Lifeblob's World

We’ve been thinking how we can help our users do more with their photos and one of the things that we hear very often is:

“Hey, I’m happy to see my photos online and see my friends comment on it, but it would be kinda nice if I could print them!”

So a few weeks back, we decided to figure this out and I’m happy to announce that we will be announcing the launch of a lifeblob photo store really soon.

The lifeblob photo store will allow you to turn your photos into beautiful frames, personalized greeting cards, canvas prints and gorgeous photo books. You will also be able to get your favorite photos printed on T-Shirts, Mugs and several other artifacts.

To take advantage of our location, the store will initially be opened up for delivery within India and will thereafter be scaled up to enable deliveries in other countries as well. If you would like to see your country supported, do send us a note at feedback [at] lifeblob.com and it may just help us prioritize our next steps!

So get your printing wishlist ready and watch out for our launch announcement soon!

flow by sicknessclown

When we ask our users how they like to browse through photos, the thing that we hear most often is:

“Whatever you do, just don’t make me click”

Well, we took that rather seriously and have come up with a very interesting way to browse through your photos. We call it the river view for the way it offers a free flowing way of browsing your photos.

Simply keep scrolling down the page and we keep adding more photos until you have seen all – cool, isn’t it?

Click here to check it out

So what can you do with this? Here are some of our thoughts and we would certainly like to hear how you end up using this!

a) Open up your lifeblob page in the river view and breeze through your entire photo album in <15 minutes. Really, I’m serious!

b) Open up a friend’s lifeblob page in river view and stumble upon photos that you’ve never seen before. Do comment on some of them too, your friend will appreciate it.

c) Think of the first word that comes to your mind, stick it at the end of http://www.lifeblob.com/tag/ and see the photos that everyone else has posted related to your word. It could be something cheesy like http://www.lifeblob.com/tag/cheese or it could be something funny like http://www.lifeblob.com/tag/funny or any random word like http://www.lifeblob.com/tag/random but you are bound to find some great photos!

The photos are currently ordered by popularity, but if you want to see them time ordered too, shoot us a mail and we’ll build it for you. We would love to hear how much you like this one!

Celebrations photo contest ended on 24th January. We received a lot of interesting submissions; mainly around Christmas and New Year celebrations from around the world.

The winners of this edition of our photo contest are:

Gold: Anuj Sethi - lorenzkirche Nuremberg Dec 31 ‘09

lorenzkirche-Nuremberg-Dec-31-09 by Anuj Sethi

Silver:  Olga Kornivska – smile

Smile - Olga

Livewire: ripizzo – Frozen Puddle

Frozen-Puddle - Ripizzo

Honorable Mentions:

Control the let go – josh_wroe

Control-the-let-go Josh wroe

Disney World Celebrations at night – Vishal Sood

Disney-World-Celebrations-at-night by Vishal Sood

The current contest “Beautiful Moments” is on till 28th Feb 2009. So submit your entries and win great prizes!

We have had several breathtaking entries to the “Celebrations” contest. Thanks to everyone who posted photos and voted on them. Due to popular demand, we have decided to let the celebrations linger on for just a little bit longer.

The deadline for submission of entries and voting has been extended to Jan 24th, 2010. If you haven’t posted your entry yet, now is a great time to do so. It also gives you plenty of time to popularize your content and gather more votes.

Today, we witness one of the biggest celestial events of the millennium – an annular solar eclipse that will be the longest until December 23, 3043. The eclipse will last 11 mins 7.7 seconds maximum and I’m sure there are several photography enthusiasts who would like to capture it in their frames.

However, taking photos of a solar eclipse could be very harmful to your eyes and also the equipment you use. Here are a set of instructions that you should strictly follow to safely take photos of a solar eclipse:

1) Setup your equipment early. If you have a tripod, this is the time to bring it out as it will save you from looking directly into the sun and also let you take long exposure shots.

2) Get a good solar filter that can be attached in front of your lens. Do not shoot without a filter as it can seriously damage your eyes or the camera sensor.

3) If you have a DSLR or a camera with interchangeable lenses, put on the lens with the longest focal length. A focal length of 200mm to 5oomm should give you a really good picture that captures the intricate details of the sun. If you are using a compact camera, set it to the maximum optical zoom level that is available.

4) Use an ISO value of 50 or 100, aperture size of 8-16 and focus on infinity. Take a series of photos at every shutter speed ranging from 1/1000 sec to 1 sec.

5) If your camera supports bracketing, turn it on. This will tell the camera to automatically take the same shot at 3-5 different exposure levels and you can choose the best of the lot offline. If you don’t have bracketing, manually change the exposure level for your shots so that you don’t miss out on the magic. The low exposure shots will give you the details, the high exposure shots will give you better outer coronal features and you can also combine them later to create an HDR image.

6) Take a few long exposure shots to further capture the coronal features better.

7) To take group photos during the eclipse, project the image of the eclipse on a wall or in water using a reflector and shoot against the backdrop.

The National Center for Biological Sciences, Bangalore is doing a study of the behaviour of birds and animals before, during and after the solar eclipse. If you would like to support their research, please submit your observations to Eclipse Watch and post any photos of the eclipse, pets, animals, birds etc during the eclipse at the Eclipse Watch Lifeblob.

“Photowalking is the act of walking with a camera for the main purpose of taking pictures of things that the photographer may find interesting” as per wikipedia.

Traditionally, photowalking has been used as a method to practice and improve one’s own photography skills. Walking is also a good exercise and during a photowalk, you could roam around a neighbourhood for several miles without realizing how much you walked.

Last week, we started photowalking and are amazed at how much we learnt about our neighbourhood . More importantly, we shot very interesting people and objects, the kind that you would normally squander and opportunity to shoot. We simply love it and are going to do it on a regular basis now – if you would like to join in, you are most welcome to.

Here are some snaps from our last two photowalks:

Lifeblob “People of the world” was a grand success with a lot of interesting content being showcased. This was what we intended for when we started this contest in the first place.

Some of the interesting photos were:

Celebrate the happiness that friends are always giving,
make every day a holiday and celebrate just living!

Lifeblob today announced the launch of the third edition photography contest with the theme “Celebrations”. The contest is free for anyone to join and is currently live on http://www.lifeblob.com/welcome/contest. The contest closes on 15th January 2009. The contest is open to people of all nationalities above the age of 13.

SUBMIT your photos which adheres to the theme “Celebrations” on lifeblob.com

PROMOTE your photo on twitter, facebook by inviting friends to view and vote for it

WIN!!! 50$ Amazon gifts and much more!

So, what are you waiting for!

This holiday season showcase your celebrations in style on Lifeblob!

For those who have been asking for it, its time to rejoice – we changed the profile photo defaults to make them more colorful. Yay!

Now thats not much of a news, so we decided to check out what each of these colors mean in the language of photos. And guess what, the results were very interesting.

Click on any of the photos below to check out what that color means:

Today we are launching a new way to discover photos at lifeblob – the “good old search“.

Lifeblob now has a collection of over 1.5 Million photos and adding search for photos makes it really easy to find photos that match your interests. So go ahead, type in a few words and explore the amazing world of photos.

Here are a few searches to try out: Kid Photos, Pet Photos, Landscape Photos, Bangalore Photos, Road Photos.

Tip for lifeblobbers: Photos that have more comments / likes / views rank higher in the search results. Promote your photos by sharing them with your friends!