Bonfire night, or near enough, saw the Fab Four waving sparklers at Dave's camera. Then there was one of Sparkly's delicious casseroles to eat, preceded by chestnuts roasted on an open fire I'd made in the garden from deadwood collected over the past few weeks from The Tree House's four trees.
Dave, as you see, made a good job of setting his Big Cam's menus and bolting it to my tripod before using the self-timer so that he could join us for this snap. He so loves a challenge.
The underlying production values and other technical details are not at all obvious, but I wanted to write about my experiences this week with using on-line photo editing applications. We read about "The Cloud" and "Web 2.0" but what does this mean in practice? I am pleased to find that things have developed and converged to such a point that I can see no difference in quality between the two pictures you see above. They do differ, but only in the process by which they were formed.
The first image I made traditionally in Adobe Photoshop, by cutting pieces from two different shots which Dave had e-mailed to me. I had downloaded his work, then manipulated it on my laptop before uploading the result to this blog. The second image was edited in a virtual reality, courtesy of the links between the various free services I subscribe to. My Yahoo! e-mail account is linked to Picnik, which is where and how I worked on the above photo, still attached to an unopened e-mail. All the basic tools I needed were freely available, right there on my laptop's screen from a remote store associated with my e-mail account. Everything was running harmoniously in my browser. The Cloud had provided me with not only the means for editing, but also the channel through which I was able to transfer the end product back to yet another remote server system, at TypePad, where Light and Shade lives.
I'm really getting very enthusiastic about this way forward. I am hoping it heralds the end of being forced to upgrade expensive software versions far too frequently to ever get value for money from them. It also allows me to work from any location with an Internet connection, instead of being locked into one expensive computer system at home. I am currently finding it to be simultaneously liberating and empowering technology.
