ProtectMyPhotos is a slick new online backup service that automatically syncs the photos on your computer with secure, offsite servers. Online backup isn't new or sexy but automatic backup that's secure and completely simple to set up and run? That's the new hotness.

Download a small application, tell it to either scan your whole system for photos or tell it which folders to scan and then let it run quietly in the background and do its thing. After the initial time consuming scan and uploading process ProtectMyPhotos unobtrusively makes sure the photos on your hard drive match the photos in your online backup. Add new photos? ProtectMyPhotos detects them and automatically uploads them to the datacenter. Delete some photos? ProtectMyPhotos let's you know about any discrepancy so you can make sure that what you deleted is what you actually want gone. It's very cool and very easy to use.

I keep mentioning the simple factor here because I'm thinking of getting my grandmother a subscription to ProtectMyPhotos for Christmas. My grandma loves digital photography and digital photos. When she thinks about her computer it's in terms of how many pictures she can get on it, how safe her photos are on it, how easily she can get to her photos on it, and how harshly she needs to warn the grandkids not to mess up her photos on it. A simple, automatic back up process would give her peace of mind and save me hours of DVD backup burning on visits. That's right, ProtectMyPhotos is so easy and painless to use I feel confident hooking my grandma up with it.

The free account allows unlimited backup of low res jpegs. The paid account is $49.95 per year and works with nearly every image format you can think of including RAW files. In addition the service is stretching the limits of its name by allowing you to back up video, mp3 and other audio files, office documents, and financial documents (Quicken, MS Money, etc). You can access your files from anywhere with a secure web based file browser and restore any lost files with a click.

Tags: photography, backup, ProtectMyPhotos, file backup, photo backup, data backup

Even though I do think the photo sharing market is getting crowded with Flickr clones, wannabes and also rans I try to check out all the new ones I find just in case something really is groundbreaking and cool. It's not often I find something that meets those criteria but Tabblo does. Tabblo is billed as "a brand new way to tell a story with your photos." The Wall Street Journal says "If you want people to see your photos in a more-personalized way, Tabblo is a good service that will change the way you look at online photo sharing."

Tabblo is Web 2.0 and ajaxified to the core and I mean that in a good way. It's extremely intuitive and easy to accomplish the main site objective which is to share photos in a different way. That different way is by arranging photos into tabblos or collages and photo essays with text. The mechanism behind building displays is incredibly easy and powerful. You can choose background colors, layouts, rotate images, do minor image effects (convert to sepia for example). A great example of the flexibility tabblos offer is Title IX from a photographer who was working for the Orlando Sentinel. Title IX is his photo essay representing "a year long personal project" commemorating the anniversary of Title IX. The obvious advantage to this method of display instead of say a Flickr set slide show is the extreme flexibility in layout and design and the option of adding text among images.

In addition to the cool factor of the photo displays themselves it's extremely simple in Tabblo to set privacy controls, integrate your photos from Flickr, upload pictures from popular photo apps like Picasa, tag and search images and all the other things you'd expect from a next generation photo sharing service, like the ability to order prints. In the short time I've played with the service all of the options and tool integrate seamlessly and provide a really great user experience.

Though it's probably not going to replace Flickr as my go-to photo sharing service Tabblo is on my list of useful tools. When I want the creative flexibility to very easily create photo essays and collages (a post-family Christmas photo collage from which family members can order their own prints comes to mind) Tabblo is definitely where I'll turn.

Tags: photo sharing, tabblo, photography

I received prints today from Shutterfly. This is the first time I've used this online lab so I was anxiously awaiting my order to compare Shutterfly's work to other online labs I've used. I'm generally pleased because the prints work fine for the purpose I bought them for (namely being framed or even just magnetically tacked up for display in my own home). However if I had a less specific or more formal need for these prints I'm not sure I'd be so pleased.

The color prints have phenomenal and true color. Deep greens, true reds and pure whites. I have absolutely no complaints about the color quality. The black and white prints are another story. The contrast that I had both on my screen and in some samples I printed with my low end photoprinter was exactly as I wanted it. The black and white Shutterfly prints are muddled. The contrast is weak and shadows and shades of gray just seem inadequate. I'm sure a combination of less than high end post production on my end and lack of calibration on Shutterfly's end is probably to blame but the black and white prints definitely aren't where I'd like them to be.

