My Technically Media colleagues Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and I kept running into situations where we needed headshots or team photos.

Even as a startup, for conferences and speaking engagements, we’d send out photos taken by friends or shots that had landed on Facebook and we realized we needed something a bit more formal.

So, as noted last week on our company blog, we worked with Philadelphia Photographer Colin M. Lenton, whom we know from our college newspaper days, at his rental photo studio in the Frankford section of Northeast Philadelphia. We’re really pleased with the results. See the low resolution versions on our company Facebook page here.

(As noted here a couple months ago, we actually had a few fun shots taken by another great Philadelphia photographer, Neal Santos, but that just in preparation for another photo shoot altogether and weren’t formal headshots.)

Technically Media co-founders Sean Blanda, Brian James and Christopher Wink. Photo by Neal Santos

All photos by Neal Santos while preparing for a Technically Philly Technology Leaders Breakfast photo shoot back in March.

See the other team photos here. Below is one of the photos from the next morning’s leaders breakfast, which

Click to enlarge.

Photographer Colin Lenton, whom I came to know during our college newspaper days, and a few of his colleagues have rented out beautiful space in the Frankford neighborhood and have made it into a unique studio space.

This weekend, Philadelphia Productions, what they call themselves, held a great grand opening party.

They had a camera set up that could take portraits with a click of a button and everyone had fun with it. See examples here.

Lenton and I did as well.

After my first asset analysis joining Back on My Feet in January, it was beyond the pale of question that we needed a camera that could get our organization content — photos and video — up and moving quickly.

I was looking for a camera that was the following:

• More durable than the personal camera I had, enjoyed but kept having it fail on me
• Better lens for clearer video zoom and photo quality
• No more than $500 and preferably nearer to $200

Upon some research and inquiries, I recommended we spend more than $300 on the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H20. Complimentary CNet review here.

It was more expensive, has a somewhat awkward lens cap (which is conveniently not displayed  in the above photo) because of its extension zoom and is altogether quite a bit bulkier than most we looked at (if not all), but it had everything I was looking for and that 10X zoom available during video mode was a big sell and something I continue to rave about today.

Since that, two of our chapters have had the popular Flip cameras donated, costing around $100. As Tech Crunch has consistently exclaimed after each of the Flip models, while it is a powerful, inexpensive tool, it really isn’t the best choice for anyone determined to put together regular content.

• It doesn’t shoot quality photos
• Its audio and video quality isn’t HD quality
• Zoom functionality is limited
• While more durable, its functionality wasn’t as versatile or helpful as the similarly priced cheaper point-and-click I personally had

I found the most important difference between the far higher quality (and more expensive) Sony Cyber-shot and the newest Flip during our last two Back on My Feet chapter launch breakfasts.

I attended our Boston launch in May and used the Sony to shoot video of alumnus Kevin Brown speak, as you can seen below.

In September, another staff member was in Chicago for that launch using the Flip and shot video in similar light, from a nearer distance and with similar background noise. As you can see below, it is simply less audible.

So take that as the clearest lesson.

If you want only video content, plenty of it and will be doing close-range shoots in quiet surroundings, the Flip is really very valuable. Otherwise you want to look elsewhere, and if photos and video are important and will be something you’ll do often, I’d strongly recommend the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H20, which I remain very happy with.

Phil Pappas, of West Frankford Town Watch, investigating an alarm near Comly and Bustleton on early Saturday morning July 10. Click to enlarge. It's my photo.

Earlier this month, I went on a ride-along with the West Frankford Town Watch in lower Northeast Philadelphia. For the love of hyperlocal journalism and community coverage, I put together a 2,500 word profile of the organization, with a handful of photos of mine. It was good to remember that I got into this whole scene for a love of writing. Give it a read and let me know what you think.

Mike Mawson smells something.

It’s past midnight on Comly Street near Bustleton in Mayfair. The sun went down hours ago, but forgot to take this sticky July heat with it. Mawson is riding shotgun in the sensible four-door sedan that his partner Phil Pappas drives. The West Frankford Town Watch patrol was circling around to head back south of Cheltenham Avenue to drive the streets of its namesake neighborhood when Mawson caught a whiff of something off in the still nighttime air.

“It smells like something is burning,” confirms soft-featured Pappas, 53, sitting upright with two hands on the steering wheel and dressed with purpose in matching earthtones. “I’ll pull over.” MORE

Read the rest of it here.

A portrait of romance as captured by Keith Angelitis.

My first clip for the Fishtown Spirit ran in last Thursday’s issue, and my second ran yesterday.

Keith Angelitis just started a fire in the front room of his Frankford Avenue studio. He has a jacket on and a ball cap pulled over his ruffled brown hair. Big front windows welcome the sunlight that pours in and fills his 15-foot ceilings.

He is relaxing in a wooden chair, a prominent member of an otherwise sparsely furnished room, warmed by an old wood-burning stove. In the corner is an over-sized closet that Angelitis built during the beginning of his continuous renovation of 2452 Frankford Ave. Read more here.

