The fine people at Lensbaby were kind enough to loan some of their new line to us during the months of September and October. I know I walked around with the 4/3 Composer for a few weeks and if you trundle over to our YouTube channel, you’ll see me fumbling with Derek’s E3, a Composer, and swappable optics.
More about the babies, and some pics, after the jump…
read more
Once again we photo-walked this week, and once again if you weren’t there you really missed out. DJ Jared was great to work with (and we thank him for giving us his time, if you were out there and had shots get them to me so we can share them with him in thanks). We had an Elinchrom Ranger pack and an A head with a softbox and some bounce reflectors, so we were able to shoot mixed strobe and ambient on location. We also had some of the new Lensbaby products out with us, showing off the Composer and the swappable optics system (which I hereby propose we call “swaptics”).
And, it was a good mash-up out there. Nick and I were shooting our trademark Olympus cams, Dawn brought her Nikon D40, one gent used Panasonic’s LX3 point-and-shoot, another the original 5D, and Tony showed up with a medium-format view camera. Film, people! Film! Craziness.
It was a lot of fun. There was shooting, strobing, and later, a motorcycle. Check out the pictures in the gallery below, and make sure to find your way out to next week’s walk so that you to can start padding your portfolio with awesome shots.
We run a Flickr group dedicated to showing off pics from the various photowalks, and you can find that over at http://www.flickr.com/groups/nick-and-dereks-walkabout/. You have to join, just so we can keep it strictly to photowalks and not get a lot of the vaguely tangentially-related chaffe that you get with Flickr groups, but don’t let that turn you off. We want to see what you got out there.
It’s like fishing stories, but for photographers.
“One time, I had this awesome shot. Stellar. Change your life. There was this chick–and she was hot–and there was this explosion and a cow tap dancing.”
“Wow, that’s amazing. Can I see it?”
“Ah, no. It got away. I forgot I had my camera set to ‘FAIL’ priority…”
Flickr is basically the best baseline for what our market is you could ask for: completely voluntary, community-driven. It has only a couple biases, and they fortunately happen to be the same biases our online store operates by: consumer- (versus professional-) centric, and of course skewed towards the opinions of consumers who are also web-savvy.
Sounds like online shoppers to me.
Anyway, it’s been a big deal around the tech blogs that the long-time top camera on Flickr– the venerable Canon Rebel XTi–is soon to be displaced by a new most-popular camera– the iPhone. No, seriously. Mock them as many of us might, the camera phone is clearly arising as the new snapshooter of preference in the internet crowd. Interesting to note, and it means I’ll pay a bit more attention to Sony’s continual efforts in that arena (boy they love putting megapixels into anything that’ll sit still long enough for them to).
Rounding out the top 5 cameras on Flickr are two more Canon’s and the legendary Nikon D80. Flickr also breaks down statistics by point-and-shoot (Canon owns the top 5), DSLR, brand, camera hone, etc.. So, if you’re looking to see what’s popular in the Web 2.0 crowd, here’s your new bookmark: http://www.flickr.com/cameras/
Voice activated lightstands
Things went rather well. The weather cooperated, so I didn’t need to use my rainsleeve. And even though I managed to convince everyone to park something like, nine miles from the shooting sites, everyone seemed pretty pleased with the outcome. Above, you’ll see our volunteer model Erin, framed by two voice activated light stands with Tony’s elbow poking in from the side.
Later on we’ll have footage to put on the Roberts Imaging channel on youtube, and as Derek and I filter through and spruce up our shots we’ll get them added to the Flickr feed for y’all to ogle and mock. Dawn’s got some pretty neat shots (and some hilarity) from the fish-eye she borrowed off Jeff.
We’ll be having another informal walk on Tuesday, August 18th about 5:45pm at the corner of Illinois and Washington (kinda by Champp’s, under the Artsgarden) and if the weather get’s nasty we’ll head inside. We’re working to arrange another model to come out and hang with us as that seems pretty popular. I know I get tired of shooting Derek.
Well kids, I finally got my hands on the video files, so before I head out this fine Indianapolis Friday how about my mini-review of my photowalk experiences with the E-P1 and 14-42mm kit lens?
