Played around with this camera app on my wife’s iPhone earlier tonight. Best camera app I’ve ever seen on any phone. Check it out iPhone only (for now) and free for the basic camera and a set of filters. [Disclosure: SmugMug is a sponsor for Photo Talk Plus, a video show I host]
Well then you are in luck! Because we are giving one away, courtesy of SmugMug, next Wednesday night live on Photo Talk Plus.
Want to learn how you can win it? Then tune in and join us tonight at 8PM PST LIVE on the Vidcast Network for an epic interview with the one and only Robert Scoble.
Robert and I go way back from the days of our photo walking videos and tonight’s hangout should be a great one. Tonight we’ll be talking about SmugMug’s new awesomest iPhone camera app Camera Awesome, the brand new Lytro lightfield camera announced today, an update on Sunday’s huge Trey Ratcliff / Tom Anderson hosted photowalk down in Los Angeles, all the latest from the rumor mill on the rumored to be imminently released (this Friday) new Canon 5D, Mark III, and much, much more.
Joining me tonight as always will be my lovely cohost Lotus Carroll, along with panelists Don MacAskill from SmugMug, Natalie Villalobos from Google, The Vidcast Network’s Keith Barrett, Camera Labs’ own Gordon Laing and LIFE Through the Lens Host Karen Hutton.
Thanks as always to our great sponsors over at Drobo and SmugMug!
I’ve been playing around with the new Lytro camera for the past 24 hours or so. The images below represent what I’m calling my initial Lytro Field Test. The image on the left is a Lytro exported JPG straight out of the camera. The image on the right is my processed version of the JPG using Adobe Lightroom.
One of the things that you can do with a Lytro lightfield camera is adjust the focal point after you’ve taken a shot. The most dramatic examples have things in the foreground and background. You can play around with the photo at the top of this blog post to see what I mean. Click anywhere on the image to set a focal point. Double click anywhere on the image to zoom.
Lytro images are shot in a proprietary RAW format and the software that ships with the camera doesn’t have any basic editing functionality. You can export the images as JPGs though, and then manipulate those JPGs in whatever editing software you’d like to use, like I did in the examples below.
I know what you’re going to ask next. How many megapixels does the camera have? There’s no way of knowing. The camera measures instead in megarays.
From a quality standpoint, these are not images that you are likely going to want to print or blow up. The quality seemed about on par with a camera phone for basic photography purposes. I can usually give most camera phone shots an artistic edge with processing and I sort of did that with the Lytro images below. All of the shots are taken in the square format. The square format is my favorite crop. 
I still need to play around with the camera some more. I have some ideas for it with street photography but the camera does seem to have several limitations. The biggest is that you have to keep the camera very still when shooting. Too much motion will create a blurry photo that you can’t really use. I tried shooting some street stuff in low light last night and wasn’t happy with the results at all — maybe I still need more practice though. I’ve only just started using the camera, so I suspect I have a lot to learn.
The camera comes in three colors, graphite, blue and red. It also comes with software that you can use to import and manage your photo library — the library format feels alot like iPhoto. From here you can export photos out of the library as JPGs, but for now you have to export them one at a time. The library also allows you to share your photos to the Lytro website. From there you can share them in other places, like I did on Facebook here. You can also get embed code for your blog (which is how I blogged the image at the top).
The blue and graphite cameras have an 8GB chip in them (about 350 photos). The red camera has a 16GB chip (about 750 photos). The cameras are $399 and $499 and you can order them here.
I like the overall design of the camera. It feels very Apple like — the colors are aesthetically pleasing, it has easy to use touch screen technology, and the buttons are on a grip that make the camera easy to hold. The Lytro has an internal battery that charges with an electric ac adapter or through a standard USB cable.
You can read more about the camera at the Verge here. Robert Scoble has the best write up I’ve seen so far today here — he’s been shooting it for a year. By the way, Robert Scoble is our special guest on Photo Talk Plus tonight at 8PM PST and I’m sure we’ll get more into the camera on the show then. Lytro’s own blog post on their camera here. Alot more examples of their focus technology from mugurm here.
Today Flickr is rolling out their new “Photos from Your Contacts” page and it looks pretty awesome. They announced that this was coming last week and it looks similar to how it was reported on then. I think it’s being rolled out in waves and everyone might not have it at once. I do have the page now myself though.
Photos are now placed in a new “Justified” jigsaw pattern that makes the photos as large as they can possibly be, emphasizing the photos over surrounding white space. Even better, the page now has infinite scrolling. Paging sucks and now you don’t have to page this page anymore — simply scroll to the bottom of the page and more photos will be loaded. If you hover over each photo you have an opportunity to both fave the photo (stars are white and click them to make them pink) or click comment which will take you to the comment box on a photo’s actual main photo page.
