How to Share That Perfect Picture

So you’ve followed our tips for photographing children and got some gorgeous shots of little Madison with birthday cake on her nose. Now you want to share them with Granny and Aunt Maud on the other side of the country because you know they’ll find the cake-nose thing just too cute for words! So what’s the best way to share your photographic masterpieces with family and friends? Well, guess what here at Photodoto we’ve made a handy little guide to some of your online photo sharing options just for you, and Granny, and Aunt Maud. Here it is:

Flickr It’s the big one, everyone’s heard of it and the site has over 3 billion photos (here’s the 3 billionth). Back in the day when I first joined Flickr as a gangly teenager it was just Flickr but now it’s owned by Yahoo! so you do need a Yahoo! account to join.

A basic account is free and allows you to upload 2 videos and 100MB of photos per month, however even if you upload the original high-res shot only smaller sizes will be accessible.

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Flickr for Good—A Joint Project

flickrtechsoup.jpgFlickr has caught on not only with individuals, but also with certain organizations. They have discovered that flickr can bring attention to their causes, their members, their goals, and their achievements. Recently, flickr and TechSoup, which helps nonprofits share and learn about technology, began a new program called Flickr for Good.

Flickr for Good will provide 10,000 almost-free pro memberships to registered nonprofit organizations and certain libraries in the United States and Canada. I say “almost-free” because while the memberships themselves are free, there is a small administrative fee of $3 per account.

Many groups have already taken advantage of this offer. For example, The Nature Conservancy has a flickr site that ran a digital photography contest that received more than 11,000 entries. Interplast, a group that provides free reconstructive surgery to children in underdeveloped areas, shows before and after photos of patients, as well as images of their own workers. Oxfam sponsored a Starbucks photo petition showing images of people holding signs that said “I support Ethiopian Coffee Farmers.”

Organizations can use flickr to publicize themselves and their work,

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Patches for Pictures

Recently I read an article about two new tools that are being developed to help digital photographers remove items from their images. Suppose you had taken picture of a great small town main street, but when saw the image you realized that three parked cars obscured the view and just looked messy. If only you could remove them! However, if you did, you would be left with a void.

Apparently, you are not alone. At least two teams are trying to solve this problem. One is developing a scene-completion algorithm that searches for a patch for your picture. It quickly scans thought a database of millions of images on Flickr, looking for images of the same subject, taken from the same position, with the light falling from the same direction. The algorithm narrows down all the choices first to 200 and finally to 20 or so. Ultimately, user are given a choice and select the one that looks best to them.

Another team is trying to create a library of clip art, taken from the Label Me library of images. This library could supply patches for missing picture parts.

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Mastering a Subject

daisy showerDo you take the same types of pictures over and over again? You know what I mean—hundreds of flower images (or cars or cats or whatever) fill your photo albums, but no portraits, buildings, action shots, or street scenes. One school of thought urges you to push yourself to shoot what does not come naturally. However, I have another suggestions: stick with what you love, but work to perfect that subject.

There is a vast difference between lacking the imagination to try new subjects and deliberately working on one subject to develop skills. The first is a type of laziness; the second is a path to mastery. I like to think that I’m following the second path, but I’m too close to tell, so I’m going to use another example, flickr photographer Steve Wall.

Now, I’ve never met Steve; I know nothing about his life; he isn’t even an online correspondent, or at least he wasn’t until I asked permission to use his photos. But I have been following his photography on flickr for a few years because I saw some pictures of his that I liked and marked him as a contact.

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