The Blob

Monday, September 23, 2002

Adieu, Kodachrome

Over the weekend, I started work on a fun project: publishing a book of photos of Java, our kitten, as a gift to my mother-in-law. Okay, that sounds pretty trite and too G-rated for its own good. But stay with me. What may sound trivial on the surface is really quite revolutionary inside.

The reason I mention this is because it's being done all electronically. No film, just pure digital. And I have the brilliant minds at Apple Computer and Canon to thank for this. For the past couple of months, I've been using my new little Canon Digital Elph camera to photograph our four-footed supermodel. The photos are then uploaded to our iMac into an amazing Apple program by the name of iPhoto. It's like having a digital light table allowing me to edit my selections, arrange them into coherent stories, and do some basic image adjustments and cropping. (For the serious stuff, such as color correction, and other heavyweight touch ups, I launch Adobe Photoshop, and photographer's best friend.) I should finish the work tonight. Then comes the fun part.

iPhoto has a share function that allows me to automatically publish my images to the Web (I'll post a link here in a future blog). But it gets cooler still. iPhoto also has an album feature containing a built-in page layout program with several very elegant templates. All I have to do is select the appropriate template and my photos are automatically laid out in a book. Add some text, arrange the photos the way you want and press the Order Album button. Ten days later, a hard-bound album of your photos arrives in the mail, looking for all the world like you've published an expensive coffee table book.

My mother-in-law will go bonkers.

You can do the same thing with photos of your kids. Or a portfolio of photos. A yearbook. A catalogue. Or anything else your imagination can conceive. Suddenly, anybody can be a publisher of note. That may sound trivial, but it's not. Thanks to tools like iPhoto, a digital camera and the Internet, we have options that were unimaginable a few years ago. And to think that a child can do this opens amazing new possibilities for learning. For sharing. For growing. What blows me away is how good it looks. The tools we have today are orders of magnitude more powerful than the pedestrian photo and graphics tools of years past. With a little commitment, anyone can publish at a professional level. In my days of using Kodachrome, it was a big dream for me. Today, reality is well within reach.

Give it a try. You'll see what I mean.

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