Merry Eye-Fi Christmas

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Merry Christmas to anyone that wants to be wished a Merry Christmas. This morning I opened a present to find an Eye-Fi explore card.Sweet. These things look pretty cool. I wish I could tell you how cool it is to wirelessly transfer images to my computer, but alas, it is not working.

The 2gig card comes with a reader and the software on the card. That is pretty smart. No disk required. I installed the software on my Mac laptop, and tried to go to the Eye-Fi manager app, which directs you to their website login. Problem is, I haven’t registered yet. I searched everywhere on their site, but can’t figure out how to register. It is supposed to send me their automaticly, where I would register and be good to go. Unfortunatly that is not how it is working.

I tired another mac as well, but the same thing happened. I looked on their forum, and found a thread that was suggesting that I may have to send the card back because it may have been registered to someone else already. That would be silly if they have no way to reset their cards or their online database. Hopefully once customer service is at their stations again, someone there can get this straightened out.

Javascripting

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So I started playing with Javascript a bit more recently. I looked for a library that could do some cross browser animation stuff. The lightbox script was based on prototype and script.aculo.us for effects. I have only scratched the surface of what these librarys can do, but they seem pretty cool.

The project I am working on is an upgrade to the single collage that I have up at christopherwardphotography. The idea is that you would pick an album, and the images would fly out from the album. What I wanted was something that would move an image. The scriptaculous Effect.move class provides this. The really cool thing I found was that the javascript interpreter does not stop and wait for the move to finish. It keeps going. If you call out several in a row, all the images will move on the screen at the same time. Very cool.

I will have more about this “flyout collage” later when I am finished. It will apear at christopherwardphotography when it is done.

Digital Pro Talk Links

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I was reading Digital Pro Talk today, and came across a couple of things of note. First up, David pointed out a series of 50 photoshop tutorials at Smashing Magazine. I don’t have time to look at them right now, but I looked over the topic list, and they seem pretty great.

David also had a post a couple of days ago on presenting your images to clients. This was very interesting. He has posted other thoughts on the idea, and I am starting to come around. Before I started into photography, it seemed to me that photographers would want to meet with you to up sell the heck out of you. Some still do, but the way David approaches this appears genuinely with his clients needs/wishes in mind. Yes, he has a product to sell, but the customer has a desire to get beautiful memories. That is why he was contacted in the first place.

The senior photo’s I took of Gavin could have benefited from this. I didn’t sell any pictures at all. I talked to his mom about a few options, but never heard from her. I think next time I will try to take more time to whittle down the selects, and look at how they are presented.

Sold my first print

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Window Poster I had created this picture as a poster a while back. My sister liked this image, and I had this poster printed up for fun on standout. It looks really great. My sister does’t like the standout style though, she likes regular frames better, so I brought it to work to show off. A coworker really liked it, and thought she might buy it, poster, standout and all. Well, it didn’t quite happen, but she did buy a print of the poster in 8×10 that I had up on my wall at work. So there you have it, my first print sale.

The image overlay effect

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On ChristopherWardPhotography.com, when you click on an image, it pops up the image in a floating panel above the other images. I think this is pretty cool. I have done something similar in code that I had written to tarken the screen, put up a “glass pane” (you can’t click on links), and place content in an overlayed div. This library works really slick though.

I first started with lightbox. It is pretty popular, and quite a few people use it, although I don’t think it is over used. This works pretty well. It has a few dependancies, such as prototype, and scriptaculous. These libraries on there own add quite a bit of functionality to javascript, but they aren’t lightweight.

Then I found lytebox. This project shrinks down the code by “borrowing” just what is needed for the lightbox effect. Then he has improved it. The images will automatilcy resize to fit the browser screen, and it will also allow html documents in these pop ups, not just images. This is what I went with.

