Meanderings in Blogland

Oh my, time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like… nevermind, everybody’s heard that one. Anyway, long time, no blog, and it’s not because nothing blog-worthy has happened. It’s more like stuff happens faster than I can type it, or something.

Anyway, I’ve been putting some time and energy into promoting my nature photography online again. From a business standpoint, that’s just dumb. There are about a gazillion good photographers out there, and about three people who occasionally buy nature photography. Not a good ratio.

Ten to twelve years ago, I actually made a significant portion of my income from selling nature photography at art fairs. I had pretty much the only color darkroom in the area, so I had a nice niche selling my custom printed local scenics. My few competitors sold cheapy drug store prints or horrifically expensive custom lab prints.

As digital technology has advanced, my work has improved, but everyone else’s has, too. Now everybody and their grandma has a nice inkjet printer and a ten megapixel camera. Quite a few people even know how to use them. So, my product has improved and my sales have dropped to near zero, even while I have my own “gallery”… OK, it’s mostly a web design office.

But, I digress… this post was supposed to be about Smugmug.

A couple of months ago, a guy I met in a bar emailed me a link to some pics he’d taken. The photos were good, but the gallery site was even more interesting. The layout was attractive, the organization excellent. As I poked around more, I learned that they had “Pro” accounts, where you could set up galleries of your photos, and sell them without actually filling the orders yourself. The orders are sent straight to a specialty lab which prints and ships the orders.

I haven’t been getting many orders from my web site lately, but when it happens it’s consistently at a very inconvenient time: I’m off camping, I’m out of mat board, the jets on my printer are clogged, I’m drowning in a sea of urgent web work, or some combination of the above. With Smugmug, all that doesn’t matter; the order gets shipped promptly anyway. I was a little sceptical of the quality of their printing, so I ordered a few of my own photos (once you have the pro account, you can order at low wholesale pricing) and they turned out quite nice.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I plunked down the $150 for a year’s worth of Pro, and started uploading photos. It’s a frightfully time-consuming process, to get the right versions of the right photos uploaded and placed in the right galleries with the right keywords and looking up latitude and longitude data so the pics are listed on maps.smugmug.com and getting the pricing right and yadda yadda yadda.

But, the time has come to formally start promoting my Smugmug site. It’s still fairly small; I’ll keep plugging away with adding new images, and new localized galleries. But, there’s enough there for the world to look at.

Photos of coastal Mendocino County

Photos of California’s Lost Coast

Photos of the Sierra Nevada

And there’s plenty more. I’ll try to find some time in the next few days to blog about the particulars of setting up the Smugmug site, tips I’ve figured out, etc. But for now, one last little thing: If you should find yourself setting up you own Smugmug account, use this magic personal coupon code: tFHWQQZiHZTI2. You’ll get a discount, and I’ll get a credit against next year’s account fee.

Some of life’s more interesting moments are mundane, trivial events which somehow capture larger truths. Here are a couple of them from my life:

The Dressing Room Clock

I’ve done an awful lot of theatre over the years. If there’s one thing theatre people are good at, it’s complaining. I’m not sure we’re different from everybody else in that regard, but I digress.

During the run of one show I was acting in at our local theatre, I noticed that the clock in the dressing room had stopped. I was the only one around at the time, and it was Sunday, right before a few days off. “Dad-burned, dinkle-dorfing theatre,” I said silently to myself, “everything is always breaking around here.”

Thursday rolled around, and it was time to do another show. I soon noticed that the dressing room clock was still stopped. In retrospect, I’m not sure who was supposed to notice the problem and fix it, but still, I was annoyed. “Things never get fixed around here!” I grumbled to myself. Had there been anyone else around, I would have grumbled to him, too.

Of course, I’d never told anyone of this situation, and there was no reason to think that anyone other than the actors who use that dressing room would notice. But still, I was annoyed.

