And He Blogs

Just a quick post on a new discovery - Photoshop tutorials from a deeply disturbed individual entitled “You Suck at Photoshop“. Definitely PG-13 and abusive, but very funny - and yet instructional.

UPDATE: YSAP returns for “Season 2″ on June 27!

1 Comment »

I suppose that Flickr would be the sweet, lovely butterfly and Picnik provides the sting as the bee. The marriage is finally consumated. You will now find an "Edit Photo" button on your Flickr pictures, and that editor is the Picnik engine, which opens up a new section for you to edit to your heart’s content. Or at least with the functions that the service provides you. Those features include things like resize, crop, fixing red eye, and even exposure and "auto-fix" capabilities.

Since I had an account already, I was greeted with this.

If you have a Flickr account, and you haven’t signed up at Picnik yet, it’s time!

1 Comment »

For those of you who haven’t heard of Picnik, here is a little promotional video that those folks have put up on YouTube. If you store your photos online at sites like Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums, or even Facebook, then why not use an online photo editor. The Picknik folks are doing what looks like a bit of a promotional tour (NBC and ABC networks), so I’ll help them out (again) by posting their video here, and vouching for their service. It really does work elegantly with really easy and tight integration with the above mentioned photo services. Their "premium" features are even available for free, for a limited time.

No Comments »

As I prepare for a new position as “New Media Specialist”, this is the sort of groundbreaking application that I’d like to highlight. Mac fan-boys (and girls) will be so jealous!

8 Comments »

The latest version of Flock has changed quite a bit. Configuring all my accounts (del.icio.us, Flickr, Photobucket, wordpress.com, YouTube) took just a couple of minutes. I dragged in an image from my Flickr account. Looks like all the difficulty that I had using previous versions has gone away. They’ve thrown so much into this version that it’ll take some getting used to. This may just be my new “blogging platform”.

Blogged with Flock

1 Comment »

Do you recognize this place? Let me give you a hint.

Still don’t recognize the place? Maybe you’re not a Windows XP user, but if you are, the chances are good that you’ve considered putting this scene on your computer desktop.

The place depicted in this photograph, called Autumn Lane, was the subject of an epic search by Nick Tosches in a Vanity Fair article. It all started with a computer tech changing the standard Windows XP desktop image, called Bliss, to Autumn on Tosches’ computer. After seeing this image, he deploys what he calls “Team Autumn” to track down the photographer and the location. Microsoft was not very helpful, at least at first. Eventually someone at Microsoft does come through with a location, and one of the team members comes up with the name of the photographer, Peter Burian.

The Vanity Fair article is a great read, and the story (thanks to David Pogue for the lead) of finding the place where the photograph was taken was intriguing enough to me to seek permission to use the photos here, from Peter Burian himself. I went to Peter’s website and filled out a contact form asking permission to use the photos in this post. FOUR MINUTES LATER, I had a reply from Peter saying, “Ok, can do.”

Peter also sent me a few other links to stories that appeared in newspapers near the location of the photograph - Burlington, Ontario, Canada. The Hamilton Spectator and the Toronto Star both ran stories about “the search”. Burlington is between Hamilton and Toronto, and the more accurate location of the photo is Kilbride, Ontario, which is a small village that is part of the Burlington township. I’ve taken many trips through this area on the way to Toronto.

Burian says that it wasn’t until this past December that he discovered his image was a part of Windows XP. After being contacted by Vanity Fair, he was as eager to find the location of the photo as Nick Tosches was. It’s amazing the power of a photo to literally move us.

One last point. Getting permission to use photos with a copyright can be quite easy, if you just ask. Thanks again Peter.

6 Comments »

Sometimes I need to see things twice before they get my attention. I first saw Picnik at Tim Lauer’s site, but it didn’t register until Will Richardson posted about it today. Picnik is a “Flashy” type online app that covers the basics like resizing, color touchups, cropping, and saving. It’s real power comes from it’s tight integration with your Flickr photos. Just point it to your account and now you have instant editing of your Flickr photo sets. In addition to feeding it your Flickr photos, you can point it to your computer’s hard drive, a web site, or even your webcam. I’m starting to agree with Will. It’s time to start throwing away all that software I am paying for

1 Comment »