I kind of wish that lightbox had the same image scaling and html content that lytebox has, because I have some more plans for some sriptaculous scripting…

Vision Driven Workflow

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David DuChemin over at the Pixelated Image has a great post. I am a couple of days late on this. Being sick put me behind on my web readings. Anyway, this is the kind of post I really like from David. Practical info on putting vision to work. I struggle with getting a vision into my photography, and his post on post-processing with vision is very usefull. If you can’t name the mood in a couple of words that a picture was trying to convey, then you won’t be able to get it there in post. This seems so obvious, but it was one of those “Ah Hah” moments for me. Like he warns, I spend too much time trying to make my pictures “not suck” instead of bringing out the mood that I saw of felt at the time.

Christopher Ward Photography

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Well, I finally did something with the domain ChristopherWardPhotography.com. This will be where my “portfolio” will be. It is a start. I only have one album out there right now, and really, it is just some images I have pulled from flickr. They are not really a cohesive album. I need to spend some time to get some images out of Aperture. I need to get some thumbnails too. The thumbnails you see are just browser scaled versions of the larger images.

The NAS is still down

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I got my Western Digital green 1TB drives the other day. That didn’t work. I got a new power supply, thinking that the new drives just took more power than the old clunker could muster. No luck. Still dead. Not sure what the issue is at the moment. I need more time to troubleshoot. The system takes forever to boot, whether it is the existing system disk, or a CD of Ubuntu. It sits there just after a boot logo for a long time. With the drives in, it never gets further. Without them, it eventually continues. I can’t figure out where it gets stalled. What could be causing this?

Integrating with WordPress

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I probably should be working on the 2.7 upgrade, but instead I started looking at photo gallery options other than Gallery2. It is just too slow. There is too much of it I don’t use as well. I think I have settled on zenphoto. It seems to work pretty well, with out the feature creep that Gallery2 has. I figured I would convert the annieandchris.net site to that.

It got me thinking though about how I might integrate it with WordPress. After seeing the tantan Flickr plugin, and how well it works, I figured that there must be a plugin for zenphoto. Well, no. Not really. There are a couple that will let you show pictures in the sidebar. And Trung’s presszen looked promising, but it didn’t seem to work. I started taking a look at the code for the tantan Flicker plugin, and saw how he was able to take control of a URI to insert his own code in with the current wordpress theme. I stripped out the relevant stuff, and got it to work. This is the code.

function parse_query(&$query) {
	$query->is_404 = false;
	$query->did_permalink = false;
}
function request($query_vars) {
    $query_vars['error'] = false;
    return $query_vars;
}

function cww_template() {
	get_header();
	echo '



Zen Integration



';
	get_footer();
	exit;
}

define("CWW_ZEN_BASEURL", "/blog/test");
if (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], CWW_ZEN_BASEURL) === 0) {
    status_header(200);
    remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');
    add_filter('request', 'request');
    add_action('parse_query', 'parse_query');
    add_action('parse_request', 'parse_query');
    add_action('template_redirect', 'cww_template');
} elseif (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].'/', CWW_ZEN_BASEURL) === 0) {
    header('location: http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].'/');
    exit;
}
?>

I think that I may take a go at pulling in the zenphoto albums in a plugin, and see how it goes. I like how you create plugins in WordPress, and it is kind of fun poking around. It was frustrating for the longest time when I was trying to get it going, and I was getting the body of the blog showing up at the bottom. I finally realized that I needed to ‘exit’ the script to prevent the loop from happening. You would think you could override a WordPress function to prevent that instead.

WordPress 2.7

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So, no sooner do I have a bunch of new stuff added to the blog, than WordPress releases version 2.7. This is no small release. There are a bunch of things added that can break plugins and themes. Comments are upgraded, the admin interface is overhauled, and several new functions exist to support all this that need to go into the themes. There is a migration doc here. I will probably need to use it. The theme I am using is not yet on the compatability theme list, and I have customized it quite a bit. The The plugins I am using are not on the compatability plugin list either. I am a little nervous to upgrade at this time. I will probably need to install a “test” version of 2.7, and install my theme and plugins and see what I need to fix.