Should have, could have

Hooray I finally managed to scrape myself together to finish this page. It only took two weeks.

Tomorrow I am off to attend a writers festival and do a comic workshop. I will report back afterwards.

Image management

Here are some conclusions I came to about the use of social tagging for images. They rank from not recommended, to good, to fantastic, respectively.

Tumblr.com

Forgive me if I am wrong but I could not figure out what tumblr was all about. I was expecting that it would let you repost images you like with one click of a toolbar button or some such, but it seems you just have to ‘save as’, then upload. There was not much help on the site and I could not find much elsewhere in regards to tumblr. I am guessing you can get a lot of things for it with firefox.

Vi.sualize.us

I was actually impressed with this one. It was kind of what I was thinking of when I first set out to research this area. I was able to download a button for my safari tool bar and with one click I can have the option to post to my account; Once I have added tags.

The only draw back is that it’s only for reposting, there is no upload option. Which is actually not a big deal.

Picassa.google.com

This was a pleasant surprise. A nifty free program to collect and store your images with all the features you would expect, tagging easy searching etc. You can even upload to your own online album. The only problem is that the Mac version does not work on my PPC Mac, the beta release is only for intel based Macs

The main reason for looking into this was based around the idea of what would work best for a Visual Art student to store, sort and share their images. In short, what would be the best way to make your very own digital visual morgue. I do not think this idea strikes most people, as most would just say they will just look up an image again if needed, the whole internet is one big morgue right? That may be true but it is still kind of cool to collect your favourite images in some way.

Help with my project

I am working on a project for my library course. I would like to know more about the quality of various networking/sharing type sites. I could join everyone and try them all out but I figure a lot of people reading this blog may have experience already. I have had experience with some but I want to know what others people are using.

I am talking about sites like (But not limited to)

Tumblr

Stumbleupon

Digg

Delicious

Imgfave

Reddit

 

I am looking for the site that can best share your favourite images. I do not want to have to right click and save then upload. I want to be able to either copy the URL or click a button in a browser add on or something. Tags could be helpful too.

 

Or alternatively does anyone use software that does a similar thing but stores and sorts images on your own hardrive for future reference, shareware would be preferred, Mac and or PC.

 

So leave a comment or shoot me an email on your thoughts and experiences.

Shots

I have been discussing with students this week about the types of shots you can use in comic panels. The language of this is taken directly from film directing terms. Whilst there are a lot of direct links between comics and film, they remain uniquely different also.

Here is a list of types of shots, each have their own place to provide meaning to the viewer.

Extreme close-up

Close-up

Medium close-up

Medium shot

Full (figure)

Medium wide

Wide

Extreme wide (or distant)

This was taken from here which goes into more detail.

Will Eisner's books also have some useful information about framing shots and choosing shots.