In May, the very talented Scott Kelby and other great photographers are putting on a first ever photographer's conference centered around the Google+ service.

The people behind the conference are actually good photographers who have genuine track records of doing things to help the photo communities.  I've met and talked to a few in the past, followed their careers, and have nothing but good things to say about all of them.

Aside from good reputations, there's still all the usual characteristics of conferences.  Most try to cover very general topics to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible, meaning there's a good chance you won't attain any new knowledge or experience that you could not have otherwise gotten somewhere else in a cheaper and easier way.  Also on the agenda is to push some support for a product, which in this case is definitely the Google+ platform as well as gaining more awareness for the photographers speaking at the conference.  All good things of course, and with a possible realization that you're being suckered into helping these guys become more successful than they already are, you have to take into consideration that this is their passion and their careers, they're first intentions are to help others before gaining more recognition.  You have to respect and understand that they're going way out of their way to do something that helps everyone.  The success of a conference is defined by the ability to balance promotion with education.

But it's not all about promotion and education, there's a huge networking aspect at conferences.  To make the most out of a conference, setup your own agenda.  What workshops and speakers will be most appealing to you?  Can you meet with some photographers or industry leaders on off times?  What is your exact goal?  Learn new techniques, build your G+ brand, or just join in the hobnob?  If you have a clear agenda you'll be more likely to get a lot out of the conference.  Networking will probaby be your most valuable take away.

Definitely don't approach this conference, or any conference, with the idea that you're just going to go, sit back and enjoy.  A passive approach is a waste of your time and money.  You can easily meet with the same or other fantastic photographers on free photo walks and watch their podcasts and Google+ hangouts.  All the tips on how to build your brand and increase your G+ abilities can also all be found on the web.  Using a conference as your only launchpad to really get your skills up on photography or using a tool is silly, especially in the wealth of information that today's technology allows for.

My approach to the conference, if I decide to go and take time off from my non-photo related dayjob, is to learn from all the photographers who attend.  I will try to meet and talk to as many as I can, those who I know to catch up with, those who I know of to formally meet, and all my friends to just hangout and have a good time.  I want to see what the current state of photography is in, in terms of what technology and innovation is currently allowing for.  I'm not talking about the tools of taking photos, but moreso the services and technology behind what happens after the photos are taken and processed.  Photography, especially for photographers who use Google+, is a lot more than simply taking great photos and leaving them on a harddrive somewhere.  Photography is almost more about sharing and interacting than even taking the photo initially.  The most amount of time anyone spends with photography is usually in discussion, in sharing, and of course browsing other photos.

The services and tools that exist today are still so new.  Flickr started off a huge social movement towards photos, Facebook proved photos are the backbones of social hubs, and Instagram helped the realization that great photography can be made by anybody and instantly social.  With that said, there's so much more to tap into, and too many companies are too focused on the tools to take photos and the ability to store and share.  They bend to the usual social table stakes that all photography services try to implement.  Tag friends, geotag with locations, use hashtags to organize, and have forums to discuss and organize.  All these existing features are great things, but how do you put those things elegantly together?  You can't simply piece all that in a better looking format and think it will be successful.  Brand new innovation must happen for the next steps of true social photography, and who better to help build that than photographers at a conference like this one?

It's rare to get so many active social photographers in one place for two days straight.  I'm hoping to learn and get some insight into the difficulties and problems people are having today and to eventually understand possible new directions that photography services and products can launch into and create a new wave of social innovation.

If you're attending the conference and would like to meetup please let me know!  I'm always up to meeting and chatting with anyone and everyone.

Lastly, a link to the photography conference site: http://gpluspc.com/

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In my recent quest to avoid ever losing my photos again, which I did a few months ago, I've tried and investigated a bunch of different services.  I still haven't been able to say for sure which service is the best, but in summary a combination of local storage and cloud storage is probably the most secure.

Keep reading below for my experience and research into the different solutions and why I've chosen this setup.

Cloud Storage

There are a lot of pros and cons of cloud storage vs. local harddrive solutions, but the reasons why I'm drawn to cloud storage is because of these key factors:

• No need to keep expanding hard drives
• No need to manually keep disks in sync and maintained
• No clutter of harddrives everywhere
• No need to distribute duplicate data in different locations (one at home, one at the office, one at the neighbor's, etc), in case of a burned down home etc.
• No large initial investment

Problems with Cloud

There are definitely downsides of cloud services.  A few outlined below

• There is no quick access to your files. Cloud still lives out in the internet somewhere, so to get the files you need, you need to download them first.  Sucks if you need to grab a ton of data at once.
• No nice previews if you're storing them on general storage solutions and not photo specific solutions.  You'll have to rely on directory structure to guess which files you want.
• No internet connection?  You can't access it.  This is not really a big problem, but it could happen.
• Super slow initial backup.  It could take months to upload a few terabytes of data if your internet is slow enough.
• So easy you might screw something up.  If these apps just sync all your files for you, you might forget about it and that's sometimes a good thing, but what if something went wrong?  You won't even know until it's too late.

Local Hardware Backups

I've looked into systems like a Drobo that automatically backs up everything for you on multiple drives.  While cool and fun, it's still one unit on your desk.  The better versions of the Drobo come in prices around $500 without harddrives.  When you need to expand, you just buy a new harddrive.  Sounds pretty sweet and easy to use.  Of course you'll have nightmare stories, and there's still a risk that something could go wrong.  You'll still need a few other safety measures.  In the end, it's good but I felt like there has to be something better.  What I like most about the Drobo as compared to other companies like Synology, is that for only a little more expensive price, you can expand to 16TB.

Problems with Local Hardware Backups

Systems like the Drobo, Synology, other NAS and plain old multiple harddrive solutions is that hardware can break.  When they break or fail, you hopefully have backup solutions to these backups, and backups to that.  The worse case scenario is something goes wrong and you lose all the harddrives.  Distributing them in different location also works, but in the end, all that work could make you lazy and thus prone to having a sub par backup.  This is why a layer of cloud storage will resolve the local hardware backup problems.

