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Lynda.com, My Personal Trainer

April 26, 2008 in Education, Pay, Service, Website | 4 comments

Logo for lynda.comRecently I have had the urge to learn Photoshop. I have always seen it as a powerful yet untameable beast. I have tried fiddling with the software before and got nowhere. There were just too many features and I didn’t even know the basics.

Awhile ago I heard about the site Lynda.com, which provides video tutorials covering a large range of subjects. The videos are led by some extremely talented professionals who really know their stuff. They peel back the various layers of the software, moving from the basics to more advanced techniques. The provide the viewer with numerous real world examples and teach tricks and shortcuts along the way.

Each subject (like Photoshop or Web Design) has multiple sets of videos that allow you to focus on specific topics and skills. Each set is then composed of many shorter videos that walk through the software. The short video format allows you to skip topics that you already know and cover a subject over many days. You can easily leave off on one video and pick up the next whenever you have time.

Lynda.com offers a couple free videos on every topic. However, to get the real benefit you should move up to the subscription plan for $25 a month. This is an outstanding price considering how much material is covered.

I am currently working through the Photoshop for Photographers and Creative Photographic Technique tutorials which are led by Chris Orwig. He does an excellent job of introducing ideas and techniques as well as reinforcing them throughout the trainings. If you have ever wanted to learn a piece of software I suggest giving lynda.com a look.

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Video Comes to Flickr

April 8, 2008 in Pay, Service, Social, Website | 1 comment

Starting today, you can enrich your social web with videos on flickr.  This great new feature basically does what you would expect, it allows you to put video on your flickr account.  However, the services does come with a few restrictions.

First, you must be a pro member in order to enjoy these benefits.  Second, videos are limited to 90 sec and 150 mb.  These limitation are trying to prevent it from being a youtube clone.  Instead, it aims to help supplement your photos with self created video or “long photos”.

These videos can be played on your main page alongside your photos, or they can be viewed on their own page (just like photos).  You even have the ability to embed them elsewhere on the web, like your blog.

Some people may dislike the limitations that flickr has imposed.  I for one don’t mind them.  They did get in the way with my first video (which was 3 min long), but I feel that this will help keep the sub-par content out.  The limitations are similar to those that Twitter imposes.  On Twitter, it is 140 characters and on flickr it is 90 seconds.  The limitations should encourage people to edit their clips and only grab the best part, which would benefit everyone.  If you want to put your entire *insert event here* video online, there are plenty of other media distribution services.

Overall I think this is an excellent addition to flickr and hopefully we will see it grow and develop more in the future.  By the way, I love the sleek clean interface for the video controls.  I will be posting a video as soon as I can get it uploaded (probably in the morning) and you can check out my flickr site here.

EDIT: My video finished uploading sometime last night.  It was put together by my girlfriend.  You can find the video here (or below) and her flickr page here.

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Flickr for Photos

August 2, 2007 in Community, Free, Pay, Service, Social | No comments

In celebration of my new camera. Today’s post will be covering flickr.

Flickr is a photo sharing site that was recently acquired by Yahoo! It has a very large user base of enthusiastic photographers sharing their recently captured photographs. It is a free service which is limited by monthly bandwith restrictions. There is also a “pro” version that eliminates these bandwith quotas.

First off, if you do not own a camera or have no interest in sharing your digital pictures, flickr is still a very useful site. You can use flickr to find great images. Either use their search to find photos on a specific topic or just browse some interesting photos. There are some incredible people in the world taking extrodinary pictures. After awhile, you may find that you want to start taking more pictures yourself.

After creating an account, if you want to share your masterpieces on flickr, you will first need to choose a way to upload them. There are a large number of ways to get your photos onto flickr. There is a list here, and these include things from desktop applications to email. There are even cameras that will upload directly to flickr.

Once uploaded, your images are being shared over the internet. Flickr then allows you to do more along the lines of organization. You can apply tags, descriptions, titles and more to describe your photos and assist people in finding them when doing searches. You can also organize your photos into sets and collections. This will help give more meaning and overarching themes to your photographs.

After all that you are already knee deep into flickr. The basics are uploading and organizing your photos, but you can go further than that with cards, stickers and prints. You can also get your friends and family signed up so that you can all share those precious moments, no matter how far away you live.

To check out the photos that I am sharing on flickr, visit me here. Also you can follow the photos taken with my new camera here.