dria.org

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…

So, you might ask, “why a photoblog, dria?” There are two answers to this, each with a number of layers. One is a relatively succinct answer. The other is (so far) three pages long. The three-pager only deals with photoblogging incidentally, but the subject of those three pages is actually more why I started a photoblog than the short answer. I’m just going to give the short answer today, because I’m not finished writing the long answer.

Here’s the short answer.

I have started a photoblog for the following reasons:

1. I like photography a lot. I very much enjoy both taking and viewing photographs. I get a fundamental sense of satisfaction when I manage to take a decent photo, and I find viewing at other peoples’ photographs to be very rewarding. Photographs are akin to poems, in my mind, in that really good ones manage to capture a moment with an efficiency of composition that communicates volumes. I admire the craft behind these compositions, and I admire the discipline of the composers.
2. I want to become a better photographer. The only way to become a better photographer is to practice photography. My photoblog is intended to be a catalyst, driving me to be more disciplined about my photography. Wanting to become a better photographer is, as they say, easier said than done (demonstrated by the fact that I’ve been saying it for years).
3. I have been inspired by other photobloggers. In particular, daily dose of imagery (a brilliant Torontonian photoblogger), and chromasia. These guys are actually out there with their cameras almost every day. They demonstrate the sort of discipline I want.
4. I want to justify purchasing a high-end Digital SLR camera before I run off and drop a few thousand dollars on one. I would really, really like to buy a Nikon D70s kit, a couple of additional lenses, and a big fat CF card. Right now I do not use the gear I have nearly enough (or nearly skillfully enough) to justify that. If I can maintain a photoblog for six or twelve months, posting new photos on a more-or-less daily basis, I’ll have a much better reason to engage in that sort of rampant consumerism.
5. It will be fun.

Note: The photoblog RSS feed is still semi-broken. It validates, and it works fine in NNW, but Firefox and Safari both dislike it. Hrm.

Update: Photoblog feeds should work now. Thanks Vlad :)

Nevermind the previous post…I’ve sorted out Pixelpost well enough to use it for the time being. Cobbled together the beginnings of a custom template, although for some reason the RSS feed is busted right now. I’ll sort that out tomorrow.

Check it out over here, if you like. If you happen to know why the RSS feed isn’t working, let me know.

I’m in search of software that will allow me to quickly and easily post photos — with thumbnails, thumbnail pages, captions, and ideally a user-comment facility — to the web, only hosted on a private, self-administered server. Think “flickr” or “.mac + iPhoto”, only without having to entrust your photos to someone else.

How about (this would work, too) something like Pixelpost, only with catalogue pages that will display clickable thumbnails for a whole month. Something like that would be sweet. Like candy.

I’m starting to think I might just have to suck it up and build it myself, but if you happen to know of software that does stuff like this, please post a comment here. Note 1: I have a Mac desktop and a Linux server, so whatever it is has to run on that. Thanks! Note 2: If you happen to know of a WordPress plugin that does something roughly like what I’m describing here, please post a url.

First things first, some photos. I took around 400 photos while I was there, and about 1 in 10 are decent as-is. I might be able to save another 1 in 20 with some judicious photoshopping. I really need to learn how to be a better photographer. My excuse is that I was almost incessantly on the run when taking photos, so conditions were not optimal. Also: I really do need a better than point-and-shoot camera. The Nikon 5700 is a great camera, but if you put a filter on the damned thing, it starts vignetting like a mofo. No good.

My future camera will be a Nikon D70 or D70s or whatever the next proper Nikon DSLR turns out to be. I really, really want a proper DSLR. The time will come eventually.

Amsterdam. Tons of fun, met lots of great people, had a ton of good food, walked more in a week than I probably have in the past two months combined. Gorgeous weather, great hotel (facilities, at least…the staff was a bit off, but more on that in a moment), utterly phenomenal coffee.

Europeans seriously know how to make good coffee.

On service: I’m not sure whether it was just a bad week or something, but the staff at hotels and restaurants we frequented during our stay in Amsterdam was pretty universally sub-par. I’m not sure why this is, but we just got generally lousy service every where we went. Some folks were ok, and everyone was generally friendly, but, really, servers at decent-or-better restaurants in Canada are, on average, just much better at what they do. In one Amsterdamian restaurant our waiter was so in-your-face that I found it distinctly uncomfortable.

