It's was a bit windy for any casual flying. It was extremely windy for any blimp flying!

The Despicablimp was making its way south and trying to stay as low as possible in an attempt to avoid excess head wind. Unfortunately that made for a rough ride as they porpoised along and right over 53VG.

Nick goes for a run on the runway

There are times when you know there is going to be a Kodak Moment and you’ve left the Hawkeye at home.

I’ve written many times of the quality of modern smartphone cameras. While they are not going to capture a great telephoto image, they can definitely capture some great moments of your life.

I can understand why a recent tweet from a professional photographer proclaimed the Lumina 920 was his new favorite phone. It has, by far, the best camera available today in a smart phone.

So, my advice is – if you are going to get a smart phone and you know you will use it for most of your photos, get one with a good camera!

While I take a lot of photographs, I do not always take good ones. Typically, I am either capturing something that “looks interesting” or I plan ahead and am taking pictures of a particular subject matter. More often than not, the iPhone is the camera for the first category while my 2nd hand Nikon D700 (and a 20 yr old lens) is my camera of choice for the second.

If there is a good photograph somewhere in the many frames I've shot, I want to post it to this blog. That requires some form of workflow to get the picture from the camera, make any adjustments, compose the supporting narration, and then upload it to the blog.

For iPhone pictures, that all takes place within the phone. For shots with the Nikon, there are a few more steps.

I've previously written on using an Eye-Fi card with the D700. I have configured the eye-fi to selectively transfer images (uses the 'lock' or 'protect' feature on the camera). This gives me a level of filtering since I often take several pictures of the same subject, knowing some will have better composition than others.

Once the pictures are on my iPad, I use the built in camera roll App to pick the ones I will be using in the blog post or email. Those get a little more consideration. I'm currently using the Snapspeed App for most of my processing, including cropping, color balance, dodging & burning, and emphasis.

When I will be using more than one image, I decide if they will be used individually or as a photo set. I use Strip Design for making photo sets. One feature of Strip Design I am using more often is the ability to create a specific layout rather than use one of the predefined layouts. The above photo set is an example. I looked at the images I had processed with Snapspeed and from their relative sizes – tall, wide, square,etc. – I 'cut' a page into my desired layout. After adding the photos to he layout, I decide if I want any type of treatment, bordrs, etc. then I save the finished image back to the camera roll.

On the iPad in using the Blogsy App. While the app is pretty good, it does have one annoying limitation – it uploads your images and then uses CSS to scale the image to the page. I would prefer it to upload the image and then let me choose one of the optimised images which WordPress has generated.

WordPress automatically generates up to four scaled images for each upload – thumbnail, small, medium, and large. The blog administrator defines what actual sizes correspond to these descriptions.

My solution is to complete my work in Blogsy and have it load the finished article to the blog as a draft. Then I can just reload the draft and switch from Blogsy's CSS scaled image to one of WordPress's generated images. This makes the blog more efficient to load for readers.

Feel free to post any questions !

simulated wide angle lens

I wanted to take a picture of Nick after he collapsed but given he had collapsed on me, he was too close even for the iPhone. Then I remembered my AutoStitch app.

By taking three portrait photos -left center right – and using AutoStitch, I had the equipment of a wide angle photo.

AutoStitch is designed for panoramic photos but it can also be used up close.

I’ve blogged about the AutoStitch App before. This is the first time I thought to use it for a close up.

I’m going to need to investigate this app more.