Edit, store and display your picture with Adobe for free. The company recently released their public beta version of Photoshop Express. They give you 2GB of storage space and the ability to crop, tone and color photos with your web browser.

Rob Galbraith reports that the broad rights-and-usage clause for photos uploaded and made available in "publicly accessible areas" of the Photoshop Express service could become a concern for most photographers.

8. Use of Your Content.
Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

“Publicly accessible” areas of the Services are those areas of the Adobe network of properties that are intended by Adobe to be available to the general public. However, publicly accessible areas of the Services do not include Services intended for private communication or areas off the Adobe network of properties such as portions of World Wide Web sites that are accessible via hypertext or other links but are not hosted or served by Adobe.

I haven't fully tried it out yet but it seems for the hobbyist this would make an excellent way for them to manage their digital photographs without having to buy expensive software. But for serious amateurs and pros copyright issues using this service is likely to become a sticky point.

Links to this post |

Judging is underway all this week for the NPPA contest, Best of Photournalism 2008. Winner results are being posted.

Links to this post |

Nelson takes his shot at the ailing newspaper industry.

Links to this post |

I have been wanting to buy a new camera for a while now. While looking at my options I was reminded of this What The Duck cartoon.

Links to this post |

This is nothing new. Most j-bloggers have been pushing this idea. But it seems that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has gotten into the act. He has written several posts on Blog Maverick on why he kicked bloggers out of the locker room. This is from the last one he wrote on the subject.

That is the endgame I see for newspapers that publish complimentary content on their website. You can call it blogging. You can even call it something else. The point I didnt make clear enough in my previous post, is that it has to be something else. No matter the quality of the writer, its just another stab at an audience in a medium where there are no barriers to entry. Its just one more example of the newspaper business following everyone else onto the web and doing exactly what everyone else is doing, but expecting they will be better because they are "The big paper". Thats a huge mistake.

Call me crazy, as many out there have, but I would have made every effort to be different in a way that leverages brains, technology and size. I would have sat down and tried to figure out the answer to the question "What leverages our strengths and pre empts every blogger out there so that people perceive blogging as the low end and our presentation as the future of the medium"

Even though he writes specifically about blogging, I think this can be applied to every aspect of what newspapers do on the Web. The call for innovation is clear. Cuban sees it. I hope that more people in newspaper industry see it also.

Links to this post |

The buzz has been growing about photo sharing site Flickr adding video sharing to their service. Dan Farber of CNet reports that beta version should be out by next month:

After spending a few hours at the Flickr fourth anniversary party in San Francisco on Saturday night, the "coming soon" line was uttered by various Yahoo people, including Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. Upon further investigation, it appears that "coming soon" means that Flickr Video will debut in beta next month.

Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, will not replace Yahoo Video like it did with Yahoo Photos. But with its huge user base it wouldn't hurt Yahoo to gain some of the market share. I don't think that its service will overtake the hold YouTube has. However, if they remain true to the Flickr community, as TechCrunch reports, then they should be a success.

Part of the delay may have been a long internal debate about how to make Flickr Video special and distinct from what YouTube already offers.

Links to this post |

My week of covering the county spelling bee is done. Now its off to Ensenada via a Royal Caribbean cruise ship. I'll try to update my Utterz widget with photos and video as much as possible for those interested.

Links to this post |

If you are then let everyone know at Happyjournalist.com.

There of course is angryjournalist.com if your still feeling bitter. But there is still a lot of work to do so don't linger there too long.

Here are some happy journalists:

Bryan Murley 7:04 am on March 4, 2008 | #37

I’m happy that I get to help motivate young journalists to learn multimedia. And that I get to meet such cool folks out in the industry who are helping to change the world.

Luis 5:22 pm on March 5, 2008 | #59

I’m happy because there are 55 posts here and more than 1,600 at angryjournalist.com, proving that loving this wonderful job is greater than words.

Greg Linch 9:41 pm on March 2, 2008 | #4

This is cheesy, I know, but being able to meet and interact with new people all the time. Also, not having to be stuck in a cubicle all day or having to push paper.

I'm very happy to be in this profession.

Links to this post |

For the past few weeks I've been experimenting with social media networking tools. If your a regular to my blog you might have noticed I've added a Sharethis button at the end of my blog posts. A Blogrush widget and Twitter updates was added to the sidebar. Also added to the sidebar is an Utterz widget.

