One of the greatest things and worst things I ever did was purchase a digital camera.  In the past 4 years, I’ve built an online photo gallery of over 4GB and close to 8000 images.  I’m certainly no expert at digital photography and don’t really have the patience to become one, but I love “the cool stuff” and this blog post is about The Cool Stuff.

Like everyone else with a digital camera I love to stand in a spot and take a series of pictures in hopes of firing up Photoshop and stitching them together. Then when I get back home to the computer and decide to fire up photoshop, the reality that I know absolutely nothing about Photoshop or how to stitch a series of pictures together cleanly enough that they don’t look like a bunch of pictures just glued together hits home and I soon realized no only did I look like a dork spinning around trying to get a series of pictures but now I’m dork with a bunch of pictures from standing there spinning around! 

I asked a friend of mine (who is a digital camera and photoshop guru) what’s a great, easy to use (and ideally cheap) application for creating panoramic photos from a series of separate shots.  The application he recommended as easy to use (and affordable) was Panavue image assembler from panavue.com (at $64 it’s moderately affordable).

So as they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words and here’s a few of the pictures created with Panavue using default setting and pretty much just clicking “NEXT, NEXT, NEXT, FINISH”.  I’m sure as I spend more time creating more panoramic shots I’ll learn how to use it and how to create better pictures.

Chicago February 05

This picture was created from two different shots pasted together. I found creating shots from 2 pictures really gave the best results.

 

The above picture was created from these two pictures:

Greece 2006

 

Which started out as these two pictures

 Buckingham Palace 2006

This is actually pretty interesting. Look at the lady with the white blouse and gray hair walking towards me and then at the lady smoking to the right of me. It’s the same person!

These are the pictures that created this great view:

Washington DC Spring 2007

This was taken from our hotel at the Mandarin Oriental in DC. It’s overlooking the Treasury (that’s the money factory on the left) and was composed from two separate photos.

At the base of the Washington Monument.

In the Mall by the Smithsonian.

   

 Key West Summer 2007

I know with a little effort and tweaking the settings of the application these images could come out even better. Now in a couple of them you can see where the images blend together (especially in Buckingham Palace and the Key West daytime picture above. However, I think the pictures really show just how powerful this type of application can be and just what kind of great pictures even an amateur like myself can take with a digital camera and a little digital photo cleanup.

Several years ago I created the little graphic ufo you see here. It’s actually a file from coreldraw like 2.0 or so. I took the image, put a little colored blur on the lights, made them rotate with using gifanimator and then published it on my site.

A couple years ago I saw the image posted on someone’s website. Turns out they purchased it on a shareware images cd from a computer show for $20 with a compilation of “royalty free graphics”.  Thing is I never gave anyone permission to distribute my image and in fact I probably couldn’t as it’s not really ‘my’ image.   How’d I know it was mine? The gif comments in the image shows it was created with the trial version of gif animator (same trial I used in fact) and it was the same small section animated.

Applied Innovations has long been recognized as a leading windows hosting provider with a global reach. We’ve been selected to power over 10,000 websites for clients across the globe as well as the United States. Unfortunately, we never really targeted our local market. South Florida is home to atleast 8 different hosting companies of equal or larger size. In fact, Verio and Valueweb are both headquartered just a short drive from our office.

Recently we began marketing our services more locally and it’s working extremely well. One of the things we did was join the Boynton Beach Chamber of Commerce. I got my start in engineering as an Electrical Engineer for Motorola Messaging when it based in Boynton Beach. When the time came to join a Chamber of Commerce the Boynton Chamber was an easy choice, having previously been home to such a major technology giant as Motorola.

The Boynton Beach chamber recently commissioned a video to be made spotlighting several of the local businesses and was asked to assist with the “internetizing” (my own term, coined by me, all rights reserved) of the video I recommended we use Google Videos. My role was nothing more than uploading the video to google.

Google Video was extremely easy to use. The company commissioned to create the video converted it to a MPEG4 at 15 FPS and the video came in just under 100MB. I uploaded this to google and within a few minutes the video was ready to view.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Boynton Beach Chamber of Commerce Video (please note this video is available on their site, I’m simply posting it here because I believe the Chamber does good work for the community and the area businesses)

 

Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend an hour making phone calls to my friends and family to raise money for the MDA. I’d like to thank everyone that donated or made a pledge, it’s most appreciated and I’m happy we were able to raise so much money.  I had a goal of $2600 but raised a total of only $680.00. Still $680 is not bad for an hour of phone time and I’m proud to be able to say we all came together to raise money for a worthwhile charity.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it brings ease and access to everyone for just about everything.  Like most the MDA has recognized the value the Internet brings and has evolved.  You can now make a donation online. In fact I have my own donations page available:

Click here to Donate

This is certainly a big change from the milk cartons we used pick up at the local 7-11 and then use as kids to collection donations door-to-door around the neighborhood to “help jerry’s kids”.

I know the MDA has been both praised and attack but one thing is certain they are definitely helping people with Muscular Distrophy so I encourage others to donate as well.

Oh and for my hour of time I got a nice little goodies bag and a pretty nice picture frame. It’s funny, I noticed if you got your $2600 bail you got a t-shirt, if you missed it you got a picture frame. Honestly, I have enough t-shirts, I’m not a college kid any more and although I still enjoy wearing t-shirts (like my Rocky Balboa T-shirts from 80stees.com ) they just don’t get the use they used to. The picture frame was a much nicer gift in my opinion.

Applied Innovations (www.appliedi.net) (applied-eye is how we say it, most of our hosting clients call it app-lid-E) was merely an idea in November of 1998, in February of 1999 we took on our first webhosting clients and officially launched the company as a Microsoft Windows webhosting company running NT4 and IIS4.0 and offering both ASP & PERL on windows!  When Windows 2000 launched we were among the first hosts to launch Windows 2000 hosting and joined the Windows 2000 Hosting early adopter program.

The move from NT4 to 2000 was probably the easiest migration we had ever made and to become a Windows 2000 only host was not difficult at all. Why? Because we only had 1 webserver and 110 websites!

Since our modest start Applied Innovations has continued to grow and today is recognized in the webhosting community as a premier windows webhost specilizing in E-Commerce and ASP.net webhosting.

It is with great pride I announce that we have finally completed the process of becoming a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with multiple competancies and specilizations.

Achieving status as Microsoft Gold Certified Partner represents our commitment to one of the core values Applied Innovations was founded on: to provide the best level of service, support and technical expertise to our clients possible.   Microsoft Gold Certified Partner represents the highest level of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies, and provides us the closest working relationship with Microsoft allowing us to provide an even higher level of service and support to our hosting customers. 

Applied Innovations currently maintains Gold Certified Partner competencies in: Networking Infrastructure Solutions and Advanced Infrastructure Solutions with a specialization in Hosting Solutions.

Applied Innovations Corp (www.appliedi.net), A Boca Raton, FL based webhosting provider was founded in 1999 to provide cost effective webhosting solutions to Small and Medium sized businesses allowing them to grow and successfully compete in the Online Marketplace. Today we host thousands of websites and have clients worldwide. Our specialization is ASP.net hosting, E-Commerce hosting and sharepoint hosting on the Microsoft Windows family of Operating Systems.