This is a podcast-enabled post, so if you subscribe to our videos you’ll be getting the video from the end here beamed to you, so don’t worry there.
Getting started, let’s look over the highlights of this beastie:
Ready to read my lengthy-ish review? Click below.
Did I say it was easy to embed Cooliris in a page? I did. Guess what, it’s not beneath our fearless webmaster use something sexy and free. Check our monthly photo contest page and our Flickr feed to see this slickery goodness.
If you want in-depth knowledge of how to do this head on over to the Cooliris developer forums or pester us (Derek) in the comments below.
You should also keep an eye on the Robert’s Raw footage videos on our Youtube channel. I hear rumblings from the webmaster implying that he’ll be feeding them into Cooliris as well. Ba-da-BING!
And if there’s anything with gloss, shine, and a delicious GUI, it’s the browser enhancing digital-image experience called Cooliris 1.11. A small download at 2.9mb, it’s a free to use (and if you’re a geek, integrate into your website) infinite wall of photos which navigates much like the Coverflow function in iTunes, but sleeker and sexier.
And its ruining my web-viewing experience. I checked out Derek’s fine E-P1 shots using Cooliris (by navigating to the set page in Flickr and booting Cooliris from the bouncing logo) and everything was smooth, intuitive, and shiny. Clicking an image brings up any tags or details and the scroll wheel zooms away from the highlighted image so you can click and drag to scroll the wall. It doesn’t integrate image saving or EXIF data, so be a dweeb and sign up to be an alpha/beta tester. The whole of it will massage your eyeballs and immerse your attention.
When I closed Cooliris the standard index of 75×75 pixel thumbnails, frozen as next-year’s fruit-cake, actually confused me for a moment.
It’s not that Flickr has a bad built-in slide show function. It’s tidy and well behaved, like it should be wearing a dark, wool business suit. Cooliris is wearing a slinky dress and a lamp-shade, and probably isn’t measuring the drinks.
So other than ocular hedonists, what use is Cooliris? For a photog with a limited budget (OK, so all budgets that aren’t spawned by the House and Senate are limited) or wants to display their work online with a lot of panache and not a lot of coding -Cooliris is certainly something to consider.
Due in equal parts to excitement and boredom, we’re going to work the first field test of the Olympus E-P1 into a proper field report. I used one for a little over an hour yesterday around the gardens at the Indianapolis Art Museum, trying purposefully to test several of what I knew would be this camera’s field weaknesses in good light. The results? Not yet. We’ve gotta get a few short video clips together, so look for that full report Monday. In the meanwhile, why not take a look through my selected results in our own little trial gallery? Most of the pictures are straight out of the camera, Large Superfine JPG with whatever the default NR was set to. In a few shots I’ve done some quick and dirty processing in Adobe Lightroom to show how the JPEGs shape up. I didn’t have a large enough card to justify shooting RAW, so tests for RAW conversions will have to wait for next weekend’s Worldwide Photo Walk.
I can say, initially, that I was very pleased with the overall performance, though it’s not without quibbles. It was so fun in the field, though, that the quibbles came to me as afterthoughts afterwards. Look for the full report Monday.
And, all you non-Oly vendors: want us to do a nice field test for your new camera, gadget, or gizmo too? Just make sure we can get our hands on a demo unit and we can do a similar experience review for you as well.
So, in case the blog, the vlog, the Facebook group, the MySpace, and the Flickr (not to mention the Flickr discussion group we run), weren’t all enough to prove Roberts commitment to being out there and mingling, we now have a Twitter. As a matter of fact, as soon as Jody presses the approval button this post, you should see a happy little tweet pop-up on our Twitter letting you know this shiny new post has been, er, posted. Progress, I tell you.
Also, check out the Twitter feed to the right. We’re trying to find the Twitters for as many of our vendors as we can, and we’ll be posting the latest 20 tweets from the lot of them over there. Just one more way to try and keep you up-to-date and the everything that is everything.
Hey! Vendors! Notice that we can post your tweets, but you need to hit me up with your official Twitter account first! We’ll also follow you, so it’s totally worth it.
Switch To Mobile Site