Just entered my 1st contest ever and I am open to suggestions to improve where I may. I am still figuring out your site and hopefully succeeded doing things correctly. Thank you.
added a message for all new users who have never voted. the photo page now will say something like
” Hello Nick!
This seems to be the first time you have ever voted in one of our contests. Simply click one of the stars below. 1 for lowest, 5 for highest – and we will record your vote. To read more on how voting works read Voting Rules. … See More
”
above the 5 star rating. As long as they have voted at least once, this message will not appear again.
I only see 5 likes on the website page, and 3 on the Facebook app page for this photo. Sometimes I have seen when using facebook plugins the numbers being inaccurate. For example, one comment box reported over 1,000,000 counted, when only 5 displayed. So likely you saw the same thing.
If you have not used the ‘slideshow’ option while browsing a contest in the gallery section of the site, be sure to check out its features. Built on top of Cooliris, it is a great way to interact with the many photo submissions in a contest. You can browse photos quickly, and its fun! Here is Cooliris in action for the Flowers Contest. Be sure to check it out in Full Screen mode, and the sharing options for Facebook and Twitter. You can even share the entire gallery of photos directly to your Facebook wall. Try it out!
I got the Holga TIM a few weeks ago, and rattled off some shots so I could quickly get to the camera store and process my first roll of film. It’s usually hit or miss with me and shooting film – this time it felt more like a miss. When I got the pics back I only liked a single shot off the whole roll. Much of the shots were just taken just trying the play around with the controls on the camera body, or showing it off to friends.
Some coordination is needed when shooting in half-frame mTode. I lost my place in the sequence and would forget which ‘eye-ball’ I shot with last, or if I just shot in stereoscopic (using both eye’s at the same time). The result would be unintended double exposures or blank frames as I would advance the roll too soon.
Despite my lack of coordination – its a fun little camera. I think I like my Golden Half better at this point, but I’m only one roll into the Holga TIM.
This shot was taken from the pump house at Linda Mar in Pacifica, CA. You can notice the slight shift (parallax) in the two frames. Both shots were taken simultaneously. Supposedly, you could actually get an stereoscopic viewer on a print on the image and see it in 3D.
Okay this looks like a promising tool I could spend hours in tweaking the controls and lighting in some of my old HDR Shots. It also revives my interest is playing around with HDR shots again. Yet – I am still obsessing with toy cameras at the moment, but I think I’ll check PhotoEngine out this week.
Take a look at the following demos of PhotoEngine from OloNeo. The Beta program is open till October – so if you want to play around with a pre-release of this tool for free go to the download page @ http://www.oloneo.com/en/page/download.html
I’ve been on a tear lately with toy camera’s. I first got the Golden Half, then the Blackbird Fly, and now I found myself over the weekend at PhotoWorks in San Francisco staring at this odd camera on the shelf that seemed to be staring right back at me. It was the Holga 135TIM, an ugly little camera that reminds me more of a Sponge Bob Squarepants toy from McDonalds than an actual 35mm camera.
Other than the comic personality of the camera body – what also caught my attention was the way the camera supported half-frame shots. Where the Golden Half takes consecutive shots – each one on half of a 35mm frame – the Holga TIM gives you some more control on how to take such shots. Each “eye-ball” on Sponge Bob can be opened or closed to expose each half frame. You can choose the left or right eye-ball – open it up , frame your shot , and click. This actually gives you three options to compose your shots.
Left half frame first
Right half frame first
Both left and right at the same time for a stereoscopic full frame!
The one issue I have with the Golden Half is not knowing which two shots are actually composed on the same frame. This isn’t an issue with the Holga TIM – as you get to even choose which half frame to compose first. The cool effect of option 3 is the dual lens is slightly displaced from the subject of your shot which produces a 3D image. You need one of those old-timey 3D viewers ( which by the way Holga actually sells as an accessory – though I cant find it online) and a print of the final image to enjoy the 3D effect.
There is actually a fourth option for your composition.
Double Exposure
In order to support half frame shots, the Holga TIM has an exposure switch – which allows you to re-shoot on the same frame after toggling the left or right eye-ball before taking the second shot. This exposure switch can actually be used when taking a full frame shot with both eye-balls open at the same time. Simply take your first shot, flick the exposure switch, and take another shot. The effect is you can do a double exposure on a full frame.
Below is the unpacking ceremony for the Holga 135TIM. Once I get some shots developed – I’ll post online.
Over the last few weeks, I have taken time off of work mostly for a ‘staycation’ - working in the garage, surfing, reading, and generally just sitting around the house as much as possible. I did get a chance to go back east to visit familiy and took my Golden Half along. Its much easier to travel with than my Nikon D300 – though I miss the instant gratification of being able to view your shots as you take it. Its a fair trade-off to the simplicity of the Golden Half.
Once I came back home to the NorCal coast of Pacifica, CA - I worked on overhauling this Site. Hopefully you find the new layout an improvement, as well as the ease of the new Login mechanism. Hope eveyone is enjoying the summer!
Below are some new shots from the Golden Half. For more shots, checkout my Flickr stream.
You may have noticed a number of changes over the last couple of days.
