Mike Cohen

Trying SmugMug

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I’m trying out SmugMug as a possible alternative to Flickr. They have a Flee Flickr 50% off deal, although I’m still on the 14 day free trial.

I’m not leaving Flickr, but with the co-founders leaving Yahoo, I want to be prepared just in case it goes away. I really hope Flickr survives, since it’s one of my favorite sites. I’ll most likely keep both services.

I really like SmugMug, although it still feels a bit alien. It doesn’t seem to have Flickr’s community-oriented features, but the galleries look gorgeous. Unlike Flickr, SmugMug lets you change the theme & layout of your galleries instead of always displaying your photos on a solid white page.

You can visit my SmugMug homepage at mike3k.smugmug.com/.

mike3k : photos : Fort Lauderdale Photowalk- powered by SmugMug
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

I survived the Photowalk

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I had a great time at the Fort Lauderdale Photowalk today, and the weather cooperated, at least most of the time. We met at Las Olas Riverfront at around 9:30 AM. After the introductions, we went north on Brickell Avenue to SW 2nd Street.

Riverfront

Fountain

We then went west, across the railroad tracks, to the Museum of Science & Discovery.

Railroad tracks

Old Fort Lauderdale

Museum of Science & Discovery

We then turned south to River Walk, where we continued back to the Riverfront plaza.

River Walk

River

Riverwalk Bricks

Double Tree

Under the bridge

At this point, we stopped for some group photos and a few people left. We decided to cut the route short, since it was hot and most of us were tired. Instead of continuing to Las Olas Blvd, we went to Briny Pub for lunch & drinks.

Briny Pub

The group

It turned out to be a good decision, since it started raining while we were having lunch. By this time we were down to only 8 people, including Paulo, his wife and his son.

We decided to wait until it stopped raining, but it didn’t show any signs of stopping.

Rain

Finally, Paulo had to leave, so the 5 of us who remained went indoors since we were getting wet on the covered patio. While we were waiting, we took some pictures of the fish tank.

Hiding in the coral

Finally, we made a run for it, even though it was still raining pretty hard. In all, we had a great time and I learned a lot from some of the professionals about focus, exposure, color balance, and photo processing.

There were more Canons than Nikons, and most of the Nikon owners had a D300 or other high end models.

I posted a full gallery of my photowalk pictures at Flickr.

Photowalk: what you need to know

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Paulo Jordao posted some final details about this Sunday’s Photowalk. We are going to meet around 9:45am in front the water fountain at Las Olas Riverfront, rain or shine. This is a FREE event; you can bring friends, family and even kids. Everyone should have a camera, even if it’s just a cheapie disposable.

The question: what should you bring (other than a camera, of course)?

I was debating whether or not to bring a tripod, but now I’m definitely not. It would only be extra weight, since we’ll be walking.

I haven’t decided which lenses to bring, but Paulo is only bringing a 17-55mm. I’ll definitely bring my 18-55mm, since it’s the most useful general purpose lens. I’ll probably bring the 55-200mm, but I probably won’t bring the 50mm, since it takes too long to set up a manual focus shot.

The walk is 1.7 miles, and at the end we might stop for brunch or drinks.

For the full details, check Paulo’s blog.

SproutCore + Fluid = Wonderful Synergy

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The most exciting thing that came out of WWDC wasn’t Snow Leopard or the iPhone 3G; it was SproutCore, an open source JavaScript framework. When Steve Jobs demonstrated Mobile Me during the keynote, he didn’t say how Apple was able to make those web applications look as nice & responsive as desktop apps, but we found out a few days later in a session introducing SproutCore.

I’ve been looking at SproutCore and playing with the demos for the last few days and I’m very impressed. The photo sample looks like a stripped down iPhoto. I think with a bit of tweaking it would make a great online photo gallery.

One thing that takes a bit of getting used to is that SproutCore uses a ruby gem to build your application and serve it during development, but you can build a static version that doesn’t require Ruby and can be deployed to any web server.

While web based applications are starting to look and act more like desktop apps, Fluid lets you bring your favorite web sites or applications to the desktop. With Fluid, you can build a site-specific browser that you can double click to open that web site immediately. Fluid also adds some additional functionality to web apps, such as showing dock menus, badges, and growl notifications. You can even make your web app a menu extra so it’s available anywhere by a single click.

The two pieces work together beautifully as a new way to deploy applications. Write your application in SproutCore, deploy it on your web site, and build a Fluid desktop app that your users can double-click from their desktop to run your web-based application just as if it actually was a desktop app.

Theme Change

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I didn’t really like the modified Barthelme theme I was using, so I switched to Chris Pearson’s Cutline theme. I think this theme looks a lot cleaner and easier to read. The theme already supports random images, so I just enabled that feature and added 12 of my favorite photos for the header.