Calm Photos

In our world of instantaneous digital communication and immediate viral marketing, YouTube presents an incredibly convenient “bang for your buck,” particularly due to the fact that little to no “buck” is required. And best of all, you don’t have to learn software or cumbersome code to post videos. Just simply shoot and upload. The difference in quality comes into play on the “shoot” side of the equation, with the advantage going to those who are more adept with a basic understanding of lighting techniques and basic editing.

The video quality of many of the videos uploaded by individuals on YouTube now easily surpass the ancient and amateurish techniques displayed on your typical community access television channel, soon to be rendered obsolete.

YouTube is made for digital video. The challenge for a still photographer is trying to make the YouTube interface work well with slide show presentations. Although convenient, inexpensive and just as effective as a web site in marketing images to a huge audience, the memory upload and hosting limitations (i.e. mp4 file formats) of YouTube cause most slide shows of still photography to be rendered at much lower level of digital image quality than what most serious photographers would find acceptable. This probably due to the fact that YouTube is a universal application designed to present video on a variety of devices, most recently the iPhone. In fact the slide shows I’ve created and posted on YouTube look much better when played on an iPhone as compared to a laptop or LCD screen.

I will still continue to post slide shows on YouTube, but I also like to give visitors to both www.JimCrotty.com and Calmphotos.com the option of viewing a higher quality presentation, one created using a slide show program designed for professional photographers and hosted on my site server which doesn’t have near the bandwidth limitations of a typical YouTube account. However, I’m quickly learning that even these programs have limitations when trying to present photographs as slide presentations on the web. The one I use - Showit Web - seems to constantly have upload problems when accessed through Firefox, even after recently upgrading the software to version 2.6.

With this post I’ve embedded two recent slide shows, the first being the higher quality option placed on my web site server and the other posted on YouTube. See if you can tell the difference and please let me know by way of comments if the first show does not play and if you’re using Firefox (the little, red letters appear saying “trouble uploading image #”).

As is the case with photography, marketing on the web is a constant learning process, which makes it almost as much fun.