• Lots of hardware to maintain and keep track of
• Need backups of your backup plans
• Distribuing your harddrives to different locations
• Such a big investment in time and commitment to a system that it can lead to laziness and thus no backup solution at all
• Drobo or RAID system goes haywire, all the harddrives go splat

Cloud Storage Requirements

I've found a lot of services that are simply backup services.  These are the cheapest solutions.  There are then the services catered to photography, but they rarely ever allow RAW file storage. These following items are what's really important to me as a serious hobbyist photographer:

• Reliability
• Ease of backing up (seamless stuff that I can forget about)
• High or unlimited data storage (more than 2 terabytes)
• Storage of RAW photo files
• Don't want to worry about usage, would rather pay a flat fee and forget about it (like unlimited data for cell phones)
• Not too expensive
• Allow access to specific files that were stored

Why just raw storage?

At one point, I realized that I just really need to store my RAW files.  I'm storing them in NEF or DNG formats (the former are files straight from my camera, the latter are what I've been saving my files as with Lightroom).  There's a good chance that the photos I want to share over the web or print have already been shared or printed.  I have great services for that already, and I don't need some one stop shop that does both.  It would definitely be a plus if Flickr or 500px would store my RAW files alongside my processed jpgs as well, but I doubt they'd ever go down that route.  So my real need is to just be able to access my raw files when I needed.

Service Comparisons

Here are the products that exist today that I've collected and researched.  These were all suggested by different photographers, ranging from casual photographers to weathered professionals.

SmugVault

• Very photography / video oriented.  I like the service because it really tailors to photographers.
• Pay per use.  This is dangerous because you could easily store a ton of data.  They said they were cheaper than straight Amazon S3 pricing, but that was before Amazon S3 prices dropped to equal levels.
• You get SmugVault's great interface for free and pay for your Amazon S3 storage at $0.125 / GB a month.  I currently have about 1TB of data that needs to be stored.  This will amount to 1024 * $0.125 = $128 a month.  That's a lot!

Amazon S3

• Running your own S3 should be pretty cheap right?  Wrong.  Like I said above in the SmugVault points, you still have to pay the $0.125 a month per GB.  And you don't get the cool SmugVault application to help organize and sync it all.

Dropbox

• Too expensive for just storage of raw photos
• Keeps a copy on your laptop/computer as well as on dropbox servers. You're harddrive will fill up anyway.

Flickr

• For about $25 a year, you could get unlimited data storage on Flickr.  But Flickr saves your photos at a very slight decreased quality (or so I've heard and experienced, but not actually proven), and also doesn't store RAW files.  Immediate deal breaker.  Great for sharing photos though.

Snapjoy / Everpix

• Both of these services have great native applications.  Everpix acts more like dropbox and syncs photos automatically, while Snapjoy uploads whatever you throw at it.  It looks like Everpix will delete files though, like Dropbox would, if you removed it locally.  I can't confirm this, but what I've seen this looks to be the case at this point.
• Both do not support RAW.  Dealbreaker

Mozy

• Pretty cool backup service, but also pay per use.  Gets expensive if you start going over a terabyte or more.

Carbonite

• This service seems pretty good.  There's a lot of great reviews and people have had great success.
• Unlimited storage plan for solid price of $59 / year subscription price
• Native applications that helps you sync easily
• Allows for any type of file storage, so RAWs are good to go.
• Access individual files easily from anywhere.  Browser, iPhone app, laptops, etc.
• Could be good for backing up more than just your images.
• I haven't gotten the native application to work yet, so I still can't say how easy it is to access the files.

BackBlaze

• Native application looks great and probably is the most "Mac" like in the way it was designed. That is a plus. No good solutions for Windows / Linux, OK for me since I'm always on a Mac.
• Slightly more expensive than CrashPlan+ (mentioned as the next service).
• Here's the dealbreaker: does not keep files for more than 30 days after they're deleted.  So it sync's it with your harddrives, and if you remove a file, it removes it 30 days later from the backup forever.
• Another big dealbreaker: external harddrives disconnected for more than 30 days has all their information removed from the backup.  So you would have to constantly reconnect your harddrives, otherwise the timer will trigger a total deletion.  They say it's because people would abuse this too much.
• Another dealbreaker, if your harddrive is also used as a TimeMachine backup, BackBlaze will not allow it to be backed up.  What?  This seems dumb.
• Bottom line, looks like backblaze is better for backing up your system disk rather than crucial photos down the line.

CrashPlan+

• Very similar to Carbonite and BackBlaze, not as well known as Carbonite though
• Unlimited storage plan for a cheaper price than Carbonite at $49 a year, cheaper for multi year subscriptions
• Also allows for mobile access
• Seems hard to access individual files.  You have to traverse down a very simple folder tree, select the files you want, then you can download the zip file.  No way to preview the file either, so you have to just guess what it is you want.
• Keeps all your data from your external harddrives, even if you disconnect your harddrive and store it away indefinitely.
• The native app is Java, and it's kind of slow and doesn't feel that native, but it works.

Current Plan

After trying all these systems out, I realized that I need a compromise between cloud and local storage.  Cloud storage still isn't going to be exactly what I need.  Reliability-wise it's great, but getting to the photos on cloud are really what's keeping me from completely relying on it.  So this is what I will be using:

Drobo S
The drobo seems like the easiest and reliable way to store files locally on external drives.  I'll still be able to plug my USB in and get instant access to the photos I need.  There are nightmare experiences with the Drobo units, and that's where the cloud storage backup comes into play.  When I need to expand for more space, I'll buy bigger hard drives, and at a certain point I'll just archive the old harddrives somewhere safe if I don't need quick access to them anymore (old photos, like over 4 or 5 years old).  I would keep my favorite photo digital negatives on my Drobo powered drives always just in case. Good thing about Drobo is it can handle up to 16 TB.  There's a good chance I won't have a huge shelf of harddrives since they can all live on the Drobo.  Then there's the cloud solution below to make sure that even if the Drobo fails, I have the backup.