Below the scoop on why I got involved with the Spirit.

Some people join a bridge club. When I move into a neighborhood, I find out how people get their news and information and try to get involved.

I bought a house in the Philadelphia riverward neighborhood of Fishtown last month, so of course I’ll use the Fishtown Spirit — one of two local weeklies — for some extra cash and, more important, the chance to meet people in my new neighborhood.  Since spring 2004, the Spirit is the only newsweekly based in the neighborhood — its major competitor the Star was purchased by the Inquirer‘s parent company and its headquarters were moved to suburban Trevose, Pa.

After moving in, I reached out to Maryanne Milligan, the Spirit’s editor whom I had interviewed for a story I did for the Inquirer, she connected me with the first story — which ran below the fold on the front page of last week’s issue.

Perhaps more to come.

Pike Place Market in Seattle.Photo by Alex Irwin. See more at AlexIrwin.wordpress.com

Last month, Alex Irwin, a good friend and a very hip arts blogger and Philadelphia music writer, posted that he gave over publishing rights of two of his photos to an online travel guide for Seattle, where he was visiting his girlfriend when snapped the pictures.

Wrong move, I say. Let me tell you why.

I hardly waited in posting a comment on his blog:

I was with Alex at one time. I questioned whether I could market myself as a photographer considering that, like Alex, I had no real formal training. Alex is a trained journalist, a Progressive Business Publications editor and a professional arts and music blogger with a growing portfolio, which increasingly includes taking photos and video. Welcome to the new age of journalism where you need to be able to do everything, in at least a serviceable fashion.

Crowd-sourced Web sites like Schmap, the online/desktop travel guide site to which Alex gave his photos, are making money on the backs of free-content providers

After attending and taking photos at the Obama inauguration, I got a similar offer via Flickr:

I found your photo on flickr and I would love to use it for a story on NowPublic.com. We are a crowd sourced news website powered entirely by the ideas, stories, photographs and eyewitness accounts of people like you. We need your photos for our live inauguration coverage!

I declined the no-pay offer, and I hope more people, particularly anyone in the media field of any note, would, too. Alex Irwin can take a photo better than the average slob. He is a trained journalist, so I think he, like the rest of us, should be paid for it. It’s about honesty and transparency, I know I am not an exclusively trained photographer, but it comes part and parcel now with my product as a high-caliber multimedia freelance journalist. I won’t offer my work for free and think anyone who does hurts the rest of us.

As I put it in a previous post:

I think in this age of journalism, we all need to diversify our talents, but do so honestly. I am not going to make a pitch or close a deal with photography, and certainly not with Web design. But it can sweeten the deal. That is the difference.

Lead with what you know best, supplement with what you’ve learned or can manage. [Source]

So what do you think? Am I just being as stubborn as a newspaper wanting to charge for online content? Is this anti-capitalistic, or am I just hoping to set a precedent to fight the flow that content creation is a much less profitable act than content dissemination?

Talk to me.

Where do you store your photos online? I’ve used at least five different services and currently have three active accounts and can’t say I’m sold on any of them.

Read my thoughts and share your own. Am I missing out on the go-to place to store, save and share photographs?

Flickr

Flickr, it seems to me, is the It choice. All the serious photographers I know – not including me in that distinction, though I do have a Flickr account – actively use the Yahoo photo service.

For a professional photographer, like the friends of mine who use Flickr most actively, paying for a premium account makes sense. They get unlimited storage capacity and easy use of Picknik, the very cool online photo editing application, within Flickr.

For a free, basic account, like me, my limit is 100 mega-bytes per month, which is a sizable increase since 2006 but can be easily tapped, anyway. (I exceeded my limit by uploading 50 photos last month, mostly taken with this camera, on the heels of my European backpacking trip).

What’s more and, really, let’s put it out there, I don’t want a Yahoo e-mail account. I had a wonderful ride with cwink32 [at] yahoo.com, but all but abandoned it in 2005 when the spam got overwhelming and Gmail was ready to offer everything you could pay for on Yahoo Premium. (I should note my second e-mail address ever was mj23superman [at] yahoo.com, only slightly after veryhotmale32 [at] hotmail.com).

So I had to go and create a new Yahoo account when I wanted to join Flickr, and, yeah, I haven’t opened that e-mail account since. I can think of at least three friends who won’t use Flickr just for this reason. Lame.

Still I have a Flickr account and, because of the upload quota, tend to put only better photographs. Without a quota or even a larger one and no Yahoo-e-mail requirement, Flickr would be an all-go for me.

Slide

Slide, no seriously. OK, mostly because there is no upload quota, I use Slide to host photos, so I don’t have to upload photos to this Web site. But I also find their photo slideshows to be the easiest to create and post online – yeah, that’s why every fourteen-year-old girl with a MySpace page, and me, has a Slide slideshow there.

However, there is no easy editing application like Flickr, the site is janky and since a recent revision, it’s a pain for me to find my slideshows. I also would think if Slide brands itself as a slideshow market leader, should be a way for me to review all of my photos – like Flickr’s photostream – and more easily reorganize them into a new slideshow without having to completely re-upload them.

