Of course I quickly had to go and watch the video and lo and behold I find he’s right! The Twitter @reply that JetBlue sent me a while back is fairly prominently visible as shown in this video:

For reference, here is the twitter thread:

 

Here’s a couple helpful links for more information in case you are curious:

So what is BetaBlue and what does Yahoo! have to do with it?

Photos that the guy from JetBlue was talking about.

Part of the project which is visible from the ground (since most is visible only from the plane) that I developed.

Niche #1 – Taking my camera + laptop somewhere

I’ve went through many cases in this area and nothing has really stuck with me. What I have found that works best for now is a Case Logic bag they generically call their SLR & Computer Backpack. The problem I have with it is that to hold a camera + multiple lenses like they show in their photos you have to leave you camera lensless in the bag. I at first thought that wouldn’t be a problem, but I’ve found the inconvenience of having to assemble in the field makes that a bit unattractive to me. So what I did was rip out the dividers and put a camera + one extra lens in the main pouch and used the side pouches for things like a flash, a Gary Fong Lightsphere, or whatever else I needed with me. It’s not the most comfortable pack on long hikes, though, so I am still looking for something better. Here’s a couple shots of it courtesy of Case Logic:

Niche #2 – Taking just my camera somewhere

Sometimes I want to take the minimal stuff needed. Just my camera, maybe a flash, and nothing else. The best bag I have found for that is also coincidentally made by Case Logic, which also has a very generic name, the Large SLR Camera Case-5 Lens. Why the five is in the name I dunno, as it definitely wouldn’t hold five lenses. My only complaint with it is that I wish it was more sling like. I’ve seen many slings, but never found one I liked any better than this one, so I’ve stuck with it. It seems to work well and it’s made of the same material as the backpack which proved to hold up to rain and mud quite well and still keep the camera dry. Here’s a shot of it also from Case Logic’s website:

Niche #3 – Hauling all my gear somewhere

The requests for me to do headshots and related photography at Yahoo! have been picking up a lot lately, especially after I did the headshot for our new CTO, Ari Balogh. I’m not sure if anyone outside a select few knew I did his photo, so the timing is probably coincidental, but the point is still I have been doing more shots recently. I’ve also been having more requests than in the past to do photoshoots off of main campus where I have a nice studio I can use. This requires me to have the ability to easily haul a large chunk of my gear to other places arriving intact in one piece, and thus I have the following three Pelican cases. Pelican is the defacto leader of sorts when it comes to heavy duty robust cases and while they are a bit pricey, I feel they are well worth the money.

This case holds my camera bodies, several Canon flashes, my light meter, and other misc accessories. While I can’t remember the last time I used my 30D on a headshot, it does come in handy for corp events as it allows me to have a second lens ready for shooting without having to swap lenses in the field.

This case holds all my lenses, some filters for my 50mm, and my pocket wizards. I’ve found it extremely helpful to have several different lenses on hand because of the fact you can’t always predict the environment you will be shooting in (especially with last minute location changes). When it matters to get the shot right the first time, I make sure I am over prepared.

This is the case I affectionately call “big bertha” as it’s freaking huge. The picture really doesn’t do it justice, so the best way I can describe it’s size is that I have a Honda Accord and I have to put the passenger seat all the way back and it still barely fits in the front seat. This case holds most of my studio lighting gear, all but softboxes and light-stands, as I have heavy duty cloth bags for them.

Right now, the only niche which is really well filled is #3, the one using Pelican cases. I am still hoping to find something which works better for niche #1 and #2. If you know of any good products, I am sure either Terry or I would be all ears.

Free premium vodka can make any party good, but great parties even better

Instead of my usual gear, I decided to go light and just bring my Canon Powershot SD870IS point and shoot along with my Eye-fi card (reviewed previously here). While this camera might not be big and fancy enough to get called a “Flickr photo slut” like Terry Chay, I definitely am impressed with the results given the circumstances (a drunk me + low light).

