Our Founders Talk Tech

Recently our founders, Chris & Morten, talked with Microsoft’s Jon Rozenblit about how and why we are moving PhotoPivot to the cloud. Jon presented what we’re doing at Prairie Dev Con in Canada and then wrote it all up on his blog.

You can read all about it here.

My Experience of PhotoMarathon UK, Cardiff

We not only support Photo Marathons, we also participate in them. Yesterday, Saturday 11th June 2011, I travelled to Cardiff to see what it was like as a participant in the UK’s PhotoMarathon. I grew up in Bristol but I don’t think I’ve ever been to the Welsh capital before – yes, poor show, I know. Adding this element of complexity to the competition was daunting. Even if I thought of some great compositions, how would I know where to shoot them?

Our starting point, the Millennium Centre, is a work of art and quickly filled up with 400 excited, caffeinated photographers. Once we’d had our gear checked and our first 4 themes issued we headed out into the wilds of Wales. The sponsorship from Cardiff Bus was invaluable as it gave us free travel throughout the day. I think, for most of us though, these distances paled when compared to those walked!

After I’d completed the first 2 themes I settled on an overall theme for my entries – “Food & Drink”. This, potentially, would garner rewards from the judges but the risks were high too. I had another 8, unseen, themes to complete – the chances of all of them being able to fit my umbrella theme were slim.

I loved the pressure of taking the shots that involved strangers. Once they’d agreed to give up their valuable time, correcting a badly exposed shot quickly is tough. And when evening came, the city transformed. Gone were the happy shoppers and tourists, willing to help and interested. All that remained were doormen, police and drunken revellers – a  tough crowd to give stage directions to! My thanks to all those that put up with us lunatic photographers!

After 12 hours, 12 themes and 12,000 miles walked, I was exhausted – both mentally and physically. The sense of elation having completed the event and created a portfolio was amazing! So, here’re my entries with some explanation. I look forward to seeing you all at the exhibition next month.

Theme 1 – My Entry Number / Work of Art

I’d originally wanted to create a tattoo-based photo for this theme. However, after visiting some of the darker areas of Cardiff, I changed to a theme closer to my heart – coffee. Card and craft knife bought and stencil cut, I needed a helpful coffee shop. Thanks to the guys at Costa Coffee on St Mary Street for helping out. Pretty happy with the results and it felt good to get the first theme under my belt.

Theme 2 – Inside Out

Originally, I’d planned on opening an orange for this theme. I wanted to shoot a close-up with a really short DoF, but I didn’t have a lens for it. I’m not overly pleased with the inside out fish shot, but didn’t want to linger.

Theme 3 – Community

One of my poorer efforts, I’m afraid. I was working on a ‘Peas in a Pod’ idea. In hindsight, I could have done a lot more with this and put the peas in a setting – e.g. some sort of children’s play farm or house.

Theme 4 – Super Powers

For those of you too young to remember, Popeye used spinach to give him super-human strength. I searched in vain for a supermarket that sold some sort of canned spinach. I was then going to impose on one of the many, many gym-frequenting guys in Cardiff City Centre. Settled for a simpler shot that still fitted with my overall theme.

Theme 5 – Drama

Very please with this one. Most people seemed to flock to the local arts centres and theatres. I managed to find a friendly butcher who agreed to send up the ‘Alas poor Yorik’ scene from Hamlet. Fits perfectly with my Food & Drink theme and I’ll be amazed if this isn’t unique to the competition!

Theme 6 – The Great Outdoors

OK, so this one’s a little cheeky. The RSPCA had an exhibition in one of the parks to talk about wildlife conservation. Fortunately for me the back of their tent contained a collage of delicious prey.

Theme 7 – Double

This one came to me quickly – a double shot of espresso. Props to Coffee#1 near the Central station. Not only were they willing to let me interrupt their business (messing around with different lenses behind their counter), but they also served a superb latte. I really like the short DoF on this one.

Theme 8 – My Secret

Sticking to the Food & Drink theme, I wanted to use lemon juice to create some invisible ink. To expose the message I just needed to apply heat to the paper. Unfortunately, it was too windy outside and I couldn’t find anywhere indoors where people were comfortable with me, seemingly, setting light to some paper! Forced to change my thinking, I’m actually more pleased with the result. It’s much more cryptic; I just hope the judges understand it.

