My 2 Cents

Funny Time Warner Cable PhotoShow Ad

Here is a funny Time Warner Cable TV ad that mentions PhotoShow 5 and won a Gold Addy award!

PhotoShow as a Marketing Tool

Here is an archive of a recent Radio interview with RSS Ray on how to use PhotoShow as a marketing tool...

Your Memories Where You Want Them

At Simple Star we have always believed that you should be able to enjoy and share your memories however you want. For the last couple years we have let people easily publish PhotoShows to blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Ebay, their personal web sites, etc... now we are taking this one step further!

   

Last week we launched some cool new video services on PhotoShow.com. You can now easily podcast your favorite PhotoShows to iTunes for synching with iPhones, iPods and Apple TV. We are also allowing you to send PhotoShows out as a video RSS feeds. This can be great for getting your PhotoShows to digital picture frames, connected TVs or to DVRs like Tivo which recently announced that they will support video RSS feeds in March.

   

We are also enabling PhotoShow.com creators & visitors to download a video file of any PhotoShow. This is great for uploading your personal content to YouTube, importing a PhotoShow into Power Point or a video editing program like iMovie or Movie Maker. You can even easily burn a DVD with this downloaded video file as a quick way to enjoy memories on your TV. For more on these great new PhotoShow video services please visit the PhotoShow News blog.

iPhone, Apple TV, tivo, Podcast

Lensbaby 3G

I promised that I would share some photos from my new Lensbaby kit that I purchased at PMA. I was at a friend's Chinese New Year party last night and tried out this new selective focus lens. In short, it is a fun creative toy that takes some time getting use to. The general idea is that you have bring attention to a "sweet spot" by having that one area in focus and everything else gradually more and more out of focus.

The Lensbaby 3G that I purchased allows you to shoot in two modes. You can shoot in a very free form manner where you are compressing the lens to find your sweet spot. You can also lock the Lensbaby in a fixed spot and use the fine focus ring to find your perfect area of focus. I found this locked in manner easier for me to use as a very novice lensbaby shooter. Here are some of the shots...

PMA 2008

I just visited the Photo Marketing Association’s (PMA) annual event in Las Vegas and wanted to share some of the show highlights.

Two big themes that were being discussed were the recent success of digital picture frames and continued high growth and emphasis on photo books. Being a huge proponent of storytelling and screen based viewing I was happy to see these trends finally be at the forefront of the imaging world who can often times spend too much time talking about how do we get consumers to print more pictures that they don’t want.

·         Infotrends predicts a 43% industry wide growth in revenues from photo books from 2007 to 2008

·         Lyra says that 6% of homes with digital cameras have digital picture frames and that 4 million units will be sold in 2008 (which sounds low from what I have heard from a few specific major vendors) and growing to 40 million units in 2011.

What I want…

I always want some new toy after visiting PMA. This year it is the newly announced Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX35

Why: Small form factor, great Leica lens that has a nice wide angle due to it’s 25-100mm zoom lens. Also, it is one of 3 digital still cameras supporting HD video with an HD video mode that captures  (1280x720 @ 30fps). Kodak and Casio have also both introduced DSCs that capture HD video which is a great new feature set to have in compact digital still cameras. This camra will be released on April 20th and Amazon says they will be selling it for $349.

What I bought…

http://www.lensbabies.com/products/lb3g/

I did treat myself to a show special of the lens baby kit which allows you to achieve selective focus as a creative way of shooting. I’ll post back in with some examples and more on lensbaby once I get a but better with it!