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I love San Francisco. I lived there for a couple years and now that I’m in Vegas, I still visit every couple months. I keep a running list of “New Things To See and Do In San Francisco.” I just added something to that list today.

At 1337 Mission St (yes, the address is 1337) there is a place called Shine Dance Lounge. In that joint, they have a photo booth that is hooked up to the web. It uploads the shots automatically to Flickr.com.

I remember reading about this a few months ago, but it was when they just barely got it installed. But, now they have a Flickr account with thousands of pictures uploaded. It’s kind of fun to browse thru them.

If you’ve ever been to this place, or have pictures of the booth, I’d love to know what it looks like.

Here are the next batch of Photo Booth Photos. This one only has three. We’ve been getting a ton of photos for the iPod Shuffle contest, but all the Jay Leno impressions just aren’t going to make the cut. Shake up those creative juices. Bring your laptop outside. Bring it to the pool. Gather your family. Uncommon is good.

I dropped in on PhosthopWorld, but I must have missed the sneak peek that was given of Photoshop CS3. According to this AppleInsider post:

“During the Photoshop World keynote, Adobe’s Sr. Vice President of Creative Solutions provided a quick look at Photoshop CS3, apparently running on an Intel-based Mac,” PiperJaffray analyst Gene Munster wrote in a note to clients on Monday.

“While the presentation did not reveal any of the CS3 features, it provided evidence that the company has already successfully moved this core application to the Intel-Mac platform.”

CS3 isn’t set for release until Spring 2007. That’s a bummer. CS2 runs alright on my Intel machines, but I’d sure love to have a Universal Binary version.

Here are the best of the shots from the last couple days. There were about 100 shots that came in yesterday, but most were similar to each other. Don’ be discouraged, if you don’t see your image here than get your thinking cap on and send in a couple more.

Macworld is reporting that Apple will indeed have a special event the day before Photokina begins. The invitation they received reads, “Start photokina a little early this year.” It will take place on Sept. 25th.

Photokina is one of the largest photography conventions around. This convention really isn’t the place for huge hardware announcements, but I’ll be excited to see what goodies they have for Mac photographers. Even if they add a little to Aperture, that will be fun.

Source: Macworld

Here are this morning’s batch of photos for the iPod Shuffle Contest. I have some more to put up later today, but I just wanted to post all of these that Zachery sent in. Because there are five, I thought it deserved it’s own post.

All I have to say about these is “Wow.”

Crab

Elephant

Jelly Fish

Octopus

Monkey climbing a tree.

These are really good, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be beat. Keep them coming in!

A while back, the good folks at CompleteDigitalPhotography.com offered some very useful Automator Actions For Photoshop. Well, now they’ve added to the collection with some Automator Actions For Photoshop Elements.

These are quite useful for Photoshop Elements. From the Developer’s Site:

As all Photoshop Elements users know, the Actions Palette is one of the things that separates Elements from Photoshop CS2. Or rather, the lack of an Actions palette is what separates Elements from CS2. Photoshop Elements has no scripting facilities of any kind - no Actions palette within the program, and no scripting support for AppleScript or JavaScript. However, now with Automator and the Photoshop Elements Action Pack, you can finally automate Elements, to batch process your images.

Wow, I woke up this morning to a lot of very strange images for the iPod Shuffle Contest. They were great.

Here are my favorites from the first batch. If you don’t see yours here, please feel free to take some more and send them in.

What a cute little girl. Very original shot!

This one reminds me of the “Hey You Guys” guy from Goonies.

This one just had an awesome caption written by a 12 year old. “This is my librarian! (I wonder why she looks so angry)”

This one just had an awesome caption written by a 12 year old. “This is my librarian! (I wonder why she looks so angry)”

This one just made me laugh.

This one is artsy. I like it.

This one is so wrong it’s right.

There were a few sent in with forked tongues. This one was done great.

What a stubborn old man face.

He’s got a huge uvula. The reaction of his lady friend is great.

The contest isn’t done. This is just the first batch. Keep sending them in!

Did you see the new iPod Shuffles that were released today? How fun do those look? Fun enough to give away!

I’m pleased to announce our first photo contest for FreeMacPhoto. Hopefully, this will be one that a lot of people can participate in.

On all the latest Apple computers, there is a program called Photo Booth. With this program, you can take all kinds of fun pictures. (Pictured to the left is my brother-in-law’s photo entitled “Beaver”.

So, let’s see what you can come up with.

Send in your best pictures taken with Photo Booth. They can be funny, strange, creative, artsy, whatever. I will take the best ones and post them to FreeMacPhoto. Then, after two weeks we’ll choose a winner and send them a new iPod Shuffle. Easy enough?

You can send your pictures to brian-(at)-freemacware.com. If you don’t have a Mac with Photo Booth, head to your nearest Apple Store and go to town on the display models. Tell your friends about the contest. If this turns out to be a successful contest we’ll give away a shuffle every two weeks in different photo contests.

(Can you digg it?)

Update: I still get emails about this so I suppose I should write and say that the contest ended a while ago. It was sure fun while it lasted.

A while back, I learned about tilt-shift photography. It “is an artistic technique where the lens is tilted and shifted relative to the attached camera.” I’ve never tried it in real life, but I have used a tutorial on how to fake it in photography and it is great. One of the most interesting things that can be done is making a a real city look like a mini city. For example:

Here is a picture I took while in Bern, Switzerland:

After applying the tilt-shift technique (and doing a little cropping) it looks like this:

It’s really not a hard thing to do, but it does take some practice. I found that it is best to take the photo looking down on teh city or the scene. Also, have good hard lighting with shadows.

Here is the tutorial: Fake Model Photography
Here is a great Flickr Group with tons of examples: Tilt-Shift Miniature fakes

If you find any really good ones, leave a link in the comments so the rest of us can check them out.