I had seen a couple of posts from a couple of my Flickr contacts that use use a high key lighting effect. I’d never heard of the term before this week, but I find the effect intriguing. Therefore, I had to give it a shot. I decided to use a tutorial I had found after doing a Google search of the term.

I’ve seen high key lighting used most often in portraiture and artistic nudes. In the latter, it’s used to hint at body contours without too many embarrassing details. Not in the mood to disrobe in front of a camera, I decided to settle on portraiture. I think anyone who reads this blog will applaud that decision.

I was wearing a white shirt, so that would make things easier. I found the lightest wall we had available in the house, then set up two lamps on either side of a chair so that it was evenly lit. I don’t have any real studio lighting, so I used a utility lamp with a daylight fluorescent bulb.

I took several shots of myself, and even conned Laura into sitting for a couple of portraits. She insisted on sitting with one of our cats, so the result wasn’t really appropriate for high key. Mine, on the other hand, were a bit stark, but usable.

In Photoshop, I first used a curves overlay to blow out the exposure. Then I created another layer and added a color overlay to bring back the color in my eyes. I did a slight lens blur on the base layer to eliminate a few of those pesky wrinkles and blemishes. Laura said that the result (seen above) makes me look a bit psychotic. The black and white version looks even more psychotic.

The tutorial I used had done the effect on a baby photo, resulting in something that looked like the star child from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’m not sure if I’ll even use this again, but it was an interesting exercise. For me, personally, it looks a bit too pastel. I guess that’s appropriate for babies (or nudes), but it didn’t turn out quite like I’d like for a self portrait.

Technorati Tags: High Key, photography, portrait, Photoshop

OK, so the phrase is hardly original. Apparently I’m not the only one to wonder why in the world I would want to use Twitter. I mean, do I really want the entire world to know that I’m watching “Evan Almighty” as I’m typing this? Do I really need to micro-document my entire life? I don’t think so.

Yet, many of my colleagues, and several of the blogs I follow constantly tout the benefits of using Twitter. These proponents contend that by following the “tweets” of their friends they can keep up with trends in various fields. I’m afraid that all the twittering would contribute to even more digital noise (to extend the onomatopoeic metaphor to its logical conclusion.) How do you filter out the pertinent information from those that insist on posting daily minutiae?

These doubts and concerns aside, I’ve decided to give it a shot. I have a Twitter account, and I’ve added a Twitter Widget to this website. My intent is is to use it just for quick blurbs and updates - nothing earth-shattering, and certainly not full of minutiae (I hope.) When I started blogging, I wondered how long I would keep it up. We’ll see how long I fee like twittering.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Web 2.0

In my discussions about geotagging, one of the questions that always arises is the issue what location should be tagged. If you’re tagging photographs, should you tag the location where you took the shot, or should you tag the location of the subject. For example, if you were standing on an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway and take a picture of something in a valley below, your subject might be several miles away, which is a significant difference for geotagging. Most photographers agree that you should tag the location from which you took the shot, and not the location of the subject. You’re tagging a specific view.

Since a photograph is a frozen moment in time, each image can be matched with a discreet location. That gets a bit thorny when talking about tagging audio or video. Thinking back to my recent flight with my cousin where I did some video work, the video lasted for much of the trip. Do I geotag the starting point, the ending point, or somewhere in between? The same question would apply to audio that is recorded while traveling.

Well, the folks at Seero have come up with a pretty cool solution. Their service matches the video with a GPS track, so that you can tag the entire length of the video. According to their website, Seero lets users…

• Broadcast live video and archive it for on-demand playback.
• Track GPS position in real-time and archive a course for playback with video.
• Explore the world and discover video through an innovative geo-navigational interface.
• Geo-tag your video clips to showcase the destinations where they take place.
• Experience location specific factoids and feeds with a video broadcast.

It sounds pretty interesting. The demonstration video I saw showed a clip of the two site creators driving around Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The video appears on the left, and a Google map interface appears on the right. The map is updated with correct location as the video progresses, tracking the trip along with the video. In addition to the track, placemarks can be added to the video.

