A friend sent me an interesting newsletter e-mail the other day that included this great post about Journalism that Matters:

Journalism That Matters is an evolving community and collaboration supporting pioneering individuals who are shaping the emerging information and news ecosystem.Journalism That Matters focuses on cultivating "healthy journalists" and lively, informative interaction between journalists, teachers, reformers and community members.

Journalism that matters in an interesting combination between old and new world journalism and Art of Hosting techniques, another community that I have been involved with in the last few years. Art of Hosting is all about bringing out the best ideas in the room or community to best solve a problem. It's a great technique for tackling big issues, like the future of journalism. Many un-conferences, like Podcamp Halifax, use art of hosting techniques like 'open space' to loosely plan an event.

Although traditional newspapers have slowed the rapid decline since the recession a few years that saw many papers shut their doors or drastically reduce staff, the message is clear: innovate or die. Journalism that matters looks like great way to discuss ways for the future while respecting the traditions that got us here.

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The world's biggest tech show, CES 2012, wrapped up a few weeks ago after displaying all the newest tablets, TV's and cameras to a huge crowd hungry for the latest gadget news. It's kinda like being Tim the Tool Man Taylor at a Binford Tools convention – but for tech geeks. One day I hope to make the trip in person, but for now I'll have to be content to monitor it from the wings on the internet. This column is a little short to cover all the exciting products unveiled – but I wanted to focus on the cameras that caught my eye.

Fuji Goes Retro

The huge news was the unveiling of Fuji Cameras first interchangeable lens, mirror-less camera, the X-Pro 1. It doesn't seem that impressive to type out, but this camera is taking firm aim at the Leica M9 digital rangefinder, which with a lens, costs the same as a small car. So for those of us without an extra 10K in our pocket, but want all the advantages of small rangefinder like camera, the new Fuji looks like it will be a winner.

The camera is modelled after Fuji's hugely popular 2011 hit, the X-100, which sold like hot cakes to photo enthusiasts looking for a retro styled camera with a digital upgrade. The 16 megapixel X-Pro 1 gives the user an updated version of the X-100's hybrid viewfinder. The viewfinder is either optical with the camera information and focus points overlayed, or with the flick of a switch, is a full digital electronic viewfinder. The X-Pro has pretty well the same manual styled controls of the X-100, but the big difference is the addition of interchangeable lenses.

Fuji is going to have three fast prime lenses available for launch – a 18mm f2, a 35mm f1.4 and a 60mm f2.4 macro (that's equivalent to a 27, 53 and 90 in a full sensor D-SLR camera). The absence of a zoom lens may deter some, but for the photo-enthusiast it's all good. The camera is rumoured to be selling for $1700US for the body and about $600US for each lens. 

Upgraded Canon Compact

Camera giants Canon unveiled a new G1-X compact camera that is modelled after their hugely popular G12, but adds a sensor closer in size to an SLR camera. They boast that this gives you better quality and detail then your average compact camera, but with better portability then an SLR. The 14 megapixel camera is slightly larger then the G12, but looks easy enough to carry around.

The G1-X boasts and 28-115mm f2.8-5.6 lens, which will give you some wider then average shots. The camera also can shoot up to 12,800 ISO which makes it a great candidate for getting great pictures when the light gets low, even without a flash. I used to use a G10 quite extensively, and I loved the fact that it was small, but let you shoot with the same options as a D-SLR. This camera looks like a huge improvement over previous models and I excited to see what it can do. It is slated to sell for $799US.

New Nikon Flagship

 Nikon unveiled it's latest flagship camera, the D4. If you have ever pressed the shutter on a D-series camera, you will know why it is the prized possession of many a professional photographer. The upgraded 16.2 megapixel version doesn't look like it will disappoint Nikon's loyal customer base.

The big upgrade is the addition of a full 1080P HD video mode which runs at 30 frames a second. Nikon has been later to the video game then it's Canon counterparts, but sample videos floating around the net look simply stunning. The D4 will also shoot stills at 10frames a second and sell for $6000US. 

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When you are producing your next video, multimedia project or slideshow and you want to have some nice music to accompany it, you just can't use the latest Katy Perry tune that you may have purchased. If an artist creates it, then it's copyright. Buying music on sites like iTunes only gives you right to listen to it, not use it in your work. Sites like YouTube often remove copyrighted music, along with whatever audio you might have had in your project.

