To the nearly 100 of you that came out for our first Photojojo Photo Safari in NYC, we salute you! Amazing photos were taken, lots was learned, fun was had, and we even discovered two real-life street artists in-action.
Our next Photojojo Safari is coming up in one week in San Francisco, and we’re in NYC again in two weeks. Sign up for email updates for our events to get the dish!
(Photo by our friend Matt Nuzzaco, who wrote a great light-painting tutorial for the upcoming Photojojo Book!)
As summer rolls to a close, what better way to celebrate than to get outside with friends and have fun with photography? We couldn’t think of any, so we teamed up with our chums at JPG Magazine and Lomography to put together a fun outing this week!
This Wednesday, September 3rd, at 7pm join fellow photo fans outside in NYC and San Francisco for some lightpainting fun!
There’ll be someone on hand to show you how it’s done, lots of others to help you create fun light paintings, cameras on loan from lomo (and bring your own) and even some coupons for the Photojojo Store.
Where (NYC):Union Sq Park, under the George Washington Statue
Where (San Francisco) Dolores Park, under the statue of Miguel Hidalgo in the middle of the park
When: Wednesday, 9/3 at 7pm
Bring: Your camera, charged batteries, friends, and a light source (flashlights, cell phones, LEDs, etc.)
One of the cool things about buying Eye-Fi at the Photojojo Store is that we sell a Compact Flash to SD adapter with firmware especially tailored for the Eye-Fi. This means you get super-speedy Wi-Fi speeds in your CF camera.
Occasionally, we hear of customers who have problems using Eye-Fi with the CF adapter and their Canon 20D, 30D, or 40D, and in talking with several of them, we’ve determined that the problem often occurs when the camera is running an older firmware that doesn’t deal as well with SDHC cards, like the Eye-Fi.
When you see a CF error in a Canon, the first thing we recommend is people try formatting the Eye-Fi in their camera.
This only erases photos, and doesn’t touch the part of the Eye-Fi that’s responsible for its Wi-Fi smarts.
If that doesn’t work, it’s worth trying a firmware update. Reader Matt Beller was kind enough to send us a list of the steps he used recently to get an Eye-Fi plus adapter working with his camera:
First I checked my firmware on my Canon 30D.. I was one behind.. My camera was running 1.0.5 and I downloaded 1.0.6 from canon.
After the camera was updated I put the Eye-Fi in the card adapter and put it in my 30D camera.. I still got the CF error. So I tried formatting in the camera and that corrected the CF error. I could take pictures with it.
I put the Eye-Fi card in the USB reader and plugged it into my computer and the Eye Fi manager was able to initialize the card again and restore the wireless settings.
The card now works both in my SD550 and my 30D.
Hope that’s helpful to some of ya! Also worth noting: If you ever need the Eye-Fi desktop software that came with your Eye-Fi, you can download the most recent Eye-Fi software here.
Our pal Danny Farmer sent us a great email the other day that really made us smile.
Not only did Danny love a recent shopping experience he had here at Photojojo, but he also shared with us something awesome he did with some of the Fotoclips he got from the Photojojo store. Well, let’s let him tell you:
I am stationed overseas in Iwakuni Japan so getting things over here isn’t always easy… Not only did you answer all my question towards fpo/ap - I got my package of photoclips in and it had a Blowpop in it! Packages are a great morale boost and let me say – I was smiling all the way home - Thanks for… well Everything! A Great Company, A Great Product… and a Great newsletter! A regular triumvirate of awesomeness!
How neat is that? Danny, man, we’re thrilled that we could spread a little photo cheer. Thanks for making OUR day….
Okay, so we don’t know how great the Bethlehem postal service was back then. We can’t imagine the shepherds even bothered with it when trying to get the family newsletter/photo/holiday card out, nevermind that there probably weren’t many stamps around. The angels, on the other hand, definitely had a great way of getting the message across – and they did it with “style”.
Here’s one awesome NY-based family that must’ve inherited the angels’ ability for sharing great blessings. They decided to model their Christmas cards this year after Jan von Holleben’s “Dreams of Flying” photo series, which we told you about in the newsletter a while ago. Gabrielle, the Mom, documented the process on her wonderful blog, and we can’t be more impressed with the results!
Go ahead, check it out – we can only imagine the fun Gabrielle and kids had photographing this, and we’re sure the folks on their Christmas card list are gonna love it.
(Now we just have to figure out how to get on their list too.)
Grab your umbrellas, folks. We were expecting a response to our recent newsletter, but what we got was practically of deluge of emails, pointing us to a bunch of other doggie- and kitty-cam experiments. (Great minds think alike!)
Sam Easterton is a San Francisco-based author who has apparently been doing “animal-cams” for almost ten years. He outfits all sorts of animals – chicks, sheep, reptiles, you name it – with helmet cams, to draw attention to their perspective, hoping that his work “will help expand the public’s capacity to understand the natural environment - in empathetic terms.” Originally shared with us by Lori, Easterton’s work is beautiful and engaging.