Flickr has chosen to display the photographer’s name in small white letters over the photos, which feels a bit distracting at times, but it’s nice that it makes it easier to find your favorite friends’ photos by name.
Overall, I’m incredibly pleased with the redesign of this page. The justified view feels a lot like Google+’s “Photos From Your Circles” page, but from a functionality perspective it’s a lot better. You can fave photos on this page on Flickr but not Google+ and Flickr’s most recent view is better than the algorithm that Google is currently serving which seems more an odd combination of randomness and female faces.
I’m also really happy that this new design represents a moment of innovation and improvement for Flickr. It seems like under Flickr’s Head of Product, Markus Spiering, that they have a renewed sense of purpose. Shipping this new design is great proof in the pudding that they are serious about improving the site for their users, which is probably the most exciting thing about this new design of all. Congrats to the Flickr team who redesigned this page and rolled it out.
As much as I like this page and am happy to see it today, I KNOW that this page can even be awesomer than it already is. Here are some ideas on how to make this page even better!
1. When we hover over a photo let us press the F key to fave. We can press the F key to fave a photo on the photo page; let us also use it to fave photos on hover. This will make it easier and faster to fave resulting in more faves, and more user interaction.
2. Right now there is only 1 way that this page serves photos, by recency. Flickr could build in 5 other views in a pull down menu on this page: most interesting by the last hour, last 12 hours, last 24 hours, last week, last month. Especially with my contacts (I have a lot more contacts than friends), this will allow me to see the best of their work in various time frames and help surface the absolute best of what my contacts are putting up.
3. Let me filter this view by buckets. Right now I have only two ways that I can filter this view, by contacts or friends and family. What if I wanted to see though all of the photos by my SF photog buddies? Or what if I want to see this page only for my upcoming Utah friends because I’m going to Utah next month and what to immerse myself in their work ahead of the trip? Google has circles, Flickr should have buckets. Once they have buckets then we should be able to filter this page by contacts, friends, or any other bucket that we create.
Anyways, I think all three of these items would make this page even that much better and I hope that today’s redesign is just the beginning for making this page as awesome as it can possibly be. What do you think of the new page? Do you like it? Not like it?
UPDATE: When I wrote this story I tested Flickr’s behavior on how a default account is set up. In my test image it appeared that this image was coded by default as “all rights reserved” with sharing disabled and I could not pin it. Based on this behavior by Flickr, I assumed that all default photos (the majority on Flickr) could not be pinned. In actuality the fact that this account was set up with the “all rights reserved” “no sharing” options default may have been an error in the default settings on flickr. I’m now told by Flickr that the default setting actually *should* be all rights reserved sharing enabled.
What this means is that the only photos that are being restricted from Pinterest are a very small number of photos where users have consciously chosen to restrict their sharing elsewhere on the web. This is actually a pretty smart thing to do to give these users more control over their flickr photos. The vast majority of all rights reserved images on flickr then are still very much able to be shared to Pinterest. Aaron Hockley has a good rundown on the situation here.
Original article corrected:
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Flickr apparently disabled the ability to post Flickr photos to Pinterest when the photo is uploaded using the all rights reserved license that Flickr defaults to when a user has opted not to share their images outside of flickr in their flickr settings.
1. This limitation is super easy to get around. Just install Dan Pupius’ mega-excellent FitrFlickr extension. Now on a flickr images’ main photo page under every photo will be direct links to the various sized copies of the images that flickr stores. Here you can easily just go to where the photo is stored directly and share that version of the image circumventing flickr’s code that has been put in place.
2. If you’ve disabled sharing in the past but now want people to be able to share them on Pinterest, just go to your sharing options and turn the default no to “yes, that would be lovely.”
3. One of the biggest things that this does is helps to make sure that flickr’s underground porn world stays underground. The “no pin” tag has been put on all non-safe, non-public photos on Flickr non matter what settings you’ve put on your photostream.
You can of course still post non-safe, non-public photos with the hack that I described in item 1. For example. Flickr has coded this photo that I took of a painting at the Chicago Art Institute as naughty (rolls eyes) — so if you try to pin it you can’t. But if you go to where flickr actually stores the image you can pin it from there just fine. And here it is, a super naughty non-safe flickr photo live living and breathing on Pinterest.
4. Flickr Help Forum thread on the topic here.
As far as Pinterest goes generally speaking, I like it. I blogged about it the other day here. My friend Trey Ratcliff blogged about it the other day as well here. Alot of photographers are pretty wound up about it though. The most recent bugaboo is that Pinterest strips your metadata when a photo is uploaded there. This upsets alot of people because they embed things like their copyright in the metadata on their photos. Thanks for the heads up on the metadata thing Gary!
