Cyberward.net

Annie is throwing me a 40th birthday party. As part of the event, we are doing a gallery showing of some of my work. I printed up some of my new images, such as some of the DLWS images that I have shown lately. With the new images and some of the ones we had around the house, we had two dozen images framed. Very cool. Annie did a great job of picking out some frames.

I had the pictures printed from WHCC, and they were great as usual. I think that they were a little darker this time, but I had been using a different color calibration tool than the last time I had things printed. I think I may just have to try to turn down the gamma setting.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the part tonight. Thanks Annie!

I went to random.org, and had it pick some numbers for me. It picked 6, 1, 2 for me, so Kristen, Marianne, and Sue have won a copy of Steven Pressfields book “the War of Art”.

Sue, please send me your address, and I will ship one to you. Kristen, and Marianne, you two saved me some shipping costs I will get your copies to you soon.

I finally have the Christopher Ward Photography site up and running. I feel like I have been working on this new site for ever. Off and on for a couple of months anyway. This was a new site for me in several ways. First is that I designed it based on a business card, and I started by putting it together in Photoshop.

This site is much better representation of where I am at, and where I am trying to get to. Some of the other landscape pictures and city shots I really liked, and maybe I will find a place for them on this site somehow.

Some of the cool things about this site…

The menu at the top with the rollover images is one big image and some CSS tricks. I plan to blog about that later. The index page, and the galleries page have slide shows that use jQuery and the cross slide plugin. It does the Ken Burns effect on the galleries page. Not sure if I should keep it. It seems like it is jerky and pixelated in versions 6 and 7 of IE. Works great on Firefox and Safari.

Clicking on an image in a gallery brings up a larger image and allows you to move between the images using the Thickbox jQuery plugin.

The text on the galleries thumbnails is done with a transparent PNG overlay. I forgot that IE6 doesn’t handle it very well, and that IE6 could be used as much as 30% still. I might need to just redo those images with the overlay put on in Photoshop. I did have plans to change the thumbnails dynamically, but I might not bother now.

We have a winner. I have selected a picture by T.J.Asher as the winner of the dramatic portrait contest.

T.J. will get the ticket to go see David Ziser. Congratulations T.J.

I thought I would pick a couple of runners up, so that they could hit their desk, and say “Shoot, I almost won!”

Here are a couple pictures from Rich Yates, and Jorge Rimblas

Thanks everyone for entering. Who knows, maybe I will do this again sometime.

Sorry if you tried to get here and found the site down. It was up last night, but at 10:00 this morning when I tried it was down. Not sure when it when down for sure. I called 1and1 right away, but it took several hours before the site was up again. If it is slow for you this Friday, it is not your imagination. It is dog slow right now. Maybe 1and1 is using less servers while somthing is rebuilt. Frustrating all the same.

I have blogged before about the eye-fi card. Today I am going to use it to post a “live” picture shoot of Kate’s birthday party. The party is from 1-3. I have a couple of pictures up here already, and as I take them today, more will show up.

This is a cool concept. The eye-fi card is a wi-fi SD card with 2gig of memore. I put the card in my camera, and it connects to the eye-fi servers and uploads the pictures. Then the pictures are sent via web service to our web site, and the pictures are automaticly sent to iPhoto as well.

Just wanted to put out a reminder that I am doing a photo contest to win a chance to go see David Ziser for free. Check out this post. I would expect that I will not be flooded with submissions, so get your images in, and win the first contest on this blog.

Check out the tour site for all the things he will cover.

If you want to register, use promo code: ZCWDWC09 and pay just $59.

See you there!

I am not sure how I missed this. There is a plugin for WordPress called ZenPhotoPress. I even had ideas of trying to do this myself. Anyway, what this does, is allow you to get your photo’s from Zen Photo into your wordpress blog. It is built into the visual editor (tiny mce).

I have been working on a gallery with Zen Photo with my Cyberward theme. Still trying to decide what I want to do with it, but I think that I will move to migrate my family photos over to Zen Photo instead of Gallery.

Zen Photo just seems better in my opinion. Gallery (actually Gallery2) seems slow and burdened. Too many things activated and going on by default.¬† Zen Photo has fewer plugins, but that’s ok by me. It seems much easier to hack on too. I guess now I just need to time to do this.

I briefly mentioned David Ziser’s tour before, and that I have already booked my seat, but I thought I would tell you a little bit more. Why you say? Three reasons: I want to see you go because David is an amazing photographer with a ton of information he is willing to share with you. Two, because I have a discount code for you, and three, because I am running my first contest, with the prize being a seat at the big show.

I forget now how I stumbled upon digital pro talk, David’s blog. I hadn’t done any weddings, and it looked like he was a wedding photographer, and I was ready to move along, but I decided to read a couple of posts. Well, I have been back many many times to read and reread his posts. He has so many¬† interesting things to say about portraits, lighting, gear, and the business of photography, that there is something there for everyone whether or not they ever shoot a wedding.

It looks like his digital wake up tour will have a ton of useful information.  What might you learn? This is from the tour site:

• 32 ways to use your on and off-camera flashes for creative and dramatic effects.
• 10 of the best camera settings and lens choices for creating striking images on every job.
• 7 ways to use the new DSLR video capabilities to transform your product offerings.
• 10 “Magic Bullet” techniques to make your digital workflow nearly effortless, highly efficient, and fun with today’s top software from Adobe Lightroom, NIK, and LumaPix: FotoFusion.
• 20 new product and marketing ideas targeted to today’s customers¬†which will¬†add substantially to your bottom line.

Your still on the fence? How about all of this stuff you will get :

• Tour Handbook including: program notes, photography, marketing and more
• 2 Hour DVD with extended program content
• $100 Rebate from American Color Imaging
• 1 year membership to WPPI and Rangefinder magazine, a $99 value
• FREE 3 month membership to DigitalProTalkPlus.com, a $45 value
• FREE 3 month subscription to PPA Magazine, a $15 value
• FREE PPA Indemnification (no-fault) insurance for all new PPA menbers, a $50 value
• Over $2,500 in door prizes awarded each evening
• And a chance to win 1 of 4 Grand Prizes worth over $5,000

David is bringing the event to 58 cities across the US, including the Minneapolis event September 16. I’ll be there. If you don’t win the contest, David has given me a discount code that you can use to get $20 off the event. Enter code:¬† ZCWDWC09 ( last digits are zero nine) on the registration page, and you will receive a $20 discount. Price will be only $59 after the discount.

Want to enter the contest and go free? Ok, the contest will be me arbitrarily picking the most dramatic portrait from the photo’s submitted to the Cyberward flickr group.

1. First get a flickr account. They are free.
2. Upload your pictures to flickr.
3. Join the Cyberward flickr group
4. Add the¬† tag “dwc09″ to the photo’s
5. Limit the photo’s you enter in the contest to 3 please.

The contest will run until April 11 at @ midnight (Saturday). I will choose on Sunday, and email the winner and post the winning picture on April 13 (Monday)

Good luck, and see you in September at DWC09!

Update:moved the contest end back into April (again) and added the registration code

Our huge (yes I giggled) community now has a flickr group. Drop by and join a discussion, or add your photo’s to the group pool.

Why do we have a group you ask. Well, I needed a group for a contest… more to follow.