What are you doing this Summer?

Our local school district just released kids for the Summer last Friday and 4th of July is next week. Summer always seems to fly by but this Summer seems to be flying by faster than ever.

People are traveling, visiting friends and family, enjoying staycations and long Summer days.  Lots of photos are being taken with all sorts of gear but we’re betting many will be taken with iPhones. 

Both our Timeboxes have 1000s of photos and we sometimes wish they were just a little better quality. A few of our friends are excellent photographers no matter what equipment they use. They also are quite proficient using filters and other post-production techniques to improve their shots. The two of us just want to take the easy way to better pics.

Admittedly, it will take some practice but over the next few weeks we’ll be trying some techniques from the articles below.

https://www.apple.com/iphone/photography-how-to/ - written for the iPhone 7 many of the tips and techniques described here can help you even if you have a different iPhone.

https://medium.com/vantage/7-ways-to-take-better-landscape-photos-91870c9c010d - landscapes can really bring back memories of place. Tips on positioning and exposure might be helpful to you.  

https://medium.com/photographytalk/10-rules-to-follow-when-composing-a-photo-a000f5fbfd7a - "if you don’t take care to compose the shot well, no amount of good light and inherent beauty will prevent the image from being a dud.” Ten rules to help you take more “impactful photos”.

Have fun and take lots of photos. Sometimes timing is everything and a less than perfect photo is better than none.

Mary Ellen

A photographer friend listed what he wanted in a photo app and Timebox does it all

Len recently had lunch with a friend who develops software and of course they discussed apps including Timebox. From the conversation, our friend discovered that Timebox does everything he's wanted a photo app to do better than the built-in iOS Photos app. 

Timebox continuously groups your photos into daily stories.

Our friend is a perfectionist and works as a professional photographer in addition to his job developing software.  He has thousands of photos on his iPhone and sometimes he takes a dozen or more photos of a single scene or even half dozen shots for a selfie. He’d like to be able to browse and explore the personal photos on his iPhone, but said that the built-in Photos app is really hard to use for that. 

Here’s what he wants and what Timebox does:

• Help him clean up all the junk photos he has on his phone. But, he doesn’t want to actually DELETE any of the photos, since “you never know…”.
• Automatically arrange the photos into groups.
• Let him manually arrange the photos within a group.
• Add captions and other searchable text. 
• That would be easy to search and jump to a particular date or year.
• Incrementally cleanup over time and in spare moments, even when he doesn’t have an Internet connection (at airports, on flights, etc.).

Admittedly, Len had to show him how to:

• Tap Edit to edit a story.
• Add text and captions.
• Hide a photo - Friend: “how do you get rid of a photo”, Len: “tap the Hide button”, Friend: “ah, right”, Friend: “it’s cool that it shows a list of your hidden photos at the end of the story.”
• Arrange the photos within a story.
• Make a Movie.
• Search.
• How quick it is to go to a year and month.

After he was running Timebox he said:

• “It’s so cool to watch it as it organizes all the photos into stories the first time you run it.”
• “It’s so fast!”
• “If I wasn’t having lunch with you now, I’d love to just look through my old photos with this.”

The challenge is how do we get Timebox to the people who would love it since we can’t have lunch and teach everyone individually. Even if someone has Timebox, knowing how to use it is not as intuitive as we would like. We’ll add more hints and help in our next version to alleviate some of these issues.

It's easy to hide (not DELETE) photos in a story.

Use the Arrange button then tap-and-hold to order your photos.

Tap the Movie button to instantly make a shareable video.

Joel Sartore: Making an impact on the world with photography

Joel Sartore’s book The Photo Ark: One Man’s Quest to Document the World’s Animals is impossible to resist. It includes 400 out of Sartore's 6000 animal portraits, mostly those that are endangered, now archived by National Geographic. I couldn’t help myself as I lingered over every portrait and read every word.  

Interspersed with the photos are stories of people Sartore calls “Heroes” who have dedicated their lives to helping protect animals even as one of them Tilo Nadler said “It was not my work, not my profession but what else could I do.” Another hero, Houston Zoo’s Chris Holmes called one of his beloved blue-billed curassow birds “a big jerk” 20 years ago but now says “This work has affected me personally as I realize how we are all connected.” These individuals and groups often focus on one species but advocate for all animals. 

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There are also Behind the Scenes pages that describe some of Sartore’s photography adventures. One describes the “hot and steamy” Singapore Zoo where he photographed “some 150 species over 12 days - animals ranging from aquatic invertebrates to Asian Elephants.” There’s also the story of photographing Mary Ann the American Bison at the Oklahoma City Zoo. They said “it couldn’t be done” but in the end “She was just a sweetheart."

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Sartore has the photography process down to a science from the black or white background, controlled lighting and use of Photoshop to clean up the dirt to keep the process going quickly. It’s also an art with the goal of producing a “clear, focused portrait of the animal…to eliminate all distractions…to get viewers to care."

It’s Joel’s goal to photograph the remaining 6000 captive species before he dies. He’s been at it for more than a decade and hopes his efforts will help save these species for future generations. 

We love animals and applaud Joel Sartore’s efforts. If you do too, you can buy a signed copy of his book at joelsartore.com, follow him on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Also visit the Photo Ark on the National Geographic site.

#SaveTogether