Things, stuff, and other items of interest

Camera Stuff

Index of amateur photography related info and links that can be found on this page:
  1. Sharing your photos online
  2. Twitter
  3. Real Simple Syndication
  4. A log of changes made to this page 
  5. Reference material links: 
Sharing your photos

There are a lot of different options when it comes to sharing your pictures with your friends and family. To name a few:
Flickr
Imgur
Picasa
SmugMug
All of these have their own pros and cons. Personally, I'm a fan of Flickr. Their free service is quite good, and their paid service is unlimited and pretty affordable. You can organize & tag your photos in whatever manner you like. You can control access to your pictures based on membership. Case in point: I have a nephew that I'm very fond of taking pictures of. My family usually wants to see these photos. With a few emails, and a little help here and there, my entire family signed up for their own flickr accounts. Now, I can share 'my' photos with the public, and my 'nephew' photos with just my family. Very handy indeed.

One option you may have noticed is missing from the list above: Facebook. I think Facebook is a poor choice for sharing photos for a couple of reasons:
  1. The terms of use for Facebook say its licence — which applies to any user content posted there, including photos, videos and text — gives it the right to copy, publicly display, translate, distribute and to create derivative works. But ownership of the photo remains with the person who took it.
  2. I'm a bit of a privacy freak. Tying my personal information, and that of my facebook friends, to photos in which they can be identified particularly when it's not always clear who's able to see those photos,... it's just a bad idea as far as I'm concerned. Facebook is a handy social media tool, and great for connecting with people. It's just not someplace I trust with my photos.
That and a few articles / interviews I've read about the storage practices of the photos you post to Facebook have convinced me it's not an ideal choice. I prefer to put stuff on Flickr and direct people there myself. Plus, on Flickr you retain full licensing rights and are presented with a few options along those lines to boot. I tend to release most of my public photos under a Creative Commons licence.


Get on Twitter

If you haven't already, you are missing a very valuable resource in terms of information gathering. It's free. Just go give it a try. Look for some of your favourite pros and blogs on there and you will soon see that it's a hugely useful site for getting and keeping up to date.

While you're at it, feel free to follow me: @Banerixat

Here's a list of Photography related Tweeters


Use an RSS Reader

This is probably the single most useful tool I know of keeping up to date with your favourite websites. The basic premise is that you subscribe to a website's RSS feed, via your RSS Reader, and from then on, the site will update it's feed every time it gets new content. If you've got a smartphone, then you can access your custom feeds through an RSS reader app as well.

Personally, I use Google Reader, because it's free, very configurable, and extremely easy to use.  Here's a tutorial on how to set it up. If you'd rather see a video, check this one out:


My RSS Feed list of Photography Blogs

This is a list of the photography related blogs and sites I read regularly. Comprised of about twenty different sites, it's a great source of information. I would encourage you to visit the sites directly, or to subscribe to their RSS feeds in your own reader account.


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