routines

You don’t look to look all over the earth to find information. You don’t need to  scour the internet to find information. You don’t need to search through one million Google results to find information.

You need to learn where to look for information. Here’s how to be smart about finding information online:

• If I want to learn how to do something on my computer, I go to YouTube and find a tutorial.
• If I want a good teacher web site, I go to Delicious. Odds are, someone already found a great website and bookmarked it for me to easily find.
• If I want a great photo, I go to Flickr and legally use one.
• If I want general knowledge on a topic, I go to Wikipedia, where thousands of people have already edited a thorough summary.
• If I want a review of a product, I go to Amazon and see what other people have said on the product page.

Before you do a Google search, think about what you want your results to look like. Googling “imovie how to slow motion” gives you 85,000 results. Searching for that on YouTube gives you 32 results, and you get to watch somebody show you how it’s done.

I haven’t really talked about my photo workflow since I got my new MacBook pro. So, here you go.

Using Image Capture, I import the photos into a folder on my desktop named New Pictures. Image Capture allows you to run an Automator Workflow, so it also opens up HoudahGeo, Photoshop, and iPhoto. Finally the workflow asks for photos to view, then opens them up in Preview. I delete the rejects in Preview.

Next, I drag my new photos into HoudahGeo. It lets me easily and efficiently add geotagging info to my photos. I save those, and now my photos know where they were taken (in iPhoto, in Flickr, etc).

Typically, I revisit my photos, and delete ones that don’t impress me again.

Next, I edit photos one at a time in Photoshop. Recently, I’ve been using LAB mode. It preserves the histogram, and therefore the integrity, of the photos. I typically bump up the contrast (using a variety of ways) too.

I use 1001 to upload my photos to Flickr. It’s free, and easily lets me send new pics to my photo-a-day set and several groups.

The final step (on my local hard drive) is to drag the keeper photos into iPhoto. I like editing and geotagging the photos before iPhoto. If you edit in iPhoto, it creates an original file and a modified file. I think that’s lame. Also, I like having the geocoding info written into the exif data of the photo itself. The new iPhoto doesn’t do a great job of that.

Once online, I add every photo-a-day picture to its Flickr set, and then add it to my photo-a-day blog. To get it to blogger, I manually create a post. I use TextExpander to paste in all the info so you can see the picture, when I created it, leave a description, and the formatting is all set.

And this goes at the end of every post: Year 3, Day 106