CrashPlan+
This will backup all my harddrives on my Drobo.  In the event of the Drobo failing, or even my system drive on my laptop failing, CrashPlan+ would restore the files.  The key here is that CrashPlan+ is for the very rare occasions and might not ever need to be used.  At a low $49 / year, I think it's worth it.  It also comes with unlimited storage!  Even better!  I'll run a separate computer to do the initial backup, since that will take weeks to do with the amount of photos I have to store.

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There are a lot of new (and cool) startups that are aimed at backing up your photos, such as Snapjoy and Everpix. There are also more generic backup companies such as Carbonite and even Dropbox.  The services more tailored to photos don't touch RAW digital negatives.

These companies are trying to get into the Flickr and Facebook photo space, but are positioning themselves as pure storage, with a hint of easily sharing photos.  Dropbox recently allows for importing straighto to Dropbox, with some elegant photo display pages.  But really, I can't see them being better than Flickr or Facebook for photo sharing.

What a lot of photographers want is to leave their external harddrives, and constant redundant backups behind.  Cloud storage is the way to go, especially since they already have the infrastructure setup to be redundant enough to not worry about your files.

A lot of these companies don't get pros and serious hobbyist photographers and our need for simple digital negative storage.  It's simply just storage, and nothing else.  We have our own tools of sharing already, and we definitely don't need tools to tweak or display these raw files.  There's a good chance we already shared those files on services like Flickr, Google+, SmugMug, 500px, and more.  What we're doing is backing our digital negatives up for later use (prints, comeptitions, etc).

For simple RAW storage, I've found Dropbox to be the best, but with limitations.  It can only hold so much data, and the free plans usually don't go beyond 2GB.  We need terabytes.  Forever.

I like Dropbox, because I can save my RAW files from Lightroom using a HardDrive as a destination for publishing, and it would be automatically saved to my Dropbox.  What I don't do is import all my photos, good or bad, straight into Dropbox.  It would immediately fill my entire Dropbox quota.  If I shoot weddings, that's at least 16 - 32GB of photos right there, and with these huge 36 mega-pixel D800 cameras around the corner, that will at least double.  I just want to save the good ones that I pick out from Dropbox.

Everpix is basically the same as Dropbox, but currently in beta without too many file limitations (10,000 pixel wide limit on photos, which is fine for most cameras these days, but also jpegs only).

What I want, and what I would pay for is this:

• Dropbox solution like Everpix that accepts RAW files
• Remote storage only, like Snapjoy, so you don't have a copy of it on your harddrive (taking up space)
• Reliable and consistent
• Doesn't cost a ridiculous amount where external harddrives are still a good alternative

Why Dropbox won't work

• Dropbox requires you to keep a copy on your harddrive at all times. So if you're storing terabytes of info on the cloud, you still couldn't use Dropbox to sync
• Dropbox costs a lot for a lot of data you don't always need access to.  Only when you backup your RAWs, or if you need to find a few later on in the future.

Why Everpix won't work

• No RAW support
• Syncs your photos like Dropbox.  It looks like if you remove some picture, it will also be removed on Everpix.  Not good if you need to backup more photos than your harddrive can handle.

Why Snapjoy won't work

• No RAW support
• They're close, but without RAW it won't cut it

The solution

A new company that makes a product that uses Amazon S3 cloud storage with a really lightweight application running on EC2 with a SQL database. Holds users and photo ids that map to the S3 location.  Elegant native app for OSX/Windows/etc. that will automatically backup your RAW files (user defined on setup, or automatically finds them) by interfacing with the application's API.  Heck, it could simply be an app sitting on EC2 with the database, allowing you to setup and pay for your own S3 or other cloud storage solution.  Just that native app and the web platform needs to run for the elegance of it all.

I've yet to see anything that exists like that.  I guess I could build it, but I'm wondering if I'm the only one who really wants and needs this solution.  And also, if anything like this exists out there already today.

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In a SQL query, a SELECT for an anticipated result set of over 1000 entries will either be way too slow or comletely time out.  The old school way of getting around this is to do limits and offsets, and doing your operations in batches.  This not only helps lean out the queries, but it also uses much less memory since you don't hold so much all at once.

Rails' ActiveRecord has a great tool to help out: "find_in_batches" or simply "find_each."  The former will return a set of results, while find_each will yield a blog iterating over each in the batch.

The Paperclip gem by thoughtbot has a rake task that they suggest using for refreshing your thumbnails, and for generating new thumbnails for new styles.  These rake tasks both call

Paperclip.each_instance_with_attachment

In this method, it does a find(:all) to get every record in your model, then iterates through them to regenerate the thumbnails.  As you would expect, this times out and breaks on any dataset that's too big.

The fix I've put together replaces the find(:all) with a simple find_each

https://github.com/kineticac/paperclip/commit/71f4a60f17d3b42b73bb5255b7c8e4b...

This will have a little more overhead in the event that you have less than the 1000 records the batch is defaulted to limiting itself to, but the little extra overhead in a rake task should be negligible.

I've sent a pull request to the maintainers of the paperclip gem.  Hopefully it goes through.  In the meantime, if you'd like to use this version, you can edit your Gemfile as so:

# gem 'paperclip', '~> 2.4'
gem 'paperclip', :git => "git://github.com/kineticac/paperclip.git" 

Top Photo: Taken by myself at Twin Peaks in San Francisco.

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I've had my Chemex Coffeemaker for a couple months now.  This is my first serious coffeemaker, before this I just got coffee at the local shops (Philz, Blue Bottle, Peet's).

I was originally inspired by Cindy's amazing photos of her own Chemex (wonderful photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cloughridge/tags/chemex/), but then turned to buying it by the links from Issa about the actual coffeemaker.