The Facebook login integration has been completed to allow new user registration.
You may find login issues when jumping form the Facebook App back to the site – so be sure to login from the blog page.
New theme is being used for the blog site
Now underway is a new layout for the gallery pages, as well as more useful permanent links to each page. Currently, you may experience some broken links from time to time while these changes are underway.
All these changes will settle down by the end of the week. Hopefully with a lot of nice improvements!
Facebook has made some recent changes to how websites connect members with a new set of features called the Graph API. ThirstyPhoto uses an older feature from Facebook that allows our members to log into the site and use the Facebook App for photo contests. Since the introduction of these new features, our old code wont work for new members.
For now new members may not be able to connect to the site, upload photos, etc. Over the next few days we will review these changes from Facebook and make the appropriate updates to get all memebers – old and new – connected to the site and particiapting in our contests.
Stay tuned for an update next week on our progress! Thanks for your patience while we work on this upgrade.
Its been a whole year since ThirstyPhoto launched. In those twelve months we have evolved as each contest has brought not only great pictures, but valuable feedback from members as well. There are so many ways to grow the community farther – I wish I had more time to focus on all the cool ideas for the site! Thanks to everyone so far for your support and participation. I look forward to the next 12 months with you all!
Looking forward
Supporting Amateurs of all Levels
From time to time, various members have asked for new features, fixes to bugs, and generally questions about the site and the Facebook App. One of the most common questions is how can we maintain confidence that this is an amateur-only supported site. As contests are generally open to everyone, there is no perfect way to prevent professionals from submitting photos. Its mostly based on the honor system, and diligence in checking members to ensure they don’t have an unfair advantage when competing in amateur competitions. Rest assured we’re on the look out, but my experience so far has been that this site is mostly comprised of honest amateurs looking to learn and exposure their photography to a wider audience.
There are two ways how members can win in a given contest:
Popular Vote : Essentially the most votes win. I find that the 5 star rating system is used by members as a way to get the most 5 star votes. This is really dependent on the member’s, and the submitter’s ability to promote a photo to gain votes. This is done by Sharing the photo on Facebook, email, and other sites and asking folks to vote for the photo. In the Popular Vote round, any quality of photo can win. Even a beautifully shot photo ( even from the best of professionals) can lose to a beginner’s snap shot – if the latter is well promoted.
Judge’s Round: Winning photos are chosen by a few members who will judge the photos against the whole submission pool. This is typically where the photos of higher quality are chosen. But this also gives the judges a chance to critique and determine if the submission is from a professional or amateur to the best of their ability. So it is not necessarily true that the best photo will win – if we deem it suspect. You will typically find the higher quality photos winning this round – as is the intention – to award those who stand out. Honorable Mentions are listed here too as the judges feel more than just the top 3 should get recognition.
Presuming it is easy to determine if someone is a professional (if is wasn’t then, they are not very good at being a professional), it is actually tougher to determine the level of amateur the rest of us members are. There is the beginner ( with little online exposure, and little technical knowledge of photography), the experienced hobbiest ( which may even have their own site, flickr, tools, etc.), and the aspiring professional ( who is trying to charge for their photos, may have their own site, but have not broken through). I would like to support all these type of amateur profiles – while being fair to each group. Even within these groups – the range in quality is quite broad. I have seen some pretty basic snapshots – to some very beautifully well composed photography – all of which were from amateurs.
So maybe in the future we begin to support grouping amateurs into some basic classifications. Having contests for each, and asking for deeper level of participation from the more experienced members. This is an idea I have been thinking a lot about lately. I’d like your feedback on this so feel free to comment on this blog post below.
Over the next few months, I will post some blogs asking for your feedback and present a few polls to help. So for this post, the poll will focus on what group you think you fall into. Are there other groups worth considering?
These are some of the first shots I took with the Golden Half this weekend. It was perfect weather around the beach for a stroll. With the low tide I got a rare chance to hang out underneath the Pacifica Pier.
It was probably the first time in 9 years I had shot real 35 mm film. There is no instant satisfaction in viewing your shots as in a digital camera, and the settings are so basic you have only 3 exposure settings ( cloudy, sunny, and flash – presuming you attach one to the shoe ). But this was actually part of the attraction. No grand options, settings, meters or accessories – which really frees you up to just focus on taking pictures. It’s a lot more fun to walk around with this little camera – and more friendly in a crowd. Just walking around with it will attract inquisitive folks asking “what kinda camera is that?”
After I shot this first roll of film, I went straight to Walgreen’s 1-hour photo processing. They exposed the negatives but then their mighty machine chokes on the double exposures per frame. They had no idea what to do, so I ended up heading to Wolf Camera – whose staff actually new what the Golden Half was.
Here’s a few shots around the beach from Saturday. This is definitely the beginning of a lot of fun with these lo-fidelity cameras!
Here’s the Blackbird Fly. This is a great twin reflex camera with lots of little features. Unpacking this camera was actually fun. The design in the packaging makes you want to keep the box. It comes in a plastic bottle – similar to a big snow globe which is actually a perfect display case to keep the camera in when your not out taking great photos with it.
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