Category: photography

food blogging & making things so labor intensive I don’t do them

derby pie
derby pie

I started a food blog on Tumblr last January. Here’s the about statement:

I started this project because after a year of taking photos of myself every day, I wanted to document something else. Over the summer and fall, I had developed a routine of trying new recipes on the weekends and some weeknights. This blog is where I share photos of the results, talk about what went right or wrong, and link to the recipes.

And sometime in May/June, I stopped. I got busy. I remembered to take some pictures, but they sat on my desktop waiting to be blogged for so long that I felt guilty and overwhelmed, so I eventually deleted them.

It wasn’t like it would take all that much time to write up something. And add a link. And format it the same as the previous posts. But it seemed like a big deal at the time.

Also, I stopped cooking/baking as much in the summer.

I have this tendency to make things that should be simple and routine into complex, detailed processes that become burdensome. Is this just some freak aspect of my desire for control and order, or is it simply human nature?

Learning 2009: Image Resources for Teaching

Presenters: Jeannine Keefer and Crista LaPrade

Keefer provided the attendees with a brief overview of licensed images. Specifically, ArtStor and why it would be used in the classroom (mainly art historians). There are also many free or Creative Commons licensed resources for images:

  • Flickr – range from amateur to professional, free to fully copyrighted
  • Picasa – similar to Flickr, but less communal
  • Google Images – search across the web
  • Google Earth – geotagged photos for specific locations
  • Creative Commons – search across several sites
  • MorgueFile – stock photography
  • OpenPhoto – stock photography
  • TinEye – reverse image search engine for finding more like the one you have
  • Cooliris – browser plugin for quickly flipping through images on various sites
  • Social networks like Facebook & MySpace

LaPrade and Boatwright Library’s Digital Production Services does all of the digitization and scanning for the library as well as scanning for faculty who need to convert analog images to digital for non-art classroom purposes. Non-presentation uses for this service (ideas beyond PowerPoint) include creating reference posters for students and images supplementing faculty publications (within copyright). Unfortunately, faculty will have to find their own storage (DVDs, flash drives, etc.) and delivery options, as DPS currently does not have a server for storage and delivery.

There are many resources you could use to share images in the classroom, including Blackboard and ArtStor, but also free image storage/sharing resources or your own web pages or blog. However, there are several factors to consider, since these can also be tools for managing the images: purpose, platform, ownership, collection size, image manipulation, metadata, budget, tech support, data integrity, file types, and presentation tool. Some possible solutions include Adobe Bridge (with the full version of Photoshop), Extensis Portfolio, Flickr, and Picasa.

(Side note: I think that many of the folks in the room were expecting to have a discussion of how faculty are actually using images in their teaching, and perhaps less about the tools that can be used to do so.)

playing with masks and levels

I’m still in the process of selecting, editing, and uploading photos from my trip to Europe last month. Happily, I have made it to the half-way point! So far, my editing has mainly consisted of some basic level adjustment in iPhoto. Nothing terribly fancy. However, tonight I took some time to play around with a photo in GIMP*, and as long as you don’t look at the larger sized versions, it turned out okay.

Vienna

I chose this one because I really liked the composition, but the impending rain storm stole my light and gave me a grey, cloudy background instead. Perhaps if I had known more about how to adjust for that, the original photo would have looked better, but instead I got a dark building and a washed-out sky. After using some GIMP tools to select the sky bits separately from the building bits, I was able to adjust the levels to make it look more like it did with my eyes, and then I flipped the selection and did the same with the building.

Of course, if I wasn’t busy procrastinating from other items on my to-do list tonight, I might not have ever gotten around to doing anything like that with this photo.

*I’m too cheap to shill out $600 or so for Photoshop at this point in time. However, if I do much more processing, I may need a tool that speeds up the process.

css.php