These are the tools and materials I use:

• Chemex 3 cup handblown
• Unfolded Half Moon Chemex Filters
• Hario Kettle
• Krups Coffee Grinder
• Generic Grinder Brush and Coffee Scoop
• Bodum Presso container (to hold my beans)
• Philz Tesora beans, or Philz Jacob's Wonderbrew (darker)

The method I use is very similar to the one in this YouTube Video:

I'll let you decide, but I believe that this coffeemaker is the most photogenic one in the world.  A few of my recent photos below.

See the full gallery on Posterous

See the full gallery on Posterous

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See the full gallery on Posterous

Photography is more than just taking photos of what exists, sometimes you have to create more than just a photo.  Light painting is one of those situations where you add a little artificial amazement to any scene.

I was taking photos at Lake Tahoe, on the eastern side in Nevada, and once the sunset went down, we decided to do some light painting.  My friend, John Getchel, brought out his LED lights and we put together some awesome compositions of flowers against the beautiful night skies around Lake Tahoe.

Techniques here include:

• Finding a really amazing place that has fun shadows and silhouettes
• Setting the camera for 30 seconds of exposure, amongst other things.  Here I was using ISO 500 and more to get all the stars, all around f/4 to f/5
• Getting some cool lights to paint with
• Being really creative with painting light.  This involves tracing, in open air, what your imagination comes up with.  Lots of practice is involved!

Enjoy the rest of the photos of our light painting excursion.

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James was my very first best friend I've ever had.  From the days of going to his home to play with legos, which was really a decoy to go do word problems with his dad, to running around Cornell elementary, all the way through high school, we always were good friends and I've literally grew up with him.

It was an honor to be able to witness this amazing event of his, and a bigger privilege to photograph his wedding with the wedding photographer Timothy Mak!

What a great wedding.  It was a lot of fun!

See all photos here: http://flickr.com/gp/kinetic/ScNY52

Teasers below:

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I've been finding it hard to find the words to describe my weekend in Chicago shooting Sarah and Kiely's engagement session.  The keywords that popped up in my head include: epic, amazing, surreal, hysterically fun, exciting.

Kiely had planned this shoot way before he even proposed to Sarah.  It's incredible the amount of preparation and planning he's put into all of this, and it really goes to show how much he truly loves Sarah.  Actually it really just shows how cheesy he is ;)

Kiely flew me out to Chicago, which is Sarah's favorite city!  What a priveledge to have witnessed the proposal (which was a huge surprise), and now such a great honor to be able to photograph their engagement session.

I consider Sarah family, a sassy little sister that always has a contagious smile and a positive attitude about her.  Seeing how happy she is with Kiely, and seeing how amazing Kiely is to her, absolutely makes the world a better place.

Friday morning, around 4am, I hit snooze on my alarm.  Of course, I had set an alarm one minute after, every minute until 4:08, which is a minute before iPhone snoozes come back on.  By 4:30am I was packed and in my car on my way to SFO.  I actually almost exited to go to my office, being so early in the morning I was on cruise control mentally.  Finally arriving at long term parking, and meeting Sarah and Kiely at our gate, I knew this was going to be an amazing trip.

Once in Chicago, I was welcomed by warm smiles, and a ridiculously piercing cold.  I can't believe people live in weather below 50 degrees F.  How do you stay alive?  I wore 3 - 4 layers every day, which included underarmor and REI polartec long underwear, sweaters, jackets, beanies, and more.  At one point, my contacts got so cold they almost popped out of my eyes.  When we went to the cloud gate at Millenium Park before sunrise (5am), I actually had my fingers turn purple on me, and couldn't feel them for almost an hour afterwards.

So all the fun outings, we got some fun shots for the engagement session!  Enjoy!

All photos can be found on my Google Plus album here: https://plus.google.com/photos/101265429413963140460/albums/5687343698041878625

Teasers below:

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In my wanderings in Oahu, I came upon a few abandoned buildings right off the highway of the north shore.  There's a place called the Crawford's Convalescent Home.  At the west entrance to the parking lot is a ruined building.  I don't know the history of it, but here's what it looks like on the inside:

The easiest way in is to walk around to the backdoor, which is wide open.  The front door is cemented shut.  Here's the backdoor:

There are a few warnings about not going in, but they don't seem very official to me:

Street View and exact location here: Abandoned Crawford's Convalescent Home Building.

Across the street, behind the bus stop, there's another abandoned building.  This one also doesn't have a roof anymore.  Last I saw, there was a paddle boat in the corner of it and some cool graffiti murals.

Street view and exact location of this building here: Bus Stop Building 

I bet if you venture around even further you'll see more cool spots.  These are just super easy to get to.  I haven't really looked too much around that area, but maybe next time I will throw on something more than just flip flops and board shorts for this excursion.

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Everyone seems to be jumping ship and leaving Flickr to go over to Google+ for sharing photos.  I won't deny that Flickr may be dying, but it's not dead yet.

There's been a lot of talk about the death or inevitable death of Flickr for the photography community, more notably the blog post by Thomas Hawk and Google+ post by Ingo Meckmann.  But there is one big reason why Flickr won't die immediately and why there are plenty of photographers who can't just yet give up on the legendary photo sharing community: not all of us are popular hot shot photographers.

Aside from the innovation Flickr is lacking in terms of presenting photos, a lot of the other features are still incredibly important and still absent from the newer sharing platforms.  Thomas Hawk says he interacts with the community way more on Google+ now, in fact he doesn't have any interaction on Flickr anymore.  This works because hundreds, if not thousands by now, have added him into their Google+ photography circles.  This doesn't work for the majority of Flickr users out there who don't have his level of popularity.

New and upcoming photographers, or those who aren't the type to really market their personal brand, don't get the same influx of photo fiends giving them good constructive criticism on their photography on Google+.  It's also impossible for them to grow a photography centric network on Google+ alone.  Instead they just get the same old Facebook effect where all their friends exclaim how awesome the camera is, and asking them for help with their choice between a Nikon Coolpix vs. Canon Powershot.

