I’ve written before about the Photo Migration tool offered at http://export.goyaka.com/

It’s a nice tool to make a copy of your Flickr photo sets in Facebook, eliminating the need for folks who want to interact with your photos to create a Flickr account, not to mention a way to instantly backup your photos sets online.

I used it back in December to grab a couple of sets as a test, and it worked pretty well. Last night, I decided to go back and add some more, finally, but ran into a problem. The migration queue still showed those other albums, unfinished (they did finish uploading to FB), and the new ones wouldn’t start. My instant reaction was that something wrong with the service, and since it was free anyway, oh well. I did happen to find a support email address on the main page of their site, and sent off an email before heading to bed, not really expecting much. Based on previous experience with free online tools, sometimes they just break, and sometimes they never come back, so in this case, I wasn’t really even expecting a response.

Before I even fell asleep though, they had emailed me back and offered to clear out the queue and let me try again, which I did today. Of course, now all is working well again.

So, good work Goyaka Labs!

This week marks the 261st anniversary of the Battle of Cowpens, a victory for the Americans led by Daniel Morgan, over the British led by Banastre Tarleton. Each year, on the weekend closest to the data of the battle, the national park hosts a weekend-long historical encampment. Despite it being a bit chilly Saturday morning, we hit the road to drive the 45 minutes or so up to Cowpens to learn more about the local history. Of course, we also wanted to get some photos!

Those of you who have seen The Patriot will be familiar with some of the details of this battle, as the final battle of that movie is loosely based on a combination of Cowpens and another battle fought in the Southern Campaign. Namely, the use of militia at the front to draw the British to an unorganized charge over a ridge, where the regular Continental lines were waiting for them just out of sight. That’s about the only true similarity between this battle and the scene from the movie though.

For that matter, if you get the right Ranger guide for your tour, you’ll also learn about all of the other things he thinks popular historians have gotten dead wrong about this battle as well. I can’t speak to everything he told us, but I can tell you that if you read a history that talks about the “hills” the lines were behind, they are incorrect. We’ve been there, there are ridges, but nothing that even resembles a hill! Morgan got there first and used the lay of the land to effectively hide parts of his army in plain sight, by using the slight ridges of the field to keep them out of the British line of sight. We live in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, there are lots of hills near us, not so much when you go over to Cowpens.

So, despite the chill in the air, it was a lovely enough to spend a few hours exploring and learning from some folks dedicated to keeping the history alive!

Just the other day the wife and I were discussing the problem with using Flickr to host your online photos. For both of us, we paid for a pro Flickr account, and enjoy the fact that Flickr allows our photos to be discoverable by anyone, any time. I also like the ease of linking to the photos from there on the blog. Facebook really requires someone to “friend” you in order to even discover your photos.

On the other hand, most of our online interaction with family and friends takes place on Facebook now. We’d like for folks to be able to interact with our photos whether they have a Flickr account or not.

Well, in an amazing coincidence, our friend Kevin shared an app on Facebook called Goyaka Export, that allows you to simply grab a photo set from Flickr, complete with titles and descriptions, and import it as a new photo set on Facebook. Now, I can share photos in both places without going through the extra steps of typing titles and descriptions on both sites.

Even nicer is that when you import a new set, it will automatically be set to being only viewable by you. So you can import a bunch of sets, but only make them visible when you’re ready to share them, instead of overloading your friends newsfeeds.

I’ve started selecting some photo sets from Flickr to my Facebook profile. Looking forward to sharing the memories of vacations on my Timeline!

This has been a bit of an off year for me as a photographer. Dealing with all the changes and challenges of this year has kept me busy, obviously. Not really traveling much this year compared to the last few certainly contributed to that as well. On the other hand, I have spent some time exploring some of area I am now living in, and while I don’t have as many photos to choose from this year, I have many that remind me of the wild ride that has been 2011, and have enough personal meaning to be among my favorites of 2011. I hope you enjoy them as well!

This being the end of the year, I’ve been doing a long overdue cleanup of some of my various information sources, the first being Google Reader. After taking a look at the over 300 subscriptions I had there, and removing all of the ones who haven’t posted in 2011, and a number of ones I simply don’t care about any more, it occurs to me that a large part of why I’ve been struggling to find things to write about outside of eDiscovery and Litigation Support is due to an utter lack of good sources of information about Tech or Photography, for example.

Of course, this seems odd. The tech blogosphere is where I first learned about blogging, and where I used to find a ton of inspiration. However, I realize now that I’ve really lost touch with it. It seems the only tech news sources I’ve been following have mostly been consumed with iPhone/Android comparisons, and Google +/Facebook/Twitter comparisons. What happened to all the folks working in IT sharing their learning experiences? Where have the tech support folks gone?

