I have been meaning to try out Animoto for a while now and I finally got to it today. The service analyzes photos and music to create a video slideshow.
Images can be uploaded or imported via popular photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Facebook, SmugMug, etc. For the soundtrack, you can either upload your own or pick from their music library, which covers several different genres, from classical to electronica, from jazz to indie rock.
As with any generative services, the results are mixed. You don't really have a say on how the effects will be mixed together. But it is good if you need to throw something together quickly.
I don't know how I managed to not know anything about PicLens until today.
PicLens is a browser plug-in which transforms image streams into a full-screen browsing experience. I installed the Firefox extension this morning and I'm in image surfing heaven moments after.
I have been on Flickr for a while now and have accumulated a lot of contacts over time. All of my non-friend contacts on Flickr are folks that I have made a decisive choice to maintain contact because I respect their photographic creation. 1000+ sounds like a lot, but when you consider that more than 24 million people are active on Flickr everyday, a thousand is actually quite a small amount.
While my intention is to be amazed by my colleagues' work, the paging mechanism + thumbnail clicking has also become rather annoying overtime. I tried using the Slideshow module to go through my contacts' photos, but the 200 count limit imposed by Flickr still create some problem.
PicLens does not impose image count limit to any browsing. The browsing model is also so fluid, transparent and intuitive that require zero learning-curve.
With this tool, I did something I have never done on Flickr today: 1. I browsed through every single image posted to my contacts' recent photos. 2. I browsed through the entire photostream from a contact I recently added.
There is no way I could have tolerated this process if I were to do this in Flickr's native interface. It has also replaces the need for flickrleech now, which I must say have served me quite well before PicLens.
But PicLens does not only do Flickr, it also does Facebook, YouTube, Google Image Search, Yahoo Image Search, and the list goes on... I tested it on Google Image Search and had the first tolerable experience on Google Image Search today.
Commenting on other people's photos and blog posts is fun, but if you truly wish to engage in a dialog with folks, it's a virtually impossible task. Tracking comments RSS on your most frequented blogs is possible, but ultimately if you see the entire web as one gigantic blog like I do, you're out of luck, until CoComment came along last fall:
CoComment is a useful web site which aggregates blog comments onto a single portal. It tracks your comments via a browser plugin. In addition to tracking conversations across multiple web sites, it has tagging capability to allow easy content filtering.
My cable box arrived last week and I found myself addicted to the show. I liked it so much that I finished 2 seasons worth of Project Runway on Netflix DVD.
It's great when you've got friends to tell you what to watch because they know you well, but beyond that I'm stuck. I tried TV Guide at first but the interface is closed to useless.
What I really needed is a site that will give me TV recommendation based on interests. As always, I posted my question on Ask MetaFilter and in a matter of days, my recommendations came back: http://www.meevee.com
MeeVee really doesn't let me down. Based on the TV listings that I favorited, I created a time schedule for me. It will even record directly to Tivo. I haven't tried out the community features yet but this site looks very promising.
Seariki, a new search engine for Wikipedia, was recently launched. It is meant to replace the not too useful search engine found on Wikipedia and aims to allow better search and browsing simultaneously.
Search: Searching for specific words return results from the Wikipedia together with useful snippets of the page, making it very useful for research and references.
Browse: The category browse mode provides paths from top categories to make it easier for hierarchical category navigation.
Language Support: The site currently supports only Chinese and English, but the developers are working on indexing more languages.
Feedback: The developers are eager to hear your thoughts. You can send them comments and feedback at seariki [at] yahoo dot com.
The system is called NextEngine and according to user comment on the YouTube page, it costs $2495 including hardware and software, which is fairly affordable.
I was doing some research on maps mashups recently and I found this little gem called TinyMap.net which can best be described as a marriage of the awesome tools utilized in Google Maps: My Maps and the ingenious everyday Web tool Tiny URL which transforms long URLs into short byte chunks.
As according to the official step-by-step tutorial, Tinymap.net allows the user to create maps, trace way-points, mark out points of interests with graphic icons and add notes on the Google map.
Content creation is surprising easy, and I created my custom map in record time, much quicker than using Google's native UI.
One thing I really like about the Tinymap is the ability to create password-protected maps, which allows you to share your map with others without sharing with everyone on the Web. Unless I have mistaken, The My Maps feature on Google Maps can only create private maps that are viewable by one person.
When you save your map, the site returns a short URL for you to send to your friends:
When I shot these photos, I did not have a timer cable release with me. If I were to shoot these at a small aperture, I would have to set the camera on bulb while keeping my finger on the shutter release for the entire exposure. To minimize the risk of completely ruining the photos, I've decided to vary the aperture values for the different exposures instead of varying the time and keeping a constant aperture value.
HDR Processing
Note that it is generally not recommended that you vary the aperture values for images intended for HDR (Wikipedia: High dynamic imaging) processing. If you use software like Photomatix to perform tone-mapping, for example, the varying levels of focus on the photo will create blurry results. I have had to apply a bit more USM (Wikipedia: Unsharp Mask) than usual for this image. And if you view large, you can see that the grains are quite visible.
HDR Results
I am happy with the HDR result though--the wider aperture gave it enough exposure to show the golden reflection under the bridge, and the small aperture contribute to the oh-so-gorgeous star bursts from the lights.
Black + White Processing
By using Photoshop's channel mixer for the black and white conversion, I was able to manipulate the the local contrast further. The absence of color united the tonal values of the two orthogonal axis of the bridge. The overall composition seems to have improved, and now looks like a giant extruded plus sign with very heavy industrial ornaments.
B+W Results
The result is very rewarding and I'd like to thank Moxette for her suggestion to process this as a black and white photograph. :)