The best way to find legal music you can safely use in your next project is to license some royalty free-music. Royalty free means once you purchase the track, you won't have to pay out traditional music royalties every time you use it, like radio stations do. You pay a fee upfront, and while you won't find top 40 hits, if you go to the right sites you can find some really great music to add some punch to your videos.

One of the sites I have been using lately is FriendlyMusic.com – it's probably the cheapest option at $1.99US per track. It has a really nice search engine where you can just search for a mood or keyword and then narrow your search results even further – just selecting instrumentals for example. They are partnered with YouTube, so if that is the destination for your work, then this is a great place to start searching.

The one catch is that the music has to be used non-commercially, meaning you can't have gotten paid to produce the video, or be using the video to make money. The basic $1.99 only gets you personal use rights, which is fine if its a family video or a personal project.

If you do get paid to produce video, or would like to make money from your work at some point, you can go checkout a great site called Neosounds.com. They have lots of great music, usually for around $29.95US for a full track. They also have a nice search engine where you can browse tracks by mood, genre or even usage (e.g. Documentary) which I thought was a great entry point to their collection.

If you prefer traditional CD's I have also used DigitalJuice.com – they have lots of music collections for sale as well as some stock motion graphics for video projects. If you watch the site carefully, they often have some great blowout sales and you end up with an entire disc of music for a reasonable price.

One of the things I really liked from Digital Juice is when you get your CD and use the free software provided –  you select a track you like and you can actually choose what instruments you want in the track. Don't like the drum track? Delete it. I have had good luck finding tracks that were so-so and then deleting the instrument that was distracting to the listener. If you are real keen you can also export each instrument separately and do your own mix in your audio or video editor of choice.

When you make a video, audio is half of the users experience. Choosing great music for your work sets the mood that the user views your video in, and when chosen wrong can detract from your visual elements. Make sure to spend lots of time sourcing some great quality music, and it will show in your end production. 

Have a favourite source for royalty free music? Share it in the comments below.

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Had to pleasure to produce this multimedia piece for The Chronicle-Herald on Jon Gray, a local shoemaker. Reporter Bill Spurr and I were lucky to grab a few hours of Jon's time so he could walk us through the shoemaking process.

The video was a true collaborative effort....Bill did all the interviewing and weaved the narrative - I concentrated on the visuals and the editing. Our multimedia developer, Jayson Taylor, also helped with some editing suggestions. I love working in a team like this - your work only gets better the more people that you have to bounce ideas off of.

This image, with it's mixed lighting, would have been tough to shoot if the camera was set to record JPEG.

At some point when you are honing your photography skills, you'll ask yourself: is it time to get RAW?

You may have already stumbled upon this menu option sometime when you were out shooting, but maybe were afraid to admit, you just have no clue what it does. You're not alone. You might know that, yes, it is the highest quality your SLR or point and shoot camera can produce, but how is it different from the JPEG file we all know and love. More to the point: should you even care?

Yes and no.

RAW does in fact give you the best quality file your camera can produce. It isn't larger, but it is the raw data that your sensor captures, without any processing of the file whatsoever. This means you can adjust a lot of options later on like exposure, white balance, contrast, shadow detail and colour saturation all the while working with millions of more colours then are possible in a compressed file like a JPEG.

When you shoot a JPEG with your camera, after each click your cameras built in computer is actually processing the file for you, locking in things like exposure, sharpening and white balance. Yes you can adjust these things later in your computer with photo editing software, but not to the same degree that you can with a RAW file. A lot of things are already "baked in" and can't be changed like they can on an unprocessed image.

JPEG is also a compressed file by nature, popular in digital cameras (especially in the early days, like 4 years ago!) for the amount of photos that you could squeeze on a then expensive digital memory card. It makes the file smaller by stripping out a lot of the fine detail and colour depth, which you probably wouldn't notice unless you really compared a JPEG and RAW file side by side on the screen.