I looked back at the clock. I realized that clocks like that don’t plug into the wall, they take one AA battery. Furthermore, I had my camera bag with me. In that bag, there was a stash of AA batteries for the flash. It dawned on me that I had a few options:

• I could continue to grumble ineffectually to myself
• I could grumble ineffectually to other actors
• I could point out the problem to the stage manager and actually get it fixed, OR
• I could just fix the damn thing myself and be done with it.

The Handyman’s Curse

Another time, my girlfriend and I were having dinner with a couple of friends. The male component of the couple was celebrating; he’d just received his certification as an electrical contractor. “Why would anyone work as a $15/hr handyman, when they could work as a $75/hr contractor?” He said, looking forward to larger paychecks.

“Oh, poo-poo,” I said silently to myself. That $15/hr handyman is me… in a metaphorical sort of way. Our society does value specialists, with their intricate knowledge of esoteric topics, far more than generalists.

For better or worse, I’m a hopeless generalist. I can’t stand the idea of doing one narrowly defined thing over and over and over and over, regardless of what that particular thing is. Maybe I’m stuck for all eternity as a $15/hr handyman of sorts… a photo/graphics/video/web/text editing handyman.

Arg.

Arg. I’m on yet another adventure, this one isn’t supposed to be as much fun as my usual photo/hiking/explorations. I’m driving a rental truck full of my mother’s stuff from her old house in Lafayette, Louisiana to her new one in Medford Oregon. I  have some friends in Kansas City, so I decided to take a more northerly route. The first three days of the journey were just fine, with seven or so hours of driving, reasonable rest periods, a fun visit in KC, and a pleasant enough drive accross Kansas. Tuesday night I wound up in a motel in Ogallala, Nebraska.

I watched the TV weather reports, and it looked kinda icky. There was some snow on the route. But, it didn’t look too bad; the radar was showing one band of precipitation on my route. Most of the nastiness was to the south in Colorado. I was thinking I’d hit a few hours of slow going, and then free sailing to the coast.

I got a reasonably early start out of Ogallala. It was cloudy, calm, and 41 degrees there. As I headed west, it gradually got worse: a little light rain, then there was some snow by the side of the road, then there was snow blowing across the road, then it was snowing and blowing, then there was snow and ice on the road. After that, it started to get bad.

Just past Cheyenne, the Highway Department closed I80, routing the traffic back to town. It was 1 o’clock in the afternoon, and I had no real option other than getting a motel room and hunkering down for the night while the storm blows through.

I managed to fritter away the rest of the day; I didn’t brink work stuff, so I couldn’t get much productive done. My old laptop doesn’t have wireless capabilities, so I’m on a funky Windows machine in the “business center” of the motel. I managed to fix one problem on one of my clients’ sites, but mostly I played.

The weather forecast called for a little more snow today, but much more reasonable travel conditions. I was confident I’d get a late start, to let the trucks wear off the black ice, slowly slog over to Laramie, then have free sailing the rest of the way.

I woke up this morning, looked out the window, and the conditions were exactly the same as they had been all day yesterday… a near whiteout. Snow and wind with the temp around 20. The freeway west is still closed. Roads I could see from my room getting plowed yesterday are snowed over now. The worst of the snow has moved a little to the east, but ther’e a bunch more coming.

Looks like I’m stuck for another day. Yuck.

I’ve been having too many adventures, and getting too little work done. We recently took a week long camping/family trip up to Oregon. Several blog post worthy event happened on that trip. I’ll try to briefly cover a couple of them here.

Vaux’s Swifts in Eugene

The day after a family reunion, a cousin of mine performed in a big band concert in a park in Eugene. After the show, we were standing around talking, and I noticed the sky was suddenly full of thousands of small birds, which I took to be swallows. The locals knew right away; the birds were swifts, not swallows, and they were gathering to roost together in an old chimney a couple of blocks from the park. We walk over to watch.