The main issue I have with the Shutterfly prints though can be looked at in one of two different ways. Either "it's such a minor thing you should let it go and not make a big deal out of it." Or "this is such an obvious detail I can't believe they don't have better quality control in this area." I fall into the latter camp. On each of the dozen or so prints I got one edge of the print was rough to the touch. The roughness is from an unclean cut in the paper. Imagine you used a paper cutter on photo paper that was clearly not sharp enough. Instead of making one, swift clear cut instead the cut is ragged with tiny bits of fiber left over that weren't separated. I would never give a print with such an obvious defect to a client or a friend. I'm proud of my photography and want to be proud of my prints as well. If I'd made the prints at home I'd never hand one out if I'd failed to get a clean cut on the edges so you can be sure I wouldn't hand one out like that when I've spent money on it.

To be fair to Shutterfly I'll mention a couple things I really liked about their service.

1. The service was incredibly fast. The order was printed and shipped within less than 24 hours.
2. You have the option of adding a caption to the back of each print.

So would I use Shutterfly again? Yes absolutely if I was only ordering color prints for either my own private use or if I was going to frame them before delivering them to anyone else.

Tags: shutterfly, onlinelab, prints, photo prints, photography

Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson.

I've read several photography books in addition to taking classes. Hands down this is the book I'd recommend if you aren't going to take a class for understanding the basics (and even the specifics) of exposure or if you just want a little more help understanding how aperture, shutter speed & iso work together. The author has an easy to understand and friendly style and uses an abundance of photographs to illustrate information, examples and points he's trying to make. All the photos have all the lens, shutter, and aperture setting info (old school EXIF data) to help you learn.

What I found most beneficial about the book was the real variety of situations his examples took place in. From all the lighting situations you can imagine to swimming pools, to frozen fields, to vineyards to city streets. Some other photography books I've read have used bizarre examples in situations that I could never actually imagine occurring so I had a hard time processing the information into something I could use.

Of course as I praise this book I should also point out that I almost read this book too late. Meaning that since buying my digital rebel xt a few weeks back I've learned infinitely more about the technical aspects of photography than I knew before. There is simply no replacement for hands on learning. That being said I still think this book is a great reference book for anyone looking to increase their understanding of exposure and the technical side of their photography. I firmly believe that Improvements in the technical side of your photography lead to great improvements in the artistic side of your photography as well.

I've been blogging in one form or another for 4 years. For the majority of that time I've used Movable Type. I've used WordPress enough to stay up to date with it though. The same goes for TypePad and Blogger. So when I started photoblogging I hacked my way through it with Movable Type. MT isn't meant for photoblogs specifically so it wasn't exactly a piece a cake. It took some time but eventually I got everything the way I wanted in Movable Type. I was very pleased. Over time though I became frustrated with the steps that it took to post photos and create thumbnails.

I couldn't just upload an image simply. I had to upload the image, insert the HTML into entry field, insert the thumbnail into another field and insert the description text into yet another field. A process that really should take very little time took much more than I wanted it too. So I decided to give Pixelpost a try. Pixelpost's sole purpose is photoblogging. As such it's designed to do all the standard things that photobloggers typically want to do. Easy category setup, automatic thumbnail creation, grid of thumbnails for archive pages, etc. Also it uses PHP instead of MT's perl which speeds things up considerably. And also, it's open source (I think).

So I anxiously installed Pixelpost last week. The install process was relatively painless (if you don't already have a MySql database setup on your server you'll need to do that; that's about the most difficult part of the process) . Once I got the software installed it was an absolute breeze to get up and running with it. I'm talking seriously easy. After playing with it for only a few minutes I knew that I was going to abandon my MT photoblog.

I searched for a utility to port my Movable Type photoblog entries over to my new Pixelpost photoblog but found the only plugin (add-on in Pixelpost speak) for the task didn't work for me. I probably did something wrong in trying to use the add-on but it wasn't worth fooling around with an extended period of time to figure it out. I just manually copied over images that I wanted. That process allowed me to weed out some images that never should have been on my photoblog in the first place. The only downside is that comments from my Movable Type blog didn't get moved over. There weren't a great deal of comments so this isn't a great tragedy. Next up is the port my Movable Type photoblog design (which I still like) over to Pixelpost. This shouldn't be too terribly difficult.

If blogging is still in its infancy then photoblogging is a newborn. It's an unknown concept to most people, even to a lot of those who are familiar with blogs in general. A breif description of photoblogging would be something like "photoblogging is the act of posting photographs to blogs." That sounds pretty dumb doesn't it? But that's what it is. Blogs are spaces where people can write and post their thoughts on any and everything. Photoblogs are the exact same, except with photographs. You can share your photography, you can invite other people to comment on your photos, you can send your family the link to your photoblog so everyone you want to can see your photography. That's pretty cool. The point of this brief intro to and definition of photoblogging is to point out that if you want to get started with a photoblog you can't go wrong with using Pixelpost.