Flickr is (currently) the only service putting lesser known, and perhaps equally as skilled, photographers into a constructive arena that nobody else has duplicated yet.  Flickr allows photographers new to the world of online photo communities a way to grow and expand.  It's also a good playing ground for those who are fine with just moderate interaction with a few photography friends.

New services now are sharing with your more general network of friends.  Instagram is sharing with your usual network that may be partly built off of your Twitter followers, Google+ from your email contacts, Facebook is really everyone you've ever talked to in person.  What Flickr did and does different is, put you in a community of a photography-centered community.  Yes, there is overlap with your general friend networks, but there are plenty more that would never make it to your Facebook friend list.

More popular photographers will be able to grow their network utilizing their personal brand to grow their new Google+ network until they hit a nice critical mass, where they do no extra work to keep getting more people to add them into photography circles.  Everyone else, which I believe represents a much larger number of photographers, will not have the same ability.  In fact, it would be so hard to get to the level of what Flickr already offers, that it's just not worth the effort.

That is why Flickr is still alive for many.  That is why I can't see the path to Google+ as clearly as some.

That being said, I want to see Google+ pull something off that will totally negate the need for the Flickr community for all photographers.  So far the only contender that has something to offer right now is much more modern Flickr clone, 500px.com.  What do you have up your sleeve Google+ team?

I don't see cloning Flickr communities straight off being the right thing to do with Google+.  Google+ Circles can't allow for people to add themselves, request invites to, etc.  All you can do is comment and beg people to add you, to deem you worthy.  It is currently impossible to be discovered through Google+ alone.  Recruiting is a huge undertaking.

Hopefully I can make it to the next photoshoot that is organized where G+ members show up so I can express the frustration of leaving the lesser-known photographers behind.  Or maybe they can be convinced to go on some photoshoots with the SFBAS group.

Thomas Hawk: any thoughts on how Google+ might improve discovery of photographers not on the A-list?

By the way, if you guys have it in your heart, add me to your Google+ Photographers Circle so I can start getting some of the same benefits as Thomas Hawk on my photos, and I will return the favor as well!  Here's my profile: http://gplus.to/arthurchang

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Warm Summer Night

My sister had baby Willa on August 19th, 2011!  Willa is only two weeks old, so we weren't able to have any great conversations yet.  So instead I took some pictures and a video of her.  I got to try out Pete's Nikon D7000's video capabilities with Issa's 35mm f/1.8G lens.  Pete, Yiyi, Brinkley, and Willa live in Montreal, Canada, which is actually a beautiful city!  All my photos are on Flickr: http://flickr.com/kinetic

Pete and Willa

Yiyi and Willa

My Mom and My Niece

My dad and Willa

First time in a restaurant, she did great

Brinkley giving Willa little kisses

Tummy time

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Almost a year ago, I wrote about how to override caching when developing here, and only turning caching on when testing.  As it turns out that might not be a great idea.  Too many times I have had strange bugs on production that I could never figure out locally due to caching issues.  Only after a few hours of debugging did I realize it could have to do with caching.

There's also a really big reason why nobody's written an easy way to turn off caching in development, mainly because it's bad for you to see different behavior in development vs. production at any time, especially with queries and fragment caching.

The kind of caching you do want to turn off is class/controller caching for the sake of avoiding restarting your server just so it will pickup your new code.  

config.action_controller.perform_caching = false
config.cache_classes = false

So run memcached, do your fragment caching in development, and you should be good to go.  No reason not to cache queries or view renders.

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Flickr had it, Instgram has part of it, Facebook is close, 500px almost has it, but listen, there's a lot more to photos than simply "popularity."  The most widely used algorithm, as far as anyone can tell, is based on a few simple properties:

• Quantity of views
• Quantity of actions taken
• Quality of person who viewed or acted (based on their own accumulated algorithm results)
• Time (recency)

This works great in the early stages of photography communities, where not one group has a huge lead over newcomers.  When everyone has just about the same amount of followers, and almost all the same actual followers, any algorithm crunching the data above will surface some amazing photographs from everyone.  As soon as you start seeing discrepencies that will easily leave newcomers in the dust, you start having a problem.

Photo discovery isn't about popularity.  It's far from it.  Photo discovery should be about surfacing photos based on how absolutely awesome it is.  Composition, emotion, story, and reach.  It's lazy and incorrect to just chalk up popularity on quantity and influence.

If Ansel Adams, who we should assume hypothetically isn't famous yet, joins Flickr today, he will not make it to the Explore page.  Here's a few reasons: he's not in the group of Thai middle school kids who are incredibly influential now on Flickr, he's not taking pictures of hot chicks, and he doesn't post pictures of cute puppies... and most of all, he isn't posting unrealistic colorful HDR photos.  The only way to have your photos discovered when first joining Flickr is to stand out as a thumbnail in a Flickr Group you've posted to.  Best chance is he can post his photo in the B+W landscape only Flickr group.  Actually I take that back, he should post a full color photo of a hot chick holding a puppy in the B+W landscape only Flickr group, tagging all the Thai middleschoolers in the photo.

On Instagram if you're a celebrity on Twitter, you're good to go.  Otherwise you'll be buried and never make it to the popular page unless you have the qualities of a girl who does a ton of self portraits, or have a funky designer mutt that is named after household appliances (to be fair, kevin rose's labradoodle is pretty freakin cute).  I know plenty of amazing photographers who never get on popular, yet I see iPhone note screenshots make it up there.  Usually these notes are from girls or influential tech founders leaving tidbits of knowledge.  yah, these are interesting, fine, but you're still not discovering the greatest photos.  What Instagram does have right, is being able to see what photos people you're following are also liking and commenting on.  I think exploring this route as something more primary than simply popular photos would really be beneficial.  Probably not perfect and interesting as it is today, but what your friends have discovered and passing it on would be a step in the right direction.