My view in general on Pinterest is that many photographers are overreacting about it. Pinterest is not going to steal your photos and sell them as stock photography no matter what mumbo jumbo you might come up with on their TOU. Pinterest users are really not even the type to buy your photos. They’re basically a bunch girls/women who like to scrapbook stuff (and Trey Ratcliff). It’s no different than back in the olden days when bored housewives would cut pictures out of Good Housekeeping magazine and put them in shoe boxes to show them to their girlfriends later — or some girl printing up a photo of Justin Bieber from the internet to hang up in her locker at school. [no chauvinism meant or intended by describing Pinterest as a largely female user base with my flowery language in this part. It's a cool site for men and women both]
Oh, and if you want to follow me on Pinterst, you can find me here.
Update: I’d like to emphasize that this change only affects the *Default* all rights reserved photos uploaded to flickr. I put default in my headline specifically to try to emphasize that this applied to default all rights reserved photos, not every all rights reserved photo on Flickr. In point #2 I show users who are using all rights reserved licenses with the original default how they can actually use the settings on flickr to change the default no share option and control how their photos are shared or not with that setting.
In this episode cohost +Lotus Carroll and myself interview the amazing G+ photographer +Teresa Stover
Teresa talks about shooting in West Virginia and shows us some of her beautiful self portrait work as well stunning landscapes and poignant underground photos of West Virginia coal miners. She talks about her history as a photographer, and both her in camera and processing techniques.
+Keith Barrett +Chris Chabot (from Google), +Niki Aguirre and +Ricardo Williams (BAMMMM!!) join as guest panelists for this great episode.
Other topics include, an update to Google+’s photo lightbox, the new +Ron Clifford +Jan Kabili Photoshop hangout show (every other Tuesday at 6pm PST), an interesting advert by Canon courtesy of your main man +Scott Jarvie an update on a massive photowalk taking place this Sunday in Los Angeles with +Trey Ratcliff and +Tom Anderson the new +Lytro camera, +Vivienne Gucwa’s new +SmugMug gallery page of prints for sale and much, much more.
As always thanks to our sponsors +SmugMug and +Drobo Be sure to check them out at http://smugmug.com and http://drobo.com
Also don’t miss this next week’s show on February 29th when we interview +Robert Scoble.
photo by Teresa Stover.
YES YES YES YES!!! Be sure to tune in tonight and join us at 8PM PST. LIVE at http://vidcastnetwork.com
We’re going to be interviewing the one and only +Teresa Stover on +Photo Talk Plus tonight.
Joining +Lotus Carroll and I will be panelists +Chris Chabot (from Google), +Keith Barrett from +Vidcast Network, +Niki Aguirre and +Ricardo Williams.
Lots of good topics tonight including an update on +Jan Kabili and +Ron Clifford’s new Photoshop Hangout show. Thoughts on this week’s new Lightbox updates. An inspiring sunset post by +Scott Jarvie. An update on the upcoming Los Angeles Photowalk on Sunday with +Trey Ratcliff and +Tom Anderson which will probably be the biggerst G+ photowalk we’ve seen thus far. I had coffee with Trey, Tom and +Lytro’s +Eric Cheng this morning where we got to see the new Lytro camera live in action and much more. Don’t miss this great show tonight.
As usual tonight’s show is brought to you by our great friends over at +SmugMug and +Drobo. Have you seen +Vivienne Gucwa’s new SmugMug page where she is selling prints yet? It’s AWESOME! Be sure to check our great sponsors out at http://smugmug.com and http://drobo.com.
What a great episode of Photo Talk Plus. In this episode cohost Lotus Carroll and myself interview photographer and curator of the new Plus One Collection Book, Ivan Makarov.
Ivan gives all of the background on how this great book came into being and also shares with us some of his own work from here in the United States and also his home country of the Soviet Union.
Keith Barrett, Ricardo Lagos, Nick Gatens and Kerry Murphy join as guest panelists.
In addition to Ivan’s work and the Plus One Collection book, show topics include, Exposed, The G+ Photography Journal, Tom Anderson’s HDR work in Hawaii, the hot new photo bookmarking site Pinterest, and Google’s advertisement at the Grammy’s about using Google as a backup for your cellphone photos.
As always thanks to our sponsors SmugMug and Drobo. Be sure to check them out at http://smugmug.com and http://drobo.com
Also be sure and join us tomorrow night here again at 8PM PST Live when we interview Teresa Stover in Photo Talk Plus Episode 12!!!