More than two years ago, Engadget got the same idea we had after seeing the original TOMY doggie-cam product. Instead of a Gorillapod, though, they used The James Bond Stealth Camera, which nicely fit onto their pup’s collar.
One reader in our forum noticed Engadget’s piece, and soon filled up a whole Flickr set with great dog-cam shots. (I tell ya, we’re really liking how well the James Bond Stealth Camera works for this.)
Meanwhile, Mental Floss Magazine points us to whole gallery of Cat-Cam photos, showing life as Mr. Lee the Cat sees it. Mr. Lee’s owner is now even accepting submissions to put a Cat-Cam book together, and he’s selling his specialized Cat-Cam camera, if you’re interested.
Lastly, Jenny let us know about her Doggie-Cam, which she blogged about over a year ago – and most amazingly, she had the exact same idea we had, to use a Gorillapod. Jenny’s gotten some amazing POV shots showing off the world as Oscar sees it –which, as a small, rather adorable looking guy, is rather interesting.
So what about you? Have you tried out life as a dog yet?
We’ve always really loved scrapbookers, even if we personally haven’t a single clue about scrapbooking.
Luckily, others do, and they usually share neat ideas with us – stuff that we might just be catching up on but they’ve known about for ages. Case in point:
Apparently we put a loyal fan, Susan White (whose blog, Scrappin’ without Scraps, is a veritable treasure trove of Scrapbooking Awesomeness, btw), into stitches with our recent newsletter about the Circle Cutter – seems circle-izing photos is something scrapbookers have been doing for ages!
Alright, so we might be a little behind the times. But we want to thank Susan for helping us get up to speed (and giving us a fresh dose of inspiration, with her scrapbooking blog!)
And, we wanna say, if there’s any other scrapbookers out there who want to fill us in on other cool photo-y/scrapbook-y things, then let us know!
We may not be able to don our Super-Man Underoos and drape our blankets around our necks as capes anymore (at least in public, anyway), but we haven’t given up trying to be superheroes.
Instead of saving the world from evil geniuses and oncoming meteors, we’ve just decided to start with something a little smaller: delivering Awesome Photo Stuff to the masses!
We try our best to do a super job of it, too. Take, for instance, this happy customer’s story – from a Photojojo reader who was desperately in search of one of the new, nifty Eye-fi wifi cards (he spent a long time looking everywhere for one in stock, but to no avail):
“… Photojojo wrote back that they had received more cards and would be able to ship one overnight. Unfortunately, we just missed the cut-off time for overnight shipping, so they did some searching online, figured out where I was located, and said they could meet me in person if I was going to be in the Bay Area. It turns out one of their founders is based in San Francisco and had one Eye-fi Card with him. I accepted their offer, picked up the card, and was able to start showing it off right away.
I can’t imagine many companies going out of their way to accommodate a customer like this. Experiences like this are far too rare.”
Yes, folks, our work here is done. We’re off to save somebody else’s day now.
We’ve definitely been on a Halloween kick lately (candy? costumes? we’re lovin’ it!), so that considered, we couldn’t resist letting you know about this alternative method to capturing ghosts on film:
Bob Dragomirescu wrote in and told us about ‘em: The photos were “shot on a tripod with 6s exposure and flash. We posed for only 1-2s and than ran out of the scene. The flash managed to freeze the most lighted parts of us (faces and hands). The rest is transparent… pretty neat?”
Seems we might really need Scooby Doo after all… after we featured William Hundley’s “Entoptic Phenomena” photo series in the newsletter, there’s been more ghosts hanging around than Haley Joel Osment would know what to do with.
A few of our readers decided to try Hundley’s “Entoptic Phenomena” trick out for themselves, and we have to say: we’re mightily impressed! Heather took the idea and wore out some kids she was watching over the weekend with it; Lori also tried it out to phenomenal success.
And just in case you’re wanting to try it too, we’ve pulled together some tips just for that:
Shoot using a very fast shutter speed (say, 1/640 or 1/800) – for most of these shots that worked out, the shutter was only open for about a thousandth or two of a second (.002 second-ish).
If you only have a point-and-shoot, try setting it onto “Sports Mode” – it’s usually set up specifically to take photos of quick action like this.
Shoot around noon, so that shadows hit the ground behind the sheet. Sunny days are great for this.
Use flexible people – know any dancers or gymnasts? Use them. Drape three-fourths of the sheet over their front, have ‘em grab it from inside, hunch over, and then jump as high as they can. (If they can jump while tucking their knees in, all the better.) Get ready to shoot fast!
Try again… and again… and again… Practice makes perfect.
That’s all there is to it, so get out there and start ghost-sleuthing already!
We’ve always really loved scrapbookers, even if we personally haven’t a single clue about scrapbooking.
We may not be able to don our Super-Man Underoos and drape our blankets around our necks as capes anymore (at least in public, anyway), but we haven’t given up trying to be superheroes.
Seems we might really need Scooby Doo after all… after we featured 
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