I start paying attention to Major League Baseball when the first team loses 100 games (congratulations for the second year in a row goes to the Washington Nationals). 

The loss of 100 games signals that post-season baseball is coming and baseball, more than any other sport, is linked with America's history regardless if the sport is not universally lauded as America's national pastime anymore. 

That got me thinking about American imagery. What image collection best represents America? One source often mentioned is Visions of America, which represents Joseph's Sohm's journey across the fifty states. You can license his images direct through a site powered by ImageSpan.

What image collection best represents your country and its heritage?

Next week I’ll be in Las Vegas at the Photoshop World Western Conference. It’s a first for me and I’m looking forward to expanding my understanding of Photoshop, Lightroom and geeky eccentricities involving imagery.

I always enjoy watching the various instructors, even if they are explaining something I might already know. Often the way they apply a filter, layer effects or even a keyboard shortcut will make it worthwhile. I don’t know how many times over the years I’ve seen a demo for something that was pretty useless, but the techniques or approach got me thinking of a better way to use the software. If you didn’t already know, Photoshop World is hosted by our friends at NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) and Kelby whose instructors will be there for the class sessions and workshops. If you can’t make it to PhotoShop World, I can make an honest (and unsolicited) recommendation for their Photoshop and Lightroom one-day classes, available around the country. I like them as a refresher to all the GUI and feature changes Adobe likes to include with each revision.

I recently attended a Digital Imaging conference in San Francisco last week and wanted to share with our readers one of the key themes I heard over and over during the two day conference. Sharing your digital images on social networking sites was undoubtedly the topic of discussion for many of the attendees. As many of us struggle to determine what is the best means of storage for our digital images, many are electing to use the "cloud" or a hosted server to do this archiving

These are sites like Kodak Gallery, Photo Bucket, Winkflash, Smug Mug, Phanfare, Shutterfly, and many others. I ran into folks from a few of these sites and they are all actively developing a means to enable their users to select which images to share to one or multiple social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, and Twitter.

For those that did not know, these social network sites do not store your images at full resolution; they are scaled down substantially for storage and retrieval purposes. Given this, they would not be a good choice for long term or permanent storage as the kept size has barely enough quality for a 4x6 print. 

I’m attending Advertising Week in NYC through Thursday and sat in on the Mobile Ad Summit today. Read on for the highlights from this event, details from an interesting session with Google Creative Labs, plus the tie-in to our world of digital images.

I think the sweet spot for digital watermarking may be obvious – those who make their money from the use of images online. Conventional wisdom says this includes stock photo agencies, online retailers, consumer goods manufacturers, and media/entertainment companies.

However, there are a host of other vertical markets currently using digital images; ideal candidates for digital watermarking that you may not have previously thought.

Let’s remember that almost anyone who uses digital images in their business can benefit from what digital watermarking offers – the ability to put an ownership mark into the asset and be able to track where it came from. I talk to all kinds of businesses looking to utilize digital watermarking. Let me tell you about a few of these that I’ve run into in the past week in order to get your juices flowing:

• Video Game Creators and Marketers
  Folks in this space use a ton of creative images, and often these images are highly anticipated, which means they are at a greater risk of being released into the hands of those who would post them online
• Survey Companies
  There’s a lot of surveying going on out there via online resources and email. Large companies have various things surveyed: product designs, new service offerings, colors, etc. Digital images mages go out and the company has no idea what happens to them after that
• Medical Imaging
  I’m sure you're aware that more and more of the medical field is going digital. This includes images taken of you and others for personal medical reasons as well as educational purposes. It is very importan to digitally watermark those pictures for downstream identification

That's just a sampling; there's plenty more where that came from. Look around your business with a different set of eyeglasses, then feel free to contact me if you have ideas to explore. Maybe digital watermarking can play a role in your organization after all?

According to Tiny Pictures founder and CEO, John Poisson, Tiny’s camperphone photo and video sharing service, Radar, will extend Shutterfly’s reach into the mobile and social networking environments. As you may know, I am keenly interested in these new developments where the imaging industry meets mobile. ‘Tis the future my friends... click here for the details if you’re interested.

Photographers for Spain’s Autofácil magazine recently witnessed readers of the magazine linking from their photos of cars to video tours inside the automobiles and more. The magazine was the first in Spain to digitally watermark photos so that readers with enabled mobile phones could detect the watermarks, linking to a wide range of new and enhanced content never before available from printed magazines. As we watch the suffering publishing industry struggle to survive, this use of digital watermarking certainly looks to provide a great way to bridge the traditional printed publication to the web and other premium content. I think it is a great way to re-engage readers and keep them coming back for more.

Javier Gonzalez, Director General of aquaMobile, and I will be co-presenting a web cast on how digital watermarking is enabling these new mobile experiences. Javier will share their experience with Autofácil and what the reader response has been to date. If this is something you’re interested in learning more about, please join us. It’s free and should be a very informative hour.

Click here to register online via the Digital Watermarking Alliance.

Many of you are concerned about images file sizes when posting to the web.  This is not as important as it once was thanks to user access to websites with improved connections.  For those of you who are posting large images, regardless of my point of view, or are placing a large number of images onto a single page, have to pay attention to size or risk tempting your audience to leave if it takes too long to load.

For this post I am going to assume that you have read my previous blogs about compression and focus on showing you why some image file sizes get so much larger than others when watermarked.

Last week I attended the ad:tech conference in Chicago and thought you might like a summary of what I picked up there. Here is the quick, abbreviated, blog version of my notes, which I think you'll find interesting if you didn't have the chance to be there in person. By the way, do you like Cheetos? Read on...

After a couple of weeks in Costa Rica, I’m back to work and back to blogging. In case you were wondering. Costa Rica does have beautiful mountains, volcanoes, lush jungles, tropical beaches with younger and some older kids trying to learn to surf – and lots of photographic opportunities. As usual, I’m torn as to how to store and share my photos. I have a Mac at home and the lazy part of me enjoys just connecting the camera and downloading to iPhoto. While iPhoto is a nice package that’s free with your Mac, it has very basic tools and sharing options, but I’m always left wanting more features, like digital watermarking. Especially if I want to post the images to a shared social site and don’t want to queue the images through Photoshop.

So what does this have to do with “What’s next”?