Photo: Launch Ring Restored, Launch Complex 34, (Apollo Saturn) Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida – Roland Miller

Roland Miller is a family friend and I grew up with many of his photos in the house. He has been working on a project titled Abandoned in Place for more than twenty-five years. He is documenting in photographs the facilities and structures that were the foundation of the U.S. space program, like launch towers, gantries, factories, control rooms and panels.

Roland’s Kickstarter for an Abandoned in Place photo book is almost home! If you are interested in space, science, history, or photography, this is right in your sweet spot and I encourage you to check it out. You can get the book — with essays and memories from space program scientists and astronauts and writing by Ray Bradbury! — along with signed prints, and help preserve the stories and images of these places that are gradually being lost to time and the elements. Go go!

Bridgy by Ryan Barrett is another fantastic-looking and new-to-me tool for spinning up your own piece of the indie web. I’m really excited for the possibilities presented by it and webmention.io, both of which I found via Jeremy Keith. His Indie web building blocks post is one more great primer on how all this works.

I have so much to do.

Webmention.io is a super idea, basically webmentions as a service from Aaron Parecki, with code offered for runnning your own server. This looks lots more sophisticated than my implementation, and, hey, idea: This kind of mechanism might be a great way for sites (like mine!) over at the Tilde Clubs to turnkey implement webmentions in an otherwise limited server environment.

Maybe that’s something to tinker with this weekend!

Paul Ford had this idea, opened up a pop-up unix server called Tilde Club and invited friends and strangers to come put stuff on it. It’s pretty cool. I’m ~schussat over there.

I’m a long-time Lightroom user. Since its beta release it has been the place where my photos go. I have a slew of export actions and have hacked together methods of varying sophistication (such as the export script that produces a tiny gallery) to accomplish what I want to do. I dug into the data that Lightroom gives me about my photos, too: See, the Lightroom database is sqlite, and one can pull all kinds of things from it, such as this network map of my keyword relationships, or my then-annual exploration into My Year In Metadata.

Way back when I was running an Android phone, I had scripts and smart galleries to help sync photos from that phone into my Lightroom library and later populate galleries to sync to my iPad. It was pretty high-tech, you guys.

This is all a way of noting that I’m very much at home working on my photos in Lightroom, so that even when I got myself my first iPhone a couple of years ago and could get photos from the device onto my MacBook Pro, I didn’t have much use for iPhoto. Photostream wasn’t muh of a solution for me, because, until I recently got a shiny new Mac, I had a version of iPhoto that predated it; my cloud photos couldn’t magically sync to my laptop unless I invested in iPhoto, and I didn’t really want to do that. So I put up with periodically plugging in the phone to the Mac (horrors) or, later, using Dropbox’s photo upload capability, to get pictures out of my phone and into Lightroom.

Point is, there was still friction. But I think now I have a solution, thanks to the good photostream syncing that I now have on the new MacBook Pro with a current version of iPhoto, plus this great and now indispensable tool: PhotoStream2Folder. PhotoStream2Folder basically does what it says on the tin, and does it well: Identifies photos in your photostream (optionally within a specified range) and moves them into a usable location on your file system¹.

The Lightroom trick? Lightroom can monitor a directory and automatically import anything that lands in it. So with PhotoStream2Folder I just set up its output folder as the directory that I already have monitored from Lightroom. The next part is pretty close to magic: Within moments of landing in my photostream, new images are automatically in Lightroom. The mental overhead is just gone. I tried this in my kitchen: Took a photo of a cup of coffee (because I do), then wandered over to the MacBook Pro on the counter; the photo was already in my Lightroom library. I went to the Sunday farmers market, shot a bunch of photos with the very impressive iPhone 6 camera, and when I opened up the computer upon arriving home, all the photos were in my library, ready for me to edit, share via my extensive and baroque variety of Lightroom export/publish presets, no iPhoto interaction, copying, or re-importing required.

It’s brilliant.

One more thing: If iPhoto is importing my photostream images, too, won’t I end up with a bunch of duplicates? Very good question. Fire up iPhoto preferences > iCloud, and turn off “automatic import.” Then iPhoto will display photos from your photostream, but not import them into your catalog, and they’ll “age out” over time. Meanwhile, all those images will be seamlessly added to Lightroom, where you really want them.

The author of PhotoStream2Folder, Laurent Crivello, asks a small donation via paypal if you find the tool useful. I think it’s awesome, and want to stress that it can be used for anything, not just Lightroom; if you simply want to get photos out of your photostream, without relying on iPhoto as your photo management application, this is your go-to. With one quick solution it has taken all of the mental overhead and friction out of managing the photos I shoot on my phone.²

Apr 11, 2015 – Yosemite + Photos update: I am happy to add that with OS X 10.10.3 and the Photos update continue to work. I have yet to really try out Photos, but it apparently doesn’t come with any under-the-hood changes that interrupt the way PhotoStream2Folder picks up images from your photo stream. Sweet!

