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Reviews of photography products that enhance the enjoyment of taking pictures. Published frequently but irregularly.
Sharing Photos With Visitors
28 February 2013
As we mentioned in our piece earlier this week on Diego Rivera's murals, we gave our nephew Brent and his wife Jana a three-day tour of San Francisco. That entailed taking a few photos -- and sharing them.
GEAR
Jana had a new iPhone 5 to record our misadventures and we lugged around a Nikon D300 with an 18-200mm lens on it in an attempt to maintain our ideal body weight despite some wonderful restaurant meals.
In the course of things we had the fun of shooting a few photos of them using the iPhone. The trick is to remember the shutter is activated when you lift your finger off the screen. It doesn't have to be tapped. If you lift, you won't shake the camera nearly as much as you do when you tap.
One of those user interface things.
There's no trick to using the D300. You get two or three people to hoist it up ont he tripod and stand behind it under a black cloth, observing the world on its head and press the big bulb when you want to take the shot. Or so it feels like.
Another user interface thing.
SHARING
Smartphones have had the sharing thing down pat from Day One. Email, Flickr, you name it. Gone. There already. And here come the text messages.
View cameras like the D300 (just kidding), not so much. At all. Ever. Not even with an Eye-Fi card (which never was released as CompactFlash). No kidding.
And yet, we managed to get our D300 shots on her iPhone and Brent's iPad with reasonable dispatch. Meaning we had a chance to clean them up first, straightening horizons, brightening them up and that sort of thing.
LIGHTROOM
Over three days we took about 150 shots. We would have taken more but our hands were mysteriously occupied by a knife and fork much of the visit. Oh, and the occasional glass. And napkin. User interface stuff again.
Lightroom Publish Services. After you set up the service, you can just drag images to the collection (or album) and hit the Publish button.
To manage that many shots (almost all of which needed serious help in the editing room), we imported them into Lightroom. Lightroom 4, in fact. No less.
After import, we selected all the images and created an album for the selection.
We didn't waste much time in the Library module (except to rotate one or two of them) before hitting the Develop module. A lot of straightening, a lot of cropping. Clarity and Vibrance up. A few of the Rivera shots, though, had Vibrance down, as we explained in our previous story. One after the other.
PUBLISH
Lightroom itself doesn't include any sharing space. But it does have a Publish function built into the Library module. Facebook and Flickr plug-ins come built-in and so does the one we used for Adobe Revel, which is now free.
We simply created a new Publish Collection, dragged our images to it each day and hit the Publish button. Off they went, full-resolution and (in this case) downloadable by our visitors.
REVEL
That (eventually) got our images to the Adobe server but to share them, we had to let our guests know about them. To do that, we popped into the desktop version of Revel, logged in and visited the album.
Revel Sharing Setup. We enabled sharing and downloads, then copied the link, which we emailed to our guests.
Then we clicked on the Sharing icon, enabled sharing and downloads and copied the link to the Web page display and slide show.
Revel automatically lays out the images in a nice scrapbook format for your Web browser and includes a button to start a slide show. So to see the images on an iPhone or an iPad or anything else that can run a browser all you need is the URL.
Which we promptly emailed to both of them.
LIMON
After our visit to City College to see Rivera's Pan American Unity fresco, we hopped on a J car and road to Dolores Park to visit Tartine's and have a little lunch at Limon.
While we were waiting for our order, we suggested Jana check her email for the link and they spent a few pleasant moments reviewing their trip.
Revel on the Web. The layout you see when you go to the URL we shared (top) and the slide show in progress (bottom).
Then we passed around the five-dish lunch special we had ordered. Which is the concept of sharing taken to a whole new level. Quite a delicious one at that, too.