Photography

I really need to take the time and move this site to Drupal. Wordpress just feels so alien to me now.  read more »

A beautiful sun rise this morning filled the living room with light.  read more »

I'm back from my vacation in Cancun, Mexico. It was one of the best vacations I've every had. We did lots lounging on the beach and had two great adventures - one to the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza and the other an ecological tour. I've create a Flash photo gallery at another site for better speed loading the pictures. You can see it in the galleries.  read more »

I have learned of a new component for Flash called SlideShowPro. It makes creating galleries of my photos, or anything really, very simple and easy to update.
The look of the gallery is set in Flash and it allows a lot of customization, including setting of variables with ActionScript. I can also use Event Listeners to monitor the Flash movie and create my own navigation and captions.
All of the content in the galleries is controlled with a XML file. When I want to change a caption or add additional images, even whole new galleries, I just need to upload the images and modify the text in the XML. Much simpler than having to go back to Flash. I still learning the full power of the component, but it was well worth the $20.

The photo catalog software that I use to organize my photography and create the online galleries, iViewMedia Pro has been updated to version 3. The biggest changes in new version is the addition of a Lightbox feature to view an label multiple images side-by-side in a full screen mode. Other import changes include the ability to export HTML galleries without tables and to export XML for importing galleries into other programs. I'm hoping that means I could use Flash to build dynamic galleries. We'll see. There are a lot of other refinements as well. I think they people at iView Multimedia are feeling a little pressure from Apple's release of Aperture, but I don't think the have anything to worry about. At least not yet.

I have moved the Blackwoods and Trillium Cove Photo Gallery collections into the new format, as well as my mosaics. The iViewMedia system is working well. I can now use a powerful desktop application for organization and editing of sets that us then easily published using a similar template to the WordPress theme. Like the DVD library, I hope to develop a better integration with WordPress for easier revisions to the site's navigation and inclusion of items in site searches.

We'll I finally have my pictures from my San Francisco trip up on the site. I'm trying a new method that gives me more control over how the galleries are displayed.
I still have some video clips of the sea lions and the Aquarium, but that will have to wait.
You can view the pictures by clicking on Galleries and choosing San Francisco.