Marty Bird Blog

What’s the name of that phenomena that happens after you get up in the morning, start to get ready for work, then look outside and realize there is almost 10 inches of snow on the ground? Why do you suddenly get a burst of energy nothing like what occurs on a regular work day? Even though I worked most of the day today from home, I had a sense of excitement and energy due to the snow canceling a day-long routine.

Another oddity. Once I realized I would not be leaving the house for a good 8 hours (once the neighborhood was cleared) I had all kinds of cravings and worries for things I might need and did not have in the house. Coffee. Did I have enough coffee?

Late in the afternoon I did venture out and to my surprise the roads that had been cleared were actually dry in some places (the sun started shining about noon, which helped). I took the opportunity to take some photos with my phone (pardon the low quality).

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After scanning scanning and more scanning along with editing, cropping, tweaking, saving, optimizing, naming, organizing, naming again and again my mom and I have made some decisions about the final method of organization of our large library of photographs. Yay! (Honestly, we’re both obsessive about organization, so it was pretty pathetic watching the two of us trying to make some final decisions – but we did it!)

Our decisions were based on how our family would likely want to view the photos. We decided to use Google’s Picasa software on my computer, synced to a number of web albums in a new Google account named birdfamilypics. We’ll share the login to this account so we can administer the online photo albums.

Albums will be created based on where we lived followed by the year. For example, “Santa Ana 1970-72″ is the name of an album. As a family, we’ve lived in 5 or 6 places so that limits the number of albums to a reasonable handful. All photos will be tagged with events like “birthday” or “graduation” allowing the viewer to pull in photos across the albums when they select a tag. Additional tags where it makes sense will be added.

Even further, Picasa has an exceptional facial recognition feature which in effect, allows you to create “people tags” and view all photos where “Marty” appears. So, if you want to view Marty’s birthdays, Picasa makes it simple by allowing the viewer to choose Marty, then the birthday tag.

We had labored on and on about the file naming structure and in the end that did not really matter since the combination of album, tag, and facial recognition makes the organization and retrieval of images very easy.

Now, will somebody please appreciate us for all the hard work we’ve done so far?

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From November Snowfall

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After learning how to shoot film on a Pentax K1000 back in the day, my passion for photography waned after a few years, supplanted by my profession as a video photog in the television news business. A couple of years ago I found myself in possession of a new-fangled digital SLR, the Canon Digital Rebel XT. I’m happy to say I have finally started to shoot some photographs in earnest.

My friend Dan and I took a special trip downtown on Saturday, visiting Robert’s Photo for some supplies, then walking around the new Lucas Oil Stadium shooting photos along the route. Dan with his Nikon and myself with a Canon, we compared images later that day.

Then again Sunday, I walked up and down Zionsville’s Main Street experimenting with my camera. Dare I say I’m enjoying it? Maybe stirring up a passion?

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