It’s hard to describe the spectacle of a swirling tornado of thousands of birds getting sucked into a large chimney. Fortunately, I caught it on video so I don’t have to try too hard to describe it with words. The subhead above links to my YouTube video. Make sure you watch it in HD, the low def version is awfully gooey.

Before the Europeans Came and Messed Everything Up, swifts roosted in hollow standing snags in old growth forests. Fortunately for the swifts, as the Europeans knocked down the forests they built chimneys. Now, many of the old chimneys are being razed, but the old growth forests are still gone.

Bad Boy Elk

On the way back, Andi and I stopped briefly near Prairie Creek Redwoods to watch the Elk. This elk herd is famous; they hang out right next to Highway 101 and the Newton Drury Parkway, so thousands of tourists see and photograph them every year.

The late summer is a transition time for male elk. Earlier in the year, they’re remarkably docile for such big wild creatures. In the fall rut, they are aggresive towards everybody, especially other male elk.

When we first saw the herd, two males were locking horns in a half-hearted preliminary bout. We parked on a little side road next to the highway. We walked around a little, trying to get good sight lines, photo light, and a safe working distance. There was a wide pathway between two clumps of trees which crossed the side road, connecting two large meadows. Several elk, a mix of females and young males, were grazing calmly on that pathway about fifty feet from the road. I took a few minutes of video. It was a close range and good light, but the elk weren’t doing anything real interesting, so the video is a bit on the blah side.

As this group of elk grazed, they were gradually moving towards me and about a dozen other observers/photographers who had gathered in that spot. I figured they were gradually moving towards the other meadow across the road. They were getting a little close for my comfort level, and I believe in always yielding the right of way to big strong wild creatures, even if they’re herbivorous; so I walked back to the car and put away my camera.

Andi was still watching the elk, and the phalanx of photographers, from behind our car, so I kept watching, too. The elk continued to move toward the road; the photo phalanx stayed in position, picking up a few more members. The elk group now had all categories of camera pointed at it: cell phones, point and shoots, video cameras, even one over-equipped guy with a long-lensed digital SLR on a tripod, another SLR around his neck, and a vest full of accessories.

One of the female elk crossed through the phalanx and onto the side road. The people parted just enough to let her through. She was clearly nervous, stamping her feet and looking around anxiously. Yet, the photo tourists mostly stayed put. Suddenly, a big bull elk burst onto the scene, apparently protecting his lady. He bluff charged the over-equipped photographer, who skedaddled quickly behind a car. The humans were yielding more space to the elk all of a sudden, but it wasn’t enough for the bull. He charged the car behind which the OEP and others were hiding with a mighty CRASH of antler on metal and tinkle of antler on glass.

As near as I could tell, no humans were hurt. The woman in the part of the car closest to the charge looked rather stunned, unsurprisingly. The car suffered a broken window, a big dent on the door, and several large scratches. The bull elk suffered a headache.

Maybe, just maybe, a few tourists learned a lesson about yielding the right of way to large wild animals.

Yippee! My new video camera arrived yesterday. A new learning curve to climb. Oh, boy.

So far, I’ve had a little time to fiddle with it, I’ve walked around the area to do some actual shooting, I’ve imported some footage into Final Cut Pro, I’ve looked at raw footage on a TV/monitor, and I’ve tried to connect an external mic (a Rode VideoMic).

A few quickie notes:

Final Cut Pro 6.0.0 doesn’t work with this model; you need to update to at least 6.0.4. It took me a while to figure that one out; maybe typing that in my blog will save someone some time. Once you’ve got a current-enough version of FCP, your footage can be edited with a simple command-shift-8, “log and transfer”.

The “mini advanced shoe” on this model is non-standard, so I couldn’t just plop the Rode mic on it. Grrr… I’ve opted to order a little adapter gizmo from B&H Photo rather than mangle my new mic to make it fit. It’ll be a few days before I get to see how well the adapter works.

The footage from the HFS 100 is gorgeous. It’s vastly sharper than the footage from my old Samsung. The colors pop, and it handles contrast pretty well. Wow. I’ll try to get a little YouTube video posted in the next few days.

