Here are a few of the best photos, followed by a video slideshow made using Animoto.

Kieran and Grandma Roush Reading a Book

Kieran and Jamie on Christmas Morning

Kieran in his New Play Tunnel

And now the video:

I’ve bought several batches of cards on eBay, and whenever I’m in the vicinity of an antique shop I make a pass to see what kinds of stereo views are on sale (there are usually at least a few). I probably have 300 to 400 cards now, which is still a small group by most stereo view collectors’ standards. I wrote about my early adventures in stereo view collecting at Xconomy in December 2008.

Lately I’ve decided to get a little bit more systematic about the collection. I’m gradually going through the cards, grouping them according to the date I purchased them, numbering them, and digitizing them with a scanner. I’m uploading the finished scans to a growing Flickr photoset of stereo views, where they’re open to all (under a Creative Commons non-commercial share-alike license).

Today I uploaded a group that’s part of a genre collectors call “sentimentals,” although it also has elements of comedy. It’s a boxed set of 25 cards called “Wedding Bells.” I’m not sure who the set’s publisher is or when it came out; the box doesn’t say. I’m guessing it’s from around 1895. The set shows a young couple courting, proposing, preparing for their wedding, getting married, etc.

The set doesn’t have much of the historic, documentary, or geographical value that make most of my other cards intriguing, but I do think it offers an interesting glimpse of the Victorian ideals around courtship and marriage, including the wedding fashions of the time. Card No. 25 is cute: it shows Grandma reading a letter from the young couple, with the caption “I Always Knew It Would Be a Boy.”

I’m also working on digitizing a fascinating collection of 50 stereo cards from approximately 1906 giving a comprehensive tour of the Sears, Roebuck & Co. complex in Chicago, Illinois. These cards have extensive captions on the backs, so I’m scanning those too.

[Update 3/7/10] I’ve finished scanning the Sears, Roebuck cards. They’re collected in this photoset at Flickr.

It’s a dilemma, actually, because the HDR “look” can be peculiar, artificial, even surreal. If you lived in a world where every photograph was made this way, you’d have a constant migraine. But for now, I’m a little bit addicted to HDR (see my Flickr photoset of HDR photos of New England here). And at the risk of getting you addicted, too, I want to talk this week about how the technique works, what you can do with it, and how it can help all of us question some of the conventions and expectations we’ve built up around the art of photography, and around the related art of looking at photographs.

HDR images are unusual because they don’t represent a single moment in time, like most photos, but rather are digital fusions of several images of the same scene, taken at different exposure levels. (In photography, the longer the exposure time, the more light gets captured by a camera’s film or digital sensor, and the brighter the resulting image.) To collect raw material for an HDR image, photographers generally take at least three pictures: one that’s underexposed, one that’s overexposed, and one at a normal exposure. This is called exposure bracketing.

(This is an excerpt from the November 6, 2009 edition of World Wide Wade. To continue reading, please see the full column on Xconomy.)

In October 2008 I visited the cemetery on a crisp, cold, bright Sunday after a rainy Saturday, and got lots of gorgeous shots of the foliage, which was still shiny with damp. While the leaves were showing brilliant color, I also used that visit to start experimenting with black and white shots.

Today (Halloween 2009) was a very different kind of day at Mt. Auburn — warm (in the high 60s) and very blustery, with fast-moving clouds in the sky that kept throwing different kinds of shadows. My rechargeable camera batteries were dying, so I didn’t get as many shots as I would have liked with the Canon. But I had my iPhone with me (as always) and used that to get some nice shots, with an emphasis some of the amazing statuary around the park. A few of today’s best shots are below. (Can you tell which of the shots below came from the Canon and which came from the iPhone?) As always, you can click on the images to see larger versions.

After my recent leaf-peeping trips through New England, I’ve got a quite a little collection of cemetery shots going now — here’s my cemetery set on Flickr.

I was not upset about the general cloudiness, because I wanted to do some more high dynamic range (HDR) photography during the trip, and in my (limited) experience, clouds actually make HDR photos far more dramatic.

I took hundreds of shots and so far I’ve processed just over a dozen of them as tonemapped HDR images. I’m assembling the whole set of HDR photos over at Flickr, but below are a few of the more interesting ones.

Well, Facebook may still be a fad, but with 300 million users and growing, it’s a remarkably enduring one. It’s probably time for me to get used to it. On top of that, I’ve had some experiences over the last couple of weeks that have started to change my attitude about the site.

