If you have a brand new tablet for the holidays, ACP Now has an optimized presentation for the iPad. Have a look!

Subscribe to this .ics file with your favorite calendaring program to keep-up with ACP 2011 Programs.

This calendar covers ACP programming only; it does not cover events and exhibitions at participating ACP 2011 venues. Please see festivalguide.acpinfo.org for comprehensive listings of all events & exhibitions.

In iCal, click the Calendar pull-down menu to “Subscribe”, and then paste-in this url without a line-break:

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/ekailhk3hg3ehug7a1j3r4i7no@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

In Google Calendar, click the pull-down menu in the header of “Other Calendars” on the left-side of your screen, and pull it down to “Add by URL” and paste in this url without a line-break:

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/ekailhk3hg3ehug7a1j3r4i7no@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Or you can click the image above, and choose to open the .ics file with your favorite calendaring program!

We’ve just released a Google Map for ACP 2011 that’s viewable on your smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer! If you want a real treat, you can download this kml file and open it in Google Earth for 3D zoomable fun.

Each placemark reveals details about the events and exhibitions, and depending where you view the map, the ACP programs are marked with a different color placemark. (Yellow on Google Maps, blue, in Google Earth.)

(Thanks to our developers at tehcompany for the heavy lifting in turning our Festival Guide into longitude/latitude coordinates and xml!)

A quick reminder that if you’re on Facebook, you can follow ACP on our Facebook page. We share lots of photo-relevant links there, from the local scene and beyond! Plus, every post to ACP Now! (including this one) is posted to our Facebook page. We’ve changed locations recently, so be sure to “like” our new page. Thanks!

If you like taking pictures with your iPhone, you probably already know about Instagram, a free app that merges the fun filters of Hipstamatic with the ease and sharing of a fast, mobile application.

Instagram launched this fall, and as a photo-sharing experience is pretty unique. There’s no website to log into and upload your pictures — everything takes place on your phone; shooting, sharing, following, commenting. The New York Times has taken a look at the service a few times in past weeks; when they surpassed a million users and today’s article (featuring Atlantan Davin Bentti) here.

As a young product, there are a few places for improvement, specifically in following the photos of people you don’t know. You can find and follow your email contacts, your twitter or facebook friends, but you can’t follow people locally. It’s most likely a feature that’s around the corner, pun intended.

In the interest of providing a wider platform for those of you on instagram who are interested in pics of Atlanta from people you may not know, feel free to leave a comment here with your instagram username. Or tweet us @acptweets and we’ll update this post. And if you’d like to be removed from the list let us know. And if you’d like to discover more instagr.am pics from Atlanta on your own, try this tweet search.

Metro-area Atlantans on Instagram (no links – just plug these into the “search usernames and names” screen):
_raygun
cblack
desfolio
e08 <-- a zero + 8
ericajoy
ericbeatty
gt6288a
imryan1
jtrav
jelbaum
joelsilverman
keithweaver
kvoth
kwrather
ngnphoto
robertmatre
seanatlanta
sux
thepalifoxlegend
whileseated (author of this post)

A quick survey.

As most of you know, you can receive updates to the ACP blog, and now, you can receive ACP tweets via email as well.

We tweet more often than we post to ACP Now!, but you’ll only receive one email a day if you subscribe. The email will aggregate each day’s tweets.

If you want to receive ACP Tweets directly via twitter, feel free!

We’re trying something new with ACP Now! today. You’re now able to receive ACP Now! updates via email. Which means, each time there’s a new post on ACP Now!, you’ll be sent an email.

You can still subscribe to updates via RSS, and most posts result in tweets, too. Plus, if you’re on Facebook, our ACP fan page is updated with ACP Now! posts, too. A myriad of ways to stay connected to ACP!

If you like entering your work in contests, you’ll want to check-out the DVA Photo Calendar, a subscribeable Google Calendar run on the DVAFOTO blog by Matt Lutton and M. Scott Brauer. Here’s hoping they stay on top of it and keep it rolling!

To subscribe, just click the “+ Google Calendar” button at the bottom right corner of the calendar.

A quick reminder that we’re tweeting a bunch of great photo-related info at ACPtweets, our twitter account. If we can say it in less than 140-characters, it’s on twitter, in addition to links to all the new blog posts for ACP Now!

This year, we created a few Google Calendars to help everyone keep track of what’s on view. Here’s what’s viewable this week!

Do you tweet? You don’t have to if you want to follow ACP on twitter. Here’s why it’s the best way to keep-up with this year’s Festival.

* Instant updates, while events are happening
* Trusted schedule changes, as they happen (they most certainly will)
* Every blog post on ACP Now! is tweeted (even this one!)
* Inside track on this year’s ACP Public Art Project “Gifted”, starting October 1st
* Quick links with news from around the photography world (and Atlanta!)
* You can have tweets sent directly to your cell-phone, as txt messages
* More current and comprehensive than Facebook!

