Digital Dad®

Kodak Storage – losing your photos

OK, I get it, but I don’t like it. Kodak Gallery sent me an email saying that if I didn’t spend a certain amount of money with them they would delete my photos.

There “TOS” – terms of service -has changed, but unlike my favorite Smugmug, you can’t download original hi-res photos from the site, so if you don’t have the image you upload a few years ago, you’re out of luck.

It seems like if you change your TOS and require people to empty your servers then you should at least enable them to download the hi-res image –right?

image courtesy of outofbodies.com

Lenses for your DSLR

I received an interesting comment when I posted about my wife’s new Nikon D60 camera back on Aug 10. Reader slacy suggested I get a really fast lens like a 50mm f1.4. I did some research and looked at an f1.4 and an f1.8 (much cheaper) but haven’t taken the plunge yet.

Lo and behold I opened up the New York Times recently and found an article about a burgeoning market for “old-school” camera lenses, meant for SLRs, being re-purposed for new DSLRs.

Mileage will vary, as various camera bodies fit various lens manufacturers, and you need the right adapter. If you don;t mind focusing yourself, which apparently gets you back into a more visceral photo process, then this may be the ticket.

Full article here.

Back to SmugMug

I've mentioned SmugMug a few times now, with the first reference on this blog back in 2004 (zoiks!). Now that we have the fancy Nikon D60 I thought I would give it a try. Some positives for me:

• Layouts - very nice selection, very rich, although the "themes" are a little weak on design. Seems a bit "geocities" for some of them.
• Extra Info - I like the extra info on the camera and other image deets
• I like the "hover" for voting a photo up or down
• I really like the fact that my visitors can download a high-res version for themselves
• Ability to play back video is pretty cool

Some negatives:

• Print prices are $.19 compared to $.14 at Costco.
• Too many uploader options. Which one should I use? I couldn't get the Simple one to work for me on my Del XPS, but it did work on my Dell XPS One desktop. Huh? Both ave Vista and IE7. I tried Firefox on the notebook and that didn't work either.
• How about a decent Facebook SmugMug app?
• How about a SmugMug upload from Windows Live Photo Gallery?
• I can't seem to upload home movies. I have a 200Mb WMV file and it uploads all the way but doesn't show up. Bummer.

I'll keep using it but I look forward to the improvements. Much better than Kodak/Ofoto for sure.

Lights. New Camera. Action.

We're a week back from our east coast vacation and fully "recovered." The day before we left I surprised my wife with a gift - a Nikon D60 with two lenses - the 18-55 that comes with plus a 55-200mm. Actually it all came in a good bundle at Costco, including a decent bag.

I know that there is a Nikon lens that goes from 18-200mm, which sounds awfully convenient, but it costs about $600.

The D60 was recommended by two folks at work and it's the first time we've had a digital SLR in the house. As loyal readers may note, we've been avid digital photographers with a series of Nikons, but i thought it was time to step it up a notch and enable my wife to match her photo framing skills with some serious hardware.

The D60 is serious hardware. It's only 17.5 ounces but packs vibration reduction, a 2.5" back panel, 10 mega-pixels, an 8 group/11 element lens system, three frames captured per second and ISO support down to ISO 100. It also does smart things like turn off the display when you put the viewfinder to your eye.

It comes with a decent manual but I really liked the two DVDs that came with it that included good instructional videos. It would have been cool to have those on an included 2Gb SD card. The "AUO" setting works well but you can just rotate the knob to turn off the flash, hit a few pre-programmed "scene scenarios," run through some pre-programmed aperture modes or or go straight into manual mode.

The battery life is very solid and we went days taking photos without recharging. We ended up with about 1000 photos after about two and a half weeks. The pictures were fantastic (check out the D60 club at Flickr). As with any camera you have to work with it to learn how to get the most out of it, but whether it was whale-watching off of Provincetown, boogie-boarding at Nauset Beach or just roasting marshmallows over the fire pit, the D60 was a great addition to the vacation.  

Check out the new photo show "ShutterSpeed" on Channel 10.

Cameras and kids

Engadget is querying its readers for suggestions on cameras for kids:

"many parents are looking to snag a point-and-shoot that wouldn't be too overwhelming for the average kiddo, yet could stand the abuse and churn out somewhat respectable images."

What do you think?

Pogue and the digital camera/camcorder

Interesting post by David Pogue on a number of products that aren't "there" yet, one of them being the digital camera that acts a camcorder, as I discussed recently:

 . . .The all-in-one camcorder/camera. I’ve been writing about this mythical beast for 7 years, too. Apparently camcorders and still cameras need totally different sensor types for best results, so nobody’s made a single machine that takes great stills and great videos.

Still cameras are getting there; one or two models can zoom and change focus while capturing video. But a real camcorder’s image stabilization and microphone are still miles ahead of a still camera’s. . .

The Dreaded Holiday Card

I did a dumb thing seven years ago. I used PaintShopPro and a burgeoning digital photo collection to create a black and white collage of photos from that year and sent out the print as a holiday card.

Everyone loved it, which meant I was condemned to repeat the process every winter through perpetuity.

I've blogged about it before and whenever Thanksgiving rolls around I groan in anticipation of this year's effort. Some challenges with the effort:

• Browsing and selecting a year's worth of photos from our archive
• Put those images aside for processing
• Process via black and white, some sharpening
• Create a collage of these photos with varying sizes and overlays
• Print, assemble, distribute
• Do all of this with spousal consultation

The last point bears reinforcement. The process needs to be done in such a way that it is simple, straightforward and easily adjustable so we can jointly apply our judgment on photos, arrangement, etc. This forces a serious level of integration and flexibility in the process.

