Quiet last day of holidays before getting back to work. Made a big batch of beef stew (very yummy), puttered around the house a bit, and went for a walk to take some pictures.

One of my goals this year is to work on my photography a bunch, so I’m trying to get in the habit of actually taking more pictures. Today’s walk resulted in 97 photos, of which I’ve processed and posted 20 so far. You can look at them here, if you like. I might process and post some more later, but I’m not sure how many more are actually worth sharing.

Happy new year and all that.

Books are awesome and teach you super-useful things about stuff, like Photoshop. Here’s a tomato:

Last week I built a cheapo light tent for doing lighting for indoor macro photography. First attempt was too huge, so I took it apart and cut all the dowels down by another 6″. It’s still too big, so I’ll probably take it apart again tomorrow and cut it all down another 4-6″ per side.

In the mean time I messed around and took some shots using my awesome Nikon 60mm macro lens. The problem right now is that now I need to figure out how to embed the proper colour profile in the images for browser display. Hum. Anyhow, here’s one of the shots I took earlier:

Spent some time messing around with my macro lens, taking detail shots of some stained glass I have. I need to sort out a better rig for this sort of thing — after 70 shots leaning over a glass table with a not-featherweight camera, my lower back was killing me. All in all a fun experiment.

I’m looking for the simplest possible way to upload, organize, and share my photos. I’ve tried Gallery2 and it’s OK, but I’m wondering if there’s something better out there. I’ve looked at both Flickr and Smugmug, but their UI and visual design just annoy me enough that I’m not really interested in using them.

General requirements: bulk upload from a Mac (ideally with iPhoto integration), must be Firefox friendly, the less Flash the better, autogeneration of resized photos and customizable thumbnail sizes, no upload limit (either per picture or total), reasonable bandwidth limits are OK, pay-for-service is OK, customizable themes would be ideal, proven reliable service would be nice, solid customer service track record would also be good.

I get the feeling I’m going to just stick with Gallery2.

Rob and I went to the camera store today, after I did some research on wideangle zoom lenses. Ended up buying a Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 wideangle zoom and a Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 telephoto/macro zoom. And filters. And a camera bag.

I really am a big fan of wideangle shots. This and the 18-70mm will be my standard “walking around” lenses, and the telephoto and my fixed focal-length macro will be for special occassions.

Left for Moncton on Friday. Left Moncton to go to NS on Wed morning. Yesterday and today we’re in Wolfville, and tomorrow we head in to Halifax. Saturday morning we head back to Moncton, then Sunday we drive back to Ottawa. All good, although the weather has been relentlessly crappy. We actually have been snowed on more than once this week, and the forecast is hinting at further flurries this evening.

I’m increasingly convinced that “summoning crap weather while on vacation or travelling” is my super power.

It stopped raining today long enough for us to get a few photos of the Annapolis Valley. You can see them here.

Today I finally treated myself and picked up a Nikon 60mm f/2.8 D macro lens. Naturally, in the hour or so I’ve had to play with it, I’ve taken nothing but a bunch of poorly lit, full-autofocus, mostly crappy test shots, but that’s how it goes, I suppose.

The following shot is one of the more presentable test shots. It’s a monochromed macro shot of a pigeon feather I picked up on our porch the other day. The feather is about 1.5″ long. I could have got closer, but not without losing more of the depth of field. All in all, I’m pretty darned happy with this lens. Hopefully tomorrow’s weather will cooperate and we’ll get out to take some pictures. Otherwise, I’ll be hitting the hardware store to get the basic gear for a home macro studio :)

There are some really fantastic photographers out there. Here are a couple of my most recent favourites:

• Edmund Leveckis
• MUTE

So, it turns out that my Photoblog software doesn’t want to let me log in. Not only that, but it doesn’t want to email me my current or a new password. Long story short — I’m screwed. There’s no way for me to actually log in and use that part of the site anymore.

As it turns out, however, that’s OK. The reason I was even looking at it is because I’m replacing it. Posting individual photos was simply turning out to be a pain in the butt, so I just stopped doing it. I’m going to be using Lussumo Filebrowser instead. This is an extraordinarily slick little piece of php coding (no database) that basically builds a gallery of images (or whatever other file types you have), including, if you so choose, thumbnail previews. It’s…just neat. And tiny! Those Lussumo guys seriously seem to know what they’re doing.

Anyhow…the existing photo site is going away and will be replaced in the nearish future. I think I’ll start going through and organizing my photos right now, in fact…