500px has an editorial section that worked great early on to surface some otherwise unknown photographers into the limelight.  Unfortunately, they just can't keep up with the scale of photographers now using the site.  I've seen people who are influential on Flickr ask their Flickr communities to help them bump up their numbers in 500px.  They need to fix this otherwise they will fall to the same demise of Flickr Interestingness woes.

Instead of going on and on about this, you can clearly see a pattern.  Photography discovery has a long way to go, yet there hasn't been a lot of innovation on this front.  You can't simply take simple stats to surface the best photos people will care about.  There needs to be a level of heuristics involved.  The problem is that there's no clear logic to figure this out just yet, and you can't just go 80% and expect it to work well, you need to hit at least 95% accuracy or higher, which is hard.  People who work on natural language processing live in a similar world.  If the NLP is only 80%, it can be impressive, but won't work enough for people to keep coming back.  The last 20% is exponentially harder and seemingly even more time consuming.

Some good things to look out for: image recognition, meta information tied with current issues, crunching interests with photographs, and putting more emphasis on photo referrals from friends.

Image recognition can go far.  It's similar to natural language processing, and I guess you can even call this image processing.  If you can programatically come up with a way to know how awesome a photo is based on composition, quality, etc., then you can easily come up with a bunch of meta information to crunch into an algorithm based on interests and so on.  This is a hard problem, Face.com is closing in on facial recognition, and Facebook has already implemented a easy way to suggest tagging faces in your photos.  If you can take a few photo properties, like color depth, image size (if an image size is larger within the same dimentions as some other photo, you can probably accurately assume there's more detail and higher quality, which isn't always better but useful), see if it uses the Rule of Thirds and Golden Ratios, has boobs, has cute fluffy ears, you can really revolutionize photo discovery.

But until someone builds some robust image proccessing library, there's plenty of things to be done with suggestions from friends, newcomers who are influential in other networks, editorially picked photos (on a massive scale, like mechanical turk), and pulling out more meta information that's available.  I haven't seen anyone do this just yet.  Dedicate a team to photo discovery as well as the usual photo sharing/virality team.  It is a huge factor in long term success and not just a passing feature you poke at once in awhile.

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Do you remember this couple? It was already quite the honor to attend their wedding, and I had the honor today of photographing their maternity shoot. (Wedding photos: flickr.com/gp/kinetic/A0596g/). Nic and Critty are great friends of mine that are just an incredible couple. They are always happy, smiling, and laughing.

Nic and Critty got me out of a recent photo slump. These two have reminded me what photography is all about. I can't express how much I enjoyed shooting these two and processing the photos. It's been so long since I've laughed out loud while processing the photos, and my smile muscles have had quite the work out.

This is why I do photography, so I can be with amazing people, and capture the emotion and lives of the people I love. I can't thank them enough for making photography awesome for me. Their friendship is priceless. Here's a link you should check out with all the photos: flickr.com/gp/kinetic/o94N57

Teasers below:

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When substantiating product ideas, make sure you can clearly bucket the main features into at least two of the seven deadly sins.  The deadly sins are firm reminders of what people innately constantly surpress, things that are undeniably evident in our lives yet religious and societal morals have deemed them to be traditionally evil.  But if you want to know if your product is something people want, there is no better guide to turn to than one that spells out what is sinful.

Some of the most successful products fall heavily into one of the seven sins.  Let's take Facebook for example.  It has almost all of them: Vanity, Envy, Lust, and Sloth.  You post status updates about how cool you are, vain.  You snoop around at people's successes and failures in their relationships, envy.  You stalk your crushes in hopes they mention you or post some hot photo of themselves, lust.  And you just post a happy birthday message on a friend's wall rather then taking the effort to going to their home to give them a proper celebration, sloth.

Of course, this is not a catch all procedure in validating any of your ideas.  Still do the usual due dilligence of listening to your users, eating your own dogfood, and be generally aware of the realities of the problems in society.  This is just another tool to add to your regime of product development.

So the next time you're thinking of the direction, focus, and primary features of your product, take a step back and think if you can easily and clearly bucket those features into one of the deadly sins.  It's a good sign if it's a no brainer to which sin it could fall under.

photo: taken last weekend off the coast of California along Highway 1 in Big Sur.  It doesn't really relate to this post.

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Good way to text / ping your engineers:

Got an email saying server x.x.x.x is down. I checked the site and it still seems fine.  Let me know if there will be long term problems affecting business.

Bad way to text / ping your engineers:

What happened?  Is the site up?

At no point shall non-engineers ping engineers responsible, without knowing what they might be responsible for.  Never report an issue without doing as much investigation as possible, because abstract questions will only make things worse.

On the flip side, engineers should do the following

Site is down, will affect business until further notice.  We're all working on it now, no need to call or text or freak out, it's being worked on.

Giving everyone else in the company a warm fuzzy feeling, engineers should also report:

Earlier today we had a few alerts, these did not affect any business, we were working on things behind the scenes and no related issues will occur.

Combining the two efforts you get a much better communication channel between engineers and non-engineers within the company.  Let's discuss further the benefits of the good texts.

Non engineers doing due dilligence on an issue will prevent engineers from scrambling from what they're working on, which may be much more important, and running countless tests to see what in the world might be going on.  The overhead here is magnitudes greater than if the person reporting the issue gives context and enough information to help engineers know right away.

On the flip side, engineers have most likely already gotten those same alerts, if not more.  If there really is a big issue, engineers should notify those who need to know (or care) about what business is being effected.  If there are no problems affecting business, then there really isn't a need to notify.  If a non-engineer does the due dillegence, gets no alerts from engineers, and notices business could be effected, then tracking down an engineer with the right information is warranted.  They might have missed it, they're sleeping, or whatever.

The bad and lazy ways of pinging engineers is the absolute worst.  It's a bad habit that will only make the world a more devastating place.