If you still shoot film, and occasionally need to calculate settings for your manual flash, all you have to do is reach for your iPhone. Reviewed in Macworld, PhotoCalc is an iPhone app that goes deep into f-stops and focal length the old fashioned way, including help with the Zone System. Yes, your iPhone can help you shoot like Ansel Adams.

“Photocalc is essentially a photographer’s toolbox, providing a group of widgets to do all the primary calculations for you as well as giving you additional information that could be crucial to getting just the right shot. After launching the app, choose your camera from PhotoCalc’s extensive list of options; these include not only every digital camera on the market (and many older models), but all film formats, including several cinema films.”

Curious about twitter? ACP’s there! To learn more about how you (as a photographer) might utilize twitter to assist your marketing plan, have a look at Scott Bourne’s “How Photographers Can Use Twitter as a Marketing Tool.”

We’re working hard at ACP to achieve our goals this year, and one of those goals is an overhaul of the process for submitting a listing for this year’s ACP Festival Guide. We’ll be working with a web developer to re-do the process from the ground up. If you’d like to help support ACP’s effort, you can donate directly to this project by clicking the image below. And thank you so much for contributing to ACP!

We’re currently soliciting proposals from developers for our Festival Guide Submission Tool. It’s a small, fun project, and we’re looking to make a decision on a developer in the next few days. Our budget is small, as we’re a non-profit arts organization, but if you’re interested in photography and the arts, it could be a good fit! If you’re interested, please let us know.

Here’s the google document with the project’s details:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ah77szpz272f_83f9zdpg6d

Thanks for your consideration, and please feel free to forward this request if you know someone who’d be interested in the project. Previously mentioned here.

If you’re new to Facebook and want to use it to connect to local arts venues in Atlanta, here’s a list of venues that have participated in (or supported) ACP in years past. These are venues and organizations with Facebook pages, which are viewable outside of Facebook. There are groups, too, but they’re not visible unless you’re logged-in.

You can “become a member” (or fan!) of ACP on Facebook at our main ACP group and on a page for ACP 11.

If you’ve been a participating venue in ACP in years past, please leave a comment so we can add your Facebook page or group to this list. We’ll compile this list into a larger resource page to launch with our redesigned site this Spring.

Facebook Pages:
Atlanta Photography Exhibit
Composition Gallery
Fay Gold Gallery
Get This Gallery
High Museum
Jackson Fine Art
Mint Gallery
Saltworks
Westside Arts District

Facebook Groups:
Art Papers
Art Relish
Barbara Archer Gallery
Burn Away
The Contemporary
MOCA GA
The Seen Gallery
Spruill Gallery
Mary Stanley Studio
Whitespace

Become a fan of ACP 11 on Facebook!

ACP has had a “group” on Facebook for awhile, but Facebook “pages” offer a bit more flexibility, so we’ll have a page for each festival, while keeping our overall group. We’ll be posting timely updates over there for ACP fans, and the page even folds-in updates from this blog. Handy, right?

Head on over and check out the video highlights from last year’s festival. Thanks!

We like to keep a local focus on the Atlanta photographic community, but seeing that ACP Now! is a “photoblog“, I thought I’d provide a few quick links to other photoblogs that create original content worth reading. Some are extremely popular, others are hidden gems.

• If you like vintage cameras and printing techniques, check out
  silverbased.org.
• Peer inside the mind of a magazine photo editor at aphotoeditor.com.
• Magnum Photos has their own blog and a lot of good subscribeable content, including this post, which points to many fine resources.
• Heading East is run by Raul Guttierez from Brooklyn and keeps a wide-eye on the global photography scene.
• Conscientious is “quite” the heavyweight fine art photography blog, run by physicist Jorg Colberg.
• Strobist is a resource for DIY lighting solutions.
• ACP 9 lecturer Alec Soth had a pre-eminent artist’s blog that’s grown dusty (victim of its own popularity?) but the archives are still worth a looksee.
• I Heart Photography features daily updates of work across a wide spectrum.
• Mary Virginia Swanson, who gave a presentation during ACP 9 at MOCA GA, runs “Marketing Photos with Mary Virginia Swanson“.
• Flakphoto posts new work from a variety of sources, nearly every day.
• 5B4 takes a dedicated look at photobooks and photobooks only.

Linked out? There are plenty of photographers (some emerging, some emerged) who run their own blogs as well. Have a look at Amy Stein, Peter Baker, Richard Renaldi, David Alan Harvey, Liz Kuball, Olivier Laude, Andrew Heatherington, Todd Deutsch, Brian Ulrich, Shane Lavalette, Will Steacy, and Zoe Strauss.

Links to local photoblogs (and blogs of ACP participants) can always be found in the “Friends and Neighbors” section of the sidebar on the right. Feel free to list yours in the comments!

If you process your images digitally, and want to learn more about Apple’s latest release of Aperture, there’s a class coming to Atlanta on March 5th. Free registration. Learn more, on Apple.com