Lifeblob's World

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!

We hope you are having a great time submitting your photos to the People of the World Contest and viewing and voting on submissions by other lifeblobbers.

Yesterday, we launched a few tools that will make it much easier for you to participate in the contest:

1) Lets start with the tweeple – we now have a retweet button on the contest page that makes it a breeze for you to run for the Lifeblob Livewire Prize. Use this button to tweet about the contest, spread the word and become a livewire.

2) We have introduced a new “Submit your photo“ button on the contest page. Clicking this button will directly take you to a page where you can upload your contest photo.

3) All of your photos will now have a “Post to contest“ link on top. To submit a photo from your lifeblob, simply click the name of the contest in the dropdown and you are done!

If these tools are helpful, do drop in a comment and we’ll feel appreciated. If you have something in mind that we should do, let us know that as well.

Have a great day and keep blobbing!

Earlier this week, google announced image swirl with much fanfare. At this point, it is just a preview of what it can be but certainly good enough to show the potential of this technology.

Since lifeblob is also about connecting people and their memories through photos, it makes an interesting comparison with google swirl. Infact, a lot of people have already asked me how lifeblob is differentiated from google swirl – here are my thoughts:

1) Swirl is about similar photos, Lifeblob is about related photos

With google swirl, you are essentially exploring through similar photos with a specific intent in mind. If I search in swirl for “Washington Monument“, I will essentially see lots of photos of “Washington Monument” neatly grouped up.  You want it, you get it – nothing more, nothing less.

With lifeblob, when you are viewing a “Washington Monument” photo, you see other photos around it that are related to it in some manner. That means, you could see other photos from washington, other monuments of the world, or even photos that are related to the person who took this particular shot.

You don’t get 100 photos of “Washington Monuments” here, but what you do get is the opportunity to meet other people who have similar interests ( perhaps cyclists or photographers or travelers in this case ) and you get a chance to discover other things that are related to this monument.

2) Swirl is about navigation, Lifeblob is about discovery

Swirl gives you a cool way to navigate through photos, but they are all essentially variants of the same photo. You don’t get anything more than what you ask for.

With lifeblob, every photo you view is a door opening into 20 other photos. And any of these photos you choose opens up into 20 more. With every step, you are discovering, seeing the world from the eyes of others and meeting new people.

3) Swirl is about intent, Lifeblob is about serendipity

There are times when you really want to find a specific photo – that is when you go to swirl. And once you are done, you get out of there.

With lifeblob its a longer term relation. We host all your photos for you and discover interesting photos for you – there is an element of serendipity and surprise in there. You may post a photo of your college days and be surprised with photos of 5 of your classmates popping up next to it – try it out, its very likely.

4) Swirl does not connect people, Lifeblob creates ad-hoc interest based groups

Behind the funky visualization, swirl is a search engine and its job is to find photos that match your query.

Lifeblob, on the other hand is a social networking utility and its job is to connect people together. In addition to friends that you already have, lifeblob helps you discover people who have common interests. So if you are a cycling enthusiast, upload your cycling photo and see lifeblob find photos from other cyclists show up next to your photo. Its a great way to meet new people, especially since their photos tell you a lot about them before you initiate a conversation.

5) Swirl gets boring quickly, Lifeblob remains enjoyable for a long time

A part of the motivation for this statement is that we run Lifeblob . But really, to use swirl, you need to think about some keywords first. After a search or two, the initial euphoria dies down very quickly and you log off.

With lifeblob, with every photo, you see 20 connected photos. With each of these 20 photos, there are 20 more. Do the math yourself – its a huge mesh of photos connected together and there are infinite possibilities for moving around and discovering new stuff. Once you get started, it can be very addictive ( don’t say we didn’t warn you ).

I have left a couple of links around in this post so that you can experience lifeblob first hand. And if you have used both these services, do let us know what you think!

Our world is a beautiful mosaic of people with different beliefs, different hopes and different dreams. It is our humble effort at Lifeblob to collate photos of people from around the world and showcase them on a single platform for the world to see.

With this in mind we have started the second edition of the photography contest entitled “People of the world”.

Submit photos of the people you have seen or met, people for different walks of life or just photos of you hanging out with your friends, invite your friends to see your contribution and vote for it. If your entries happen to be the most popular ones then you could win some cool prizes.

For more details and to check the contest rules and regulations visit the contest page.