It started with my iPhone. Two weeks ago, as you might remember, I wrote a column about “The Best Camera.” It’s an iPhone app created by Seattle photographer Chase Jarvis as part of a cross-media campaign promoting his message that “the best camera is the one that’s with you.” The app lets you apply some intriguing digital effects to the photos you snap with the iPhone’s built-in camera. It also lets you upload your processed images directly to Facebook, where every new shot will show up on your Wall and in your friends’ news feeds.

I’ve sent a few of my Best Camera shots to my Facebook photo albums, and a truly surprising thing has happened. People have been commenting on the photos. Not a huge crowd of people, but enough to make me realize that there are Facebook users who actually pay attention to the new stuff they see every day, and that some of them care enough to leave feedback.

This is an excerpt from the October 9, 2009, edition of World Wide Wade. Click here to continue reading the column at Xconomy.

Today, though, some pictures. These are just a few of the many thousand I have on file.

I’d read about Photomatix, a program for creating HDR photos, almost a year ago and have been meaning to try it out ever since. Made by HDRSoft, the software costs $99, but you can download a fully functional trial version (the only difference is that the trial version leaves a Photomatix watermark on your finished images.)

HDR photos look weird—that’s the first thing that needs to be acknowledged. They don’t look the way we expect photos to look. They look more like the way our eyes (which are sensitive to a far greater range of luminosities than any camera) really see the world. You know how it’s really hard to take pictures with visible detail in both the highlights and the shadows? HDR image processing software can create such images, by blending a minimum of three photos that you capture using different exposures.

There’s plenty of information on the Web about how to make HDR images, so I won’t go into it here—I liked this beginner’s tutorial from the blog 23x by Jared Earle. I just thought I’d post some of my early HDR experiments—see the shots below (and click to see larger versions). The photos below may not look so odd, but if you could compare them to the originals you’d see how much more detail they have. In fact, I’m definitely agreeing so far with what Earle writes: “When you look back at your earlier HDR attempts, you may well cringe at how overdone they look.” But it’s fun stuff, and I hope to get a better hang of the technique on some future weekend. I haven’t decided yet whether to drop $99 on the full version of Photomatix.

[Update 10/31/09: I did end up buying a full license for Photomatix, and I've created and posted a whole bunch of new HDR photos.]

Flowers in the yard of a Newton Street brownstone

Berries on a shrub

Haven Street

A former church in the South End with the Prudential Center in the background

This week, Jarvis took his slogan to the next level, launching a trio of products—a book, an iPhone application, and a photo-sharing community on the Web—intended to encourage all photographers, pro and amateur alike, to get more creative with their camera phones. This cross-media campaign is a brilliant concept—both as a digital-arts-education project and as a piece of self-promotion for Jarvis and his studio—and it also happens to fit in really well with the theme I’ve been writing about in this space throughout September in “Seven Projects to Stretch your Digital Wings,” Parts 1, 2, and 3. So, if you’ve got an iPhone, go spend $2.99 on Jarvis’s app, called “Best Camera,” and consider today’s column Project #8.

There are more than 1,300 photography-related apps in the iTunes App Store, but as far as I know, Best Camera is the only one that comes with a dedicated community of other iPhone users. The app allows you to take a picture with the iPhone’s built-in camera, apply a range of cool digital filters and effects, and then upload your finished photo to a gallery that’s constantly being updated, in real time, with new photos from other Best Camera users. You can give the photos you like best a thumbs-up, and browse photos either by popularity or recentness.

This is an excerpt from my September 25, 2009 World Wide Wade column. Click here to continue reading the column at Xconomy.

Well, if you’re like me and you’ve got a weakness for gadgets, software, and Web tools, you may find something of interest in the following list of easy digital projects. This is just a smattering of the options popping up every day for people who want to use new media to explore the world around them and express and share their own ideas. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a creative type, I urge you to give these new tools a try. Everyone has something unique, valuable, and personal to say about their life experiences, and in many ways, the new digital technologies make it easier than ever to say it.

In this week’s column, I cover three projects in the areas of visual art and Web publishing; I’ll outline four more ideas involving different media next week. [Update 9/18/09: Actually, this turned into a three-part column. Be sure to check out part two and part three.] Some of these items involve technologies I haven’t written about before, and others are things I’ve introduced in past columns. Most of them require a bit of basic equipment, such as an Internet-connected computer, a digital camera, or smartphone—but the Web-based tools that I list are all free.

Pick one and have fun! I encourage you to post your results online and share a link in the comment section here. And if you have your own favorite tools for digital self-expression, let us know about them.

This is an excerpt from the September 4, 2009 installment of World Wide Wade. Click here to continue reading the column at Xconomy.