My friend Joel is working on a webmentions method of his own: Email!

I’m trying out keybase.io: alanschussman

The usual suspects have their extensive iOS and iPhone 6 reviews up and feeding page views to the masses. I have particularly appreciated a few:

• Ars Technica

This week’s Humble Bundle is the first in quite a while where I haven’t already owned most of the included games. Of the set, I only had Papers, Please, so I went for this one. And all weekend long I’ve been playing SteamWorld Dig. It’s fun, has great two-dimensional art, is challenging but never obtuse, with a nice learning curve.

Gamasutra has a cool writeup by the developers that describes the design decisions they made in the dig and jump mechanics. It’s a good read, and a great game.

There’s some research somewhere — or perhaps merely a critical contention — that focusing on taking pictures instead of appreciating the moment inhibits our formation of memory. That is, the argument goes, all our social media documenting makes those moments increasingly fleeting and uncaptured. Well, I spent a good chunk of yesterday slowly making my way through 2007 in photos,¹ and was struck again and again by those memories. I took more than 4,000 photos in 2007; when I scroll through those images I am astounded by what I remember.

I shared many of those photos at the time. I was trying out my first Project 365 on flickr, and I posted at least one and sometimes several pictures per day. It was a pretty big year for me: I lived on my own in Seattle for a while during a predoctoral internship; finished my dissertation and graduated; interviewed for some jobs; made a significant career change; bought a house; and captured hundreds more daily snippets of life because I was basically taking pictures all the time. Walking through not ony the pictures that I shared, but the photos that I didn’t share, brings me back this flood of recollections.

Don’t Forget to Remember This (At John Carey’s blog, which I discovered via Shawn Blanc) is a wonderful essay about why we take pictures and about the pressures that shape what we shoot, and for whom:

The challenges present in photography today are not in the devices we use to capture, it’s not in our approach, skill level, or what we think we need to create good photos; the problem today is in social pressure. Photography has quickly evolved in its short lifespan from revolutionary, to useful, to ubiquitous and full of expectation.

John Carey works through the conflict in contemporary photography between one’s own perspective and the aesthetic driven by likes, shares and faves. So much of what he says resonates deeply, all the moreso as I think about — and look at, again — the photos I never shared: My wife, my son, moments that might be snapshots or might be carefully composed but which were shut out of sharing because perhaps they weren’t fancy enough or evocative enough, or maybe just because I had already posted a couple that day.

Some of the pictures of my wife and son (born much later than the year of photos I have been poring over this weekend) are images I would love to share; they’re so beautiful, and pictures of people have so much vibrance and life to them, which I am always so happy to preserve. But they’re also private. The stars and comments of “great capture” might superficially validate me or make me feel like a portrait photographer with a fine eye. But a flickr friend’s heart would not feel what mine does when I find, again, that lucky photo of my wife suddenly laughing, so wonderfully bright and alive.

My current camera of choice is this wonderful Fuji X100S, but previously I shot with a Pentax K100D and a growing collection of prime lenses. It’s easy to be captivated by new, fun, fine gear: gear acquisition syndrome is driven just as heavily by the peer pressure to make photos like others’ photos and in turn the notion that doing so requires having their gear. But as I look back at these older years’ collections of photos I am also struck that some of those photos are really good. Not simply because I like the subject or I found a good moment, but technically good: They’re sharp, colorful, detailed. That’s a good little camera that’s now nearby on the shelf with its FA35mm lens mounted and ready to go; that combination perfectly fit my own photographic vision for years, and I loved going out and using it.²

John Carey again:

My compositions and developing have similar fingerprints in that they tell me a lot about how I felt when I made the photographs. Every click of the shutter for me is a moment worth remembering and it’s the memories that make photography so gratifying for me. I find so much to be thankful for when I look back through the images I have captured through the years.

Back to my own memories: Exploring the photos I made that year, I can’t say that I recall every single moment. Sometimes I was detailed enough to put in a pretty good caption. But in the context of the surrounding images, I get so much back: That was a photowalk around Bellevue; this was a hike on the Arizona trail (and that summer we hiked almost every day!); here’s the celebratory drink the night I decided to go for it; the job interview trip and Half Moon Bay with my grandfather; sitting in the backyard with the dogs and making coffee. Normal days and extraordinary days all lined up next to one another.

And on and on, now with my iPhone and Fuji (regarding which I must confess that I am beginning to feel some desire for the flexibility of point of view offered by an interchangeable lens system; that’s another desire re-kindled by my back catalog and many favorite 50mm images from the old Pentax); and even more with a boy now in preschool and a city and neighborhood that I still frequently walk, camera on my shoulder.