Site Maintenance 6/12/17

The MIJC site, specifically the forum, will be undergoing maintenance this afternoon (Monday 6/12/17) in order to update it.  The forum will be sporadically down during that time.  I will update this post when the process is complete.

Edit: The forum software is now updated.  I find the new look to be cleaner and more modern, although the difference is subtle.  If something is now broken for you, or you can’t figure out how to do something that used to be easy in the old version, let me know.  Otherwise, I encourage you to explore and learn.

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!