I thought I'd try doing the month of January as a test. I'll be honest, I don't think it works. It seems sloppy, lacking any elegance.
Watch.

So while I plan to continue finding a song for each image I post, I'm not sure this will be the way to package it. I like the concept but not sure I can pull it off. I considered titling each image but thought that would simply add to the cognitive load. Maybe there is a way but I'm not seeing it. I could use your help. Can this be improved? Be honest. I can take it.

I’ve noticed a few new members to this year’s pool so I thought it might be helpful to share a few tips that I found helpful in sustaining the project.

• Carry a camera with you all the time. This sounds obvious but it was a rare occasion I did not have my camera with me. I bought a simple carrying case that I hook on my belt. Ladies, your purse is your friend.

• Use a cellphone. While not the greatest quality, it became my backup.
• Shoot tons. You never know what will make a great photo. Sometimes I’d shoot the same thing 20 times using various settings to get something of interest. This is how you learn your camera.
• Determine a workflow. I tried to download photos everyday and was successful most days but the rare occasions I waited more than a couple of days meant culling through more images than I wanted. I’d rather take 20 minutes at most to view a day’s worth of images than having to go through dozens over a few days.
• Light editing is usually all you need. You can always do more but playing with levels and some basic cropping is usually good enough.
• Find an easy upload tool.  I use iPhoto and this tool is the best exporter to flickr I’ve found and it’s free.
• Tag within iPhoto. I didn’t do this right away but the exporter tool maintains all tags and titles so I now do it within iPhoto and flickr uses them too. In my previous life as a Windows user, I edited in Picasa and found this tool a nice way to directly upload from Picasa.  If all else fails, the flickr uploadr tool works too. It’s just one more step.
• Subscribe to the group.  After about day 9 you’ll start wondering what to shoot. Believe me, you’ll have many days like this. Feeding off the work of the entire group, you’ll find a great resource and inspiration.  I’m sure if you scan the pool you’ll see some similar shots. I think that’s a testament to the power of community. Without this, you might as well just do this on your own and forget the group.
• Have some ideas in your holster. Hopefully most days, you’ll always capture a few moments that have some real meaning but for those days when it seems like nothing happened, have a few ideas that are not time sensitive that you can use when you’re in a pinch. Otherwise you just end up taking photos of your ear.
• Involve your family and friends. If they know what you’re up to, they often provide inspiration and ideas for you as well.

I’ll also cross post this to the pool discussion forum. Feel free to add your tips or ask questions in either space. It’s really great to have more people excited about this effort.

Imagery

I’ve written at lengths and perhaps ad nauseum about the value of imagery. But the idea of mindful seeing is certainly something that has become a part of my day. Good storytellers listen intently to others. They find beauty in words. I remember a few years ago reading about Barbara Ganley taking her camera on walks and her efforts to embed photography into her writing classes. The idea of always having a camera with me stuck. My family and friends know it’s always with me and they too are seeing things they never saw and calling on me to capture moments. This is actually one reason I’ve fought moving to a larger SLR and have stuck with my compact camera.

Composition

One of the greatest features of digital photography is the low cost of failure. Taking a photo everyday forces you to be creative. It’s been interesting to develop vocabulary and understanding of composition and at the same time playing without really understanding why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’ve taught several introductory courses on digital photography and can’t emphasis enough the value of taking a gazillion photos.  No doubt it adds to her workload but I’m better at culling prior to downloading. Yet it still takes time. I still use iPhoto as my primary orgainzer/editor. I’m comfortable with its funtionality.  On rare occasions I use Aperture or Fireworks but iPhoto is my mainstay.

Community

This is obviously the key to this project. I subscribe to all the members of this group and have pretty much viewed all their photos. Knowing we are all trying to learn together, and yet have no formal ties, makes this a really interesting community. I’ve definitely learned from many and at times consciously and other times subconciously have copied their styles. Why wouldn’t you?  The community has also done well encouraging one another via comments. Of the 52 members, I’d say almost all have kept up and are active and those who have not, who cares?

I’d like to set up something similar for our schools this year. I’m not sure how I’d structure it but knowing the value I’ve found in this along with my push to include more intentional uses of images in learning makes think I have to figure out how. Any ideas are welcome.

Last week I shot an impromptu video with my Canon SD750 Digital camera. I dropped in into imovie 08 (which by the way was designed exactly for this type of quick video and sharing) and uploaded it to the four sites. Here are the results:

Big Dog Meets Little Dog from shareski on Vimeo

The default setting for youtube won’t give you the high quality you get from the other sites. I found this site which rewrote the code to use the higher quailty video.

With that, it’s hard to differentiate between the four. Blip is larger by default but I’ve resized manually to make it similar to the others. Unless there are some other features here I’ve missed, I’m not prepared to recommend one over the other. Are you?

Update:
From Ian’s request I also uploaded the original 15MB .m4v file to my server and it is embedded here. It is better quality than the others since it hasn’t been converted to flash. However it’s download size and also server bandwidth might be an issue.

I also added a google video. I couldn’t find a high to embed the high quality format.