The rules are simple:

1 – Visit my Facebook Jonathan Kingston | Photographer Artist Page HERE.

2 – Click the ‘Like’ button.

Thats it!  You’re entered to win.

Winners will be announced on my Facebook artist page every Friday for the next month or so.  The weekly winner gets to choose any photo from my archive.  Tell your friends!

A band of musicians prepares to play for a wedding in Mathura, India.

Halleluja!  After obsessing for the last couple weeks in front of the computer to solve the problem of balancing a tightly edited website featuring a current portfolio of my work while still allowing art buyers to search older classic images, I have implemented a two pronged solution.  For anyone wishing to while away a few minutes of your time –  please kick the tires of the brand new portfolio site jonathankingston.com and the new stock site stock.kingstonimages.com, then drop me an email or comment to let me know what you think.

A friend sent me this link to the story of Vivian Maier, a Chicago nanny who took more than 100,000 photos during her lifetime and never showed them to anyone.  She recently passed away and her photography has been discovered.  Some say she may rank among the top street photographers of the 20th century.

It has been nearly two years since I migrated my business to Google Apps, and I can’t say enough good things about their service.  My spam has gone to almost zero, I have push contacts, calendar and email to my phone, and now Google is rolling out a service that will allow me to send large files to clients (ie – hires photographs) for free. No more FTP! Read more about it here on the Google Enterprise Blog.

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Store and share files in the cloud with Google Docs.

Read all about it here!!

There are two drawbacks that both have a workaround for wireless syncing. Your iPhone will wirelessly sync beautifully with your Google address book and calendar, however, it will no longer sync with your Apple address book or iCal.  What a drag!  Thankfully there is a workaround posted here for the address book issue (be sure to click on the “see all answers or post an answer…” link on this post). And here for the iCal issue (you have to set up iCal to subscribe to a calDAV account).  After a bit of fiddling, everything is now up and running on my phone, computer and Google apps account!  It is essentially the same as having a true Exchange account for my photography business, but without the annual cost.

As a photographer who spends a lot of time on the road, the iPhone has been a big blessing with its window to the web capabilities.  During my pre-iPhone life I never had to worry about keeping things like email, calendars and address books in sync — because I worked off of one computer.  Now that I have this terrific tiny top computer, keeping things in sync became a high priority to avoid the digital stress of duplication.

Looking into my options to accomplish this there was Mobile Me for $99 per year, purchasing a Exchange account for $120 per year, or the solution I finally settled on — Google Apps — for free. 

After a lot of experimentation, I have figured out a push-like wireless sync solution for iCal to Google Apps to iPhone calendar, and a wired sync solution for Address Book to Google Apps to iPhone contact list, along with IMAP email support.  All hosted at my business email address. (NOTE: UPDATED INFO ON THIS HERE.  GOOGLE APPS NOW SUPPORTING EXCHANGE PUSH SYNC!)

Here is what I did:

NOTE:  For the below steps to work, you will need to have administrative access to the MX records of your website.  OR you can just follow the steps with a Gmail account – but then you don’t get the benefit of keeping your business email address.

Email Sync:

1.  Sign up for a Google Apps account here by clicking on the blue button on the upper right hand side of the screen.  Google Apps allows you to keep your business email address, but have it hosted through Google.  There is a step-by-step guide here on how to get started with the setup.  Once this process is complete, Google is now acting as the host of your business email.  With Google mail you have the choice of enabling POP or IMAP email.  Choose IMAP, which allows you to mark a message as read on any device (your iphone or smart phone, your computer or web based mail) and it will be marked as read on all other devices reading the IMAP account.  Brilliant.

2.  Set up your local email client to access your new IMAP account.  This will work whether you are using Mac Mail, Entourage or Outlook.  Instructions of how to do this for your specific email client are on the Google Apps help page here.

3.  If you want to take the process one step further, you can upload all of your old emails that live locally on your computer hard drive to the cloud.  It took me almost a whole day on a fast connection to upload the last ten years of correspondence to the cloud, but it was well worth the wait.  No more worry about backing up some of my most valuable data – my emails.

