New Photos! Wait, what???

As you might be able to tell, I’ve been working on the website and forum today.  It’s been mostly techy crap you guys don’t care about, but when I was poking around some of the darker corners of our web space, I found some neglected photos from waaaaaaaay back in 2017.  So put on your old pair of Google Glass(es) and visit a piece of ancient history, back when the iPhone X had just been released, people were lining up out the door to order their Tesla Model 3‘s, and the Nintendo Switch was what all the youngsters wanted under the Christmas tree.

It just goes to prove that I haven’t forgotten how to post pictures.  Got some photos from a new or old MIJC event?  Let me know and we’ll try to get them up here for everyone to see.  If you’ve been around the club long enough to have the FTP instructions I used to distribute, they should still work.

Photos online!

MIJC_05_14_2016_Badlands_Matt_Brown_039I’ve been trying to catch up with photos from this year over the past week… Now online are new photos from the annual banquet back in January (courtesy of Jeff Fitch and Larry Wilson), Flat Nasty in March (courtesy of Dan Brown, Matt Brown and Daren Cordell), and our most recent trip to the Badlands last weekend (courtesy of Matt Brown).  If we can keep this pace up, we’ll have enough to do a video this year.

I think I’ve identified part of the problem with getting pictures: people work entirely off their smartphones these days.  Don’t get me wrong… phones have pretty nice cameras in them and they’re always with you, so they are particularly convenient.  The problem is that while phones are really good at sending individual pictures via text message or email, or posting them to social media, they do not provide a terribly good way to move a bunch of pictures and videos at once, directly to someone (like me) who needs them.  Take a look at this article for Android or this one for iPhone.  In these articles you’ll find tips and instructions for getting your pictures loaded onto your computer, where you can then burn a disc of them, put them on a USB flash drive, or transfer them to me via FTP (easier than you think… contact me for directions).  Google Drive and Dropbox are also good solutions that are available on both mobile platforms and do not necessarily require a computer.  Share your links for those services to my work email address, dlennie@bradley.edu.

So why can’t I just pull them off Facebook/Flickr/Shutterfly/whatever?  For the following reasons:

  • I need photos at the full resolution at which they were taken.  Sometimes we crop down a bit or add the pan and zoom moves, both of which require extra resolution on the original photo so it won’t end up looking blurry.  Uploading photos to a website downsizes them to a smaller resolution.  Videos also get downsized when they are posted/emailed/texted, and they are difficult to download from viewing sites like Youtube or Facebook.
  • It’s tedious to pull one photo at a time from these types of sites.  These sites are designed for viewing, not downloading.  It’s possible to download them, but I have to individually view and save each picture.  Same goes for email.  On our FTP site, Google Drive, Dropbox, or a physical medium like a CD or USB drive, I can grab all of them at once.
  • We need a LOT of photos to make the video.  Giving me 5 or 6 select images from one event is great, but I’d really rather have everything you shot, even shots that look fairly similar or are multi-burst photos.  You’d be surprised what we can do with the photos and videos you don’t think make the cut.

A few other basics as you’re headed out with your camera/smartphone… horizontal photos work better for us than vertical, and NEVER take videos vertically.  It is difficult to integrate vertical videos into our horizontal presentation, and what’s more, Jeeps are more horizontal than vertical anyway (insert hill climb bragging to contradict that here).  Taking videos horizontally is advice for life, really.  Unless you have your TV mounted vertically on the wall.

Of course, if you have a ton of photos from MIJC events and just can’t figure any of this tech stuff out, please don’t hesitate to contact me for help.

It’s still early in the year… we start collating materials for the video around December 1st.  So take lots of pictures this year and get them to me!

New photos online

MIJC_05-18-2015_Harlan_John_Geiselman_008Got a few more photos… some added to Inspections back in March, and new pages created for The Big Trip (Harlan, Kentucky) in May and Duke’s July 4th outing.  All courtesy of Larry Wilson and John Geiselman.  Thanks for your contributions!

It’s great to get some more event photos (John’s were admittedly waiting in the wings for a few months), but limited photos from only four of our outings (one of which is the relatively dull inspection event) is not enough to do a video for the annual banquet.  Short of a miracle in the next month where hundreds of photos and videos are submitted to the video crew, there simply won’t be one this year.

October Events

Saturday, October 3rd, we go back to our winter meeting time and place: the Pekin Avanti’s at noon.  Join us in the back room for a bite and a quick meeting.  On October 10th we have a trip scheduled to Potowatomi in Fulton, MO.  It’s too far for a day trip, so plan on making a weekend of it if you want to go.  Keep an eye on the forum for details.

Our annual trip to Duke Winch’s place on 10/24 has been cancelled for this year, as Steve has a 6-month work trip to sunny Curaçao.  Not sure where that is?  Yeah, me neither… I had to look it up.  Turns out it’s just off the northern coast of Venezuela.  Or it’s just down the street at your local liquor store.  Whichever one it is, I’m sure Steve will be as pleased as (spiked) punch.  We’ll be thinking of you when there’s a foot of snow on the ground here, buddy.

As the year begins to wind down to an end, the time has come for me to make more urgent pleas for photos and video so that we have something to put together for the annual dinner.  What you see on the 2015 Photos page is more or less all I have.  I don’t want to overstate it, but if that’s all we get, there ain’t gonna be a video this year.  Last year, some planned extra photography at the October Duke Winch event got us another song for the video, and that event has been cancelled this year.  Please contact me and let me know what you’ve got, so we can make arrangements to get your media from you.

Lastly, the calendar on the Schedule page was apparently broken, displaying a mess of text of which very little sense could be made.  I think it broke during the last site update a couple weeks ago.  It’s now fixed.