How Does Twitter Integrate with Photo Sharing and Social Media Networks?

Twitter is known for being a major social media network for the cable broadcast television industry, and I've had good success seeing some of my more interesting videos posted to +YouTube  go viral with the help of people tweeting about them.

According to Twitter, the appearance of tweets embedded in blogs has been improved:

Rich photo experience now in embedded Tweets
https://blog.twitter.com/2013/rich-photo-experience-now-in-embedded-tweets-3

I've tweeted photos from various networks in recent days, and I'll use Twitter's generated code to embed a few examples here.

First, lets see how a photo tweeted from Flickr embeds here in a blog:

New photo captured this week in Yosemite Valley: Storm Cloud Reflection at Valley View http://t.co/oF5kC16TIU Snowed Wed nt on Tioga Pass!
— Jeff Sullivan (@JeffSullPhoto) September 27, 2013

And a Flickr photo shared to Tumblr, then tweeted from there:

Photo: Sunrise Moon Set by Mt. Whitney on Flickr. As a general rule of thumb the full moon rises at sunset... http://t.co/FPLhNnUacb
— Jeff Sullivan (@JeffSullPhoto) September 27, 2013

Now let's try 500px:

Pic “Yosemite Falls Moonbow Star Trails” by Jeff Sullivan (@JeffSullPhoto) #500px http://t.co/yFePAcyUOg #startrails #yosemite #photography
— Star Trails Photos (@startrailsphoto) March 15, 2013

How does Facebook do?

Dust Spot Check at Sunrise this Morning I'm going to visit several locations this week, so I stepped outside... http://t.co/aGwXv0WjPu
— Jeff Sullivan (@JeffSullPhoto) September 18, 2013

What about Facebook's Instagram?

That's A Moray - today is a free day at CA Academy of Sciences at SF's Golden Gate Park. http://t.co/F0cpgfhWrW
— Jeff Sullivan (@JeffSullPhoto) September 29, 2013

And now a picture uploaded directly to Twitter:

Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park now 70% contained at 231,088 acres. pic.twitter.com/3IrLj6BtKC
— Jeff Sullivan (@JeffSullPhoto) September 3, 2013

How about video? Here's one of my videos recently popular on Vimeo:

#RimFire #timelapse http://t.co/vpiqm9CVjV by @JeffSullPhoto
— LA Times Photography (@latimesphotos) August 30, 2013

Now a video shared from YouTube:

I liked a @YouTube video from @jeffsullphoto http://t.co/gxcLVEKFsn Perseid Meteor Shower 2013
— Stephanie Weil (@stephaniexoxo14) August 15, 2013

How about URL shorteners, do they affect results? Here's a Flickr photo shared via Bit.ly:

The Winner is Stargazing by Jeffrey Sullivan. Congratulations Jeffrey! @jeffsullphoto http://t.co/RqPHn6a #astrophoto11
— Royal Observatory (@ROGAstronomers) September 8, 2011

At first I see no photos at all, and the same thing happens on my WordPress blog, but it seems that the Twitter posts just take a while to render on a blog..

Anticipating Sun and Moon Alignments

Originally posted in 2010, I occasionally bump this forward in my blog to tell people that they can plan to take an amazing sunrise moonset or sunset moonrise shot on an upcoming date.  As I update this on September 17, 3013, here on the California/Nevada border the moon will rise at 5:50 pm tonight and be about 12 degrees up in the eastern sky at 7 pm sunset.  Somewhere with something tall to place the moon next to should work well, like Yosemite Valley.

Tomorrow the moon will rise around 6:25 then be about 5.8 degrees up in the sky at sunset (close to 7 pm).  That will work best somewhere with a relatively low horizon.  These times will vary by your specific location on the globe, and the application described below can correct the times for your position.

I used to line up moon shots the old-fashioned way... looking up the full moon rise, arriving and seeing where the moon was emerging, predicting where it was going, and changing my position several times to try to be in just the right place at just the right time.

Fortunately there's an application that takes a lot of the guesswork out of lining up the sun and moon with natural or man-made objects to take stunning photos. The application The Photographer's Ephemeris allows you to plan a shooting location for a fairly exact alignment with particular landmarks: Free Download for PC or Mac

It runs on Google Earth satellite photos, so you can easily see your planned shooting position, it shows you the azimuth angle (compass direction) of the sun and moon at any give time from there, and you can read the elevation angle as well.  If the lineup isn't just right as the sun or moon is coming over the horizon, you can adjust your shooting position (at various times and stages in the sun or moon rise) to get just the alignment you want.

View the tutorials for some examples of the capabilities of, and applications for, this program.
Tutorials: stephentrainor.com/tools#tutorials  You'll be surprised at just how easy and intuitive it is.

Below are my results from researching on TPE a much more subtle event: anticipating and planning for the position of a crescent moon. I identified two positions a couple of blocks apart for two different times, then adjusted my position a few yards onsite to place the moon beside or behind the same courthouse, while avoiding trees or power lines.

