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The
internet is a big, and sometimes scary, place, but some of the
things that you can do online are fascinating. Many of you reading
this article have camera-enabled phones; some of you might even
have digital cameras or, better still, digital camcorders. The
internet offers you several ways to showcase your creativity.
The easiest way for you to do this is to use a plain vanilla service
such as Yahoo's Flickr (www.flickr.com) or hp's Snapfish (www.snapfish.com).
Both are very simple services but offer limited bandwidth to users.
Flickr, which is the more popular service, and in my opinion,
easier to use, has an upper limit of 200 pictures you can upload
using the free service. But, you can directly post them on to
a blog if you have one and there are several other tricks you
can pull off with Flickr.
However, though Flickr is good, there is
also Picasa (www.picasa.com) from Google which is an absolutely
fantastic bit of software (for free). Picasa began as a free photo
editor with the ability to mildly tweak your images, but it has
become a lot more. Flickr processes images automatically, whether
you want to or not and Snapfish's software, though good, isn't
as easy to use as Picasa. After you've tweaked your images, you
can, if you have a Google account, press a button and upload them
on to Picasa's web album.
Today's mobile phones, too, can do a lot
more. The Nokia N93 that we used is a tremendous visual device
(see The Hardware). So, we ended up taking quite a few videos;
now there was the little bit about sharing them. You could, if
you wanted the data charges to shoot through the roof, use Nokia's
fairly decent M-blog (www.nokiamblog.in) application to host both
images and video, but for the latter, one would recommend either
YouTube (www.youtube.com) or Google Video (video.google.com).
Now, while everybody raves about YouTube, the fact is that it
really isn't that easy to surf about. I prefer Google Video, which
is better indexed. However, YouTube's upload procedure is quite
simple and it does accept a multitude of video formats, including
3gp, the standard video compression format used by most cell phones.
Interestingly, there are a lot of YouTube-like
sites being started in India; I noticed MeraVideo (www.meravideo.com)
which really needs to sanitise its content slightly. See the images
and videos from the N93 at printedcircuit.blogspot.com, and there
is a lot more coming there.
-Kushan Mitra
| THE HARDWARE |
 The
Nokia n93 is possibly one of the bulkiest phones out there.
It looks like a brick, feels like a brick, is occasionally
tedious to operate, but, my god, it can shoot great pictures
and video. There are a few things you wish Nokia had done
better-like making it a bit easier to use, the revised key
format does take some getting used to and the outside screen
could have been larger. However, the quality of images through
the Carl Zeiss lens and its inbuilt optical zoom (which explains
the bulk of the camera) is very good, more than sufficient
for print quality! |
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