Camera Owners of the Bay Area

The April 2005 meeting of the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group will be held on Wednesday, April 13, 2005 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 7:30-10:30 pm.

smugmug

smugmug is a popular online photo storage and sharing web site. smugmug differs from many of its competitors in that it offers unlimited photo storage, the ability to download original images, archiving to CD/DVD, an application programming interface (API) for developers, and more.

smugmug stands for ease of use and style. Easy for you to upload and arrange. Easy for your admirers to view.

Topics that will be covered include:

• Unlimited storage
• Archiving
• Printing through EZ Prints
• Ease of upload
• Selling your photos
• smugmug API

smugmug bio

smugmug has grown from its inception in November, 2002, to nearly 60,000 customers and 18 million photos. The company was started by father and son team, Chris and Don MacAskill.

Chris MacAskill was a founder and the CEO of Fatbrain.com, one of the Internet’s first success stories. It grew from the family garage to a $100 million public company before being purchased by Barnes & Noble. He holds an M.S. from Stanford University. Don was the first non-founding employee at Best Internet — the earliest, most respected, and most successful Internet Service Provider in Silicon Valley, which was purchased by Verio. He designed the networks that hosted Hotmail, eBay, and Fatbrain reliably.

ReadyNAS 600

Okay, you’re photos are stored online, but how are they stored at home? We’ve covered a number of backup strategies in recent months, including CD/DVD and multiple hard drives. We’ll be taking a look at another solution, a 1-Terabyte RAID Network Attached Storage (NAS) box from Infrant.

The ReadyNAS comes with 4×250GB hard drives offering a total of 1TB storage in RAID 0, 500GB in Raid 1, and 750GB in RAID 5.

• Infrant Website
• Luminous Landscape Review

The March 2005 meeting of the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group will be held on Wednesday, March 9, 2005 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 7:30-10:30 pm.

Post-PMA Roundup

The big Photo Marketing Association (PMA) conference ended recently, and we’ll recap all the major announcements.

Photography Book Review

There’s nothing like a good photography book to teach you new skills or to refresh your memory. Do you have a photography book that you would like to share with the group? Bring them to the meeting and let’s have a review!

Subject matter can range from SLR and Digital SLR Photography, photography technique, computer editing, or general information. I’ll be bringing and talking about the following books:

• Canon EF Lens Work III (Canon)
• Photojournalist: The Professionals’ Approach (Kenneth Kobre)
• 35mm Handbook (Michael Langford)
• Digital Photography: Expert Techniques (O’Reilly and Associates)
• Digital Photography Hacks (O’Reilly and Associates)

Photoshop Tips and Tricks

Have you learned any new Photoshop tips and tricks since our last meeting on the subject? Bring them to the meeting to show and teach to the group! Examples of tips that we’ll cover include:

• Changing the default settings for Shadows and Highlight
• Getting rid of moire
• Effective noise reduction with Noise Ninja’s PS Plug-In
• Correcting perspective without using tilt-shift lenses

Email me if you have any tips or tricks that you would like to demonstrate to the group.