I also ordered some lighting gear from an ebay store called Ephotodiscounters. I couldn’t find much info about them online except their ebay customer ratings. We’ll see how that works out.

For several years now, it’s seemed inevitable that I’d take a serious plunge into the shark-infested waters of video production. The inevitability has a lot to do with some sort of metaphorical mathematics: theatre + photography + computer graphics = video. Or something like that.

A year and a half or so ago, I bought a cheap little Samsung SC-DC575 video camera. I realized that this cheap little thing would get frustrating quickly, and I was right on that front. Nevertheless, I’ve been using footage from it to learn Final Cut Pro, and get a sense of what sorts of shots translate well into the new (for me) medium. For example, no matter how lovely the scenery, handheld walking shots never work as anything other than scary clichés; we always expect someone with a machete to pop out from behind a bush and chop us to bits. I’m still trying to figure out ways of capturing the feel of nice, quiet hikes on video.

Recently, one of my web/graphic design clients offered to fund my plunge as an advance on future work. This set off a batch of research projects and contemplations: which camera? can I get indoor shooting space? how much/which light and sound equipment should I get right away? what sorts of productions am I going to do, anyway? is the shed at my house big enough to set up a little chroma key rig?

On the gear front, the recurring theme is the giant chasm between “consumer” gear and “professional” gear. In the camera realm, the best consumer cameras top out at a little over $1000; the pro cameras start at about $3000. It’s a similar tale with tripods, microphones, lights, etc. I can’t afford the pro gear, and I don’t want cheap junk. The adventure is finding the best gear I can afford, and using the still camera gear I have when it’ll work well.

The decisions are starting… I’ve ordered a Canon Vixia HF S100 camera from the always reliable Newegg.com. The Canons seem to have the best lenses and features in the prosumer realm; the only competition I was seriously considering after the first round was a Panasonic model. The Canon S100 has a more expensive sibling, the S10, which costs $300 more and has 32GB on board memory. When I checked the prices on compatible flash memory—$75 for a 32GB card—I giggled a little and ordered the S100. The camera should arrive in a couple of days. I’ll blog about it and post a YouTube clip quickly.

In anticipation of many large files, I’ve also ordered a couple of new, large harddrives. A 1TB external drive for backups, and a 1.5TB internal drive for the main video files and projects. A 1.5 Terrabyte harddrive for $160. The mind reels.

Sound. Arg. On camera microphones really suck. Cheap microphones really suck. Pro microphones are too expensive. So, what to do? On the one hand, the reviews say the on board mic on the Canon S100 are better than most. Plus, with flash memory, there’s no motor sound. So maybe, just maybe the on board mic would be adequate. For some projects. After several hours of research, I decided to get a Rode VideoMic, too. It should be a big improvement, especially in eliminating extraneous noises. I found a “blemished” one at a firm called zZounds.com for a little over a hundred bucks. We’ll see.

Lights. I’m still in research mode on this one. I might start with newfangled compact fluorescent bulbs for my old photo flood lights, or mayble I’ll get some umbrellas or softboxes with a backdrop stand and greenscreen background.

Forward and onward…

My goodness, time flies. I haven’t had time to blog for… I dunno, a few months. I could look it up, but that’d be research. Anyway, one of the reasons I haven’t blogged is actual work.

I’ve posted a couple of brand spanking new sites for my clients.

One is for a restaraunt/bar in Los Angeles, near Universal Studio City. It’s called Henry’s Hat. In my neck of the woods, restaraunts have little business card sites if they have sites at all. In LA, with its hundred gajillion times larger population, it’s a different story. This site has, or I’m working on developing, lots of interesting database stuff. The menus, which the owner assures me change daily, are all on the DB with scripts to make them easily editable. They have a big party room, which will be decorated specially for sporting events. The events themselves will be chosen by online voting. If you find yourself in LA while hungry and/or thirsty, check it out.