I am pretty excited about learning how to use Utterz. Its concept is like Twitter's. You post messages from a cell phone. However, not only can you send text messages but voice, video and pictures can be sent as well. This is something I've been looking for because there have been times I wanted to update my blog with a picture when I was nowhere near a computer. Now I can post them in the widget with my cell phone.

But the only thing that is limiting me now is my Samsung Blackjack phone. I found out when I send an MMS, the largest file I can send is 295k. So my videos I put in the widget canonly 15 seconds long and they are shot in the lowest quality.

Links to this post |

Kings County's top economic drivers have been cotton and dairy. This should come to no surprise to anyone who lives in the area. The county sits in the agriculturally rich region of California known as the Central Valley.

What is surprising, however, is that many of the children who live here don't know where their food comes from. Every year the Kings County Farm Bureau makes it their mission to change all of that by holding a farm day for all of the third graders.

For the past few years I have been given this assignment, which I don't mind at all. I enjoy watching their face light up as they hold a baby chick for the first time, like the picture above. Or the look of horror they have when they find out that the calf they were just petting could eventually end up on their dinner table.

It's a reminder of why I wanted to be a photojournalist. I enjoy having those expressions when learning something new about the world around me. And I'm glad I get to do it with a camera hanging from my neck.

Links to this post |

Tired of reading about all the gloom and doom happening in the newspaper industry? The check out Journalist Fight Club. A compilation of journalism related videos. With categories like reporter fight videos and journalism music videos it should be entertaining to all the media minded folks out there. It even has a neat widget. I found it through Journerdism.

Links to this post |

After reading over 1,000 books in each class, Armona Elementary second graders were treated to watching their teachers get pie thrown in their face. The top reader of each class had the honor. In this era of screenagers, I don't know how effective this will be into turning kids into avid readers. But it was messy fun.

Links to this post |

Flickr, the photo community owned by Yahoo, has teamed up with TechSoup to donate 10,000 one-year Flickr Pro memberships for nonprofits. The program is called Flickr for Good.

We've partnered with TechSoup, a US-based non-profit technology training service, to donate 10,000 1-year Flickr pro accounts for good causes. TechSoup and its international partners will distribute these to qualifying non-profit organizations.

Cnet reports that:

Each nonprofit can grab up to five memberships to distribute among its staff. Details on how the groups are supposed to use their Flickr memberships are a little nebulous, but in its blog post about the new site Flickr pointed to several high profile organizations like YWCA and Camera Rwanda have been using the photo host to create photo exposés.

It should be interesting to see the work to come out of this partnership. Also, what kind of copyright issues that might arise.

Links to this post |

Check out the icon makers of tomorrow. Photo District News has come out with its 10th annual 30 emerging photographers to watch.

Links to this post |

I found this on Digg the other day. It has the same concept as the popular social media networking site but it does it with photographs found on the web.

PictPicture.com is the place to find and share the best pictures online. Click on the up and down arrow to rank the pictures! This is your community; by uploading your content and voting on your favorites, you influence the latest trend in photography.

Registration is easy. So take the time to look at some good picutres , send in some of your own and vote.

Links to this post |

Sentinel photographer Gary Feinstein has shot a hand full of videos for the paper. I've said this before but this a pretty new experience for him. The learning curve is steep. And there always comes a first time when learning new thing. Here's the first sports video he shot. It's also the first sports video I've ever edited. Unless you count the ones I've done of people skateboarding.

I didn't know how to piece this one together. Gary shot a lot of other things besides the action but I had a hard time putting it together in a narrative form. Also, for some reason the word played too fast. But it did look good before I compressed the video. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. High school sports plays an important role in the community our size and I would like to do more of these kinds of videos.

Links to this post |

This Saturday I had the choice of covering the California Interscholastic Federation's valley basketball tournament, which is 45 minutes away in Fresno, or the CIF Wrestling Championship two hours away in Bakersfield. I choose the latter even though shooting wrestling confuses me. I don't know enough about the sport. But what I do know is that the fans, coaches and wrestlers are really passionate about wrestling and that makes for a fun assignment. Too bad I couldn't stay for the finals.

Links to this post |