Blogspotter: Photo blogs make sharing pictures a snap
If your summer calendar groans with vacations, reunions and weddings, it’s a great time to create a photo blog that shares snapshots with loved ones—or even impresses the world with your amateur artistry.
“People around the world are sharing wordless stories and textless information,” writes Catherine Jamieson, publisher of the online photography collective Utata.org, in “Create Your Own Photo Blog” (Wiley). “You can see for yourself through the eyes of everyday people what it’s like in Capri this time of year or whether the wildflowers are blooming in Greece.”
For expressive shots of Eastern Washington, check out Spokane photographer Jennifer Raudebaugh’s Tales of Jennifer blog or her Spokanitis sets on Yahoo’s Flickr.com photo-sharing service. (She’s also one of 59 members in Flickr’s Spokane! pool.)
From action shots of Hoopfest and the Rosalia Rock Lake Classic bike race to close-ups of Spokane Fire Department equipment and an expired mosquito (under the caption “got the sucker”), Raudebaugh captures emblematic moments of local life in her lens.
The graphic artist started a photo blog for friends and family after her husband gave her a digital camera. “I then began to see all the great photographers that belonged to Flickr and got addicted,” Raudebaugh said via e-mail. “Not only is it fun, but I have learned a great deal of technique and perspective in a short amount of time.”
Most photo blogs take the structure of text blogs, with entries viewable in reverse-chronological order and visitors invited to comment on each post. Photoblogs.org lists more than 18,000 to explore, and you can find more by searching on Technorati.com.
Some of the sites showcase random shots, while others adhere to a theme. Matt Haughey, creator of community blog Metafilter, is documenting a decade of his existence by posting daily pictures on Ten Years of My Life, for instance.
Publishing platforms that support photo blogging include LiveJournal, Blogger, MSN Spaces and Apple’s .Mac. But shutterbugs who want to set up a site need look no further than Flickr.
Flickr pages closely approximate blogs with their dated photo posts and comment threads. The service allows users to tag pictures as public (accessible to any curious surfer) or private (restricted to select groups, such as fellow attendees of that wild bachelorette party). Photos also can be organized in thematic sets and viewed in online slideshows.
The site’s directions and intuitive interface make it easy to upload digital snaps or scanned photos from your hard drive. File transfer times are slow via dial-up connection, but folks with high-speed Internet access can create a Flickr page in minutes.
And then get ready to be surprised by the reactions to your pictures. “You may post what you think is the best photo you have ever taken and people hate it,” Raudebaugh said. “Then you can post a mediocre photo and people tell you it’s brilliant.”
Either way, at least those pictures won’t just be gathering pixel dust in your computer anymore.
Guilty pleasure
Under “Entertaining Time Wasters” for $2,000, you’ll find the blog of “Jeopardy!” champion di tutti champions Ken Jennings, at ken-jennings.com/blog. The Seattle-based trivia kingpin drew nearly 575,000 page views last Tuesday after receiving national media coverage for a satirical piece he wrote about the show that made him rich and semi-famous.
In the July 19 post, Jennings suggested such new “Jeopardy!” categories as “Reality TV,” “Men’s Magazines” and “Skanks from Reality TV Who Got Naked in Men’s Magazines.” He also called for physical challenges involving angry bees and requiring host Alex Trebek to shoot contestants “the two-index-finger point, like Isaac in the ‘Love Boat’ credits.”
Who knew Jennings had a funny bone to go with that giant brain?