The sad demise of Polaroid

Its a changing world I suppose so ity should come as no surprise that the old staple of design, wardrobe and make up depts, having been replaced with digital cameras, is about to expire. Polaroid - the instant colour camera, much loved by artists, voyeurs and photographers is to cease making film in 12 days time. Naturally there is an internet website that is trying to fight back (save polaroid) but the economic odds are heavily stacked against it.

One solution - and its well worth a play with - is to try Poladroid (mac only). This neat free app allows you to process an image as if you had taken it with a Polaroid camera! It must be puzzling for those who are unaware of the soft greenish images that Polaroids produce. You can even influence and control the development as you could with the real things! Waiting for the image to process reminds me of the same wait in the darkroom and the thrill of seeing the print appear on the paper ........

Here's a video by way of explanation (I recognise the music loops from Soundtrack Pro but they are very nicely used). Play around with it and have fun. Happy Christmas! See you next year.

Official POLADROID demo video - v0.9.5
Uploaded by paul_ladroid

experiments with flickr custom html

Carrying on from my experiments with photobucket. I explored
Divshare as a storage and slideshow generator for my blog. It works quite well - although the uploader is'nt the greatest. Here's the result.

Divshare




FLICKR

This is my new preferred option. Great quality, easy upload and you can control the slideshows easily. That includes the embed size. There are monthly restrictions on uploads and a limit of 'sets' - groups of images. Still its great for a free service.

small



Large



Supersize!

Experiments with Photobucket

I have been experimenting with Photobucket
recently. It seems better than Picassa - which is a pity. But I really like the slideshow feature. Its also dead easy to embed in blogger.

These pictures were taken with my mobile phone. Its great to have a camera on hand - all the time.

It updates easily too from the original slideshow from within Photobucket. There are some editing facilities as well that seem to work nicely. Even 'curves' adjustment - look under the 'geek' tab!

Embedding PowerPoint presentations and MP3 problems

This week we had a number of presentations on sound pioneers. I suggested to the students that they upload their presentations and embed them on their blogs. Richard set to immediately after the session. You can see his presentation on Brian Eno on his blog.


In order to do this he used slideshare net. You don't need to join up. Go to the home page - Select UPLOAD. Select the file you want to embed on your blog. Just upload your .ppt file. It uploads quickly - but without audio files etc. You then complete this form. Click PUBLISH and its done. You may have to wait a few minutes as its processed. You should be able to see the uploaded files by selecting My slidespace.

Some of the students have been using the free audio editor Audacity to do some prep editing before working with Soundtrack Pro. There is an issue with exporting the edited files as an .mp3 file - for sharing with Divshare for example. James has posted instructions to get around this. Thanks James.