Tuesday, May 11th:  6:00 – 7:30PM

This ongoing, monthly meetup will help you learn to share and use photography and video online. Learn to use Google Picasa, Flickr, and Facebook to share with your friends and family. Keep up with new equipment and technology!  Work on your photos with helpful, friendly people just like you.

Cost: $20 (or whatever you can afford)

Materials:

Bring your laptop, camera, and USB cable.  During this meetup, you will be taking photos off your camera, downloading them to your computer, organizing them using Google Picasa or iPhoto, and performing various photo manipulation exercises.

We have 2 large monitors available at Tech Liminal if you would like to work on a larger screen, but this meetup works best if you have your own equipment.  Bring a mouse as well.

You may download and install Google Picasa to your computer in preparation for the meetup.

About the Instructor

Ted Curran is a renaissance geek. Keenly interested in education, technology, arts, communication, and language, Ted continually experiments with ways to integrate these passions towards the ultimate goal of empowering people. Ted is currently a graphic designer for hire with ChimeraDesigns.net, an education technology consultant, blogging teacher, and blogger at TedCurran.net.

Ted has been a high school teacher for over eight years, teaching Advanced Digital Media Arts, English Language Arts, and Social Science in public charter schools– most notably Envision Schools in San Francisco.

Tonight’s workshop included someone who is new at Digital Photography. We filled him in on a few of the basics, which was a good review for the rest of the group.

How do you organize your photos?
Not unlike the shoeboxes of yore, the “My Pictures” folder is insufficiently robust to keep your photos organized and easy to find. There are many available tools that can be used, but only two really stand out for ease of use and universal access:

1. Picasa – Google’s photo organizer is available for Windows and Mac (Intel Chips only!). It will look on your hard drive for all photos, finding every jpeg, Photoshop file, and tiff you’ve ever uploaded onto your drive.
2. iPhoto – If you’re on a Mac, this comes with iLife, which is either included on your computer or can be had for a mere $79.

Both of these will do the following:

• Allow you to do some basic photo manipulation, like correct white balance, crop, resize, change colors, etc.
• Allow you to label and tag your photos
• Identify photos of people and let you specify who’s who. Later, you can search for them.
• Let you assign a location to your photos so you can see them on a map.
• Let you create albums and slideshows.
• Let you send photos to printers, calendar makers, and more.

Hours of fun! But wait, there’s more.

How do you upload them?

Uploading your photos “to the cloud” means that you can access them from any computer, anywhere with an internet connection. There are a zillion photo sharing sites, and with all of them you need to start with:

1. Set up an account. If you have a gmail account, you have free access to Picasa’s online sharing site, Picasaweb. If you have a Yahoo account, you have access to Flickr.com. Otherwise, you’ll have to sign up for an account.
2. Some sites charge, others are free. Read the fine print.

We recommend the following sharing sites:

1. Picasaweb.google.com – Google’s photo sharing site starts out free, and lets you share photos with people by sending them a URL. There isn’t a lot of community on here, but it’s a good site.
2. Flickr.com - Millions of photo afficionados upload photos, comment, organize, print, etc on what is an amazing fun online experience. You can add photos to group pools, share with others, and add photos to other websites. You can
3. Smugmug.com – This is more of an album-focused site that allows individuals and families to create some pretty fancy showcases of their photos. You can even sell prints.

We are at the end of the workshop, and didn’t answer all the questions, but everyone is left with an assignment – organize and prepare photos for uploading and sharing, which is going to be a continued subject in our ongoing workshops.

Thanks as always to Ted Curran, our fabulous instructor.

See you next time!

Wednesdays in January 6 – 7:30 PM

Got a camera full of holiday memories? Want to learn how to organize and share with friends and family? Attend our workshop and get it done.

Week 1: Importing, Tagging, & Organizing Photos with Picasa (Wed Jan 6)

Week 2: Photo Retouching with Picasa (Wed Jan 13)

Week 3: Uploading & Sharing to Picasa/ Flickr/ Facebook (Wed Jan 20)

Week 4: Holiday Videos– Quick Edits and Easy Sharing (Wed Jan 27)

Register

You can register online, or come into the shop and pay with cash or check. Get all four nights for $75 or individually at $20 per lesson.

Materials:

Bring your laptop, camera, and USB cable. During this course, you will be taking photos off your camera, downloading them to your computer, organizing them using Google Picasa or iPhoto, and performing various photo manipulation exercises.

We have 2 large monitors available at Tech Liminal if you would like to work on a larger screen, but this class works best if you have your own equipment. Bring a mouse as well.

You may download and install Google Picasa to your computer in preparation for the class.

About the Instructor

Ted Curran is a renaissance geek. Keenly interested in education, technology, arts, communication, and language, Ted continually experiments with ways to integrate these passions towards the ultimate goal of empowering people. Ted is currently a graphic designer for hire with ChimeraDesigns.net, an education technology consultant, blogging teacher, and blogger at TedCurran.net.

Ted has been a high school teacher for over eight years, teaching Advanced Digital Media Arts, English Language Arts, and Social Science in public charter schools,  most notably Envision Schools in San Francisco.