So, now that my subscription list has gone from over 300, to just about 180, I’m looking for suggestions. What are your favorite blogs? What are the best sources of information about technology, photography, and yes, litigation support and legal technology, as well?

My RSS reader needs some new content!

I hope everyone out there has a wonderful holiday weekend!

I’ve written many times that I’m very appreciative of tools that allow me to post to various networks, with one-step. RSS feeds, for example, are great to feed from WordPress to Twitter or Facebook to allow a new blog post to show up in multiple places without any extra effort from me.

In that same vein, one tool that isn’t really new, but that I’ve only recently started playing with is Instagram. On it’s face, it’s a neat little add-on for the iPhone camera, that allows you to take photos, apply some neat filter effects, and share those photos. It’s behind the scenes that I really see the value though. After taking a photo, and applying a creative effect, I am then presented some options to Geotag, and share across other networks.

In my own workflow, I can take a cool little photo of a place we are visiting, like walking around the campus at Furman.

Now I can push the photo out to Twitter and Facebook, letting folks know where I am, what kind of cool things I’m seeing right at that moment, and I can also store a copy of the photo along with my other online photos at Flickr.  And, I can do all this in one iPhone app, not by making visits to a bunch of different networks.

To me, having the ability to share information to the people who are interested in seeing it, wherever they happen to be, without me having to take extra time, is a huge benefit. Instagram gets that.

This is where I work almost 40% of my work hours, in my new home office. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned anywhere on the blog that particular change in my position. Basically, I spend about 5 hours at the office each day, drive home on my “lunch” hour and spend the evening hours (the hours where I’m supporting our West Coast offices until 5PM their time) working from home. The schedule allows me to have a quick dinner with my wife when I get home, at a somewhat normal dinner time, then retreat to the office to get back to work, and then already be home when my work day ends.

As with everything else involved with this schedule, this does provide some interesting challenges. First and foremost was creating a good work environment within our house. I think we’ve accomplished that.  It’s comfortable, but also in it’s own space within the house, away from the temptations of home. So far, it’s working out well.

I’m sure, as I go forward, I’ll be blogging about some of the other challenges, especially about how working in a centralized location, for a firm with offices all over the country, and then on top of that, not being in the office a significant portion of the day, presents challenges with building an internal network. I’d be interested in hearing any ideas for handling that challenge. If you’ve been in a similar situation, please leave a comment. Or, if you have any advice for a part time, first time, telecommuter, feel free to leave a comment too. I’m always open to suggestions!

The other day, my wife was driving us down the road and we happened to be behind a guy driving a truck with a website URL on the back of it. It was an interesting business name, and we were guessing what it was when I decided to pull out my iPhone and find out. I was met with a blank website, which led me to assume it was Flash-based, and therefore inaccessible to anyone using an iPhone. (Which seems an odd decision, given the listing of the site somewhere you would be much more likely to use a mobile device to look up, but whatever…)

Now that Adobe is completely ending development for mobile Flash, the situation I foind myself in will soon be common to Android and Windows Mobile devices as well.

So, all you photographers, musicians, and graphic artists with cool looking Flash-based sites may want to consider moving to HTML5 or some other format, or live with limiting your site’s exposure to people who are more and more viewing internet-based information from mobile devices. Seems to me that you would want to make your site as accessible as possible in order to increase the number of folks who see it, especially if you’re doing any advertising of it offline. (Business cards, brochures, signs, bumper stickers, t-shirts, etc.) You want folks to see the site when they are thinking about it, instead of having to go home and get another computer.

By the way, I did go home and look at the site, it was a recording and graphic design studio. I’m not a marketing expert, but I can’t help but wonder how much of their target audience uses iOS devices quite frequently.

I’ve never been overly comfortable taking photos of people or street scenes with people in them. I guess I’m somewhat shy about approaching people, and assume that most people would rather not have someone take their picture, so I don’t do it often. This past weekend, however, I made the trek up to Asheville for the Bele Chere Festival, because festivals are a great place to get a little practice shooting in a crowd!

There are also a ton of “stories” you can tell with your photos. Above, I can show you just how hot and sunny it was in the mid-afternoon by virtue of this gentleman’s attempt at getting shade wherever he could!

Festivals are also nice because you get two advantages you don’t normally get when it comes to street scenes. One, there are people there performing, who are actually trying to get your attention, and are easy therefore to get shots of. Secondly, because of the performers, it’s easy to know where people will be gathering, and what they will be looking at. You don’t normally get those sorts of leads when looking for shots on a downtown street!

On the other hand, there is so much going on, and so many people around, that it can be overwhelming trying to find the good stories that you can tell with a photo. I can’t tell you the number of times I caught a glimpse of something just as it was passing by, or happening, and didn’t have near enough time to capture anything! Then again, the more you get out and practice, the better you would get at anticipating those. At least I hope so!