Theme 9 – Element

I looked to the classical elements for this one. I would have liked to have gotten more shapes and colours in the blown background, but I still like the composition.

Theme 10 – Movement

I wanted to get a blurred movement shot of a working kitchen for this one. Unfortunately, the atmosphere in Cardiff changes when the evening draws in. Restaurants are in full money-making mode and are much less amenable to even charming photographers. I wasn’t convinced by my final idea, but it’s growing on me.

Theme 11 – Obstacle

These chaps are certainly a formidable obstacle to getting some food and drink. Most doormen weren’t open to having their photos taken; maybe they’d momentarily forgotten that they weren’t, actually, on close-protection duty for Barack Obama. I did find a couple who were good sports though.

Theme 12 – I Have a Dream

This was a wonderful theme to end the day with. I wanted to portray a single person’s dream of having someone to share a table and a drink with.

Why you should always use a protective lens filter.

I’ve been using (D)SLRs for almost two decades now. Not from day one (but certainly for as long as I can remember) I’ve also been using protective filters on my lenses. It quickly got to the point where I didn’t even question why I was using them any more. It was just another tax that you added on to the cost of your new lens. This morning reminded me of why these little discs are essential.

I’d left one of camera bags in the boot of the car and we’d piled a load of shopping and buggies on top of it. This had driven the lens cap down into the lens. It’s never a good sign when your camera ‘tinkles’ as you pick it up!

Luckily, though, the damage you can see is just on the UV filter. The lens glass escaped completely unscathed. After a little shaking and cajoling the broken glass was separated from the equipment. The filter ring is pretty stuck on the lens thread so I’ll be taking that into the local camera shop for some TLC. BUT, the more costly lens is intact.

So, if you don’t already use, even a cheap, UV filter on you lenses; go buy one now!

Calling all Photo Marathons

Way back in September 2010 Morten and I produced our first collaborative work together. This was for the 12×12 Vancouver Photo Marathon. We took over 1300 entry photos and turned them into a digital lightboard. We received such amazing qualitative feedback, especially during the event, that we decided to create a company around this idea: PhotoPivot.

We can now announce our excitement at teaming up with the Canberra Photo Marathon to provide a similar service. We’re working with them to produce an amazing addition to their website in time for their public exhibition on May 14th 2011. This will show off the incredible works of these photographers in a great new light.

We think PhotoPivot is a great addition to these competitions and we have plans for much greater integration over the next 12 months. What we want is more Photo Marathons. If you’re involved with organising or competing in any then we’d love to hear from you. You can contact me, Chris, directly at chris@photopivot.com.

PhotoPivot Personal URLs

We’re pleased to announce the addition of ‘Personal URLs’ to PhotoPivot.

What this means is that, if you’re signed up to use PhotoPivot, you can now navigate directly to your photos via a custom url. The format of this is http://photopivot.com/%5BFlickrId%5D.

For example, you could jump straight to the photos of our co-founder, Morten, here: http://photopivot.com/34492094@N02.

The great news is you don’t need to do anything to set this up. If you’ve been accepted as a beta tester it’ll just work. So now you can share you photos much more easily with friends.

Update on Bug Fixes

Well, it’s been a month since we opened our doors and started beta testing in public. We’ve not been shouting about PhotoPivot during this period because we wanted to get a handle on our bugs and fix them first. And, we’re pleased to say that we’ve now done that. All of the bugs on our previous post have now been fixed. We’ve also addressed the zoom-level issue and increased this for larger photos – although we can still do better. We still have some internal bugs whilst we’re building collections for new users; but that’s our problem, not yours.

So, if you haven’t yet seen what we’re doing go check it out http://photopivot.com. You might even want to sign up and help us beta test some more?

Higher Res Images for Standard Accounts

In a previous post we reported a known bug. It meant that users without Flickr Pro accounts would see very low-res images in PhotoPivot.

This has now been fixed and you’ll see much more detailed images now.

A Lap Around PhotoPivot

This post will give you a quick tour of our new application, show you the important aspects and help you get the most enjoyment from it.

Firstly, the landing page.