I’ve tried added their new “embed” feature below. Because the video/map combination is wider than the formatting used for this web page, it will bleed over onto the menu items on the right. Sorry, but it can’t be helped.

I’ve signed up for an account with them, but I don’t have anything to contribute just yet. I may try a driving tour around Greenville, using one of the Greenville Library guides, or one that I come up with on my own. We’ll see. In the meantime, I may visit some of the other tours that have already been contributed to the site. This looks like it has some very good potential.

Technorati Tags: Seero, geotagging, Google Maps, video

Saturday morning I skipped out on a bunch of gardening chores that Laura had lined up for me and went to a shape note singing at Furman. When I arrived, there were about thirty singers already in their open square configuration, singing away.

Unlike the William Walker Memorial Singing at Wofford a couple of months ago, this event was held in a room designed for singing. The sound in Herring Hall (where the Greenville Chorale rehearses) was much more resonant, and the tunes sounded much better than they did in the dead room at Wofford.

The group started singing from the Southern Harmony, which has the more traditional do-re-mi scale. Even so, I struggled with the note names on the initial sing-through, and wound up singing “la” for most of the notes. For the second hour of the morning, they switched to the Sacred Harp, which uses the four-shape fa-so-la scale. It was much harder, and I never really got the hang of the note names. There was a break when we switched from one tune book to the other, and I had a chance to talk with several of the singers. I was told that Southern Harmony tends to be a bit more subdued, whereas Sacred Harp singing is always more raucous. Even though the notes were more difficult for me, I was up for high-energy raucous singing. Read the rest of this entry »

I briefly wanted to mention two new web apps I’ve been using lately. Both of these are free, and they really enhance the multimedia experiences of Flickr and various blogs.

First, there is PicLens. PicLens is an add-on for the Firefox browser that allows you to view photos on a web page in a 3-D slide show format. It goes beyond the linear slide show, providing search capabilities and the ability to view a page of thumbnails. PicLens is automatically configured to work with Google image searches, Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, SmugMug, and DevianArt. You can also register your own web page with PicLens so that artwork on it can be displayed using the slide show format.

PicLens is an elegant way to view a collection of images, and seems to work very smoothly. The only problems I’ve encountered are on computers that still run XP SP1. You need SP2 or higher.

The other new application is Apture. This application allows users to create a multimedia rich environment on blogs and other web pages. All you have to do is register on the site (free), then add a bit of code to your web page. An editing window will appear on your web page once you log in which will allow you to add YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, and other hotlinks to enhance text on your website. You may have noticed the little “W” icons in my posts lately that link to Wikipedia articles. These were added with Apture. The camera and video icons similarly link to other related media.

When you highlight the text to which you want to add a link, it automatically searches for media that reference that text. The results are displayed in the editing window, and all you have to do is click on the links you want to add. Each bit of highlighted text can have multiple links to media.

Here are three examples. I’ll use the term “Grand Canyon.” When you hover over the link, the references will appear…

• Grand Canyon - link to Wikipedia
• Grand Canyon - link to a Flickr image (not mine, but one produced as a search result)
• Grand Canyon - link to a YouTube clip
• Grand Canyon - link to a news article
• Grand Canyon - combination of multiple sources.

Apture searches for all media that is tagged with CCL, Creative Commons License, so you can be sure that it’s OK to have this linked to your website.  Also, the links are not created in the post itself, but are house with your Apture account.  If I were to view the HTML code for the links above, I wouldn’t see any of the links.

I also have the SnapShot preview enabled on this page, and this creates some conflicts. Apture only creates a pop-up box for media links created especially for that application. Snapshot creates a pop-up box to highlight ALL links, including those created by Apture. Therefore, so of my links will have two pop-up boxes. Right now I’m not sure if I’ll keep both of them. More and more advertising has been sneaking into the Snapshot previews. If that continues, it’ll be the first to go. Until then, I’ll leave both in place. It doesn’t see to cause any problems.

Technorati Tags: Apture, Snap Shot, PicLens