Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

Digital video and digital photograph formats are so close, and yet so far away.

On many cameras like the Nikon D90 I use, the difference between capturing one or the other is a switch or a button away, and destinations for the content like Flickr do little to distinguish the two formats. However, when you get the memory card back to the computer what you do with them and how you process the captured files is worlds apart. I don’t have a handy solution to process images and video in the same way, but here’s one way to help the management of the files by using a still reference photograph as a hook for the metadata though our workflow from acquisition right through publishing onto web sites.

View Slideshow

In the vein of events like 24 Hours of Flickr and Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk a local photographer recently used Flickr and other local web sites to organize 48 Hours of Maplewood, an event where people in town were asked to go out on a nice summer weekend and document their suburban New Jersey neighborhood.

Many photographers on Flickr and across the web have come across Project365 in the last few years. As described by early driving force Photojojo, along with other benefits:

Taking a photo a day will make you a better photographer. Using your camera every day will help you learn its limits. You will get better at composing your shots, you’ll start to care about lighting, and you’ll become more creative with your photography when you’re forced to come up with something new every single day.

I’ve thought about joining in each of the last few years — hey, I already take photos a few times a week, what’s a few more? But that’s why I never have. I already shoot a few times a week, carry one of my cameras almost everywhere and spend more time then most looking around for a potential photo op. In the end I just didn’t think taking more photographs would advance my skills.

As 2008 comes to a close many sites are doing year end wrap ups see previous post and here are two sites highlighting how New Jersey saw the year.

Last Friday, Flickr held its second 24 hours of Flickr event where it asked photographers to take a photo sometime in the 24 hours that made up August 8th, 2008 and contribute to a giant pool of images from around the world.

Above is my humble contribution, taken late friday during a break on my regular bike route at Verona Park, in Verona NJ.

Those who read photography blogs may have already come across the dustup, but the discussion over [ab]use of the Flickr API and application developers not respecting copyright on content should be of interest to the web developers out there as well.

The discussion centers around the realization that last weekend Every Flickr Photo Ended Up on Sale as cell phone wallpaper at MyxerTones.com

comment on this photo at flickr

Things are getting a little old and dusty around here as a result of me being quite busy with work as well as contributing more elsewhere on sites like flickr, ma.gnolia and newsvine.

To honor its crusty-ness I’ve aged the site’s color palette some, like a fine, aged, um, newspaper? Enjoy.

Seems like a good time for a little update on my contributions to other sites around the internets…

I’m looking for your vote, if you think the shot is worthy, on this image of seedlings for the JPG Magazine ‘Breakthrough’ theme for their next issue.

And last weekend was the Lunar New Year parade in Chinatown, the weather was pretty good and the costumes better. A bunch of photos from the event are now up in a new Flickr Set

Just getting around to some much needed maintenance on some of the projects around here and had to chase down something that was plaguing Place Name Where? for a few weeks now. Though I looked at it when it first came up I just didn’t see the cause of the “Node no longer exists in…” messages that PHP5’s SimpleXML was throwing.

[Warning: The following post is not safe for Molly.]

Picking my head up from a few projects to pimp my latest flickr postings… My South Mountain Reservation Photo Set is about to hit 80 photos. All taken during my various strolls around the area including these from this past Saturday:

A week or two ago I posted some comments about working with CakePHP for an upcoming project. Well, I’m happy to announce that that project—Place Name Where?—is up.

Place Name Where? is a personal information aggregator that tries to reverse the trend of decentralized content contributions that seems to be one of the core features of “Web 2.0” sites.

Web 2.0 is great, but at a certain point one can feel too distributed. You’ve got news stories here, pictures of your pet dust bunnies over there, and in the cellar you keep your favorite wines. Each service is kind enough to provide ways to include the content you added to their site back into your own site, but typically this is limited to a presentation that doesn’t go further then “hey, look at the last 10 things I did on this other site”.