So fire up TPE and go give this a try in your area on the next full moon rise (and set), or whenever!  Let me know how it goes.

 Remember to pick a target reasonably far away (say 1/2 mile to several miles) to put the moon alongside, so you can use a long zoom lens and capture the moon appearing really large beside it.

Enrollment Open for Last Bodie Night/Interior Access for 2013

It's always a little touch and go trying to clear the fee hurdles to access Bodie State Park at night or to get escorted access inside the buildings, but enrollment has reached a point for October 12/13 where I can offer the sessions individually as well.  Doing both will be a bit of a marathon since we'll have the night session Saturday 6 pm - 1 am, then be right back at the front gate at 6 am for sunrise and access to interiors.  But the sun sets early so it's our night access with the longest period of darkness, and with the sun rising later we actually get to sleep in  a bit (if you can call it that at 6 am) to be back in time for sunrise.

The permanent description page for my Bodie workshops here on this blog has been updated:
http://activesole.blogspot.com/p/bodie-night-photography-workshops-2013.html

Best of all, the Bodie Foundation is kindly discounting the back-to-back sessions a bit for this weekend, so forget about my typical prices of $325 each.  Enrollment buttons for either session ($295) or both ($545) appear on the front page of my blog: www.MyPhotoGuides.com.

Rim Fire Closes Areas of Yosemite National Park

At 10:41 am this morning Yosemite National Park distributed a map of closed areas within the park, generally north of CA-120 and east of Glen Aulin, as shown on this map:

Details of the Yosemite National Park closures may be found at:
http://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/rimfire.htm

On Twitter Cal Fire sent out a tweet on current conditions this morning at 7:35 am:

#RimFire [update] near #Yosemite (Tuolumne County) is now 149,780 acres & 15% contained. http://inciweb.org/incident/3660/ 

Cal Fire's page for incident updates is found at:
http://inciweb.org/incident/3660/

The latest Cal Fire map color-coded to show daily progress of the fire is available at:
http://inciweb.nwcg.gov/photos/CASTF/2013-08-17-1950-Rim/picts/2013_08_26-14.11.21.961-CDT.jpeg

Perseid Meteor Shower 2013

Perseid Meteor Shower August 2013:

Don't watch in this tiny window though... start it, then click "watch on YouTube" at the bottom, then the little gear icon to make it go 1080p or 720p HD, then click on the icon to make it go full screen.  Enjoy!

I have a copy on Vimeo as well in case you might like to compare the two:


Perseid Meteor Shower 2013 from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

Watch this in 720P or 1080P HD resolution. Over six minutes of footage from recent nights in 2013 during the Perseid Meteor Shower. The slower, mostly horizontal lights are airplanes. The brief flashes of mostly vertical streaks are the meteors (a few slower ones are satellites). Many meteors are faint, so you'll only see most of them if you follow the instructions above and change the viewing resolution to HD and expand the video full screen.
For the soundtrack, the timelapse video of the Perseid meteor shower is set to the InFiction String Remix of David Bowie's "Let's Dance", as featured in the recent Kia commercial (used with permission).

All images © 2013 Jeff Sullivan. To license Perseid meteor shower or other time-lapse footage, please contact me. All unauthorized uses will be pursued.

Milky Way Photography Workshop

Milky Way Reflection and meteor at Topaz Lake on the California/Nevada border, 2013

The best time to view the Milky Way in the Northern Hemisphere is close to the Summer solstice June 21, which is coming up fast. My best workshops for capturing the Milky Way will be June 14 and June 29 in Bodie State Historic Park:
http://activesole.blogspot.com/p/bodie-night-photography-workshops-2013.html

I still have a couple of spaces left in each session. The June 29 date may be the better of the two for Milky Way shots, since The moon rises late, so we'll shoot mostly under a dark starry night sky.  As an added bonus, fellow astrophotographer Steven Christenson will be co-leading this one.  We've both won awards for our photography in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest conducted by the Royal Observatory, Greenwich in London (the observatory is home of GMT, Greenwich Mean Time, and all GPS coordinates in the world are defined relative to their site).  June 29 is also the same date as the Google+ 2 year anniversary photowalks, so we may offer a free photowalk in the eastern Sierra earlier that day.  Contact me if you'd like to join us!

Milky Way, a set on Flickr.

Bodie Foundation 2014 Calendar, Winning Shot!

Congratulations +Maximilian Laue on your contest-winning shot from our night photography workshop at Bodie last year!
I can't wait to see it on the 2014 Bodie Foundation calendar!

I can't seem to blog your photo provide a URL directly to it, but I can link to my share of it:
https://plus.google.com/104896696773020847048/posts/41fskApuWgE

I'm also thrilled to hear that you can join us again this year, on the dual night/morning sessions Oct 12/13 added today:

June 29th night
August 9th night
August 24 night
Oct 12 night + Oct 13 dawn/interior

Info:
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/bodie-night-photography-workshops/
Registration:
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/

Bodie State Historic Park, a set on Flickr.