This is from Santarchy last weekend on the National Mall. Could it be my last Instagram picture ever? The controversy over their terms of service made me rethink my attachment to this photosharing service. I like the Instagram community but they’re owned by semi-evil Facebook. And they shrink photos down to 612×612 pixels.
Around the same time, Flickr debuted its great new mobile app. It has filters, doesn’t shrink my pics down and there’s a great Flickr community that I’ve been part of for years. 2013 will see more Flickr pics and fewer Instagram snaps for this mobile shooter.
While it looks like a scene from The Ring, it’s actually Bryana Siobhan, a senior at Corcoran College of Art + Design, performing Center of Five, a ritual and repetitive work that explores personal memory and mental barriers within a constantly changing society. I took the photo at the Hillyer, my favorite small art gallery in DC.
And it’s an iPhone shot, modified with the narwhal filter in Flickr’s great new app. It’s about time that Flickr developed a decent mobile app. What I like about the app is that it doesn’t shrink photos down like Instagram and it’s tied into Flickr, which I use every day.
Snapseed is a dream of an app on the iPad – and now it’s free!
Snapseed is like Instagram’s bigger and more powerful brother. In addition to scores of faux film filters and frames, Snapseed can perform the kind of adjustments that you’d need Adobe Lightroom for. Crop, white balance, saturation, contrast, color correction, center focus, selective adjustment – it does much of what the Adobe product does but with a radically simpler interface. And a much smaller pricetag.
I like Drama. It’s one of the unique filters in Snapseed. It creates highly stylized images by pumping up the contrast and saturation. Grunge is another one, adding a beat-up texture to your image, as if it had been stored in a drawer for decades.
Over the summer, I did a photo shoot in Georgetown, using just an iPhone to capture the images and then Snapseed to edit them. My model was Lauren, a friend of mine. We started at the graceful Q Street Bridge over Rock Creek and then explored Georgetown side streets.
After the shoot, I edited from the comfort of my couch, using Snapseed. I cropped, fiddled with levels, tried and untried autocorrect, experimented with different filters, applied selective focus and, in less than an hour, I created some photos I was really happy with.
Here are some examples of the fun you can have with Snapseed.
example of grunge filtercropping, temperature and color adjustments in Snapseedcropping and subtle color, temperature adjustments
Seven hours after Austin, I exited I-10 in west Texas. I would spend the night in Alpine and then check out the artsy town of Marfa the next day.
I fell in love with this road, this empty strip of asphalt heading toward the Davis Mountains. Big skies, a treeless expanse, the only other car a dot on the horizon. I took this photo during my road trip across the country – the sheer emptiness of this landscape made it one of the most memorable of the trip.
This is a fascinating old lock that I encountered in Blagden Alley, a historic alley complex near the convention center in Washington, DC. Check out the rest of the pictures from this city photowalk with photogs from the InstantDC meetup group. They were a great group of fun and creative folks who made the most of this cool alley.
I have a photo in the Bicycling in Virginia Map, a publication by the Virginia Department of Transportation. The above shot is from the Mount Vernon Trail, just across the Potomac from the Jefferson Memorial. I took it on a beautiful spring morning, when the flowers along the bike path had just began to bloom.
You can order the map for free. It’s a handy guide to the state’s numerous bike trails and routes. From the monumental views of the Mount Vernon Trail to the fall foliage of the New River, the Old Dominion has some of the most scenic bike trails in the nation.
****
After months of winter, that spring morning was so pretty that I waded into the daffodils to get the photo below. It’s a little Instagram picture but was published earlier this year in Momentum, a biking lifestyle mag.
“Being there” is 90% of photography. Within a few days, the daffodils were gone and the light wasn’t the same. I’m glad I got this picture when I did – it’s one of my favorites.
A photographer friend of mine told me once that if you’re not dirty at the end of the day, then you’re doing it wrong. The secret with portraits is to get low, as this stylish young photog illustrates. It’s such an interesting photo, demonstrating how she interacts with her subject and the level of commitment required to get the shot. Lying on the floor of a parking garage in heels – that’s dedication.
I took this photo in an upright position at the Diamond Derby, a celebration of biking culture in Crystal City.
Receiving an email survey from a company is not unusual in American life. Amazon, Caribou, Five Guys, Target – you’ve probably been been given the opportunity to rate the experience on a rigid five-point scale.
It’s unusual when you have the opportunity to provide feedback to an actual human, like I did with Instacanvas, the Instagram artist marketplace. Instacanvas turns your Instagram creations into beautiful canvas prints and gives you the opportunity to sell them online. It’s free to sign-up.
Instacanvas has reached out to actual users of the service and scheduled calls with them, to see what they could do better. I had the chance to talk with Todd Emaus, Co-Founder of Instacanvas. He asked about what I liked about Instacanvas, what I thought they could do better, ideas I might have for product enhancements.
In surveys from other companies, I’ve seen the question, “Do you think Company X cares about you as an individual?”, which I thought to be absurd. Starbucks does not care about me. I’m just a data point in the millions of transactions they conduct every day, to be crunched by soulless MBAs in Seattle.
But a company that assigns a person to call me personally – maybe they do care. Perhaps they do want me to be successful and design an “insanely great” product that meets my needs. It’s a thought, a tiny hopeful one in the spreadsheet world of American business.
****
buy me on Instacanvas
Rant over. What did the Instacanvas guy say? Todd said they’re planning on rolling out more contests and greater social media integration to promote the company.
I asked – what are successful Instacanvas artists doing? They are:
1. Tagging their photos so that they could be found easily. Using tags like #bike, #scenic, #landscape, #sexy and so on.
2. Promoting the hell out of their work. They Tweet, Facebook and email continuously, with news of their online store and new photos for sale.
Check out my gallery when you have a chance. It’s filled with photos of iconic sights from Washington, DC, plus pictures of city life beyond the monuments.
I was a Photo Coordinator for the DC Shorts Film Festival, responsible capturing images of the event and managing the work of twenty volunteer photographers. DC Shorts is a ten-day long festival of short film that takes places annually in Washington, DC.
You probably think that photographing a film festival is a lot like this:
Filmmakers at 2012 Grand Bash | photo by Joe Flood
Lots of pictures of pretty people enjoying themselves in a glamorous setting. Which it was. But behind the scenes it was:
In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, here’s an Instagram shot from an Urban Pirates cruise that I took last weekend, part of an American University alumni event. It was a cheesy good time, as you can tell from this pic of one of the “wenches” aboard the cruise.
This is from Santarchy last weekend on the National Mall. Could it be my last Instagram picture ever? The controversy over their terms of service made me rethink my attachment to this photosharing service. I like the Instagram community but they’re owned by semi-evil Facebook. And they shrink photos down to 612×612 pixels.