Drunken photography doesn’t always have to be completely bad

In an attempt to see how far I could push those photos, I decided to break out Photoshop along with some new action sets and plugins I recently bought and see what could come of it. Here are a couple samples:

If you want to see the set of all edited shots (including an over the top edit of one including Jonathan Abrams), then go here:

http://flickr.com/photos/jeremyjohnstone/sets/72157603473421927/

I’ll be adding more edited photos to that above link as time permits. To see the original photos as uploaded from the camera, then visit this flickr set:

http://flickr.com/photos/jeremyjohnstone_wificam/sets/72157603469749802/

It’s good to experiment with new photo styles, you might learn a thing or two

Let me know what you think of this new (experimental for me) style of photo editing. I know it’s not something I will always use by any means, but it’s good to have versatility and be able to do a multitude of different styles, IMHO.

Unlike my friend Terry Chay, I find a lot more value in the stats than just pure vanity and ego boost. Albeit I have to say my ego got a tiny boost when I saw he has only double the number of views I have even though he is a better and more well known photographer than me. I had expected his numbers to be more in like with Scott Beale’s Flickr stats. This has been in internal beta for a couple months now and I have been using it to learn who is referring traffic to my Flickr pages. It’s an amazing resource for learning where my photos are being used (when they do the right thing and link back to me that is, discussed in a previous blog post) and what types of things people are looking for when they arrive on my photos.

Not surprisingly, here is my most viewed photo:

It pops in and out of Explore from time to time which I have to say is damn kewl. My next goal is to have one stay there permanently in a solid position (aka < 100), but that might be a while before it happens. The majority of the rest of the photos in my top ten most viewed are all of Taylor Swift when she performed on campus. Those photos consistently are always in the left column too as well (aka Yesterday’s most viewed), so I don’t see them getting bumped out anytime soon.

I do find it humorous though that the #10 most viewed photo yesterday was:

The look on the guy’s face behind Terry is definitely a possible reaction to one’s first time seeing Goatse. Too funny!

When they arrived yesterday, of course everyone forgot they weren’t all for me and promptly accused me of pulling a “Bonforte” (Jeff Bonforte is a Yahoo VP who is notorious for buying new personal gadgets constantly, and never buying “just one”, but rather several even if the toy was expensive and/or he had no use for more than one). I finally got the chance to play with it tonight and overall have been very happy with the experience. A couple issues I found:

1.) Their installation is in a browser. Since Safari is my default system browser (as any self respecting Mac user would have it set to), the installation attempted to use it. Unfortunately they don’t support Safari and forced me to load a URL in Firefox instead. Thankfully they made it simple to do, but it’s still crappy they can’t make it work in Safari too.

2.) The app attempted to pull in my wifi password from the host OS. Since the machine never has been on a wifi network (heck, it doesn’t even have a wifi card) I am not sure where it got the password it thought would work. After sitting there watching it “attempt to connect” for a while I figured it was clueless, hit cancel, and then typed in the wep key manually. This worked flawlessly as expected and I was able to proceed finishing the setup.

3.) It seems that while you can configure multiple online services to upload to, you can only have one active at a time. Pretty lame if you ask me as I would love the ability to upload to both Flickr and Facebook, not just choose between them (especially since I can only choose online which I want to use). Another issue here is when I removed the Facebook account, it defaulted to selecting “do not share photos online” instead of flipping back to Flickr. The UI made this a bit more confusing since it hid that Flickr was even still configured, but thankfully it didn’t and Flickr still worked fine once I clicked the proper checkbox.

4.) While I can have it add the tag “Eye-Fi” to all photos it uploads, I can’t seem to have it add any other automatic tags. This would be immensely useful to be able to set a default group of tags to use on all photos, so maybe they will hopefully add this in a future update.

I’ve seen a lot of complaints online about it’s lack of ability to choose which photos to upload and other annoyances like that. Personally, that doesn’t bother me in the least because the intent I have for it is to sorta live blog my life. They are not meant to be high quality professional photos, they are meant to capture the moment. Since I am near the same set of wifi APs most of the time (home, work, friends’ houses, etc), the lack of support of public captured portals (aka coffee shop / hotel networks) doesn’t bother me much either. I know that once I get in range of one of my normal networks it will “just work” (assuming my camera is turned on) and my photos will be uploaded automatically. If you want one now too, Amazon.com will gladly take your money I’m sure.

