Photographing the SCV has never been better

I'm firmly and deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem and love debating the merits of various cloud services (or whether you should even put stuff in the cloud to begin with), whether this iGadget is good and that one is bad and reading about and working with emerging technology.

But as I said, for personal stuff, I'm firmly in the Google camp. Most days the Daily Brief is written on a $250 Chromebook, built by Samsung, while on the bus using my Samsung Galaxy Note II as a 4G LTE wireless hotspot. The Chromebook doesn't have a typical operating system; it's just a browser and minimal GUI, but it works seamlessly with all of Google's services, just as my phone does. 

And one of those new services is really cool. It's called Auto Awesome, and it's a feature designed to hook you into Google's social network/Facebook killer, known as Google+. Auto Awesome and Google+ pictures have replaced the aging but well-liked Google photo indexing/organization program called Picasa. Auto Awesome automatically adjusts pictures you upload to it, and it can even make animated gifs out of pictures that were taken in close sequence. The new feature was announced just two weeks ago. 

With the purchase of my Chromebook earlier this year, Google gave me 100GB of storage space in their cloud for whatever I needed; so I decided to upload about 67 gigabytes of photos I have on my computer at home, photos going back to my wedding 10 years ago to vacations to the birth of my son last fall. All the photos are set for privacy mode by default, and it took about a week to upload that much data to Google, but the results are in and I'm quite impressed. Check out some of the "Auto Awesome" adjusted images of the SCV I've taken over the years. AutoAwesome has given new life to some of these shots:

This was a particularly cloudy and beautiful day in September 2007. I think I took the series of pictures from atop the hill at Dockweiler in Newhall, a favorite lookout spot of mine.

This was taken along the South Fork river after a rainstorm, looking west towards the S'Tanch. 

Here an amusing gif of our former Assemblyman, Cameron Smyth, speaking at a town hall event at the City in 2007. 

A young Latino girl showing off her stuff in  costume at a Newhall Street Fair in 2006

In February 2007, I somehow managed to get an official press pass as a "sports writer" for SCVTalk. That earned me the right to stand amongst pro sports photographers right at the finish line of the Tour of Claifornia stage that year. I took several great shots but this set captures almost the entire peloton. 

Dizzy yet? One last sequence of then Mayor Marsha McLean giving a trophy to the winner of the stage that day, Argentinian cyclist J.J. Jaedo:

 

Of course it's a competitive marketplace in the technology world. Google's not the only one with free and easy to use tools. Instagram is quite popular here, but difficult to link to through the web on a desktop. 

Flickr, the one-time king of online photo storage, came roaring back to life this year with a brand new interface and up to 1 terabyte of free photo storage space. I used to post a lot of shots to Flickr and hadn't been to the site in years; but it's still very active, and a group of Santa Clarita photographers are still taking great shots in and around town. 

[ Edit: Screenshot of the Flickr web site removed by request of one of the photographers, whose work was included in the screenshot. ]