Pinned to the left hand edge of the screen is a button to follow us on twitter

and pinned to the right hand side of the screen is a button to give us feedback

If you want to see your own photos in this environment all you need to do is sign up using the “big blue button”

Finally, we’d love you to start spreading the word about PhotoPivot so we’ve given you an easy mechanism. Just pick your favourite network or channel to tell others what we’re doing.

Now on to the Application…

The first thing you’ll probably want to do is put the application into fullscreen mode. You can do this with a single click of the icon in the top right hand corner. Clicking it again will return the application to the website (or you can just hit the ‘Escape’ key).

On the left hand side we have the Filter Panel. With this you can create subsets of images from the whole. For example, I have used a combination of the IsPro and Location filters to find everyone in Canada with a Flickr Pro account.

I can then select one of these artists and, on the right hand side, I see the Information Panel for this person.

This contains, amongst other things, external links to their Flickr areas. These will open in a new window or tab and you may need to give your browser permission to do this.

Obviously, you’d like to see this artist’s photos and you can do this by clicking the Photos icon in the top right hand corner of any selected artist.

Depending on the size of the artist’s photo collection you may have a wait for the application to load some initial data. Please read our post entitled We’ve Launched for more information on this. Once loaded, you should see that the top banner has changed appearance to indicate that you’re looking at an individual artist’s photos, rather than all the artists.

In the top right hand corner we have a Grouping control.

This can be used in combination with the, previously seen, Filter Panel to create some very complex subsets of photos. For instance, I have used the Lens Filter and the Graph View to see all photos taken with a 17-35mm lens, grouped by the Photosets in which they appear.

 

I have then clicked on the Photoset name at the bottom of the application to further filter the photos to just those that do not appear in any sets.

The final control to introduce is the Zoom Control in the top right hand corner.

With this you can seemlessly zoom into any photo on the page. The application will continually load higher and higher resolution images the further in you go. The larger the image, the more impressive the zoom will be. Try it out with the fish-eye view of Vancouver.

To return to the collection of artists click ‘Artists’ in the top left hand corner.

We hope you enjoy what we’re building. Please give us feedback.

 

We’ve Launched!

A few weeks ago we asked for beta testers with Flickr accounts to sign up to PhotoPivot. We said we would be using their real and varied data to test the first cut of our application. This step was extremely important to us so, to all those that participated, we say a big ‘thank you’.

We think the progress we’ve made so far is stunning! If you don’t believe us you can see for yourself by visiting PhotoPivot and trying it out – it’s open to you even if you didn’t sign up to the beta.

We decided to pick just 23 accounts from those that applied; this was enough to help us demonstrate the potential and also identify the bugs in our application. During this process we churned through 83GB of photo data! Yes, that’s a G not an M. We then had to generate more than double that amount of new images in order to enable to smooth zooming and rendering you see in PhotoPivot. That’s a lot of work!

Because we’re developing this application in public there are known bugs and issues that we’d like to make you aware of:

Mismatched Data (Bug)

If there were problems with any photos then a blank image is seen in the collection. The bigger issue, though, is that this event knocks the photo information out of sequence with the photos. Specifically this means is that some data no longer matches the images. In a large collection it is, currently, almost inevitable, that this problem will occur. We know how to fix this and are working on it now.

Loading Times (Issue)

The technology we’re using is superb at efficiently streaming large amounts of information. However, there’s still a lag whilst we load the initial set of data. For instance, Daniel Gasienica’s data is over 22MB. This needs to be downloaded before you can start browsing his enormous collection of public photos. This is fixable and is on our todo list but, in the meantime, we ask that you be understanding with this issue.

Zoom Levels (Issue)

The beauty of our application is its ability to zoom in to specific photos. On certain large images you get the sense that you could easily zoom in much further. Later versions will allow zooming in to much greater degree. For now, though, we wanted to get this first version released so you could play with it.

Standard Flickr Account Image Size (Bug)

Collections that have been built from standard Flickr accounts (as opposed to Pro accounts) have only captured Small photo sizes. The result is that zooming in to these photos produces pixelated results. We are working on retrieving the Large photos for standard Flickr accounts.

And Finally…

We hope you like what we’ve done so far. We’re hungry for all your feedback; good, bad and ugly.