Whatever happened to Zen Waiters? The basic premise I work under is this: the less I notice the service I’m receiving, the happier I am. If a waiter spills wine on me (yes, this happened), or if I have to flag a waiter down for a second round of drinks (this also happened, multiple times), or if I have to physically back away from a waiter because he’s a total close-talker (also happened), or if I wait for my food long enough that I check my watch (happened), or if I have to physically walk around looking for someone to give me my bill (slight exaggeration, but close to truth)…guess what? The waiter sucks.

The best waiter I’ve ever had was at Acton’s Cafe in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Quiet, efficient, unassuming, brilliantly experienced, and extraordinarily talented waiter. We sat and ate several courses happily, never once having to ask for anything (water, wine, food, dessert, coffee, bill, whatever). My soup, as I recall, simply showed up like it fell through a tiny hole in space-time. I never once noticed the waiter until we were finished and I realized, all at once, that I never once noticed the waiter. I love service like that. I also, I’ll have you know, tip extraordinarily well for service like that.

If I ever end up walking away from this whole interweb thing and go back into food service, I think I’ll make it my life’s work to be that good a waiter. Really talented waiters who take their vocation seriously can make extremely good money. The problem, I think, is that most waiters think that they’re too good for what they’re doing — most high end waiters probably fancy themselves as a maitre d’, or perhaps as an underemployed sommelier. My god, the in-your-face guy was just unreal. He put me off so badly in the first five minutes we were sitting at the table that I simply didn’t want to talk to him again, and avoided it as best I could. What a piece of work.

Um…anyhow, that rant aside. I had a great time in Amsterdam, waiters bedamned. Oh, and the bartender at the hotel. I mean, seriously dude, if someone asks you “what scotches do you have?”, it’s not an invitation to play 20 questions. WTF?

Unrelated, here are some more photos, but not of Amsterdam.

It makes me happy when something — a gadget, a piece of software, a website, what-have-you — just works. I was reminded of this just now when I popped my Tom Waits Big Time CD in to the Mac for ripping. Single button press opens the CD tray, another closes it, then iTunes automatically opens, identifies the CD, queries CDDB (online CD database), and lists the tracks. From there a single click on the “Import” button rips and catalogues the tracks to my earlier-set specifications (AAC format, 192 kbps, do not play songs while encoding, do not include track number in file names, do not use error correction). The whole process takes mere minutes*.

iTunes pleases me. In the same vein, iPhoto pleases me. Yesterday I decided to finally clear the SD card on my little baby Canon. I plugged it in to the USB port on the back of my keyboard (those are damned handy), and iPhoto automatically opened, set up the import, did the import, and cleared the card all with a single mouse click.

While in California, I picked up a copy of iWork ($79 USD). I haven’t looked at Keynote yet, but Pages is really slick. It’s a full-fledged desktop publishing system akin to Word, only without the eye-stabbingly bad UI. The default UI is all most people need for most word-processing tasks, and it’s just nice and simple. It also has some extremely nice templates, and exports to PDF very nicely. All good.

Oh, in related (ie: software) news, I’ve started maintaining my TODO list in OmniOutliner. Another very slick, very useful, very usable bit of software that just does what it’s supposed to do without getting in my way.

It says something about bad software when one of the defining factors of good software is that it “doesn’t get in my way”. It sure is neat when technology verges on being transparent. I think this is why I like FireFox so much — the default configuration is nothing more and nothing less than what most people need to get around on the web, but there are piles of extensions that allow you to easily add what you want or need (but nothing else).

We sure have come a long way, and yet there’s so much farther to go…

* (While writing up this entry, I’ve also ripped Tom Waits’ Foreign Affairs, and Beautiful Maladies. Not quite sure why they weren’t already in my collection, but they are now, hooray!)

Good review over here, and I’m not just saying that because I’m a Nikon fan. The side-by-side comparison chart is worth the price of admission.

Naturally, I want a D-70. I just have absolutely no way to possibly justify that purchase any time soon :)

The stock.xchng is pretty slick. There are lots of really excellent stock photos on the site available for use with various licenses. It’s a really interesting site.

This photo, for example, is available for use with no restrictions. Nice stuff. Yay for sharing and stuff :)