If you are interested in seeing the photos uploaded by my camera, go here:

I will do my best to never delete photos and have it be a running capture of my life. If you decide to do the same, let me know your Flickr account!

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en

The areas which are most in question are the attribution and the non-commercial parts. I’ve come to accept my colleagues’ and peers’ opinions that non-commercial simply means they can’t sell my work. Personally, I think this should also mean you can’t put my photo on a page you are making money off of (aka advertising) either without my permission (which in most, but not all cases I would give automatically upon being asked), but apparently I am fairly alone in that belief. I guess it’s something I will just have to agree to disagree with.

On the other hand, attribution, is a bit of a different story. If you pay close attention and look, you will see some of my photos are used all over the Internet, from giants like Wired Magazine and CNET to mere annoyances to many like the Silicon Valley tabloid “Valleywag”. More often than not, I don’t even get a link back to the original photo, let alone a mention like “photo by: Jeremy Johnstone”. Now in the case of my Taylor Swift photos (from when she performed on campus), I could care less really since the majority of people who use those photos are teenage kids who don’t know any better (and besides, I took the photos to share them). It’s a whole different story when it comes to professional journalists and bloggers, who should know better, especially when they use my photos in negative posts about Yahoo! or it’s various employees. While I am not sure I would want my name next to something negative about Yahoo!, I also don’t want my photos being used without at least getting credit for the effort I put in.

For the record, the two forms of attribution which I approve of are:

1.) My name near the photo or specified at the end of the post/page in which it is used. Something along the lines of “photo by: Jeremy Johnstone”. If the photo is of something related to Yahoo!, then adding something like “(Yahoo!)” to the end of my name indicating my employer, is ideal but not required. The photo should also link back to the Flickr page if at all possible. If you are an over achiever and want to get on my good side, then make my name clickable and link back to my blog or to my main Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyjohnstone).

2.) If you simply want to do the bare minimum and nothing else, then just make the photo link back to the Flickr page for that photo. If for some reason that is not possible, somewhere on your page where the photo is used, indicate the original source of the photo. I really don’t feel this meets what I would call attribution, but I am willing to compromise and say it does since it seems to be commonly accepted as such.

Some say that I should be happy that people want to use my photos and I am getting free publicity (when they actually link back to me that is), but it becomes a whole different situation when you are getting flak about photos you took being used in manners not intended (like one I took of a leader of a foreign country a while back). I brought this up on an internal photography mailing list at work a couple weeks ago and opinions were all over the map. So, is this something photographers around the world have just come to accept as a fact of life, or is this something we should unite and fight against? I’d love to hear your opinions (especially if you are a photographer too, amateur or professional), so please share!

Update (12/10/2007 3:24pm PST): It would appear that I am not alone on the non-commercial part either. Here’s a post by Denise Howell talking about one of the annoying offenders, Valleywag: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howell/?p=154. Interesting to see others finding them doing it a lot too.

Update (12/16/2007 1:54am PST): It seems this topic is heating up in other circles. Check out more about the drama in the following links:
http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2007/12/15/why-lane-hartwell-is-wrong/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/15/misunderstanding-copyright-law-and-ruining-everyones-fun/
While I don’t completely agree with Lane’s heavy handed approach, I can also completely understand where she is coming from and realize sometimes you just really have to take a stand.

After dividing them up into groups, I’ve found several general “themes” emerge. A big shocker to anyone who knows me I’m sure (hint sarcasm), but the biggest theme this past year was photography. I found 16 books at home alone that I have read in the past year. Interestingly, of all the “themes” this category had the highest percentage of books I actually finished reading cover to cover (roughly 60%). Not sure exactly why photography books I am more likely to finish, but could be the writing style or the fact it’s a fairly new subject for me to be reading. Of the books, about half are Photoshop books (with a lean towards photography and not graphics design) with most of the remaining falling into lighting or composition.

