iPhone Apps on my screen

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iphone1I started typing in a reply to someone about what iPhone apps are living on my screen, so I thought that maybe I would post the list of things that I have on my iPhone here.

First up is Flickr. They don’t have an iPhone app, but they have a mobile site that is quite amazing. Great UI.

I also use the Facebook app for accessing Facebook. Most of both sides of my family now used Facebook, so this is a great way to check in.

The wordpressapp is pretty neat. It allows you to create posts right from your phone. This is not perfect. You can’t access images that aren’t on your phone. Ones from your wordpress library would have been nice. Much better than using Safari and the admin section.

I jumped on twitter recently, and the twitterificapp works great for me. It would be even better if the iPhone would let you know when updates occur, but that is not yet in the iPhone architecture. Checking by accessing the app probably saves battery life though.

AccuWeather and The Weather Channel are much better than the included weather app.

WhitePages is great in the US at least. I look up people and phone numbers with this all the time. It lets you add addresses to existing contacts or create new ones as well as providing a map of the location.

LockBox allows me to put sensitive info into the iPhone with an additional password. There are a few with that name. Thisis the iTunes link.

Yelp and AroundMework great in the US. I can see restaurants, businesses, bank machines, and more that are near by my location.

Flixster is also pretty amazing. It has a great interface to tell what movies are playing, where, and when. It used the location service to tell you what is near by. You can also see info on the movies playing or coming in the future as well as play trailers. I don’t get to movies much, but a guy can dream.

I have craigsphone (for craigs list), eBay, and Amazon on my phone, but don’t use them much. I have looked up prices on Amazon while out an about though.

I have Pandora and Public Radio Tuner to stream audio, but haven’t found that I use them much. I drive too much I guess.

Been trying to find good lists and to-do apps. I am trying ShopShop (grocery app comparison) and ToDo’s right now.

I also started using NetNewsWire. I have their desktop app on my Macs, and the mobile version of the RSS reader on my iPhone. I created an account with them and now they all sync together. Pretty cool.

Newspapers like the New York Times and USA Today have mobile app versions. It is faster and more UI friendly than their full or even mobile sites.

My 2 year old loves DressChica and I Hear Ewe.

Also check out Terry White’s Tech blog. He reviews iPhone apps every week. http://terrywhite.com/techblog/

There are a bunch of photography tools. I am pretty cheap, and haven’t tried any of the pay tools, and haven’t found any photography tools that are free that are worth buying. Depth of Field Calculatorlooks interesting. Just look at the photography catagory in iTunes. There are lots of apps there. Scott Kelby (on photoshop user tv) recommended FocalWare to see sunrise and sunset times for landscape photographers. It is $9.99. Haven’t tried it yet.

I am amazed. These apps combined with maps and address book have become glued to my hip. In about a month I am now wondering how I lived without them. I probably use more of the data plan than my voice plan. (I only have the 400 min plan)

Photog Arrested Taking Amtrak Photos

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I am not sure how I missed this. Very funny. Well, not the arrested part, but the Stephen Colbert video piece is from Feb 2. I still don’t get what people have against photographers, but the name of National Security seems to be some great rallying war cry for security guards. What the heck?

[update:I have it embeded now]

How to use Lytebox

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Note: lytebox appears to be discontinued by the author. See also Thickbox.

I was recently asked how to use lytebox in a gallery. The instructions at lyteboxes web page has several examples, but I guess they can seem a little overwhelming for some people, so I put together as basic an example as I could think of. It looks like this.

In this example, we are only dealing with useing lytebox with images in gallerys. There are lots of ways to use this library, and you can check his web page for the other options.

First, in order to use this library you need to get some files moved over. There are three things you need:

  1. lytebox.js
  2. lytebox.css
  3. images folder

These files need to be placed in the folder where your html file is going to be. So, for our example, this is what I have :

  1. index.html
  2. lytebox.js
  3. lytebox.css
  4. gallery.css
  5. images (folder)
  6. pictures (folder)

index.html is the gallery html file that has the thumbnails and pulls everything together. gallery.css is a css file to style our little gallery just a bit. You don’t need this file at all. The pictures folder is where I have all my images. You can organize your images how you would like.

Ok, lets look that what index.html looks like. The first thing you need to do is put some code in the <head> tag. This is to tell the browser where the lytebox css and js files are.

Then you need to create the links in the body of your document. I have chosen to link thumbnails to larger size images. Here is the code to one image:

So, the path to the thumbnail is in the img tag. That is what shows up first. Then, in the a tag, you add the rel attribute. This is not really standard html. Html is not using the rel attribute, so lytebox has decided to use the attribute to signal it that you are linking the image within the href of the a tag through lytebox. This all happens in the background when your document loads, the lytebox.js file scans your document looking for these rel attributes, and adds some code to make it all work.

Also, look at the this: rel=”lytebox[gallery1]”. To make this work, you only need to say rel=”lytebox”. We put “gallery1” inside the [] to link all these images together. This way lytebox knows to link these images together with “next” and “previous” buttons when the larger image comes up. In the example that I have here, I have two gallery’s, “gallery1” and “gallery2” so you can see how they work. One gallery per line.