I'm a bit late writing about it but I did want to share my experience with ordering prints from Flickr. I was in a particularly instant gratification mood when I was sorting through my Flickr archives last month so I chose to have prints made at my local Target. I ordered late in the afternoon but since Target doesn't close until 10 I thought I'd have plenty of time to pick them up. Not quite. You must order by 5PM or pick up your prints the next day. Not a major issue so I went on with the order.

I chose a variety of sizes (4x6, 5x7, 4xD) and ordered about 35 prints. First thing the next morning I sprang by Target and my prints were waiting for me. In the package there was an index sheet of all the prints and the different sizes were each in a different folder with them all together in one of the traditional photo envelopes. I wasn't disappointed with the prints. Everything came out exactly as I wanted with only a couple exceptions. When ordering my prints I was warned that a couple shots should be 4xD or 5xD (the size and format geared for the size ratio most digital cameras produce) instead of 4x6 or 5x7. The warning said that some minor cropping would occur if I went with the normal sizes anyway. I was curious to exactly how much the cropping would be and well, people buy 4x6 frames and in this instance I wanted prints I could give to people that they could easily frame. I wish there had been some way in the order process to see exactly what the crop would be. When I got the prints back the cropping was fine for one shot and totally not fine for another. It would have been nice to know that ahead of time.

Other than that my only complaint about the Target service is that you cannot get matte prints. Your only option is glossy. I love the way the Flickr printing page explains it: "If you want to pick up your photos at Target, you have the option of glossy prints". Is it really an option if there isn't a second option to compare it to? I don't think so but ok. So if you must have matte prints you'll have to choose the Flickr option that mails prints to you. I've yet to try this for myself but I've heard the wait time to receive the prints is somewhere around 10-14 days for the normal shipping option. I'll verify that when I have another batch of family prints to order.

When I started camera shopping back in June I had very few solid criteria. I had general specs that I was looking for (at least 5MP, 3X zoom) but was really most interested in the coolness factors and what I could afford. So with few set in stone criteria and a budget that included several popular price points there were lots of cameras that fell into the sweet spot. It was a bit overwhelming.

So I started looking for imformation in obvious places like dpreview.com and personal reviews at Amazon. I didn't find the information at dpreview particularly helpful for me personally because a lot of it was more in depth and more technical than I was ready to deal with at the time. And the sample galleries, while showing a lot of things the camera could do, had a lot of not great shots that could be attributed maybe to the camera but also maybe to the photographer. While it's probably better to see a mixture of good and bad shots taken with the same camera I was still mostly interested in cool stuff at this point so I wanted to see lots of good shots. Amazon helped a lot in this area. It seems that people uploaded their best shots to Amazon both to show off the camera's attributes and their own skills as photographers.

I should also mention that at this point in my search I had already decided that eventually I wanted to purchase a digital slr and would be choosing a camera manufacturer for the future and not just a camera for now. Meaning that the pretty obvious choices to me for a quality, affordable dslr are Canon and Nikon so I wanted the point and shoot camera I was buying now to be either a Canon or Nikon. So while simultaneously checking out Canon and Nikon p&s cameras I was also checking out dslr cameras from the same companies. Eventually I settled on the Canon line of cameras. This obviously helped narrow my choices down in the point and shoot category.

As I mentioned Amazon had some great photos taken with various cameras that users/reviewers had uploaded. Enough anyway to put the A95 at the top of my list. However I still wasn't sure. A friend had just bought a PowerShot S60 and was getting good results with it. One problem he mentioned with S60 though was the the lens cover was all the on/off switch. So it was pretty easy to accidentally get shut on or off when you slipped it in and out of pockets or bags. As not graceful as I am that was enough to make me back away slowly from the S60.

I went to look at the A95 in person at a camera shop. I liked the way it felt in my hand. Not too heavy but not too light either. The cameras that were too light felt like I was going to break them. See above mention of my non-gracefulness for reasons not to have a too delicate camera body. So I was almost sold on the A95 but not quite. Finally I had the brilliant (at least for me) to search Flickr for more A95 shots. I was particularly interested in Macro shots and low light situations. Unforunately you can't just search flickr by camera used but you several people tag their pictures with their camera model and there are groups devoted to one camera or another. It took some time and patience but eventually I found enough A95 shots from diverse users to really get a feel for the camera's capabilities. At that point I was 95% sure that the A95 was my best choice and then I found the excellent Digital Camera-hq. At the time they had a feature on the best camera for different price points. The A95 was chosen the best for its price point. In addition there were several customer reviews that went along with Digital Camera-hq high recommendation. So I was sold and bought a Canon PowerShot A95 and I haven't regreted the choice for an instant.

This is a little late since Canon has introduced several new cameras in their PowerShot A-series but it's still a great camera that I highly recommend.

Some sample shots that I took: