Nancy’s Blog

David Pogue in today’s NYTimes writes about Eye-Fi Explore, which geo-locates photos as they are taken.  It uses the same Skyhook technology as the iPhone.  Skyhook employees went out with a GPS device and a wifi search device, and geo-located every wifi base station they could find.  The Eye-Fi Explore correlates the area wifi signals with your photo and, voila, geo-locates your photo — within 100 feet, Pogue says.

Of course, this is only going to work where there are wifi signals around — which means it’ll work best in cities, and not at all out in the middle of nowhere.

And only cameras with SD cards.  My Canon dSLR uses CD cards, though the next generation of the same camera uses SD cards.

But — interesting idea.  I have good GPS on my Nokia n95, but would have to use an external GPS on my dSLR, which I’m never going to do.

What remains to be seen is what people want geo-locations for.  My individual uses so far:

• Remembering where I found that good place I want to revisit, someplace away from home but where I plan to return: the good hotel, the good display of wildflowers, and so forth.  Of course, I would want access when I’m on the road, and not from my laptop.
• Making a map of my itinerary on some trip.  I now have a pile of photos from various places I’ve been and never intend to return, but for which I do want to know whether that was the temple in Kyoto or Nagano.
• Showing someone else where something is, what an area is like — e.g., the friend who’s going to Ireland for whom I wanted to be able to show photos of various areas, as she planned her trip.

Collectively, this technology could be used with Flickr, Google Maps, etc to collate images. When I was considering a trip to western China, I looked for photos on Flickr, fruitlessly.  The tags on the images that were there weren’t specific enough.

Adobe Photoshop Express has gone online — a free product from Adobe. I haven’t dug into it to see what it does and doesn’t do. The reviews that I’ve seen aren’t crazy about it. It’s designed for rank amateurs. It interfaces with some online photo sharing apps, and at least one review said it will work with Flickr soon, although other reviews say it’s not as good as Picnik.

It also offers a variety of sharing options, including emailing, building one’s own online “Gallery” hosted by Adobe, and embedding or linking photos hosted by Adobe to social networking sites and blogs. There was an uproar about the terms of service and ownership, which Adobe says it’s rewriting.

What I find interesting is that these online editing tools may make more sophisticated photo editors and, eventually, photographers of people who don’t know that much about photography by offering them such functionality as exposure compensation and white balance. If it does make posting and sharing easier, then it’ll encourage more of that, too.

Like other Adobe apps, however, the documentation is terrible, and the app is definitely not self-explanatory to its supposed target audience of people who’ve never used Adobe. Adobe’s big Achilles heel is its documentation, with usability not far behind.

NY Times Sunday Jan 6:

The British novelist/actor/comedian/poetry tutor Stephen Fry is quoted as saying of booksignings– in the past someone wanting a picture “would go behind the signing table to put an arm round me or a hand on my shoulder as I signed the book with a flourish while looking up into the lens grinning soupily. Of course B wouldn’t be acquainted with A’s particular make of camera. Today everyone has a camera. They have a dedicated digital machine or something built into their mobile phone. As a result of this ubiquity the signing queue has become such a living hell that I don’t do them anymore. All the pleasure has been sucked out.”

I spent the week of July 15 at the Maine Media Workshops. Which was TERRIFIC.

I took Tillman Crane’s workshop. I also had a chance to see the work of and talk to Alison Shaw and Thatcher Cook, both of whom are interviewed in the video, and I would certainly take workshops from either of them, as well. (Though Thatcher had his workshop meeting at 4 am to catch the dawn light.)

As part of the closing night slide show, they prepared this video and voila, there I am! Eating lunch. On the right, partially hidden by the woman closest to the camera. This is part of the closing sequence. No, they didn’t ask me to sign a release for this.

They didn’t interview my instructor or take pictures in my workshop, so I’m not in those parts of the video, but I also show up in the opening sequence, a time-lapse sequence of breakfast in the dark, rainy eating area — dressed the same as in this photo, I wander through. To see the video, go to www.wku.edu/~tim.broekema/maine/ and click on July 20.

The video makes Rockport look more urban than it is — many of the city shots were taken in Rockland, which is much bigger than Rockport. We had overcast and drizzle, but we also had sunshine.