Obviously Flickr and others are worlds ahead of Slide with options but then, I suppose that’s why it can be so darn easy and cost-free. So I have a Slide account, where I dump all other photos I want online, either to share or just to host so I can post here or elsewhere online.

If Slide offered any general catch of all my photos and worked with Picknik or something similar, perhaps Slide could be my one-stop for photos – though I would have to overcome its stigma and lame, lame slideshow themes (like red carpet photo shoot photo filters! and Avril Lavigne music options!).

Picasa

Google purchased Picasa in 2004. I don’t know a lick about why Google didn’t work on its own photo site to add to its growing cluster of Google applications, and I really don’t care. It isn’t in the same stratosphere as Google’s other online aps, if you ask me, though I do have an account.

Its best asset is integration with Gmail, which is why I gave it a chance, but I don’t think the integration has happened to the degree it ought to. If someone e-mails me a photo, I want the options to directly upload it to my Picasaweb in a particular album, with text, a new title and more. Like Slide, from what I know, there isn’t an in-service editing application. I also don’t think Picasa can display photos with any degree of artistic integrity; Flickr is best for this, and even Slide slideshows are displayed on a nice-looking black background.

I have a Picasa account, but only because I use Gmail and have hopes for it. If it offered better Gmail integration – or made it easier to find if it is – and some editing option, I’d likely move to it as my only photo-hosting site.

Others

There are others that I’ve messed with in slightly different capacities. Shutterfly and Kodak.com have older audiences, for being relatively easy to upload and offering the popular ease to print a photo book (These and other sites were rated in that capacity by Slate in 2006 – though it makes no mention of Blurb, about which I’ve heard good things).

But for our purposes, both do offer hosting and sharing opportunities, though I haven’t much used them. They do have editing options, though they don’t have the social networking devices of Flickr.

I know Photobucket and Webshots attract a crowd of younger folks with digital cameras, but I’ve never tried them, nor been drawn to do so.

So, what’s a guy like me to do.

Any thoughts or advice? Any I’m missing or should explore? Have I given your choice a bad name? Let me know below.

Photo from SeeThisItem.com.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt

Google announced its hosting of 10 million Time-Life photographs last month.

The Google Life-magazine archive is a sign of more to come, but is pretty cool already. I’ve chosen five of the better images I found by checking “Philadelphia source: Life” in a Google image search. (hat tip to 10,000 words)

Right now, there are more than 200 items for Philadelphia, though the search seems to have some quirks. I couldn’t find items during one search, but if I used the same search terms ten minutes later, it might appear – other times, no Philadelphia images would register at all. Things that will be corrected I will imagine. Whether more items are to be added I don’t know, but for now, the oldest is a painting of a scene from the 1790s and the photos run to the 1980s.

See my ten favorites below, in chronological order.

Politician William C. Bullitt standing in front of run down houses during his campaign for mayor of Philadelphia. (Photo by Bernard Hoffman, October 1943)

I really wish I could find the address of this building. Hell, it might still be standing, waiting onmotion from Licenses and Inspections.

There are a number of photos of Bullitt, so I imagine Life wrote a profile on his failed mayoral bid – the Democrat and future U.S. Ambassador to France and the Soviet Union lost to Bernard Samuel, Philadelphia’s last Republican chief executive. Another good one of Bullitt can be seen here, where he stands in front of a crumbling Carpenter’s Hall. It stands today and the Hall, built in 1790 and home of the oldest union in the country, was a central focus of the major rehabilitation of Indepenence Mall and Society Hill that didn’t come until the late 1960s.

Of course, the Naval Yard has been one of the most important Philly landmarks you’ll never visit. Check this cool shot of interesting art outside one of the landmarks you will visit.

Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack (C) w. his team at ballpark during game vs. New York Yankees on day in his honor (Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1947)

There are about a billion cool shots of the Phillies, including this one, which is probably my actual favorite of them (and old timey shots like here and here). There are some of the Eagles, none of the Flyers, and a couple of Wilt Chamberlain on the 76ers that pained me not to include but you should check out here.

Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower facing the crowd in Philadelphia for Republican National Convention. (Hank Walker, September 1952)

Rocky Marciano lands a left hook on “Jersey” Joe Walcott in this World Heavyweight championship bout in Philadelphia. (Y. Joel, Sept. 23, 1952)

This surprise victory for Marciano made him the only undefeated, undisputed world heavyweight champion in boxing history. This is a fantastic shot by Life, but, I have to say, I think they were beat by UPI.

Is that classic Big Five basketball in the Palestra?

Comedian Bill Cosby (R) visting older man in his old neighborhood. (Photo by Charles H. Phillips, 1968)

Cartoonist Tony Auth in his office at the Philadelphia Inquirer. (Photo by Ted Thai in September 1980)

I love photography portraits. There are a number of Auth, so I imagine Life did a profile of the Pulitzer Prize-winner. This is my favorite of the batch.

What are your favorites from Philadelphia or elsewhere? Let me know below.