Category: Photography

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Oh Darling! Nice shot!

I spent a lovely afternoon in the city yesterday showing My Linda around. We walked around Darling Harbour for quite a while before heading down to the Rocks and Circular Quay. Sydney really is a very pretty city.

While we were at Darling Harbour I took this shot. (click to enlarge)

This photo-panorama is actually a composite of 20 individual photos. Each photo was taken slightly overlapping the previous one, and there were three rows of photos – one across the middle, then a row above and a row below. They were then taken into a wonderful piece of Mac software called Calico, which I think does an incredibly clever job of stitching them all together into a single shot. You don’t even need to tell Calico which bits go where… just dump all the photos in and it figures out where the overlaps are.

Windows users might like to look at a similar product called Autostitch.

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Moblogging

Yes, it’s yet another made-up word from the wonderful world of Web 2.0… Moblogging.

Moblogging, or mobile blogging, is all about being able to take photos on your mobile phone and blog them directly to a blogging service without the need to go via a computer as such. I bought a new Sony Ericsson K610i mobile phone recently and was quite excited to find not only a good quality camera that took a decent photo, but also an option in the photo gallery menu that said “Blog this”. Naturally it didn’t take me long to have a play with it and I can now snap a photo with the phone, and with a single menu selection it will resize the photo and upload to a blog in one fell swoop! Unfortunately, it doesn’t let you specify which blogging service you use so I can’t set it to upload to this blog, but it does do a fairly seamless job of going to a Blogger account.

The very first time you send a photo off into cyberspace, it automatically creates a new blog account on Blogger with a random name, and then sends a text message to your phone with a URL and a token code to log in. Once you log in with a Google account (which you now need anyway since Blogger went to Blogger v2 a few months ago) it asks you if you’d like to merge the newly created moblogging site with an existing Blogger site. I said yes, it chugged away for a few minutes, and in no time at all I had the phone photos up and live on a spare Blogger site that I wasn’t using anyway! Too easy!

I love this idea of moblogging, and have been uploading photos fairly regularly, in an almost Twitter-ish manner! I think I’ll keep it going… Maybe I really am an exhibitionist! And one can’t help but ponder about the possibilities for using this in the classroom.

My moblog can be found at betchablog.blogspot.com

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Free is Good

It’s always nice to find useful software that’s free. The open source movement has had a major influence in enabling software makers to build great apps and get them out there for people to use, usually at no charge. Free is good.

What’s more unusual is to find free software from the big names, like Microsoft. A few notable exceptions have emerged from the Microsoft stable over the last few years though, such as Producer, Photostory and even Sharepoint, which have actually been quite good.

The latest cool freebie is a thing called Paint.Net, developed by a group of student programmers who did an internship at Microsoft and developed a fresh new image editing tool using Microsoft’s .NET framework. Microsoft is not a big player in the image editing area, and doesn’t have a significant product in that space. They’ve obviously given a challenge to these young programmers to develop something for image editing and the result is supposed to be amazing.

Check it out for yourself at www.getpaint.net

Good on you Microsoft. Good to see some fresh thinking, even if it did take a group of clever young hackers to do it for you.