For the past couple of years I’ve had the dubious honour of being asked to produce the Christmas e-card for the Herald & Times Group.  It’s always a tricky brief – produce a seasonal e-card without dragging myself or others away from a busy schedule.

In previous years I’ve just pulled together a picture, some clip art and a Christmas-y tune in Flash to make something like this: http://www.heraldandtimeslabs.com/christmas2010/

…which is OK, but not very exciting.  So this year, I decided to try something different.

Over the space of a week I took around 3,500 still photos around our Glasgow office and Cambuslang print plant.   I then stitched these photos together using a free Mac app called Time Lapse Assembler to produce a pretty smooth 30 frames/sec timelapse video.  In turn, this was edited to match an appropriate Christmas tune in iMovie.  Here’s the result…

Two cameras were used on the shoot.  Most of the pics came from my Nikon D3100 using both an 18-55mm zoom and an 8mm fish eye for the really wide angle shots.  Interval timing was handled by a great little remote shutter release I got off eBay for about £15.  It does everything the official Nikon one does for about a tenth of the price.

My backup camera was a Ricoh CX1 which I used to capture a second angle while the D3100 was in use (like when the drivers were loading their trucks and while everyone gathered for the final “Merry Christmas” shot).

In total I reckon I spent approx four hours shooting the pics (elapsed time was more like 18 hours, but most of the time I could leave the camera and get on with other work) and then about another three hours assembling the footage and editing in iMovie.  So, for less than a day’s work — or about the same as I’d have spent creating another cheesy Santa animation — I reckon we got a much better result.

Producing this video has really given me the timelapse bug, so for Christmas I’m getting a custom-built robotic tripod head which will allow me to combine real tilts and pans with my timelapse photography.  Exciting stuff!

For the second year running, I had the pleasure of chairing the judging panel for the heraldscotland.com Digital Business Awards. The awards, now in their third year, are going from strength to strength with more entries and more award categories than ever before.

The awards ceremony, hosted by Catriona Shearer, was held on Thursday night at Oran Mor in Glasgow. Congratulations to all the winners and finalists listed here - especially the 999 Design team who scooped three awards and Screenmedia who took the top award for the second year running.

There’s also a wee write-up of the event here.

Some more pics from our holiday… (more…)

Some pics from our recent holiday to Portugal… (more…)

The Great Scottish Run took place on Sunday.  Two races – a 10K and a half-marathon – happened under this banner and as always the Herald & Times photographers where there to capture the action.

As in previous years, we ended up with thousands of photographs.  And, as in previous years, we made hundreds of those photos available to buy via our photo sales site.  But the problem we’re always left with is one of discovery: without having the names and email addresses of those pictured, how could we let people know their photo is available to buy?

So, this year we’re trying a new experiment.  As well as putting the pics up on our photo sales site we’re also uploading them all to Facebook.  Users are able to ‘tag’ themselves and their friends in our photos with prizes available to act as an incentive.  All the pics going up on Facebook have a unique reference number which allows them to be found quickly and easily on our photo sales site.

Adding this reference number was actually the trickiest part of the whole process – standard Photoshop actions, even combined with the new Photoshop Variables feature, don’t offer the flexibility needed for this.   Instead, the solution was to script a Photoshop extension in Javascript that would extract the reference number, overlay it on the image and resize the output to a Facebook-friendly res.  What… you can script Photoshop in Javascript?  Who knew?  Not me, until last week.

Anyway, it’s early days but it seems to be working quite well so far.  The technology part was a breeze and should be reusable in future with mimimal effort.

Unfortuantely the Evening Times Facebook page was only five days old at the time of the Great Scottish Run, so we were a bit short of friends to give this a big kickstart.  Hopefully we’ll be able to use this technique again in future to aid discoverability of our photo sales service.

If you took part in the run, go here to see  if you can find yourself or your friends!

The Kingston Wi-Drive is a new kid on the storage block.   Aimed at providing extra storage to iOS devices, it pairs a wireless SSD storage gadget with a free iPhone app to double the capacity of your Apple handheld.  I’m currently writing up my review of it for The Herald.

What they don’t tell you anywhere on the packaging or instructions (and by implication deny) is that the Wi-Drive works with ANY web and Wi-Fi enabled gadget.

Want to use the Wi-Drive with an Android phone or tablet, Windows or Mac laptop?

Here’s how… Simply connect to the Wi-Drive’s Wi-Fi AP then point your browser to http://kingston.  As if by magic, the main window of the iOS app appears within your browser.  You can browse folders and open files just like in the app…. or perhaps more accurately, just like the internet.

I’ve tested it on a few different devices – phone, tablet and laptop – and it works nicely on all of them.  It’ll even stream movies quite happily from the web interface.

Personally, I think this transforms the Wi-Drive from a super-niche proposition (iPhone users who are stuck for space and aren’t due an upgrade) to something far more mainstream and interesting.