Non-engineers and engineers both have the responsibility of being clear in reporting issues.

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Here's a situation that I've found myself in a few times.  Your view wants to iterate through an array of some model objects, but the models need a little more information in them that's not actually stored in the model's table.  Let me give you a basic example from working on beRecruited code.

There are a lot of connections between high school athletes and college coaches.  What I start off with is a bunch of connections that have coaches eager loaded with the sql query.

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connections = Connection.find(:all, :conditions => ['athlete_id = ?', @athlete.id], :include => :coach)

There is an unfortunate logic decision made before I inherited the code that also wants coaches that had bookmarked the athlete's profile.  This requires another lookup.

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bookmarks = Bookmark.find(:all, :conditions => ['athlete_id = ?', @athlete.id], :include => :coach)

To get an array of coaches, I map both of these arrays and get a unique list

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@coaches = bookmarks.map{|bookmark| bookmark.coach} + connections.map{|connection| connection.coach}
@interested_coaches = Coach.unique(@coaches) # I created a custom unique handler for Coach objects

The problem is, in the view I also want some extra information that both the bookmark and connection model have.  To keep it clean, I want to give coaches some instance variables that hold when they made the connection or bookmark.  The coach model doesn't have this, it's the Bookmark and Connection models that have it.  The best way is using attr_accessor.  What it does it allows you to use attributes as instance variables the same way you would use an attribute from the coaches table.

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## coach.rb
attr_accessor :interested_at

## athletes_controller.rb
coach_bookmarks = bookmarks.map do |bookmark|
  coach = bookmark.coach
  coach.interested_at = bookmark.created_at
  coach
end

coach_connections = connections.map do |connection|
  coach = connection.coach
  coach.interested_at = connection.created_at
  coach
end

@interested_coaches = Coach.unique(coach_bookmarks + coach_connections)

What happened above is I mapped the coaches with an extra attribute that's ready to be extracted in the view.

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<% for coach in @interested_coaches do %>
  <%= time_ago_in_words coach.interested_at %>
<% end %>

So now you can access the interested_at attribute as if it was any old attribute you would have pulled from the table.  Usually you won't need this since there are nice SQL queries that can actually do a join on tables and save columns out as custom named attributes.  But in this case this was the cleanest implementation I could go with since I already had these two different arrays of objects.

ps. photo taken at the Minnesota State Capital when I visited last month.

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It all started in 2009, when Joe, Vish, and I took the leap and founded a new company: Fanvibe.  That was easily one of the scariest decisions I've ever committed to, but also one of the best.  Fanvibe evolved from a simple check-in to live games product (from any location) that notified your friends via an iPhone app, to a full blown social network for sports fans.  The greatest highlights were our relationships with our users, the partnerships we had such as the NBA, launching of awesome iPhone apps, a cool automatic prediction question engine, and all the laughs and jokes we had as a company... I mean all the hard work we put into it.

Today we are excited to officially announcement that Fanvibe has been acquired by beRecruited.  What this means for us is that beRecruited is buying all the intellectual property of Fanvibe and us!  I am now transitioning over to being the lead of product and engineering of beRecruited.  Mostly doing more or less the same stuff as before, but now with a whole new product.  beRecruited is already an incredibly successful company with over 1 million users and making a good profit.

What is beRecruited?  I'll use the little blurb I put up on my LinkedIn to give you a brief on us:

beRecruited is the nation’s largest online college athletics recruiting platform, connecting high school athletes to college coaches.

beRecruited.com has active athlete profiles representing more than 22,000 U.S. high schools and 180,000 high school teams. In the past two years, beRecruited athletes have reported commitments to more than 2,000 NCAA, NAIA and NJCAA institutions.

This is an incredible new opportunity that I'm really excited to take on.

Creating a great experience for student athletes to get into college is not only an exciting challenge but also an honor.  It is motivating to know that our success in creating a great product will also help high school students find opportunities that they would have otherwise missed. The perpetually improving technology is improving the way the world works, and this is one area that I feel is incredibly important.

The experience I've had while starting and working on Fanvibe has been incredible.  I've learned more in the last two years than I could have in thirty years of working for some other company.  The people I've met and become friends with have been in magnitudes greater than I've ever expected, and the strengths of the friendships I already had have really grown stronger with all their genuine support.  

The path through the early days at Dogpatch Labs, through the Y Combinator experience, and now being acquired has been quite the bumpy road.

It wasn't all easy and success the whole time, in fact it has been quite the opposite.  I see so many stories where you hear about all the awesome times companies have, but what I didn't know is how crappy it can get.  We learned early on, however, that failure is the only way to success.  Today I'm still failing, but at least I know it and with that I can try to overcome those failures as challenges.  I will always remember Etact's Evan Beard telling us at a Y Combinator dinner to remember that: "Your mind is a fortress of impentetrable happiness."  In light of giving credit to those who've helped, big props to my family for the support, to my wonderful girlfriend Issa for being an incredible combination of understanding, supportive and inspiration, the YC family, all our amazing investors and advisors, and of course the Fanvibe team itself.

Overall this move for Fanvibe has been great, and I'm thrilled for the next steps in being a big part of beRecruited.

See some press coverage of our acquisition, and take a peep at the awesome infographic our designer, Tyler Bass, made to describe the reach beRecruited has.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/27/fanvibe-berecruited/

Also for the sake of photos, some pictures I posted of the early days of Fanvibe: http://flickr.com/gp/kinetic/Y2ceC3

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Let's think of all the weddings we have been to recently while I tell you about a few things I've noticed.  I'm at that age where all my siblings (blood related and not) are all getting married, and I've started noticing different roles photographers play.  Here are the two extreme characteristics of a modern day wedding photographer: ninja and dictator.

