Tag Archives: Thomas Hawk

Photo-A-Day #964 11/28/07

Tonight Allison and I got Eva dressed in her Christmas clothes and took her photo for our Christmas card. Afterwards we took this one of here in a stocking, she doesn’t quite fit and her expression reflects that. Once the Christmas cards have been sent out we will post up the Christmas card photo shoot. It was fun, Allison, me and my mom were all bouncing around trying to make Eva smile.

I finally got the perfect shot, edited and cropped it and uploaded it to Kodak, we made the card and ordered our boxes. I even found a coupon code and got 20% off the purchase. Sweet! Making the cards with Kodak Gallery was so incredibly easy.

Today at lunch at work I was lucky enough to attend a great presentation by freelance photographer Ben Barnhart. He was a really interesting guy and he is a New England Photographer. I talked to him a bit about photowalking, he’d never heard of it. I was glad to go up and speak to him after the presentation, sometimes I miss opportunities to make connections because I get nervous about what to say but the more I’ve been networking online and blogging and actually creating things the more I have the confidence to talk about something interesting with other people. One thing that Ben does really well is take Portraits. I was very inspired by his portraits and getting ready for Trevor Carpenter’s December Challenge, portraits were right up my alley.

I e-mailed Ben after the presentation and even extended him an invite to go on a future photowalk. Now I have to work on setting up photowalks for New England. You can check out Ben’s portfolio on his website. bbimages.com.

Speaking of Photowalks, I uploaded my Las Vegas Photowalk to Zooomr and Thomas Hawk commented on the Google map that I used to show the whole photowalk. I made the map with the GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr software. He’s going to be in New York on December 15th for a photowalk and I really would want to go if I hadn’t already committed to two annual Christmas parties. I’d bring my PhotoTrackr with me so I could capture the locations of the whole walk. That would be cool. I have to go shoot with Thomas Hawk sometime, there is so much I can learn.

Wireless Photo Uploads

Each day take photos and upload them to Buzznet and Flickr and my best shots go to Zooomr.

Typically I download my images from my camera, look through them for the best one of the day, do some editing: color correction, cropping, sharpening and then I upload the image to Buzznet first as my Photo-A-Day widget is through Buzznet. I then upload the image to Flickr because I participate in a Photo-A-Day Challenge. And I often take a bunch of photos that I would like to share with friends.

I first heard about the Eye-Fi Wireless SD card through Thomas Hawk’s Blog. I get some great info on upcoming photography products through that blog and I am a fan of Thomas Hawk’s work. Here is his post about the product announcement. Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: eyeFi Releases Their 2GB Wi-Fi SD Card for $100

I also heard about this again today from PhotoJojo. PhotoJojo is a great one for the everyday digital photographer. There are many little fun projects tutorials that you can do through the site.

So why will a Wi-Fi enabled SD card save me time?

First of all it can automatically upload my images directly to the photo hosting site of my choice. This happens when I am within a wi-fi network. There are many sites where the photos can be uploaded to automatically on the list so far.

They are Flickr, Picasa, Wal-Mart, Facebook, Gallery, Kodak Gallery, phanfare, photobucket, smugmug, Sharpcast, shutterfly, vox, snapfish, TypePad, dotphoto, Fotki and webshots. And many more will become available as Eye-Fi develops more interfaces.

By automatically being able to upload my images to Flickr I don’t have to sort through all of them and then upload. I can sort through the best ones on Flickr and decide which ones I want to make public. With the ability to do that via a batch function time is saved. Yes, you can make your automatically uploaded images go to Flickr as private so that if you take sometime that you would not want everyone in the world to see it isn’t automatically front page news. That is a very nice feature.

Of course you can avoid this all together by only allowing your photos to be uploaded to your computer wirelessly. That will certainly save me a step in my whole photo uploading process.

We just had a baby and I take photos of her each and every day now. But not all of them I want to share with the world. I want to share them with the grandparents and family. With this memory card I could take photos of the baby and they could automatically be uploaded to Kodak Gallery or Wal-Mart and my in-laws or my parents or any family member could print off photos, photo books and whatever they wanted all without me having to have sat at a computer and uploaded everything. That is more time that I can spend with baby Eva.

I think it would be very cool to set up a live slideshow like the folks from Photojojo did. That would be so much fun at a corporate retreat or teambuilding event, or any sort of gathering where there was wi-fi and fun people.

So what does a 2GB Wi-Fi enabled SD card go for. $100.00 is what will get you wirelessly uploading your images after a 5 minute setup. I would like to see if the uploads can be done simultaneously to multiple sites and if this is something that will slow down the record speed of the memory cards.

You can order this product from Amazon.com. It would go great with a new Canon camera.

Okay, now the only thing I need is a camera that automatically records GPS information to the camera and the 2GB Wi-Fi enabled SD card and I am good to go. automatic uploading and automatic Geotagging. Sweet.

But for now I think that I will continue to use my GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr and their software to geotag my images. Then I will continue to manually upload my images to Flickr. When the tech catches up to what I want to do then I will probably switch.

I do know however that there is a product already on the market what will do the automatic GEOtagging in camera. It is a Ricoh 500SE digital camera is GPS enabled with 8.0 megapixels and 3X optical zoom lens.

Did you notice the price $1399.00. That is outrageous.

Here is an inexpensive way to achieve the same thing but you have to to some manual work.

Get a Camera – A decent Canon 8MP for under $300.00. Get the 2GB Eye-Fi wireless SD memory card at $100.00 and get the GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr Pro BlueTooth edition for $114.00. Even with shipping you now have a set up for automatic geotagging of images, or wireless uploading of images and a 8MP camera all for under $500.00. Not a bad deal.