The next largest group (14 books, none of which fully read) is programming and technology related books. These books range from three books on OSX programming, couple ajax books, a handful of compiler theory/design books, to general stuff like Asterisk (a linux PBX software package). Something I found rather odd was the fact I don’t own a single Flex/Actionscript book, despite the fact over the past 6 months that’s been my day job (and something I had minimal experience with previously). I guess that can be attributed to how easy the language is to pickup because I feel I can hold my own against many with what I have learned in such a short amount of time (definitely not an “expert” yet though by any means).

The next group of books (14 books) in line is related to religion, social responsibility, and other thought provoking topics. The religious books cover a wide range of religions, from Christianity to Sufism to Taoism to Hindu. Several books that are also loosely related are around meditation. Other books in this group include a book on dreaming, Bill Clinton’s book “Giving”, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”, “World Changing: A user’s guide for the 21st century”, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” (a book I have been reading off and on for several years), and the classic “A Brief History of Time” which I reread in it’s 10th anniversary edition. This group also has the second highest fully read percentage hovering around 20% and the unique distinction of having every book had at least a few pages read.

The last group of books (11 books) are just what was left, a mix of random stuff. These include productivity books like “Getting things done”, to fictional books like the classic “The Time Quartet” (a collection of books from my childhood I wanted to reread), to general fact books like “What are the seven wonders of the world?” (a gift from my mother for Christmas last year). I also have a set of three books by Orson Scott Card, the “Ender’s” series, which a good friend suggested I buy that I haven’t had time to open yet.

So that said, based on the above books (and solely the above books) what do you think that says about “who I am”? I’d be interested in hearing your comments (either publicly on the blog or sent personally to me).

In the interest of sharing knowledge (hopefully something I will do more often on this blog), here is the lighting setup used to take that shot:

As you can see, it’s a fairly typical four light setup with one key light, a hair light (which next time I will put on a boom), and two background lights. I also used a fill card to fill in the left side of my face a bit (reflected about F/5.6ish, but I didn’t measure so that’s just an guestimate). I’m extremely happy with the results and assuming my editor is willing, the black and white version (seen here) just might become the cover of my WROX book when it gets published.

I edited the screenshots to be “safe” (such a horrible term) for all audiences, but check out what I mean below:

One another topic which has kept me insanely busy (sadly, I am still behind on), I’m also writing a book for WROX Press (the company with the red/yellow books, you know the ones) on PHP. Yet another book on PHP you say? Yes, yes, but at least the one I am writing has a little twist which makes it different than most (but not all) PHP books already in print. The book is very much an intermediate / advanced programmer book (you won’t find any history of PHP in the opening chapters) which takes you on a journey through building a community website from start to finish. I heavily cover best practices on various topics which are important to sites which might grow into something really big (aka, what many independent coders dream about, being the next Yahoo! / MySpace / Facebook / <insert name of site with lots of traffic and many users>). Having written the codebase (along with a handful of other gifted engineers) to a significant Yahoo! property with billions of monthly pageviews (sorry, can’t be specific obviously), I hope I can impart some of the knowledge the reader of the book will need to scale their sites appropriately. We of course knew from the beginning (since it was an existing site we rewrote from the ground up) how much traffic to expect, but many of the principals remain the same whether you start out big, or grow big. Two other areas which get significant coverage in the book are security and internationalization. I won’t go into all the details here (I want you to buy the book after all), but with any luck it will be worth the wait and something you will enjoy and learn something from.

In final parting is something I stumbled upon today which hopefully will be useful to others. I have been constantly trying to find a good solution to organizing the endless amount of email I receive as well as always have it available on all my devices (Mac Pro desktop at work, Mac Book Pro laptop when away from desk, Powerbook at home, and iPhone for the remaining times). While this isn’t an all encompassing solution (only covers part of the first problem), it definitely is a good step in the right direction. Check out this blog post on Daring Fireball which talks about a simple Applescript which automagically moves your read (but not flagged) email to your Archive folder. Yes, I know the script isn’t revolutionary, but sometimes its the simple details which make a big difference. Be sure and tell me what you think!