I’ll try to write more about the workshop itself and the Maine Media Workshops (formerly the Maine Photographic Workshops) later.

I’ve been writing about performativity a la Judith Butler and personal photography — that we are not expressing or presenting who we are but enacting it, as we do things, including as we pose for and take pictures. And this is in today’s paper:

Panel at International Visual Studies Association Conference, New York, Aug. 10-12:

New image-making and sharing technologies

Chair: Nancy Van House (School of Information, University of California, Berkeley)

New image-making and sharing technologies are transforming personal photography: digital cameras, cameraphones, and internet-based image sharing have rapidly permeated the world of personal photography. The ways in which non-expert users take up, re-interpret, and adapt new technologies (or fail to adopt them) are of interest in many fields of research: with new photography-related technologies, we have a case of widely-successful innovation. Personal photographers are using these new technologies in ways both continuous with prior purposes and practices, and in new ways. The changing technological and material bases of personal photography serve both to make visible previously taken-for-granted practices and uses of images, and to enable new ones.

On this panel, we will discuss these new technologies and such issues as: emerging uses of images; the changing (and persistent) place of personal photography in construction of identity and social relationships; the division between public and private, as private images become more public, intentionally or otherwise; the shift from individual to collective image making and use; the uses of cameraphone images; the changing nature of memory via image-making and archiving; and images in social networking, including on sites like MySpace.com and Flickr.com.

For further information or to send abstracts or completed papers please contact: Nancy Van House (School of Information, University of California, Berkeley) Email: vanhouse@sims.berkeley.edu

IVSA meets in New York City, Aug 10-12. For the complete call and list of panels, see http://www.visualsociology.org/proposals.html

I like Moo, and was showing off my Moo cards at the iSchool holiday party — but I’ve been trying to make more cards as a Christmas present for a week now and it hangs up halfway through the process. There’s a thread on the Flickr Moo group complaining about problems starting 12/8, which included processing and billing for orders that were not completed because of this hangup. There’s a post from a Moo staffer that says that was a temporary problem for about 20 people for a few days around 12/8 — not! Still not working. Obviously this isn’t going to work for the Christmas present. So to all the people I showed my cards to — I withdraw my endorsement of Moo, at least until they solve their problems (and communicate honestly with their users).

UPDATE 12/21: I posted this to the Moo Flickr group and others report no problems. I sent email to Moo tech support; no response. I’m increasingly pissed off at Moo. There’s clearly a bug of some sort. Doesn’t matter which browser I use, which computer I use, or whether I’m at home or in South Hall, it simply doesn’t work. ?!?!

UPDATE 12/22: Finally got a response from someone at Moo, via the Flickr Moo group, not Moo tech support. There was a bug in working with private photos. I had uploaded to Flickr a bunch of photos to use for Moo and tagged them private so as not to muck up my photostream. It’s now fixed, thanks to my public complaint.

HOWEVER — their Paypalo ordering system isn’t working, and put me in an endless loop; and it won’t rotate one of my images.  So still too buggy for me to recommend.

Interesting site – Nokia and Flickr together mapping photos from last 24 hours from Nokia’s high-end N-series phones, with a time slider.

Interesting new effort from the Smithsonian. Terrific idea, but I have to say that on my first, quick foray into the site, it was very confusing.

From the International Visual Studies Assn mailing list:

Smithsonian Launches Online Photography Initiative: The Smithsonian’s 18 museums, nine research centers, and the National Zoo collectively preserve some 13 million photographs which now, thanks to the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, will begin to be made accessible to researchers online. The images found in some seven hundred collections throughout the Smithsonian are organized by museum and discipline…The Smithsonian Photography Initiative is devoted to the presentation and study of these photographic images, viewing photography as an art form, a record keeper, and a cross-disciplinary medium that encompasses science, history, popular culture, and more. Beyond offering more information about where to find photography collections throughout the Smithsonian, a new website aims to be an educational tool, serving anyone who wishes to study, explore, and enjoy photographs of many kinds. To view the website go to: http://www.spi.si.edu/ where you will be provided access to some 1,800 digital images, the work of 100 photographers, who used 50 different processes.