Bicycle commuting begins - Outdoor photography season close behind

Today was the day I'd been hoping for for a few weeks now. Bicycle Commuting Season officially opened today. The weather was nice. Actually it was downright warm this evening. The ride to work was a little interesting, I broke a spoke on a fast descent. The wheel wasn't TOO bad out of true to ride it. It did slow my pace to make sure it was stable though. A quick stop at the bike shop on the way home for a spoke and trued wheel fixed it all up though. (see missing spoke pictured above)

This also makes me feel smile that it's going to be outdoor photo session time. The trees still have the winter bare limbs and the grass isn't quite as green as my saturation slider makes it look... but we are getting there.

It was also a good day to do some scouting with the LX-5 today on the ride for an editorial shoot I want to do showcasing Harrisburg. I think I'm going to be focusing on Riverfront park for my project because it falls in line with my fitness interests of late. It's an attractive location (just not yet... still wintery looking.) 

I'm also testing my Eye-Fi card in my LX-5 and I'm waiting for the announced "direct mode" feature they announced at CES. This would have let me port these images from my LX-5 direct to my iPhone while on the trail without needing a WiFi hotspot and then I could have social shared them right away.

For the photo above, I had a little fun with the processing. I took the LX-5 RAW file into Lightroom and did some basic exposure adjustments and a "little" creative settings. Nothing major. Then I ported those JPGs back into my iPhone and used the app Diptic for the layout (cool little app for multi-panel images). That image was then imported into Instagram for some final finesse and sharing to my flickr feed, facebook wall and twitter. It's a fun little experiment to see what all you can do with iPhone apps when you are using a little better source material then my iPhone 3G camera.

Let me know what you think. Drop me a comment.

iPhone pic of the day

Quick pre-ride photo before today's mtn bike ride.

Best Camera – According to Chase Jarvis

Chase Jarvis has long preached that the best camera is the one you have with you. It’s hard to argue that point. It is really hard to take a photograph without a camera. Chase has been advocating the iphone camera for sharing and exploring images around you. It’s actually not a bad little system. I take SOME pics with my iphone here and there, but I certainly forget about using it as a serious artistic tool and it ends up being a "snapshot tool".

motoed iPhone Gallery - see entire gallery

Joe Edelman even mentioned on a recent LightSource Podcast over at StudioLighting.net that he even uses his iphone photos for backgrounds in high-res compositions. I find that amazing and I’m curious to see one of these style images full size (sounds like a weekend test project to me.)

If you haven’t heard from one of the million sources already publishing it, Chase released a new iphone app today that coincides with the announcement of a new photo community, bestcamera.com and an iphone photo book, The Best Camera Is The One That's With You: iPhone Photography by Chase Jarvis (Voices That Matter)

One of the big things about the best camera iphone app that interest me is the single button upload to a bunch of sites (does it use flickr too? If not, why not? I hope it’s not because flickr could be viewed as a competitor for bestcamera.com!)

Update on Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 10:50PM by Ed Hidden

I guess I wasn't thinking at first when I posted this. Flickr lets you upload photos via email, which is how you can post to flickr from this app.