BijanBlog

Good sign

  signs of spring 
  Originally uploaded by bsabet.

I really have a hard time living in New England in March. It feels like the month just lasts forever.

But fortunately signs of spring are everywhere these days.

These little flowers are showing up all over our neighborhood.

Just in time.

The best DSLR bag ever

For the most part DSLR camera bags are pretty lame. They are clunky, uncomfortable, dorky and scream "I have a big camera inside".

All that is different with Crumpler. I just picked up their 4 Million Dollar bag for my Canon RebelXT. Amazing bag.Comfortable, easy to use and looks great. I love this thing.

If you own a DSLR get a Crumpler bag.

Flickr gets it

On Monday night Flickr had an outage. Photos were missing, thumbnails were mixed up. It wasn't pretty. But they did a great job communicating the issues on their blog. They reported what happened behind the scenes and they fixed the problem. Everything is back in order.

And yesterday they added email notifications. I'm glad I can now stop whining about this one.

Great lessons on how to treat customers. Respect for the user, transparency, embracing user feedback, regular product releases. They get it.

Thanks Flickr.

ps: some add'l feature requests :) mybloglog integration, better slide shows, RSS support for password protected photos

Digital photography tip

I have two digtial cameras: a DSLR (Canon Rebel XT) and a compact (SD800IS).

I make sure that even my point and shoot digital cameras have some manual features. The ability to turn the flash on (fill flash) or off is really important.

But I learned something very interesting today about noise. It turns out that compact digital cameras are as noisy at ISO 100 as DSLR's are at ISO 800. I'm going to start shooting at ISO 80 from now on with my compact camera. See Ken Rockwell's analysis here.

Snow Angels

  My snow angels 
  Originally uploaded by bsabet.

We finally got some snow in New England this week. Kids are digging it. They even got a snow day this week.

I took a few pictures of the girls and James today with my new killer telephoto lens.

Full Screen Flickr Slideshows

Many thanks to Dan who recently commented on my post about Flickr Guest Pass and told me about PicLens.

PicLens gives you full screen slideshows of Flickr photosets inside of Flickr itself. I've been wanting this for a long time. I tried it on the MacMini connected to HDTV and played back our photos from our recent vacation. Works great.

(Only supports Safari on a Mac. Firefox version coming soon)

Flickr: Guest Pass

Last summer I made the move to Flickr.

Lots of my photos are public and lots are private.

But sharing private photos on flickr with family members and close friends was a bit of a hassle. Until recently it usually required them to register and sign up for a new flickr account.

So I was really excited to see that Flickr has created Guest Pass. I recently tried it out. It's great and doesn't require your friends/family to have a flickr account to see your private photos. Good software.

Now we just need better looking (high res) slide shows from flickr so slide shows on the big screen look as they should. Please.

Better life poster

A few weeks ago I posted a link on creating a life poster.

My friend Jason put mine to shame and has a better looking format plus a higher resolution image. Nice.

Tags & Personal Media

This summer I migrated all of my digital photos to Flickr. Previously I hosted my photos on my servers using Gallery. Gallery is fine but didn't have the social/community features that I wanted so I made the move to Flickr. The migration took several months since Flickr limits uploads to 2GB/month even for the pro account.

I now have 4,400 photo's on Flickr.

With the help of Keyword Assistant I have tagged approx 86% of my photos. I can't wait until it's 100%. Tags rule. My daughter Ellie recently turned 5 and it was so nice to have her pictures available with a click. I easily grabbed all of the photos tagged "Ellie" and made a cool slide show that I had running on the macmini connected to our TVs during her party (geeky dad). Flickr doesn't do full screen slide show so I used Photocastr (developed by my friends Stuart Roseman and Jason Yanowitz) to get the high res pix from Flickr onto the Mini. Sweet.

Having tasted the benefits of my tagged photos, I now want all of my home videos tagged up too. I don't know where to start but I'm going to figure it out.

I'm guessing most consumers don't want to spend the time tagging all of their photos and videos.

We need an auto tagging system for video and photos that support existing apps (iphoto, imovie, moviemaker, picassa, photoshop etc) and existing web services (flickr, photobucket, fotki, youtube, veoh, etc). Riya tried to do photo autotagging but they wanted to replace stuff that we all use already with a new service. That's really hard. I think this quote from Munjal's blog is spot on:

"We had realized that there was one major thing different about Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0. In 1.0 no one had anything on the web so if you had a new service people would just use it. In 2.0 most people have something they already use on the web to do the task. So if you have something better (even if it is a lot better) you also have to have the key features they used from their 1.0 site before they would shift to you. Web 2.0 has a lower cost to awareness (due mostly to blogging), but switching costs are considerably higher (at least for photos). This was a big insight for us."

This new research from Penn State looks promising. I'm going to spend time checking it out.

Life Poster

 A number of people that visit my office ask about the poster I have on my wall. It's a poster made up of 98 pictures of my family.

I found this post awhile back that describes in detail how to do it.

It's really simple and fun. Enjoy.