The dictator defines a wedding.  It might not be entirely their fault, but they are put into the position of defining what happens at a wedding and when.  They say when and where to have an engagement photo session, and how to feel during the session.  "Look like you two love each other and are having fun in this place that I think looks good."  Then they tell you when to get ready for your wedding, where to take your limo for photographs, who to bring into the photos, and when to have the reception.  Everything needs to be scheduled around the photographer's preference.  I've even seen photographers want the groom to see the bride in her dress for the first time in a photo session before the actual ceremony.

The couple might put the photographer in this situation of dictating.  If the plan isn't totally finalized, and the couple are still looking to plan their wedding fully, they will take whatever expert guidance they can get.  Sometimes they find this security blanket in a photographer.  The photographer then steps out of his element of photographer, and feels an awesome pride in the experience and know-how for weddings.  They give input on engagement sessions, then ceremony locations, and boom, before they know it they're snowballing into a full on wedding dictator.

There are a lot of good things about them though.  They are pretty much sure to get great photos.  They won't miss anything, the ring exchange, the kiss, nothing.  They'll also get all the photos the groom and bride want, leaving the couple confident and happy to enjoy the wedding.  And remember, this is just an extreme, no photographer is ever totally like this.

Now let's quickly talk about the ninja style wedding photographer.

OK so that was the ninja style.  What?  You didn't see anything written there?  Well that's the nature of ninja style anything.  You don't see it.  You don't notice it.  These photographers are either really freaking good at photography, or lazy and have missed out every important moment ever.  Kind of scary.  If they're never seen, they're probably all boozed up at the open bar and have dropped their cameras into the lake.  OK, but what about the freaking good ones?

Real ninjas are really freaking good at stuff.  Best of all, they let the moments happen as they are.  They catch people doing what they should be doing.  In a way, the ninja style guys don't get in your way but still get the pictures you want.  These guys are so damn good and confident that they just say: "look, I'll show up to your next outing at the park and take some test shots, then I'll come to look at all the venues you're looking at for the wedding and just be in touch with your planning.  I'll be there to scope out the final venue location, and even for the tasting of the food.  Maybe after you taste the food we can go around the grounds and hang out.  Then at the wedding, I'll be there whenever you're awake and leave as the last man standing.  I'll send you all your photos and you'll have a great wedding."

Little does the couple know, all this hanging out before the wedding is them accomplishing a million things.  A few I will name that are important in the following paragraphs.  

First they are really getting to know the couple.  How that helps is they know the most beautiful and handsome sides of the people.  Inside and out.  They notice what angles they look great in, and what angles to REALLY avoid.  When they are at their finest, and ugliest.  Along the way they've just taken the engagement photos from the couple's usual routines of hanging out together, and then they become now accustom and comfortable with a photographer being around taking photos.  

Scoping out the venue locations is great too, because he now knows all the spots, angles, and more.  The day of the wedding, he knows where to go, gets pretty awesome shots, doesn't get in the way, and most importantly lets everyone enjoy the wedding and save their own memories.  

The scary part is the couple doesn't know if the pictures are coming out well or not.  If the couple is worried and concerned, this would probably be crazy.  The photographer might also miss a lot of pictures, people, and moments that just can't be taken without some kind of direction.

Regardless of the type of photographer, just remember that photographs should come second, memories always comes first.  

What good is it if the photographer got to see and take photos of that magical moment the groom first sees the bride in her dress if NOBODY ELSE DOES?  Yes, you get great photos of that moment because you couldn't pose them correctly in the first place so you rely on stealing this magical moment away from all the other friends and family.  That's selfish in my opinion.  Making sure the family pays to see that magical moment is lame.  I want the family to experience it.  Photos will always tell a story, but you will never be able to relive it fully if you didn't even see it.  There's so much more than just an image.

Signs of a dictating photographer:

1. Groom sees bride in dress for the first time before the ceremony for photoshoot
2. Awkward and prolonged photoshoot at any time during the wedding day
3. Rushed preparation times because of scheduled photoshoots
4. And simply telling you how to plan any part of your wedding day for his photos
5. Helps set up good shots when there is no direction
6. Gets a photo of everyone important, family, friends, wedding party, and doesn't miss anyone
7. Helps the couple plan if they need the help

Signs of a ninja style photographer:

1. Asks a lot of questions
2. Allows you to plan everything, but would like to know about the schedules
3. Asks about favorite places to go with significant other, daily activities
4. Hangs out at favorite places for an engagement photoshoot, doesn't tell you what to do, gives suggestions when needed
5. Works his way through your wedding, at the preparations because they're happening, at the wedding ceremony when it happens, at the reception when it happens, grabbing photos of everyone while everyone is congratulating, hugging, and enjoying the wedding
6. Becoming friends with everyone at the wedding.  Like genuinely friends, not just for show.

You can see my agenda here, my own thoughts about a photographer's wedding.  But all this being said, no matter what happens with the photographer, the wedding will be beautiful and you will be happy.  Plan it and enjoy it as you will, but remember to enjoy and live the moments. 

ps. The photograph posted at the top was one I took at An and Brian's wedding (Issa's cousin).  Their hired photographer was great.  I was there as a guest and took a few photos and posted some on my Flickr stream.  You can find them here: http://flickr.com/gp/kinetic/820959  (teasers below)

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It's been a few years since I've actually done real portrait photography. Closest I came to that was a wedding in the swiss alps 2 years ago, and an engagement shoot a year ago.

In December 2007 I was wandering back to my car in Golden Gate Park, when I bumped into an awesome couple. We ended up talking for awhile, and eventually I took a few pictures of them.

Fast forward 3+ years, and I find myself shooting Kathyln again in San Francisco. I was really glad to hear from her after so long, and once our schedules both freed up, we headed to my favorite spots in San Francisco. I tried my best to capture her bubbly and inspirational personality, but the photos are just the beginning of who she really is. I haven't done portraits in a long time, and I'm glad she gave me the extra push to get back into it.

My style has changed a lot since I last did this, but it's a reminder of how much fun it is to get out to SF with your camera, a model, and have a great time.

Here are some of the photos:

And a few for fun:

We got hops:

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