5% of all the traffic on our flickr site. Not bad seeing that it took about two days to make to page. Now I am creating new flickr slide shows for individual departments and programs for them to embed on their sites. Share with me how you are using flickr slide shows.

A Bridge to flickr: Metadata Propagation

Here's a little table that is in beta. It is an attempt to determine what metadata fields Adobe Bridge inputs and flickr outputs. This can help with serialization of media content.

Data Sets	Adobe Bridge CS3	flickr.com
File Properties	Filename	*Information may be propagated from Filename, Title or Headline.
	Document Type	File Type:
	Application	Software:
	Date File Created	Date and Time (Original):
	Date File Modified	Date and Time (Modified):
	File Size	File Size:
	Dimensions	Image Width: and Image Height:
	Dimensions (in inches)	Dependant upon Dimensions and Bit Depth
	Resolution	X-Resolution: and Y-Resolution:
	Bit Depth	Bits Per Sample:
	Color Mode	Color Space:
IPTC Core	Creator	Artist: and By-line:
	Creator: Job Title	By-line Title:
	Creator: Address	Creator Address:
	Creator: City	Creator City:
	Creator: State/Province	Creator Region:
	Creator: Postal Code	Creator Postal Code:
	Creator: Phone(s)	Creator Work Telephone:
	Creator: Email(s)	Creator Work Email:
	Creator: Website(s)	Creator Work URL:
	Headline	Headline:
	Description	Caption- Abstract:
	Keywords	Keywords: and Subject:
	IPTC Subject Code	Subject Code:
	Description Writer	Caption Writer:
	Date Created*	Date Created:
	Intellectual Genre	Intellectual Genre:
	IPTC Scene	Scene:
	Location	Location:
	City	City:
	State/Province	Province- State:
	Country	Country- Primary Location Name:
	ISO Country Code	Country Code:
	Title	Object Name:
	Job Identifier	Original Transmission Reference:
	Instructions	Instructions:
	Provider	Credit:
	Source	Source:
	Copyright Notice	Copyright:
	Copyright Status
	Rights Usage Terms	Usage Terms:
	Raw Filename	Raw File Name:
Camera Data (EXIF)	Exposure Mode	Exposure Mode:
	Focal Length	Focal Length:
	Lens	Lens:
	Max Aperture Value	Max Aperture Value:
	Flash	Flash Mode:
	Metering Mode	Metering Mode:
	Custom Rendered	Custom Rendered:
	White Balance *Note this value is of the original image.	White Balance: *Note this value is of the original image.
	Scene Capture Type	Scene Capture Type:
	Serial Number	*Not displayed.
Camera Raw	Raw Filename	Raw File Name:
	White Balance *Note this value is of the adjusted Raw image.	White Balance: *Note this value is of the adjusted Raw image.
	Temperature	Temperature:
	Tint	Tint:
	Exposure	Exposure:
	Recovery	Saved Settings Parameters Highlight Recovery:
	Fill Light	Saved Settings Parameters Fill Light:
	Blacks	Shadows:
	Brightness	Brightness:
	Contrast	Contrast:
	Vibrance	Vibrance:

Profile Widget

Profile Widget
Originally uploaded by John Demke

A fun little widget that creates a banner for your flickr profile using your photos and stats. It is free by a site called Big Huge Labs. The cool thing is that it is dynamic. When you change your content or contacts the image changes which is totally awesome. They have some pretty cool stuff to check out on their site.

Cheap (and Accurate) Color Photo Printing at Costco

Last fall, Adobe came to campus and gave an all- day seminar about their new CS4 products. I really enjoyed the new functionality of Photoshop including their improved panoramic stitcher. The lecturer mentioned something to the class which blew me away. He said that you could print color photos accurately from Costco.

Costco hired Dry Creek Photo to color profile every one of their photo printers and place those profiles on the web. The benefit of having the color profile of a specific printer is that you can accurately adjust your photograph in Photoshop to show you what the print is going to look like. How many times have you gotten photos back and the seem too dark?

So the question is why spend the money for expensive photo printing when you can go to Costco and get a Polish dog and a Coke for $1.50? Be sure to follow all of the instructions on the Dry Creek site for best results.

Flickr Slide Shows: An Easy Way to Show your Stuff

At Eastern Washington University, I am working to push the utilization and power of our online photo archive housed on flickr. Our site, ewuphoto, contains over 1,300 original photos and has accumulated almost 30,000 hits. What makes flickr cool is it built-in sharing functionality. You can download, link, email and embed approved content from our site but the killer app is its slide shows.

The slide shows are great. The content can be pulled directly from a bunch of different criteria including: photostreams, collections, sets and keywords. They look great, can be resized to fit different frames and can go full-screen with the single button click. Check out EWU's phototour for a great example of how this was implemented. In this case I made a set in flickr unique to the slide show. The slide show is Flash and it loads pretty quickly. The beauty of this is that if you want to change the photos in your slide show you don't have to go and rebuild the flash document, you simply go to flickr and update the set with the photos you want. Utter simplicity.

Careful Browsing: Finder vs. Bridge

Attention graphic designers! All is not what it appears to be. I had this problem come up yesterday at work. A designer in my department came into my office to see a preview of the latest photos I shot for a new marketing campaign. I put the images in the photo archive on the shared server and he went back to his cubicle. He IM'ed me a few moments later stating that he didn't see the color correction to the DNG files on his machine.

It turns out that he was using the Finder in MacOSX Jaguar to browse the photos. Apple has done some pretty good work in enabling their Finder to view camera RAW files, which is far better than Microsoft. But it doesn't apply the Develop settings embedded in the metadata to the preview. Hence when he views the files with the Finder the photos don't look color corrected. After I told him to try Adobe Bridge the color corrections showed on his previews.

The moral of this story is to always browse photos in Bridge and not the Finder.

Score Me!

I just found a fun new way to interact with other people's photos on flickr. Score Me! (post 1, score 5) is a flickr Group that requires you to rate the photo of five other photographers in order to post your own. In return you get five rating on your own photo. It is pretty interesting to see how others view your art. It also forces you to evaluate others. I think I grade a little easily. Usually nothing lower that a 5.

The Other Father

I watched Coraline on Saturday with my family. I was pleasantly surprised in the fine quality of the story-telling. It may have been a little too deep for my 7 year-old, but the 10 year-old got it.

There is a cool flash builder on the site that allows you to upload a photo and put buttons over you eyes. Check it out.