I've graduated from PaintShopPro (sorry JASC - it was fun!) to Adobe Photoshop Album (neat but not networked) to Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2004. MDIS2004 (what a name) has a well integrated system of tags and flags like Album, but works nicely off of a single network archive drive. They also have a "collage" feature!

Here's my modified process, seven years in the making:

• I use MDIS2004 to take a look at photos taken within the given year. You can do this by sorting by folder or just view by date
• I create a custom flag called "Holiday Card"
• Every time we see a picture that qualifies we mark it with that flag
• We "view by flag" to see what the candidate pool looks like so far and narrow down to ten pix or so
• I select all of them and open them all up in the Editor. I run them all through a B&W and sharpening process.
• Here are two options - you can auto-collage if you have the right # of pix - 7, 9, 11, etc. It does a half-decent job. However, we're perfectionists so I opt to create a new canvas in Editor and drag and drop all of the selected pix onto the canvas. I then manually resize and place each one on the canvas to create the collage.
• I overlay some text like "2006" on the corner and save it all in a big PNG file. This keeps all of the original images intact if I need to go back and re-arrange the pix.
• You can now print that as a 4x6 or 5x7 at home and attach/insert into a card, or do what we do and just upload it to Costco. Costco is cheaper per print than printing it at home (by about $.10 a print) and you just pick them up at the local Costco next time you are in there.
• You can also upload it and have custom cards printed at Costco - even more of a time-saver.
• I also save it as a resized 1024x768 JPG to mail out to friends.

That's it. Just remember that this will become a joyous albatross around your neck forever - enjoy!

Oh no the L1!

My wife was running out the door the other day and happened to mention "the camera doesn't work."

I do not expect too much more detail than that when getting an incoming technical request from a family member. At this point that seems like a reasonable level of detail.

Loyal readers will note that I bought a new Nikon L1 after the previous Nikon met its end by being dropped by our two year old. The funny story is that shortly after buying the L1 we took a trip to NYC. As I was lecturing everyone in the family about we really need to be careful with the new camera, I pulled it out at the Statue of Liberty and lost my grip - the camera went flying down to the pavement, snapping open the battery case. Oh no the L1!

Back to the problem at hand. I took a look at it and pressed the power button. The power button lit but the lens did not extend.

Groan.

I figured maybe it was a weak battery. I took the batteries out and tested them (all Digital Dads must have battery testers - period). It registered in the green zone - bad news.

I was not mentally prepared to shell out another few hundred $$ due to another "mishandling." (especially if I was likely to be a contributor along the way). That is just too cruel of a fate.

For kicks I popped in some AAs from an unopened pack. I press power and . . . it worked!

Apparently the previous batteries had enough charge to power on the camera but not enough to extend the lens. The ideal design would just stay off unless there was enough power to be fully operational.

Lessons learned - don't the optimism of your battery tester, and hold on to your camera, especially when lecturing others.

Do you . . . Shozu?

I've been rooting around looking at photo services lately. My new phone (T-Mobile SDA) has a decent camera and I've been travelling a bit so the issue of what to do with my camera phone pix is a real issue.

The current solution means syncing my phone to my PC and then doing something with the pix - email them, uploading them to Flickr, etc. A tedious process which frankly leaves the vast majority of pictures on phones.

Shozu is a service brought to you by Cognima, a small UK compnay that has been around for few years. In my pre-Microsoft days, when I was at a small mobile company myself, I would bump into them at the same trade shows, each of us with our little table and one page datasheets. At one show they gave away some electronic music CDs as a promo - not sure why, but it was entertaining.

It's good to see that they hung in there and created Shozu, which provides a "zero-click" way to get pictures off your phone and onto a service. First, you download the app for your Windows Mobile phone. Set it up to point to your photo service of choice (Flickr, Buzznet, Webshots, etc.). Next, every picture you take will get zapped up to the service automagically - no muss, no fuss. You can add titles, tags, etc.

The service is free, which begs the question of what the end game is here. It certainly showcases their technology and I trust they will monetize it somehow. It's a good example of the Windows Mobile eco-system coming to the rescue and solving an obvious problem with mobile phones.

Well done guys.

The brief life of the Nikon 7900

Loyal readers may recall that I bought my wife a Nikon 7900 digital camera back in June for her birthday. It took great pictures, very sleek and a big improvement over the hulking 3 megapixel Kodak DC4800.

My kids loved the camera, too. Apparently they loved it too much and it was dropped recently on our hardwood floors. The lens happened to open and extended and that contributed to the death blow (how about a sensor that retracts the lens when a drop is sensed like those systems in notebooks that protect hard drives?).

We have three little ones so being without a camera was not an option. I startted digging around and found a Nikon L1 - it's slightly thicker than the 7900 but has a few key differences:

• 6.2 megapixles rather than 7 - a minor point
• Uses standard double AAs rather than proprietary brick on the 7900 - great feature when on the go
• Has a 5x zoom rather than the 3x of the 7900 - great for capturing the kids
• Simplified menu and layout but same features
• A bit of a textured grip rather than smooth plastic
• Bigger screen on back
• Power button is a bit more recessed to prevent accidental shutdown

The great news was that it only cost me about $250 at J&R, about $150 less than Ii paid for the 7900 just six months ago. I also ditched my iSight camera on eBay (barely used) for $120 so my net payout was only $130.

All in all, very impressive work by Nikon.