A new audio podcast, 3 1/2 minutes long, and a simple take on the many advantages of using Posterous to blog.

Click here to download:

Podcast-WhyUsePosterous.mp3 (4192 KB)

Most of my photographs I like to imagine as still frames from a movie; it's one of the main reasons I favour a 21:9 aspect ratio (the nearest equivalent to Panavision's 35mm anamorphic cinema ratio of 2.39:1). There's something about a proper widescreen aspect that gives an illusion of there being more rather than the logical assumption that, being letter-boxed, there's less.

In this particular shot, the colours really lent themselves to a deeply cinematic treatment where saturation and brightness are lowered and contrast is raised, to attempt to replicate the native look of 35mm movie film. The warm and strong orange light from the sun, on a hot summer's day, was just perfect for tweaking in post-processing. A delicate vignette was added to aid the idea of a really old lens being used and (as always!) no HDR.

The subject matter is slightly amusing, I'm not too sure what was going on but the woman appeared to be about to eat the man's finger, and this is a typical example of how innocent movements in the course of every day life can, if freeze-framed, be pulled out of context and given a completely new meaning; such is the power of the camera.

Shot with my reliable Pentax K10D (soon to be replaced), and a 135mm SMC prime lens I bought in 1985 which still works exceptionally well, though on this occasion coupled to a cheapish x2 teleconverter to allow me to stand 60-80 feet away and capture moments like these undetected — one of the difficulties of candid photography.

Right, this may sound a little strange, but why use WordPress for my main website and then use Posterous for the actual blog? Yes, it sounds odd, but there are good reasons. Whilst WordPress is turning into an all singing CMS solution that's hugely configurable, it's also not the most elegant solution for quickly putting audio, video, and documents online at the drop of a hat. Which is where Posterous comes in. Though e-mail was touted as the favoured and easiest method to get content on to a Posterous blog, now that the "Post by web" option has been implemented it's even easier.

If I want to blog I want things to be fast, simple, and easy. That way there's no halt in any creative process and I can maximise my effective use of time. And Posterous seems to fit the bill here, perfectly. And the way I decided to integrate it into my website works along the same lines. Firstly I set up a DNS account with ZoneEdit, which was simple and FREE. Then I set up a Google Apps acount for the domain, which was simple and FREE — here's a pattern forming here. Then I set up (and I know you're with me) an account with Posterous (yes, which was simple and FREE). Using ZoneEdit's control panel I created a sub domain (blog.gregwallis.net) that I pointed at Posterous's servers and then linked that domain to my blog in the Posterous admin page. All super simple, everything worked, and completely free of charge. Sure I pay for hosting the main site separately, because it's a WordPress installation running on Linux, but that's about it. And it's worth noting that Google almost instantly crawls the site and ranks it. It really is close to a perfect solution.

For those that are on a very tight budget (and no shame in that) the addition of the new Pages feature that Posterous has just added, it's possible to have a small and streamlined website for absolutely zero, apart from the cost of the domain name itself. All that's required for an extra professional gloss is the modification of an existing theme to give the site a corporate identity. Now if you look at this blog you'll notice that there's no mention of Posterous except in the footer, where I have provided a link to the main Posterous site by way of courtesy and so as to not fall foul of their terms & conditions.  Not that I wish to hide the fact that it's run on Posterous(you'll have gathered by now I'm somewhat enamoured with it) just I hate the fly-out branding at the top of the page that is pretty much normal. Quite easy to modify and they still get a credit.

This works for me, and I think it would work for a lot of other people too, particularly very small or part time businesses. Simplicity is the key, and all too many people get carried away with the idea of building a huge flashing online presence, but I humbly suggest that starting small and simple is the best way to go.

So I thought I'd have a play with the cloud and signed up for Amazon's S3 service. Simple registration, nice and quick, too. Downloaded Cloudberry Explorer and logged in to the system. A few files were uploaded, a few downloaded and links tested left, right, and centre. All worked perfectly, I was most impressed.

But how much was it really going to cost? I mean the amount that actually appeared on my credit card and not some under-estimated sum that someone in Amazon's marketing department thought they could just about get away with quoting. No minimum amount was being bandied about and after a few Google searches I couldn't find anything to doubt that. So I uploaded some more, including some HD video, and nervously looked at the Total Charges Due section on the Amazon AWS website. 5 cents. Yes, you did read that right, just $0.05 as the anticpated cost for the whole month. I was doubtful and come the end of the first month awaited the real world bill that was going to pop up on my card.

Nothing. Nothing happened: no charge, no demand for payment, nothing. Except that looking at my online statement there was a note in red on it that said I was forgiven: "Amount forgiven June 4th $0.05 " And the same the next month. Confused, I Googled. Turns out that a lot of credit card providers won't accept an amount that's under $1.00 so although Amazon try to bill me, they can't. Personally, I'd have been happy for them to let it accrue or to charge a nominal sum up front and deuct it from that, but no, that's not what they do. So, it appears, that until I seriously ramp up my using of the Amazon S3 service, by a factor of twenty, then it rather seems that it's free. How odd, but how wonderful, too.

Feel free, Amazon, to find a way to take my money (I have PayPal, but you don't take that, do you) but until you do I'm most happy with S3 and shall continue to use it with your compliments.

With the best will in the world, I meant to keep this blog up and running, with new (and hopefully interesting) snippets about various issues on web design, photography, and video production. Many issues have come between me and this objective but I shall now make a concerted effort to produce a regular contribution that will, hopefully, be of some use to a few people out there. So stay tuned, anyone that's interested, there's a fair bit coming over the next few weeks and months.