4.  If you have an iPhone you will want to connect it to your computer at this point, open up iTunes and un-check “sync mail accounts” as you see below:

iTunes Settings

5.  Set up your iPhone for to access your new Google Apps account.  Instructions here.

6.  Now – If you just need your emails to sync across multiple platforms, you can stop at this point.  Mission accomplished.  However, if you want your address book and calendar to sync to Google Apps and your computer, read on…

Address Book to Google Apps to iPhone Contacts via wired Sync:

7.  Assuming you have all your contacts in Apple’s address book (if you are an Entourage user like myself, you will need to enable sync services in Entourage preferences to accomplish this, if your in Outlook I can’t help you) you can find full instructions on how to set up the tree way wired sync here.

iCal to Google Apps Cal to iPhone Cal via wireless push sync:

8.  To set up over the air synchronization between your new Google Apps calendar and your iCal calendar you need to set your iCal calendar to function as a CalDav calendar.  Instructions here.  What CalDav enables you to do is wirelessly sync iCal with Google Calendar.  Brilliant.  Unfortunately there is not yet CalDav support for the calendars on the iPhone – not Brilliant.  Here is the workaround…

9.  Sign up for a free Nuevasync account here.

10.  Follow the directions on the Nuevasync site to sync your iPhone calendar over the air to your Google Apps calendar.  Nuevasync acts as an intermediary exchange server for the iPhone, enabling wireless push type syncing to be possible.  Thanks Nuevasync!

Here is a brilliantly simple idea for managing the deluge of emails that make the world go round these days.  I was skeptical of the idea until i tried it.  Believe me, it works.   It takes an hour to watch the presentation below  (or half an hour for just the meat),  but will save you hundreds of hours in the future.  Check it out.

My agency, Aurora Photos, has just launched a first-class project titled Action:Reaction. The project starts with one photographer who conceives, shoots and delivers a photograph to Aurora with no restrictions on what that photograph might be. The photograph is then passed on to the next randomly selected photographer for their reaction in the form of another photograph. This creates a visual action-reaction chain that will be updated every 48 hours here.

Bookmark the site & check back regularly to watch the visual chain reaction unfold.

As a professional photographer, one of the parts of my job that I dread the most is keywording.  Send me on a 50 mile hike with 90 pounds of gear, just don’t make me keyword!   Sadly, if I choose to forgo this loath activity, the odds of my images ever being found in an online database are slim to none.  This equals no sales and one very unhappy photographer.  

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, keywording is something that you use on a daily basis without knowing it.  Every time you search Google or another major search engine, you are searching key terms or keywords that describe what you are looking for.   To find specific images on the internet, or within a stock photo library like Aurora Photos, the problem is compounded.  The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is quite true, however, as a photographer I have to boil down those thousand possible descriptive terms to about twenty five key words that capture the essence of the image.  Once boiled down, I then type these words into the metadata of the file, embed the metadata into the image and get the images online.

Before yesterday, my keywording process would often involve me staring at the computer screen for a few hours with my mind a complete blank.  I would then rally into procrastination mode and read the news, answer all my emails, and daydream about being anywhere but in front of the computer screen keywording. Finally, when I realized I had just wasted a few hours of my life,  I would begin the arduous process of convincing my girlfriend to do my keywording for me.  On a good day, I (she) could get about 30 done. 

This week, a lifeline appeared on the keywording front when Cradoc Software, makers of the much loved FotoBiz, released a product called fotoKeyword Harvester.  I purchased it yesterday, learned the program in about 15 minutes, and in less than an hour had 12 images keyworded and ready for upload.  Now, for me, that is some sort of all time speed record — not even my girlfriend could get it done that fast.  The brilliant idea behind the software is you begin, as the name implies, by harvesting keywords from similar images already online.  You then cull the unnecessary keywords out of this list, fine tune the existing keywords from a brilliantly implemented list of controlled vocabulary built into the program, and export the keywords to your clipboard.  Once the keywords are in your clipboard they can be pasted into whatever program you are embedding the keywords with.  Thank you Cradoc — my girlfriend thanks you too!

The Washington Post is doing an very good series on the global food crisis here, click through to view the pieces from that series.  Ethanol is not a answer to our energy independence or the climate crisis, especially when it contributes to, in the words of the Washington Post, a “Silent Tsunami” of hunger worldwide.

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