Tag Archives: photography

How to upload vertical video taken with a mobile phone

This is a brief video I uploaded to see if a movie rotated in QuickTime 7 Pro can appear on YouTube in vertical format. I took this video with my Nexus One upright (vertically) at the Sea Life Aquarium in Tempe at the Arizona Mills shopping mall. Looks like it worked!

How to do this? Quoted from QuickTime 7 Pro help:

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Digital zoom test with Froyo camera app

I finally got the Froyo (Android 2.2) update pushed to my Nexus One today, and I noticed digital zoom as an option in the new Camera app. I ran an experiment by placing this ad down on the counter, and standing in the same place taking photos at 2x, 1.5x, and 1x digital zoom.

2x digital zoom

2x digital zoom test with Froyo camera app

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The Smithsonian featured a photo of mine

I just remembered that I forgot to share the good news with everyone that The Smithsonian featured a photo of mine last March. It appeared in a Click! Photography Changes Everything post in the webzine The Bigger Picture – Visual Archives and The Smithsonian.

I am honored even though I realize that The Smithsonian has featured photos by thousands of photographers over the years. Still, how many people can say that The Smithsonian featured a work of theirs. It’s exciting to be a part of a great American institution.

Review of 2009 and Goals for 2010

I haven’t felt like writing a blog entry in a long time, but I have been updating my friends, colleagues, and the world about my life in other ways. This morning, I feel moved to recap the previous year and look forward to the next.

I continue to take photographs and share them on Flickr. Some of my recent adventures include hiking Camelback Mountain for the first time, a weekend getaway to Jerome, going to the Arizona State Fair for the first time in the five years that I’ve lived here, going “full frame” by trading in my Canon Digital Rebel XTi and EF-S lenses for a used Canon 5D, and meeting a longtime Flickr friend from Brooklyn who visited me and my husband with his husband. It was great to bring the online life and real life together, and we all really hit it off. There are several other photo sets I’ve posted in months since my last blog post as well. The best way to keep up with what I’m up to in a visual way is to follow my Flickr photostream.

I’ve also really gotten into Facebook this year. I don’t add people I don’t know as Friends, and I don’t have a Fan Page, but I do enjoy keeping up with my friends through status updates, photos, videos, links, etc. I am sort of the designated photographer at gatherings of friends and coworkers, so it’s always fun to upload an album from a shared event and tag everyone in it who’s on Facebook– which is most of them. For a while there, I was spending a couple/three hours a day on Facebook, but I’ve cut back because I have so many other priorities. I felt I was neglecting my photography and Flickr social circle for a while there, so I’ve returned to spending a bit more time on that. One thing I love that Flickr added in the last couple of months is People in Photos, which allows you to tag your Flickr friends in photos the way you can tag your friends in photos on Facebook. Those friends have to be Flickr members in order to be tagged, so it’s most useful for photos from FlickrMeets; that is, when a group of photo geeks get together to go on a shooting spree. Not necessarily good for your neighbor’s family’s Thanksgiving party unless they’re all Flickrites themselves. Thanks to this new feature and my general hamminess, I can now point you to photos of me on Flickr. As of this writing, there are over 900, though I’m not sure they are all public!

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The dilemma of self-promotion

Tonight, after posting the participant’s review of my workshop this morning, I see that there are no comments on the blog post and no “Likes” or comments on the Facebook post. My first thought is “people thought it was obnoxious.” Self-promotion can be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t proposition. You want to win people over, but you risk turning them off in the process. I don’t know if I ever strike the right balance when it comes to talking about my accomplishments or promoting my work. Lately, I fear that some of my status updates have been boldface brags; e.g., “New blog post: Rave Review for my Vague Language Workshop http://bit.ly/zWrno” (tweet), “I’m happy that 24 people came to my workshop in Phoenix, five of them all the way from Yuma and four of them all the way from Tucson.” (tweet), and “New blog post: Speak & Spell II a Successful Workshop http://bit.ly/171bC9″ (tweet), especially the fact that I shared my teacher evaluation scores. Ugh.

What may or may not be apparent is that I have felt shame and failure in my life, and there have been a few times I doubted I’d ever achieve anything. When I do manage to do something good, my feelings of past failure and inefficacy drive me to shout my achievements from the rooftops. “See! I’m not a complete failure! I DID something!”

Perhaps it is the fact that there have been so many times in my life when I have felt paralyzed into inaction. I’ve wanted to do many things that I didn’t do because I didn’t believe in myself. Now, when I finally do things that I’ve only been dreaming of doing for years, I feel… well… vindicated! Especially when other people didn’t believe in me, either. It’s like, “How do you like me now?!” Well, maybe not very much, I fear.

What good does it do to shove my success in the faces of people who doubted me? Are they really going to “like me now”? Or are they just going to resent me for rubbing it in their faces that I succeeded in spite of them? My fear is that they are going to resent me as much as I resent them. Resentment begets resentment. The thing to do is forgive everyone for everything, starting with myself.

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Pros and Cons of Photo Sharing on Facebook vs. Flickr

I’ve been uploading photos to Flickr for over three years and Facebook for over a year, and I’ve been thinking lately about what I like and dislike about each service’s photo sharing functions. Here are my thoughts on Flickr vs. Facebook’s “Photos” application.

Flickr Advantages:

  • Photograph Data
  • High-Resolution
  • Keywords Tags
  • File Hosting
  • Public Access

Facebook Advantages:

  • Friend Tagging
  • Click-thru Albums
  • Large Private User Base
  • Simplicity

Flickr for Photographers; Facebook for Friends

The way I see it in a nutshell is: Flickr is for photographers; Facebook is for friends. Flickr is a photographer’s paradise. It is full of professional, artistic, high-quality photographs and — unless the photographer prohibits it — photograph data (EXIF & IPTC; i.e., aperture, shutter speed, light sensitivity or ISO speed, etc.) You can learn a lot about how certain effects are achieved by viewing the “More properties” link under the “Taken with a [Camera make-and-model]” link. Yes, of course Flickr is also for amateurs and snapshots. It’s not all art gallery stuff. But where it really shines is Continue reading

Nature tints the morning sepia

As I lay in bed early this morning, I heard thunder, saw the occasional flash of lightning, and then saw the color of the sky change into a natural sepia tone. It was such a phenonmenon that I got out of bed early, turned off the house alarm, got my camera, and went outside to capture the moment.

My Greyhound Photo on Blur T-Shirts



DSC01326
Originally uploaded by meemalee

Found this photo on Flickr of my greyhound photo on t-shirts sold at the Official Merchandise stand at the Blur concert in Hyde Park on July 3, 2009. I’m waiting to receive one of those t-shirts myself. I look forward to it!

My Photo in Blur Posters



Blur Posters
Originally uploaded by howtorowacat

Here’s another photo I found of my photo used in posters at the Blur Concert in Hyde Park on July 3, 2009.

Blur Concert Hyde Park 3 July 2009

Found another image of my photo being used as a billboard at the Blur Concert in Hyde Park on July 3rd. Cool!

I found similar photos here, here, here, here, and here.