Capturing OCP Life
Digital images streaming in at a rapid rate from the day-to-day fun that is Our Community Place, and from its many events, major or minor. Photographers are volunteering to contribute to the stream, and that’s good. And we’re signing up for new services to help. To enjoy some of the images check out . .
Watch this space for a link to our photos on Facebook, and we’ve also started uploading to a Picasa album recently.
If you want to be a part of our Photography Team, please e-mail us. We need help . .
- capturing images;
- storing images
- editing images;
- uploading images to websites;
- categorizing and captioning images; and
- ultimately putting images to use somewhere.
As much as we want and need a constant flow of photographs of interest to the community, we also need to know they’re also being stored, edited, uploaded, categorized and captioned, and put to use. We may be overloaded with everything else going on around here to make all that work for you shots, so please jump in!
Cameras
The HP Photosmart M537 that served us so well, taking hundreds and hundreds of excellent shots (all for $89!), was dropped on the Little Grill floor in a drunken moment. Thank Goodness we’ve stayed in good graces with Gracie Shrock-Hurst who donated to us her wonderful Panasonic DMC-LZ3 Lumix digital camera which takes pictures in 5 megapixels. This, too, has served us well, but do to the technical (and personnel) changeover, these many scores of photos have yet to be edited and uploaded to any of the sites where we exhibit our images. The same can be said of numerous photos captured from other cameras.
What to do? Firstly, see some of the steps we suggest below to get all this done. Secondly, join the Photography Team. We already have a half dozen members all fired up to photograph people and things for the OCP. Send us an e-mail if you want to join up.
We do have access to a Sony video camera, but we haven’t really fired it up yet.
Services
Apart from the official OCP website, we also upload photos to the Lawn Jam MySpace page and to Flickr. You can always add yourself as a contact there (if you too have a Flickr site). We edit photos with Picnik, a free online service that pretty much gives us what we need simply and conveniently. It works seamlessly with most of the other image-using sites, like Flickr, MySpace, etc. We may upgrade to a premium account with them one day.
We’re working on getting hip with Facebook, so that might be a way to hook in with our photo stream. APicasa album is developing also.
Anyone can learn to use all these programs, and thereby contribute in his own time.
Rights and Use
Unless you tell us otherwise, when you take photos on the OCP camera you are pretty much allowing us to use them for whatever purposes we see fit–including anywhere on the internet. If, however, you want to reserve the rights and usage of your images, or simply modify them in some way, just say so. You may need to provide us with the exact dates and times you captured pictures with our device so we can track them exactly (against their digital record). Or you can upload your shots to a service that allows you to select from various rights and use options, such as Flickr or Wikimedia.
Permission
Please be hyper considerate of those in the community when taking photographs of them. Always ask if it would be all right before you do. And do provide names of those in your shots where you think that might help us when captioning for our website, newsletter, etc.