makumaro.net

On Organising Photos

This it the last photo I’m posting from the Great Ocean Road trip. Went to take a look at the Triplet Falls. This is one of the rare times I bring my tripod out and actually use it. Slapped on a polariser to reduce some of the light going in while stopping down to the minimum aperture of f/22. Even used ISO100 on my D300 to get as slow a shutter speed as possible. Managed to get a 2 second exposure out of it. All this just to get the silky look of water from the waterfalls

Really should invest in a 77mm ND filter for these sorts of shots, but I hardly get to see waterfalls anyway.

* * *

Been busy editing the website when I’m free, just to keep the momentum going while I’m still keen and excited about doing it. Putting a little more effort into deciphering code, so I’ve tweaked the archives to display the listings as I prefer it.

As I want continuity, sometime down the road I’d like to move linking photos to flickr. As convenient as it is, I don’t really want to pay $25USD annually to have that option. This plus the fact that Yahoo might wind up flickr one day and migrating the whole lot of photos if it does go down will be a giant undertaking (currently over a thousand photos on flickr).

* * *

I recall from the early days of my D70 while I was reading a Malaysian photography magazine about how one of the photographers organised his photo folders. He created folders with the year, month and day plus a short description and he imported the shoots into each based on that. I picked up the date format easily but took a little while to get meaningful descriptions for each folder.

This was way back in 2004 so I’ve been organising photos that way ever since, which is very helpful for me to find photos as I just need to recall roughly when I went on a trip or did some activity and it doesn’t take me more than a minute to locate the folder and image files.

As my collection of photos get larger (35,000 photos as of this writing?), it gets more difficult to track. I take less photos and delete images with more fervour these days. Quality over quantity they say.

I’m also getting into the habit of tagging my photos with useful metadata for easy search in the future. I get the gist of how it is useful and how I should be tagging the photos so that it makes sense for me when I do a search. I recommend watching the LL guide to Asset Management video from Luminous Landscape if you want a quick and simple method of organising your own photos. I haven’t finished watching all the videos in the tutorial but what I have gleaned so far from it is helping me sort through my files more efficiently.

* * *

After a couple of days of rain, the weather is more tolerable now. Time to go for a quick run.

A Few More Tweaks

The lighthouse at Cape Otway. Heh, managed to wait for no people to be around and took a snapshot of the lighthouse. Might have overdone the vignette in post processing but I kind of like it that way. This is a picture of symmetry where the sea level is straight and the lighthouse sits right in the middle, with the path to the lighthouse drawing your eye towards it.

* * *

Added a few more tweaks to the web design. Tweaked the navigation bar so that one can wander around the site and still get back to the main page (have always ignored to put a home link as the usual idea has been to use the header logo as the link back to the main page). Added CSS3 text shadows to the post titles, and made some subtle colour changes all around. Heh, didn’t mention Internet Explorer support as they aren’t really standards compliant so I’m not going to bother. I guess most of the visitors to this blog will be using a more sophisticated browser to begin with.

Want to go back to linking websites that I frequent. Not sure what format I’d put it in but the web has so many useful areas to provide information on various topics and I think sharing is the best way to let others know what I tend to read.

* * *

Seem to have lost track of time. Tweaking the code for this website is a good exercise in forgetting about other things and it can keep me occupied for quite some time. There’s a few things I could continue doing when I have time, including getting the search box back into the layout, as well as finding a more elegant solution to the archives.

I set about being minimalistic about the current theme, and rather than tear it up and start fresh, it’s easier for me to slowly evolve it and I’m liking it more and more each time I tweak it, which is better suited to the time I have now that I’m working, compared to when I had all the time in the world as a student. Heh, more to come soon.

Little Tweaks

One of Vyanne’s favourite photos from the trip through the Great Ocean Road. This was taken at Wreck Beach, one of the less traveled areas along the coast. The anchor you see here is one of a few, left by a sunken ship that got wrecked along this beach. The anchor is stuck in a pothole along the beach. You get some strange formations as it’s mainly hard rock near the coastline with eroded pockets of water filled with shells and other things.

It’s slightly less accessible and you need to drive on a gravel road just to get there. I cringed everytime the car wobbled over the uneven surface, kicking up and covering itself in dust.

* * *

Did some tweaks to the website. Changed the font from italic Georgia to regular Times New Roman. Also testing out the new CSS3 spec with @font-face, and grabbed some license free fonts over at FontSquirrel. If you are using Firefox 3.5+, Chrome version 4.0+ and Safari (no idea when support for it started) you will see a different font for the post titles.

Will be slowly adding some side content to the website as I’m happy with the current layout.

* * *

Trying to organise my thoughts these days. Have been looking into various wiki programs since I started using TiddlyWiki way back in March last year. Looked at Tomboy and Zim, both of which run native in Linux due to the existence of GTK and Python on the Linux platform. I would have needed to install extras on Windows just to get them working and the .NET framework is only available on Vista and Windows 7, so using it at work where XP machines are still the norm would have been painful.

So I decided to go back to TiddlyWiki for jotting down notes and linking ideas. The only difference this time was that I separated out the content into specific topics. HTML and Javascript is pretty standard and can be rendered by most modern web browsers, so migrating and editing the information between platforms (I frequently use Windows and Linux these days) is easy. Also starting to appreciate tagging for referencing posts and stuff, although I still don’t do it for this website, which uses 2004 idealogy for organising information. Heh, not the best way to lookup stuff, but there’s so far only 6 years worth of ramblings, so it’s not too important for me at the moment.

* * *

Geek stuff aside, tried to get back to running after a week and the half off. Managed probably 3 or 4 km before suffering to the heat. It was 34 degrees when I went out at 6pm and I was feeling mighty lethargic halfway through and had to drag myself home. Heh, progress is slow and I have a little more than a month left to run so I’ll need to push myself along somehow.