Holiday Helping

First of all, I want to wish you a happy and healthy holiday season. I hope you get to spend it with family, friends and all those you hold dear.

The holidays are also a time to think about giving back to our communities. I had the good fortune to do just that this past Saturday by participating in Toronto’s Annual Help Portrait event at the Ralph Thorton Centre in Riverside.

Help Portrait is a global movement of over 10,000 photographers who donate their time, gear and expertise to take professional portraits for those who wouldn’t normally have access to such a luxury. Rather than shooting, I helped with the planning and logistics of getting ten photo sets into a space that usually hosts community meetings and play groups.

Ultimately space, power and radio/optical slave issues were remedied and the event was an amazing success with over 100 portraits printed. Several media outlet stopped-by including the Toronto Star whose video of the event you can view here. As the camera pans around the space you can see me in the middle of it all trying my best to look helpful.

Hope you enjoy it, and I hope you enjoy the holidays.

Cheers,
Eric

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Tech Tip

Google Image Search:
A gift to help you fight image piracy

We all know that Google is pretty incredible – scary even – with its search capabilities. Well Google’s Image Search has entered the realm of science fiction with its latest option: the ability to use an image to search for an image.

Yes, that’s right. No more typing. Just drag and drop the image file (or an image like the image file) you want to find into the Google Image search bar and it scans the web for visual matches. Here are some screencaps to help you on your way:

Try it with one of your images. You may be surprised by the results. You may find that a blog you didn’t know about is praising your imagery or that a commercial site got tired of royalty-free stock and decided to ‘borrow’ some of yours.

If you make a revelatory discovery I’d love to hear about it.

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