Asgemi

Not to be confused with “Pulp Fiction” producer, Roger Avary (whose website I went to because I can’t spell “aviary”), this online photo editing website is getting a lot of buzz. Here’s a post from Lifehacker:

Online image editors have rapidly become very sophisticated. Last week we asked you to share your favorite online editors, then we rounded up the top five. Now we’re back to share the results and announce Aviary Phoenix as the winner. Following behind Aviary Phoenix: Adobe Photoshop Express and Sumo Paint.

For more information on the winner and the runners up, check out the full Hive Five. All of the online editors are available without registration, so you can jump right in and try any of them out hassle free.

We’ve made some progress changing code to accommodate the update to FF. Please pardon the color scheme changes, and some of the pages appearing out of proportion as we continue to implement fixes.

I just wanted to inform the community that Firefox 3.5 doesn’t render the website well. We’re looking into it, and would suggest using Chrome, Safari, or even Internet Explorer for now.

From Lifehacker:

Windows only: Portable software usually has to suffer a few through a few compromises to be compact and flash-drive friendly. If they compromised with Fotografix, you certainly won’t notice.

The interface will be familiar to users of bigger graphics packages like Adobe Photoshop and GIMP. If you’ve never used either one, it won’t take much to pick it up. Fotografix is astoundingly tiny—a mere 680k when unpacked—for offering features usually only found in bulkier and more advanced editors like image layer, custom brushes, and advanced color and image correction tools.

The advanced features of Fotografix cover enough ground that for anything short of having to deep massage an image in Photoshop, you’ll likely not have to fire it up any time soon. Fotografix makes an excellent and ultra-lightweight addition to your portable software package. If you have your own portable software that accomplishes a ton with a tiny footprint, let’s hear about it in the comments below. Fotografix is freeware, Windows only.

There are a lot of people interested in photography, and related aspects of it around the Los Angeles area, so created a meetup group here. It’s free, and I’ll probably host different meetings as I travel to different parts of the US. If you can attend, great!

I wanted to let you know what we have in store for the website. We’re hoping that this will be in place before the end of August:

Activity Streams
Filter activity streams by content type
Grouping of similar activities by one user within X amount of time

Blogs
A quick post form via the theme

Core
Inappropriate content flagging
Built in Gravatar uploading and editing interface

Forums
Better integration support

Friends
Bulk accept/reject friendship requests

Groups
Group categories and tags
Promote members to group admins

Messaging
Better message box usability (sorting, icons, etc)

Wire
Easy image posting on a wire

Xprofile
Reorder existing profile fields and profile field groups
“Profile picture updated” entry on activity streams
Admin editable profiles for all members

Just making some small changes on the home page. I reduced the Featured Video footprint so that the page would load faster; it also was rendering differently on IE than on FF. This way,  it’ll look more uniform across multiple browsers.

I wanted to thank Eriq, one of our members, for a kind write-up on Newsvine about the site. Asgemi certainly is the new kid on the block, and we still have a lot of work ahead of us, but we’re committed to making the community the best it can possibly be, and your encouragement is appreciated.

From LifeHacker:

Many a photography enthusiast has assumed the equipment necessary is far too expensive for quality high speed photography captures. A high speed capture studio on the cheap can be had with this handy guide.

There are a few challenges to capturing rapidly occurring events. Whether you’re trying to freeze a bullet passing through a piece of fruit, a pin popping a balloon, or a light bulb shattering, you need to be able to capture an event occurring within a thousandth of a second or less. Actual high speed photography rigs are quite pricey, but you can easily emulate more expensive rigs with a standard DSLR by a little creative cheating.

To work around the problems with shutter lag and flash synchronization, the exposure is done in a completely dark room. This way the shutter can opened without actually getting an exposure. The exposure time set on the camera just has to be long enough for the action to happen while the shutter is still open. Because the room is dark, the long exposure time will not have any effect on the final output (this is because no light enters the lens to hit the sensor / film) To actually get an “exposure”, a flash is fired. The flash light duration will now become the actual exposure time.

Since nobody has the kind of lightning quick reflexes it would take to push the shutter cable right when the event was occurring, there is a work-around for that too.

Check out the full tutorial below for information on creating a sound based trigger for your flash to sync the event with the flash going off. Whenever the balloon goes pop, the fruit goes smoosh, or the glass begins to shatter, the DIY sensor will pick up the noise and fire the flash—capturing your moment of high speed destruction for posterity. If DIY isn’t your thing, especially when it comes to electronics tinkering, there is a commercial version of the sound sensor available.

I’ve spent Saturday making some much needed updates to the website. Now added are RSS feeds to a greater variety of photography related blogs and resources, where attention was made to go behind the camera and highlight makeup, hair, and fashion websites.

In addition, a featured video section has been included on the main page, where you can scroll through over 50 plus video tutorials on modeling, photography, hair, and makeup. More will be added over time.

Last, to help make your experience with Asgemi even better, I’ve added a Feedback button to the main page, as powered by GetSatisfaction. Here, members can ask questions, share ideas, report problems, or tell us that we’re doing something right.