Lifeblob's World

This is nothing short of a testimony to our growing impact in the field of photography, we have made it to the photography page at Alltop.

Starting today, you will be served with 5 spectacular photos from lifeblob at http://photography.alltop.com/. And if you are one of our users, do keep an eye out since your photo may be the next one to make it to alltop.

And if you are not already sharing your photos using lifeblob, its time you start doing it if you want to see it on Alltop!

We had our second photowalk on the eve of Valentine’s Day in Bangalore. We chose Shivajinagar- Commercial street area for our photowalk with the intent to capture the mood of Bangalore’s shopping scene on the eve of V-day.

From the street dwellers to Mega malls; the Shivajinagar-Commercial street area gave us an opportunity to capture the rich diaspora of shopping experience. From cheap china electronics to Kashmiri carpets, the Shivajinagar area has a lot of street vendors selling all kinds of stuff. I was accompanied by Sidhartha, Zeeshan, Prashanth, Rakshith, Vishwas, and Pranav.

Here are some photos from the walk.

Rakshith Prasad	Vishwas Narendra	Broken - Zeeshan
Mosque - Vishwas	Antique Clocks - Pranav	Abandoned - Sidhartha

Follow us @lifeblob for updates on future photowalks.  Not from Bangalore and want to start photowalking at your city. Do let us know!

Last saturday, the 6th of Feb, 2010 we had our first “official” photowalk, though we started photowalking some time back.

Siddharth, Suman, Rakesh, Prashanth, Vikas, Vishwas, Pranav and yours truly met up near Vidhana Soudha (which is a seat of state legislature and one of the most prominent monuments in Bangalore)  and walked towards Cubban Park, taking photos of the High Court, Central Library along the way. It was great fun meeting the the photography enthusiasts in Bangalore and we learnt a trick or two from them.

Here are some of the snaps clicked by the fellow photowalkers. For more photos go here

Siddhartha Reddy	The Photowalkers - Pranav Bhasin
Dragonfly - Pranav	Statue - Pranav Bhasin

We are organizing another photowalk on Saturday, the 13th of Feb 2010 near Shivajinagar-Commercial street area. For more details and RSVP go here. See you there!

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:

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!

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.

The “Life is fun” contest ended on a grand note on the 15th of October. The general response to this contest far exceeded our expectations and this has motivated us to do more such contests.

Most of the contestants found the easy to use interface and the ability to login through facebook/google IDs very helpful as this allowed them to concentrate on showcasing their best creations.

You can view all the entries here: http://www.lifeblob.com/topic/lifeisfun

The winning entries are:

Gold – Walking on Water by diggerdude69

Silver – Who says you can’t have fun on rainy days? by heatherjones1109

Bronze – Fall Fun – spudburgess

We welcome your feedback and suggestions on how to make the contest more exciting and engaging.