I know there’s been a lot of bigger news about Instgram this week, what with the company being purchased by Facebook and all. That’s been covered to death all over the internet, so I’ll skip boring you with my take on that. (Suffice it to say, I simply hope FB keeps the tool working the way it does.)

I did want to share a service that works with Instagram that I saw via one of my own Facebook friends today. The odd thing, to me, about Instagram is that while it’s a great app, and now a great Android app as well, there’s no website where you can take a peek at your network, or your photos on a PC. Seriously, go to instagr.am, nothing but the downloads for the apps.Well, whenever there’s an opening in the social networking realm nowadays, someone will step up. That precisely what Statigram has done. Give it access to your Instagram account and it will act as a desktop client for the Instagram sevice, including giving you a public URL you can give out to share your Instagram photos with folks who are not using the service. (Mine is http://statigr.am/mikemac29) Give it access to your Facebook profile and it will let you do things like create an Instagram tab for your fan page, and let you create a cover photo for your timeline from your Instagram photos. Not too shabby, if you want to trust them with your login information. (Which is always a concern too!)

Anyone else using the service, or something similar?

Last weekend, the wife and I set out to do some exploring in the area where we live here in South Carolina. When we left the house, it was warm, and mostly overcast. On the 25 minutes journey up to Table Rock State Park, we drove through a bit of a shower, but it had stopped raining by the time we ventured into the park, so we decided to do a little hiking on the creek side trail.

Along the way, the rain started again, just a little bit, the humidity picked up some, and then dissipated, and the gray day gave way to some pretty sunshine and a great sunset.

As a photographer, the changing conditions could be a bit of a challenge, but what are you going to do, give up and stay home? Nope, we kept hiking on and tried to keep the rain drops off the camera lens. (Not to mention trying not to slip and fall into the creek with camera in hand myself!) And we were rewarded with a beautiful sunset over the lake before heading home again.

This is also an interesting metaphor for your career. Sometimes the path you start out on changes mid-hike, and you have to adjust to some new conditions that you hadn’t planned for. That can be a challenge, certainly, but if you roll with the changes, keep persevering on the path you’ve set for yourself, you may just find some rewarding views on your way.

Sometimes, as an amateur photographer, you find yourself in a situation to shoot some photos, but real life interferes with following “best practices”. Last week was one of those occasions. While at Disney with my wife’s family, especially our 6 year old niece, we decided to stay out at night and catch the fireworks at Magic Kingdom.

Now, under normal circumstances, you’d want a tripod when shooting fireworks, especially fireworks being shot behind and above a fixed object like Cinderella’s Castle the way that the are at the Magic Kingdom. On the other hand, who wants to carry around a tripod in the park all day? And forget about finding a place to setup a full tripod, or even a small tripod, in that crowd. It just isn’t really feasible. So you wind up shooting a bunch of stuff, using a bunch of different settings, and hope that a few turn out half way decent so you can have a nice photo memory of being at Disney.

That’s the nice thing about digital photography. In situations like this, you really can experiment with a number of different settings, and see what turns out best, and you’re really only out the space the photos take on the memory card temporarily. Then, once you have access to a PC monitor, you can delete all of the failed experiments and no one even has to know about those….

Unless you blog about them, of course.

So, what suggestions do you have for those of us who find ourselves in these situations?

This being the day we celebrate all things Irish, I can’t help but be drawn in by looking at the photos I took in the Summer of 2010 while spending a week in Ireland. I think that shows the value not only of travel, but of photography. I have these pictures to remind me of the grand time I had exploring Ireland and Scotland that Summer.

One of my favorite things about living in South Carolina, especially now that I’ve been here awhile and have gotten used to things, are all of the great photo opportunities. Not only do we live close to the mountains, but with the mild weather, there aren’t long stretches of the year where you don’t get outside much.

Also, there is a ton of history in the area to shoot. Previously, we went up to the Cowpens Battlefield, but this weekend we took a short drive up the border of North Carolina. Our first stop was the Poinsett Bridge, built in 1820.

This is in the very corner of Greenville County, and if photography isn’t your thing, this area is becoming somewhat famous as a great year-long training area for professional cyclists. In fact, George Hincapie make his home up here. (No, that’s not him, but we did see quite a few folks cycling for a February morning!)

After a lovely time exploring the bridge and surrounding area, we got back in the car for the short trip to Flat Rock, NC and the Carl Sandburg Home National Historical Site. Not only can you tour the home and learn about the lives of Carl and his wife Lillian, a very accomplished woman in her own right, but the land around the house is a lovely park/hiking area, and the goat farm is still very much in operation. .

You can even hike to the top of Glassy Mountain from here, however with my current struggles with a lingering cough, we thought better of the long, uphill, climb. We’ll save that for another trip up there. Anyone want to come visit and join us?

If that’s not enough to convince you to come, perhaps you should be reading Angela’s blog, which I swear is becoming her own version of Yelp for the Upstate. She’s been out taking photos even more than I have, and of course, she also has details on all the local food establishments that we’ve been trying out as well, in case photography, hiking, cycling and nature isn’t enough to interest you.

The lovely, and talented, Annika Vitolo put out the word that she was looking for photos taken in Brooklyn for her latest music video, and who am I to say no to a fellow PS 207 alum? (Annika and I sat next to each other in 6th grade, a “few” years ago.)

Seeing all the video and photos does make me a bit homesick….

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!