To take a photo shoot a video

I have seen some of the amazing photos of lightning and always been impressed.  I have always wanted to take a photography course and buy a really nice camera with all the fancy settings to I could take some of those shots.  But last week during a thunderstorm I saw my niece out in the rain with her iPhone held up in the air.   A few minutes later she comes in and shows me this:

What amazing shots!  Apparently she had used an app: Video 2 Photo that allows the user to shoot video and then pull images from the video.  at $1.99 it's pretty affordable and while you are there take a look at related apps that do all kinds of more amazing things with photos and videos.

This one in particular looks very useful for capturing images that would be difficult or impossible to get otherwise.  I think of sporting events and science experiments especially where capturing the moment the ball drops or the second the candle snuffs out would be exceedingly difficult with even an exceptional camera, but capturing it with video and then extracting the frame needed could be great.

Tech Tip Tuesday: Create a Digital Professional Development Portfolio

We have talked before about how a digital camera can be a virtual Swiss Army Knife of usefulness.  Another way that I have recently found my Digital Camera to be useful is as a virtual recorder of my professional development.  I could really go full bore and scan each certificate I get when I attend a conference, presentation or event, but another way I can create a record of my professional development is to simply snap a shot of my name tag.  This creates a date stamped record of professional development I have attended. If I am using a smart Phone or a camera with geo-tagging, I can capture the location information all with a quick snap of my camera.  This also saves me space because instead of keeping a huge box full of name tags for nostalgic reasons, I can load them on to a web based album and still keep the nostalgia without keeping the clutter.



What creative ways can you think of for using your digital camera?  Give us your ideas in the comments.

Tech Tip Tuesday: Fundamental Files Formats - Part 5

Images/Photos

Images or photos on the web obviously aren't the same as the photos developed in dark rooms, although those can make it onto the web too.  All information on the internet or on computers must be converted into binary code.  This binary code is made up of 0's and 1's.  Every bit of data that flows into your computer is made up of this code.  Different codes specify different things.  The formats we have been talking about for the last few weeks also tell the computer which program to use to decode the 0's and 1's.  Converting the pictures we are used to seeing on photo paper to digital formats brought about several different solutions many of which are still commonly used.

• *.jpeg/jpg this extension is an acronym for Joint Photographic Experts Group.  A group that together developed the format and adopted it as a standard for digital images.  This has become the most widely used standard for digital images, this may be in part due to the fact that it is the most common format created by digital cameras.


• *.bmp stands for bitmap and is a file format that is still used occasionally.  If you have ever used Paint on a Windows machine it uses the bitmap format.  This is also a common format for clipart.


• *.gif is graphics format that has been around for many years.  Graphics Interchange Format was one of the early image formats for the web. It's major contribution is the ability to overlay multiple images into a single file and thus create animation.  It is based on patented algorithms and these patents prompted the creating of *.png


• *.png is a format created to replace *.gif.  It has taken a long time but it has steadily gained ground.  While *.jpeg is still the most common but *.png is gaining more and more acceptance and use. Not all image editing software supports this format, but if you use PowerPoint to create an image *.png is now the default and all web browsers can display these images. An animated version of this format uses the *.mng extension.

Finding a horse of a different color

Have you ever looked for a horse of a different color? Now with GoogleImages color filtering you can.

When you got to the GoogleImages page to search for images, you can now choose to filter for some basic colors which allows you to find search results with specific color scheme.

This is similar to a couple of tools available for flickr

Color Fields

Multicolr

Google's new Tool does make me want to ask the question? When will it be on www.picasaweb.com or in picasa?

But either way you can now find a horse of a different color



click here for full size image