Simple? Ok, so here is all the code in our example. I have here the code for the index.html and the gallery.css file. I have not listed the lytebox code. You can download that here.



	Lytebox Example
	
	
	


	
Lytebox Example Gallery

	
	
	
	
	

	
	
	
	



body {
	background-color: black;
	text-align: center;
}
h1 {
	color: white;
	font-family: sans-serif;
}
img {
	border: solid 1px gray;
}
img:hover {
	border: solid 1px white;
	/* doesn't work in ie */
}

Check out the finished gallery here.

The Art of Outdoor Photography

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The Art of PhotographyI just finished reading The Art of Outdoor Photography (Amazon). I took it out from the library. Twice. Extended my three week time each time too. Not the most riveting of authors. I had a hard time getting into it.

Boyd spends a lot of time in each of the chapters discussing film, film choice, and whether to shoot at 25, 50, or 75 ISO. My camera doesn’t take film, and only starts at 200 ISO. Does the fact that the book doesn’t deal with digital mean it has nothing to offer? No, but it feels dated. The revised edition is from 2002.

The concepts and techniques of outdoor photography and how to compose and visualize are not different on film or digital. He does have some good things to say about “seeing”, and light in the first chapters. There is a great chapter with picture examples of how perspective changes with the use of different lenses. He also has chapters on composition and using shutter speed creatively. This takes us up to about page 70. I feel this was the better part of the content.

The rest of the chapters are short sections on film types, and different outdoor shooting situations, like landscapes, close ups, underwater, and travel. It doesn’t feel like the individual chapters get to give enough attention to their subject matter.

He has some great pictures every once in a while, but most of the images are not very inspiring. I guess that on a whole, I would recomend looking for the book in your library if you want to give it a read.

CwExif Plugin Appreciated

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The other day I finished the CwExif plugin. I got the idea originaly from posts that Gavin Gough, and Matt Brandon did where they were wishing for some easy way to get the EXIF data displayed.

Gavin today called me a “very nice man.”¬† Also that I¬†was a¬†”geeky Canadian”. We Canadian programmers take that to be the highest compliment. :-)¬†I was quite tickled. It is great when you get to create something that someone really wanted, and doubly when they go out of their way to say thank you.

I am glad that it is what he was looking for. I hope to make some improvements and options for display in the future, but will keep the “title” display¬†that works now.¬†

If you give it a try and have issues or suggestions. Leave a comment on the CwExif plugin page.

Run any Browser

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This is pretty cool. Ever wanted to find out what your site looks like under Google Chrome, or Opera, or IE6/7/8, or Safari? Well, now you can without installing the applications directly.

The xenocode browser sandbox will allow you to use different browsers. It appears to download a .exe file named for the browser you are running. By the documentation, it appears to be a repackaged binary of the browser that runs in it’s own sandbox. It’s an interresting trick. No real install, but the application still runs localy.

I checked, and all the browsers seem to run the javascript on christopherwardphotography.com just fine.

Books on Order

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Joe McNally has finished his book “The Hot Shoe Diaries, Big Light From Small Flashes.” He has quite a post up about it. It is supposed to be out March 16. I just pre ordered it on Amazon. There is a PDF here with exerpts from the book. This is classic Joe, just like The Moment it Clicks. As with that book it looks like he has short little descriptions/stories about the shot. This one looks like he might get into more detail about how he set up the lights.

I also just pre ordered “Within The Frame” on Amazon. This book is by David duChemin. I am looking forward to this one. I would love to read more in a book format about his thoughts on vision and photography.

Get this, no sooner do I decide to pre order the books, he runs a contest to give one away. What cha gona do? Well, maybe I will win and can read one with each eye.

Photography Seminar in Minneapolis

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I often lament that there are very few photography seminars that occur in Minneapolis. The big events seem to occur in Boston, or Vegas. It seems like even the one day events seem to pass us by. But I just discovered that David Ziser of Digital Pro Talk  is coming to Minneapolis. He is going on what he calls a Digital Wake Up Tour. David will be in Minneapolis on Sept 16, Wednesday evening. I signed up already. Sweet! David is mostly a wedding photographer, but he takes stunning portraits. It will be great to hear him in person.

First Version of CwExif is out

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I now have a first version of CwExif that can be downloaded. This is a new WordPress plugin that will show exif data for an image uploaded to the wordpress library in the title tag. There is a button on the media admin screen that will take the exif data and put it into the title tag. On hover, the data will be displayed.

This is just the first version. There is much more that I want to do with this plugin, but you have to start somewhere.

Get it here.

Trumpeter Swans

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Trumpeter Swans in Monticello

I was in Monticello to take pictures of Trumpeter Swans this Sunday. I have to say that it is really the first time that I went and stood around in freezing cold temperatures for several hours to get pictures of wildlife. It was fun though.

I was set up with my new tripod and 70-200mm lens right beside someone that takes regular trips to yellowstone with his 600mm lens. Yikes. That was a piece of kit!

I got some good pictures, I think. I haven’t had time to “develop” them yet. I will post more soon.

We are pretty much at the end of their migration period. In fact I was told that earlier was better. Not sure how it would have been better. It was hard enough to isolate one or two birds becuase there were so many of them. Check out the Monticello Chamber of Commerce for more info.