The Mobile Photo Revolution: Do’s and Don’ts





Image from cnn.com

  

Welcome back everyone!!  Today I will be talking about the recent phenomenon of mobile photo sharing.  With the advancement of cell phone and social networking technology, photo applications have become incredibly popular.  This can be an extremely useful tool to use to share photos of yourself amongst your peers.  It can also be trouble.





Image from googleimages

  

The most popular photo sharing takes place on Facebook.  With the increase of sales with smart phones, Facebook has become an easy tool to use to connect with friends and exchange photos.  According to Facebook, There are many other photo sharing tool that consumer may choose from.   

“There are more than two hundred and fifty million active users.  People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook as non-mobile users.” 

  That goes to show you the direction the World Wide Web is moving towards, it's going mobile.   According to cnn.com,

“Picplz and Path represent the next generation of photo sharing, where high quality photos are snapped and shared in seconds on your mobile device.  Instagram and Picplz focus on the instantaneous point-and-share functionality of smart phones while providing users with filters to fancify and enhance photos and the tools to share them with the world.  Path makes the same bet that users will capture important moments in their lives on their mobile devices, but instead assumes that users prefer to share these intimate memories with just friends and family.”

Image from googleimages

All of these photo application tools are very helpful to keep in touch with friends and family.  In some cases they are abused and not used properly.  According to an article from wisn.com, a father from Milwaukee County discovered a naked picture of a fifteen year old boy on his daughter’s phone.  The father ended up taking the phone to the police station.  The police then contacted the boy and found nude pictures of the fourteen year old girl on the boy’s phone.  This is a prime example how these types of technologies can be abused.

3D Technology

3D technology has been around for many years.  According to 3dgear.com, the first 3D film presented in front of a paying audience took place on June 10, 1915 at Astor Theater, New York.  The first featured film in 3D came shortly after on September 27, 1922.  It’s safe to say that 3D technology has been around for a while, but it hasn’t been until recent years that it has started to gain more popularity because of the new digital age.  With the expansion of technology, 3D has not only gone digital on our big screens, but it also has gone digital with new standardized cameras.     

Image from googleimages

One of the most recent 3D digital cameras that just came out this month is the “Sony Bloggie 3D MHS-FS3 HD Camera.”  It’s priced at two hundred and fifty dollars.   It looks like a great camera, but honestly I don’t think it will take off.  I’ll let you be the judge; here is a video that goes into more detail about the “Bloggie 3D HD Camera.” 

There are a lot of cool features built into this camera, such as: a swivel USB extender, HDMI output, and the Bloggie software that comes along with it.  The demand for 3D photography technology isn’t that high.  The three main reasons the demand for 3D technology isn’t higher is easy.  The first reason is because it requires you to wear 3D glasses.   The second reason is because 3D technology is expensive, and third being that there is a small amount of other 3D format consoles to integrate and work together with.  Not all 3D technologies require glasses.  The camera I mentioned above being one of them.  Here is a five minute video I found on YouTube that explains the fundamentals of 3D technology.  It also explains how 3D works when you aren't wearing glasses.

According to asiaonedigital.com, 3D technology is going to be incorporated into games very soon.  This would expose a whole new group of people that don’t necessarily go to 3D movies, or use 3D cameras.  Within the next five years it should be fun to see what will happen with 3D technology. 

Fun Editing Software

Welcome back everyone; today we will be talking about two editing software programs used to edit digital images. The two main editing software programs are Photoshop, and Illustrator.  In previous blogs I’ve mentioned some of these programs, but never explained what they are and how they are different.



Adobe Illustrator CS5 screen shot
Image from googleimages



According to an eHow article “Uses of Adobe Photoshop,” Photoshop provides the user the capability to edit images, touch up photos, move pictures, and create 3D Graphics.  These are all important features in that all are used frequently in the photography or graphic design industry.  Illustrator is great editing software. 



Adobe Photoshop CS5 screen shot
Image from googleimages



Illustrator is a fun interactive editing software.  For those of you who have used “Paint” that comes with most computers under the application file folder, imagine that software on steroids, and that’s Illustrator. Illustrator is used most often by graphic designers.  A lot of digital artists use this software as a substitute to the older means of art such as sketching and painting.  Personally I don’t have a lot of experience with Illustrator because I tend to use Photoshop for most my needs.  I have used it on occasion; I didn’t seem to have any problems.  There’re alot of technical differences as well.  According to an eHow article “How to Understand the Difference Between Illustrator and Photoshop,” Illustrator creates vector graphics and text while Photoshop creates bitmapped graphics. 

“Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitive such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s), which are all based on mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics” While a bitmap “is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images (wikipedia)."

Adobe is the company that makes both Illustrator and Photoshop along with many other software programs.  One amazing element about using any Adobe software is that they’re structured the same way.  Having the design features similar make it easier for the user to learn new software more efficiently.