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Project365, Flickr, and more

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My friend Jessica showed me the Project 365 iPhone app (iTunes link) which inspired me to finally try my hand at Project 365 this year. In a nutshell, it’s taking one picture for every day of the year so that at the end of the year, I have a picture diary. The main hurdle that kept me from partaking in it previously was the effort involved not in taking pictures, but plugging in my camera every day and downloading the picture from it. Now, thanks to the iPhone and the ease of uploading to flickr from it, the workflow is streamlined enough for it to only take a minute or two.

The first step is to take the picture, which can be done directly through the Project365 app, but I typically take a picture using a separate iPhone app (Camerabag or ShakeIt) and just pick that picture from the library.

Then, I send it to my flickr upload-by-email address. There’s more information on it here on flickr’s site. Anything I send to that email address will get uploaded to my flickr account.

Finally, I created a set for Project365 in Flickr to organize all my pictures. It’s the most manual part of it because I need to move individual pictures into there, but really, it’s not so hard to do it in batch every week or so.

As a bonus, I also have flickr2twitter activated on my flickr account, which gives me a second email address that I can email pictures to. Any pictures I send there will not only be uploaded to my flickr, but a tweet will also be created out of my subject line with a link to the picture. That way, I can tweet pictures but still have it hosted on my flickr account instead of it being lost somewhere in twitpic or some other server.

Got my first roll of film developed

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Driving into the donut hole

I dropped my first roll of film off at CVS. It was mostly a test roll to make sure my 35mm camera was working. It is. I also learned that I don’t ever want to go to CVS to get prints again. Why?

  • They didn’t know what dpi their machine scanned in negatives as.
  • Even though they charged me for 1 hour service, when I came back 4 hours after, they had JUST gotten the prints out of the machine.
  • The photo center employees know nothing about what they’re doing.
  • I guess they scan the negatives into a machine at a super low dpi, post-process it for you, and then print it out of the machine at a crappy resolution.

The last point really discourages me from returning to CVS. If they’re going to develop the negatives, scan it into a machine, alter it digitally, and then print it out of the machine at a crappy resolution, I might as well just do that at home.

I think I’m going to have to find somewhere local to get my film developed, and then eventually buy a negatives scanner so I can scan the negatives in myself. It sucks that I’ll need to get a new scanner though. I wanted to use my all-in-one printer/scanner, but the above picture was what came out of a scan and as you can see, the quality of the scanner part of this all-in-one is not so good.

My Photography Setup

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Some people have asked me what I use to take my food pictures lately. I’m still using the Nikon D40 I got last year, but I got a new toy from the BF for Christmas this year: the Lowel EGO fluorescent light. It was a bit tricky to put together, and feels flimsy considering the price, but man, the light it gives off is fantastic for taking pictures. The BF and I really noticed a difference the first time we used it. It also comes with a reflector board so you don’t actually need two light sources if you want to minimize shadows.

He also got me the Lowel EGO Sweep Table-top Background Support Stand & Colored Paper Backgrounds which I use for the back drops. It’s small so it’s perfect for food pictures and easy to put away when you’re done. I could probably make something like it using poster board and butcher paper from the office supply store, but it’s nice to have it with minimum fuss.