Colophon

Sorry, this entry is pretty boring, but some people might be interested in the nuts and bolts of blogging.

I'm doing my blog differently this time. In the past (2009), I had a laptop, a digital camera, and a video camera. Writing the blog was easy enough but it was a pain to download the pics, resize then upload them to someplace like Photobucket, then link it in the blog. I didn't even bother with adding video until after I got home.

This time I will be using my iPad for everything. I'm still taking a camera and a video for hi-Rez stuff, but now I can take photos, edit them, and place them in the blog all from the iPad. However, I had to do a little research to get the whole system going. Google Blogger does not have a workable app, and using the web interface is lame, so I found this nifty app called Blogsy, which was highly rated and pretty cheap. It took me a few hours to figure it all out, but I'm really impressed so far. Blogsy connects directly and easily to Blogger for seamless uploading. I can upload pictures from my iPad to Picassa (Google's picture dump) then place them into the blog, as well as videos from YouTube. Five stars for Blogsy!

I really don't like the boring, flat looking pictures the iPad takes, so I thought I'd check out Instagram. We've all seen the cool looking photo filters, but I found out you have to join their social network, which some people swear is the next FaceBook, but who needs another Facebook? More poking around found BeFunky which is a FREE! photo editing app that will apply filters, frames and custom color adjustments to the pics on your iPad. And it saves the new versions as a separate file, so that when the retro look becomes obsolete, you won't have to apply a "modern" filter to your retro pics. Does that make sense? Kind of an anti-Ubik for you Philip K. Dick fans. Five stars for BeFunky!

Before:

After:

When I was a kid, I loved shooting movies with my Super 8. iSupr8 is a great app that simulates the shutter flutter, the slow frame rate (12 fps!), the grain and the blown out lighting of my old Yashika. I had the free version for a long time, but paid for the upgrade which allows you to shoot in 1080 (hi-Rez low-Rez, hmm, oxymoron?) and gives you more choices for film stocks and lenses. This video from a few months ago was created with the free version, but you can see what iSupr8 does. Yeah, five stars for iSupr8.

 

For some reason, I can't seem to leave a comment in the comments section! Tried on several different computers with no luck. Does Google not allow people to leave comments on their own blogs?