So if RAW is so gosh darned good them, why doesn't everyone shoot it? Why is not the default format when you buy a camera? As a mentor of mine used to say:

RAW should stand for: Really A lot of Work

Since the camera is not processing the file for you, as in a JPEG, it is assuming that you the photographer will be doing all of that work. Rarely can you just show someone a RAW file on your screen and have them go "wow". First you have to run it through specialized photo editing software that can handle RAW formats such as Photoshop Elements or my favourite, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. These programs allow you to work on RAW photo formats and adjust basic properties like contrast, sharpening etc.

Another minus for shooting RAW is the sheer size of the file, which is generally 4 to 5 times the size of a JPEG. This makes it hard to send and share with people (that's assuming they even have the software to VIEW it). Shooting RAW eats up your card space quickly, especially if you are used to shooting in burst modes.

In short JPEGs do a great job of shooting and not using up a lot of space on your camera, being a great flexible format that you can share quickly with fiends and family, although it provides you with a lot less information. A RAW file becomes the perfect campanion to the photographer who wants the most control with processing and the best detail they can pull from their camera. 

Seems like Apple gets all the attention and glory these days – iPhone this, iPad that, richest company in the world, yadda yadda.. It's true that Microsoft, the once popular tech giant, that was the go-to solution for everyones computer needs, hasn't actually done much to keep up these days. That's why I was surprised that the latest photography innovation that has been blowing my mind recently has had Microsoft's name attached to it.

Photosynth.net is the homepage for Microsoft's Photosynth software, which is free for public use. What exactly IS a photosynth? Well with the software you can do a few things: produce a highly detailed panorama from a single location, made up of multiple photographs or; create a highly detailed photograph of a single object, like a flower for instance. The great thing about this is you need absolutely no special tools and Photosynth magically does all the work for you, and does an amazing job.

Panoramic photography is nothing new, people have been stitching multiple frames into a single shot, even before Photoshop and digital imaging. Until lately though, it was something that required a great deal of technical knowledge to achieve.

Photosynth originally caught my attention about four years ago when I saw a TED talk from it's creator Blaise Agüera y Arcas, founder of Seadragon Software, which Microsoft later purchased. He was showing how the technology he had helped develop could use 3D spacial recognition to identify similar elements from multiple photos, and then align them together in a single image. The demo he showed used Flickr photos from multiple users of the Notre Dame Cathedral to make an extremely detailed image that the user could then navigate through, zooming in and out on a vast array of details.

I had forgotten about the technology, but then recently rediscovered it strangely enough through a iPhone app. Photosynth makes a mobile phone app for both iOS and Android devices that works like a charm. Basically you find a great spot to make a panoramic image, which fortunately Nova Scotia has plenty of. You then turn the app on and basically “paint” in your surroundings. You can watch as you turn left to right, up and down and the technology magically joins all of your images together into a single panorama.

You can then upload your image to the Photosynth website, which now has thousands of great images from all over the world, or share it instantly on your social networks. You can even embed the panoramic into your website or blog so your visitors can zoom and look around to their hearts content. Having a mobile app makes the process even easier. Yes, you can use your traditional camera and get slightly better quality, but this just makes it fun.

Aside from being fun, this would also be a great tool for any real estate agent or tourism provider who wanted to give potential customers a great idea about what they will be experiencing. In fact any small business owner or company that wanted to show the inside of their store would also greatly benefit from this service.

Of course if your not into making these types of things, you can always check out some of the amazing featured examples on the Photosynth website. They have also started to marry the service with Bing maps, making it possible to browse Photosynths by location, and explore the world from you home. 

The Old Becomes New

Maybe it's because I lived through the popular invasion of synthesizers in the 80s and 90s, but two of the top 20 paid music apps in the app store are remakes of popular hardware from that time.

Rebirth ($6.99USD) from Propellerhead recreates their popular sequencing software which itself were remakes of Roland’s TB-303 bass synth and TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines that shaped a lot of electronic music in the early 80’s and into the 90’s. Besides being a pattern sequencer (you create patterns of notes, store them, and then pull them up to create combination of sounds) you can apply a lot of effects to your sounds in real-time - the multi touch nature of the iPad is perfect for turning many control knobs at once to get the sound your after. Often changing the settings of an instrument while it was playing back was the key to getting a unique sound.

