Ref: http://tinyurl.com/yfkhhen

I’m on a Mac, of course, so read no further if you live on the dark side.

I use Photo Mechanic and Aperture for my day-to-day handling of  photos so this is where I started. There’s no plug-in / extension for Photo Mechanic that I could find and I didn’t expect there to be one but there is one for Aperture, Facebook Exporter. On the whole I found this unreliable and tedious to use. Its only at version 0.5.2 so I’ll keep an eye on it and see if it shows more promise. Next – staying completely in Apple land – I tried using the iPhoto (’09) Facebook uploader, even though I try to avoid having my picks in both Aperture and iPhoto. The iPhoto uploader does work seamlessly and uses the captions (titles) you give your photos on Facebook but not the faces data. In iPhoto you basically turn an existing folder into a Facebook folder so if you are an iPhoto fan this may be the solution for you. Don’t change  your mind and try to back out of using iPhoto though because if you delete a Facebook folder from iPhoto it will delete it and all the photos it contains from the Facebook site.

Not happy with iPhoto, my search continued with Google’s Picasa and the Picasa Uploader. I had some trouble installing it but got it working after a few tries. If you need to install the Facebook button (Picasa Uploader) by hand it needs to be put in the following folder: ‘/Applications/Picasa.app/Contents/Resources/buttons’. Of course now I was back at the same place I was with iPhoto. I did not want to have to use another photo organizing application just to upload to Face book even if it did do a reasonable job. If your a user and fan of  Picasa I’d recommend it but not for me. I don’t use the Picasa web site for images, and I’ve never been a fan of the Picasa application (possibly my least favorite from Google and I love most of them) which I find clumsy and unintuitive at times. In particular Picasa doesn’t have the smarts to combine the RAW and the Jpeg of the same image into one reference thumbnail. So sorry Picasa you still have not won me over.

What I thought I needed now, in the absence of a decent plug-in for Aperture, was a stand-alone application that I could use in conjunction with my chosen photo organizing application(s). There is the Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook based on the Adobe AIR platform. Not sure why they called it ‘Photo Uploader for Facebook’ as it really is a more general Facebook client. The uploaded is reasonable but has some drawbacks. You cant see images that are already uploaded to an existing album and when you tag people in photos it is blissfully unaware of your friends list it can also be painfully slow at times but then again I’ve never been impressed by Adobe AIR applications in general. So thumbs down to that one.

That just leaves one final serious contender that I could find and whilst it does have some serious bugs / annoyances it is my pick of a very average lot and that is Bloom. “Bloom is a multi platform desktop app that let you upload your photos and videos easily and efficiently to Facebook, download albums and view your friends’ photos”. Could not have put it better myself. For me this does the job. You can drag-and-drop photos from Aperture (and iPhoto for that matter) or the finder, caption photos quickly and tag your friends easily using a list that is aware of your friends (even shows you an avatar of them in case you forget names like I do). Its quick to, probably because it only uploads small size images. Which is all I really want when sharing the family snaps. Being  a Java app it can be a little flaky. I suggest always checking the albums you create with it on the Facebook site have all the correct settings. There is one major bug to look out for: If you have a photo with a caption selected and then select all the photos in an album Bloom will set the caption of all the photos to that first photo’s caption, really annoying but avoidable. So despite these few niggles Bloom is my choice today for uploading photos to Facebook.

Occupied

I’ve been back from Indonesia (central Java) for about a week and a half now and I’m finally getting back into the swing of things. I had internet access at times in Indonesia but I was too engrossed in what I was doing to bother blogging so sorry for the wait (don’t suppose you were anyway). I’ve processed some of the photos I’ve taken of the Yogya Biennale as the start of a series of galleries from my trip. I was only able to see a small part of the Biennale but what I saw was fresh, fun and exciting. Grass-roots art that engaged the local community and the visitor a-like. I was very lucky to be in Yogyakarta at the time of the Biennale because not only did I get to see a lot of interesting artwork I also saw inside a few of Yogya’s colonial buildings that are not regularly open to the public as they were being used as gallery space. Another endearing feature of the Biennale was that the vast majority of it (certainly all I saw) was free – bare in mind that going to the toilet in Indonesia can cost you a few thousand Rupiah.

The Justice Goddess

Don't play with Matches!

In the gallery (link removed) you’ll see a few of the works I was most taken with. There’s a toilet on a very high pipe with a knot in it which, my good friend Agus told me, is a protest about the lack / condition of  public toilets in Yogyakarta. Agus was filming a documentary about the artist, Eddi Prabandono, while we were there. Another stunning sculpture which Agus called the “Justice Goddess” stood in the middle of a major intersection and an enormous box of matches positioned outside a petrol station which caught my eye as we passed by on a local bus and cased me to laugh out loud to the bemusement of the other passengers.

Some of these images represent my first attempts at HDR photography. So far I’m very please with the dramatic effects I’m getting.

Leica F2 c: Steam Engine

This 50+ year old camera still takes reasonable photos despite the ineptness of the photographer and cracks in the shutter curtain that produce light leaks.

Holgaroid: Pink Rose

Ouch – sounds painful! You should get some ointment for that. Not necessary the Holgaroid is a camera – is my latest toy. The Holga is a mad 120mm film camera entirely made of plastic (lens and all) that is used for Lomography. Lomography is the pursuit of taking technically bad photos with shoddy cameras and calling it Art . Actually its a lot of fun with quirky cameras that are optically challenged. Add to this mix a special back for the Holga that lets it shoot polaroid style film and you have a Holgaroid.

After the Flames

Pictures of the bush-land near Healesville Victoria starting to recover after the black Saturday bush fires (2009).

This image is no longer available – if you are not offended by nudity you may wan to check out guzzie’s photostream (20090801).

Originally uploaded by guszcity Gorgeous sculptures by Peter Klashorst [blogspot].

Digital Photography Day

This was supposed to be my first actual day at the MacIT conference but I had signed up to do the Advanced Digital Photography day instead. I had expected to be doing it on Tuesday but fate had dealt me a different hand.

I’m so glad I did this, the key presenters Jay Dickman [Link 1] [Link 2] and Jay Kinghorn (authors of “Perfect Digital Photography” – thanks for signing my copy guys) were quite inspiring. Getting my hands on the Olympus E-500 camera for a couple of hours to play I have to say convinced me to buy one. I’d only ever considered the Canon and Nikon digital SLRs before now but I was quickly won over by the Olympus which gives really good bang for your buck.

I have to say Olympus and I both got our moneys worth from the two Jays.