Well ok, some of them are. Using the instructions at Steve’s page I’ve now been able to locate the positions of photos taken on geoblogging.
Kristen has been doing a lot of scrapbooking recently and rather than use up a lot of her parents ink we decided to use Samsclub to print some photo’s off (as the price is 17 cents a picture for 6*4″ photos, 1 hr processing with pick up at the store. 11c for mail order.) The quality of the pictures is not too bad but as you’ll see there has been some cropping of the photo which Kristen was not expecting. This has ruined a couple of the photos as having the top of your head missing does not make a nice portrait.
Here we have the original picture as uploaded from the computer (Click on the thumbnail for a large version of the file)
However the version that came back from Sams club had been cropped to the following image.(I’ve cropped the original photo to get this image shown as I don’t have access to a scanner at the moment)
(Yes I know the cropped version looks bigger but that is due to the proportions of the thumbnail pictures).
In this particular shot it doesn’t matter too much although the heads have been chopped off a little. This cropping would be a major drawback to using this facility. At least some other services ask you where you want to crop the photo.
I’ve got some codes for 36 free photos with winkflash so I’m going to try these at 16c a photo and Dimeprints are 10c per copy. In the end I created a spreadsheet to work out which was going to be the cheapest for a certain number of photos (as the postage costs make some services cheaper than others at different quantities). Of course this all assumes that the cropping is user controllable and the quality of the pictures are the same. I’m going to send some of the samsclub pictures to the other services so that I can do a comparison.
I submitted an entry to photofriday (rare) today for the first time – Orangutans are rare enough. If you read the feed for this page then you will have already seen my submission. Incidentally this is a great way of getting people to look at your photos. By the time the xp wizard had finished uploading the photo and I had visited the webpage I had had 5 views and 1 comment.
I got a film camera at one of the caches I did this weekend so now I have to work out where to get the pictures developed. Previously I’ve used 24hour processing at the shops but I’m not too bothered about the response times for someone elses pictures. I’m also trying to work out whether to get a cd done at the same time (as ultimately the pictures will be posted online). Any suggestions on who to use or avoid?
Friday I took the day off for my birthday and we met up with Tash & Dave (non-bloggers) to go to Birmingham’s BullRing shopping centre and then to Outback for tea. The bullring was an interesting shopping centre – not the usual meadowhell/trafford centre type layout of shops and the outer design is definately funky in the extreme. I was not impressed at the parking fee’s though – it is VERY expensive to park in the middle of birmingham – we paid over £5 for 3 hours parking. I managed to get one geocache done, A bit of ….. which is a bit of a cheat really as it was a virtual and needed a photo taken of a bull statue. After lunch we went to see Hitch which was very good and funny (although the funniest bits were shown in the trailers for the film. We went to an AMC cinema and that was suprisingly cheap, £3 for the matinee performance and £5 for shows after 6pm. The local Vue cinema near us charges £6 and you have to pay about £3 for parking so a night out at the cinema works out pretty expensive (which is why we go on Orange Wednesday’s instead). Photo’s uploaded to my flickr page.
I’ve been meaning to try out some digital photo printing services, especially after Kristen got the scrapbooking bug and wants to print lots of photos out. Yesterday morning I placed an order for 10 prints from truprint and they arrived in the post this morning. That is what I call fast turnaround. I don’t know if its because the order was flagged as a first order (and therefore fast-tracked) or whether this is normal service.
The interesting thing is that they offer a service where the photo’s aren’t actually 6×4″ due to the prevention of cropping of the photos as apparently digital photos don’t fit in with this aspect ratio.
The quality of the photos that came out is very good and I’d use them again. If you fancy using the service then drop me an email using my contact mail as that way I get some photos free as a referral or you can just sign up without referral here. Wish they’d have a straightforward referral link though!
I finally signed up with flickr and have uploaded a couple of old photos to the site to play with.Flickr: Photos from absoblogginlutely is the home page. It looks like a good tool to share photos online and for people to find out that you’ve posted new pictures online. The tagging is really handy too as it doesn’t tie you down to directory names when assigning categories. What would be really cool would be integration with a tool like picasa2 so you wouldn’t have to re-tag everything.
Google have released a new version of picasa according to theGoogle Blog. Although I downloaded the original Picasa I must admit I didn’t use it much, mainly as I didn’t take the time to understand how to use it. I use paintshoppro almost exclusively for my editing and organise pictures into “albums” by storing them in directories on the disk or in my web page gallery
Interesting that the check for updates in the old version of picasa didn’t know there was a new version to download.
PS If you do download it, then read the readme.html file as it tells you want they spent time programming and the new features.
Finally got some time to put up our holiday photo’s taken over Christmas and the new year.
The snow is melting fast in Dublin now so I had to get this photo quick before the rest of it melted. It had looked a lot nicer during the week (and wasn’t as overcast/cloudy/foggy as it is today) with more snow on it but we never had the camera or time to take a photo.