Another recreation of a classic is Korg's iElectribe ($19.99USD) which is digital version of the Electribe R beatbox machine that used in ton of dance music. Thus drum machine fits perfectly on the iPad screen making the device easy to operate. It comes programed with a ton of great sequences to start from, or you can start with a blank slate and program in your own beat. I think the digital version of the this machine might even be better than the original because you can record motion animation into your sequence. For example, when playing back a beat, hit record and the turn the pitch knob on beat 4 and it gets "baked in" to the sequence.

Out With the Old

If reliving the 80's and 90's isn't your thing - you should check out Sound Trends Grüvtron ($0.99USD) which is a fun and easy to use app. When you start it, you are presented with a grid of squares. Press one square and Grüvtron starts the groove for you. The grid is like graph with one axis being the pitch and the other being the complexity of the groove that it plays. You can also select from different voices - from bass to lead instruments. Once you play with it for a few minutes, it is quite easy to start creating interesting and very unique music. If you get something you like, press record and you can save a file to use in your next project. 

What's your favourite music creation app for the iPad/iPhone? Leave a note in the comments so we can all check it out....

This is a brillant video from Jesse Rosten. A funny parody commercial, but it really rouches on an important issue - people as they appear  in magazines and advertisments aren't real (well the are REAL) but a lot of work goes into making them look perfect. As Jesse said on his vimeo page:

This commercial isn't real, neither are society's standards of beauty.

Created using Totally Rad Actions

There are literally hundreds of plugins, actions and scripts for photoshop users, but here are a few that I have found useful lately.

Take Action!

An action in photoshop is like a recipe in the kitchen, it's a set of instructions that when followed, yields the same result each time you use it. Originally designed to program repetitive tasks like resizing, rotation and other mind numbing tasks, it can also be harnessed to produce creative effects for your images.

Actions are fairly easy to create, you just hit record, perform the desired instructions and then hit stop. Once you record an action once, you can play it over on other images to get the same result. Need to custom resize a 1000 images? No problem. Actions to the rescue. There are also sets of actions you can purchase now for creative purposes, and powerful image enhancement.

Doug Boutwell's Totally Rad has two different packages of actions for purchase that produce a variety of image effects from the most basic to the totally surreal – all with one click of the mouse. With crazy action titles like “Grandma's Tap Shoes” and “Pool Party” these actions don't disappoint. You can use them for a variety of purposes – from converting an image to black and white with a dash of punch, to making a photo look like it was taken with a Polaroid camera.

Installing actions is easy, you just load them into photoshop. Once you play them you watch the computer go crazy on your image while you sip a cup of coffee, and then you get to take credit for the awesome image when it's finished. Be prepared for a lot of “How'd you do that?” and “WOW that's so cool!”.

All the Totally Rad actions are a blast to play with and you can also combine multiple actions to create your own unique look. In fact users share their “recipes” online on the Totally Rad website.

Storyboardin'

Another thing you can do with photoshop is load in scripts. Scripts, unlike actions, allow the programmer of the script to design a user interface, which makes it run more like a standalone program within the photoshop environment.

One amazing time saving product, that was produced right here in the Maritimes is Storyboard. Storyboard states that it is “a simple and easy to use script for Photoshop, that makes laying out images on your blog amazingly quick”.

Local creators Sean McGrath (NB) and David MacVicar (NS) set out to solve a simple problem that haunts most photo bloggers – how can you quickly and easily combine several images in a creative layout that will fit neatly into your blog? Storyboard to the rescue. With one click you can take several images and then watch Storyboard go to work, neatly calculating and laying out your images into a new image which you can neatly upload to your blog. You can also compile multiple completed Storyboards into a new “uber” board – all freshly pressed and ready for use in your site.

These two examples are just the tip of iceberg when it comes to photoshop time saving devices, which hopefully will give you better results, with less time sitting in front of the computer.

I usually spend a lot of the winter backing up my catalogue and also thinking of bigger projects for the coming year.

I stumbled across this great video from photojournalist Ami Vitale where she talks to Photoshelter about how to get inspiration for projects and how to pitch those projects to editors.

She also talked about ways for photographers to generate original story ideas:

• Read voraciously
• Talk to many different kinds of people
• Localize and humanize bigger issues
• Think visually about an idea
• Write a lot. Put your ideas on paper
• Be an observer of life
• Trust your own instincts!

I hope you have time to watch the entire video and get some inspiration for 2012!