The other new site is for a fellow who helps non-profit organizations get grant money. His name is Harvey Chess, his organization is First Things First. There’s lotsa good info on his site about organizing your organization so that it’ll get grant money. I’ve got some database stuff happenin’ on that site, too. His links page, and events schedule use my scripts; I’ve also set him up with a WordPress blog.

In the political debate realm, I’ve continued wasting far to much time in YouTubesville. Talking sense to wingnuts is a futile exercise, but I can’t help myself. Maybe I’ll get around to repeating some of the comment threads here.

I’ve also posted some stuff on my YouTube channel recently. My Mendocino Village 4th of July Parade video has been something of a hit.

I’ve also had a few recent camping/hiking/photography trips. I keep meaning to write a follow up to my Montgomery Woods Fire post. The short version: it’s recovering very nicely. I’ve made a couple of trips up to the Lost Coast, but haven’t made progress on my lostcoast.info site.

Oh, why do I do this to myself?

My pathological obsession with the loony right wing has continued unabated. I’m fascinated by the [made-up] facts, [twisted] logic, rhetorical techniques, and general paranoid hysteria of the right wing. For example: the gay marriage issue. Has anyone come up with a credible rational argument against allowing homosexuals to marry? I’ve looked for one, and have failed miserably in my quest. It’s all random homophobia, a couple of passages from the Bible, and some strange nonsense about protecting marriage from some kind of assault.

I had a particular exchange with another YouTube commenter which is pretty typical, or maybe even archetypal. It started with this lovely wingnut video which exposes the shocking truth that Obama wants rich people to pay their taxes and ghetto kids to pick up litter.

3monkeysmomma (2 days ago) 

“I worked as a community organizer..”

Translation: “I couldn’t get a real job in the private sector.”

 

mistergarth (20 hours ago) Show Hide

“Translation: ‘I couldn’t get a real job in the private sector.’ ”

I hate to interject just a little bit of reality into this lovely paranoia fest, but Obama graduated at the top of his class from Harvard Law. Do you really, for one second, believe that he chose to work as a community organizer because he had no other options?

 

3monkeysmomma (3 hours ago) 

Might I remind you he worked for ACORN?

It’s not paranoia if THEY REALLY ARE out to get you.

 

mistergarth (2 hours ago) 

“ACORN? It’s not paranoia…”

ACORN is out to get you? No paranoia there. No sirree bob.

Let me guess. Your message was smuggled out of one of ACORN’s white republican internment camps, where you’re forced to eat tofu and arugula while watching Olberman all day.

 

3monkeysmomma (2 hours ago) 

ACORN ADMITTED TO MULTIPLE COUNTS OF AGGREGIOUS VOTER FRAUD WHILE RECEIVING PUBLIC FUNDS. 

I hardly think that’s something to joke about.

 

mistergarth (2 hours ago) 

“ACORN ADMITTED…”

Congratulations! You’ve achieved double-wrongness! A few isolated ACORN workers committed voter REGISTRATION fraud. Hardly egregious, and not the same thing as voter fraud at all (none of these phony “voters” actually voted).

In any case, how does any of this translate into ACORN being out to get you?

 

3monkeysmomma (2 hours ago)

Mistergarth: Some trivia for you:

guess who else worked as a ‘community organizer”? Jim Jones! The communist preacher who murder 900 people by forcing/enticing them to drink cyanide laced kool-aid? Hence the phrase now so often directed to Obamabots “Don’t drink thel kool-aid”

As for ACORN there are extensive ties to attempts at fraud, rent-a-mob schemes, and the community reinvestment act which laid the foundation for the collapse of our credit markets.

 

3monkeysmomma (2 hours ago)

ACORN also has ties to SEIU which is pushing the card check law. They are thugs who will lie, break the law and commit extortion to force communist policies on our nation.

And I disagree that an organized ATTEMPT at voter fraud is is not something to be concerned about. I guess if a man tried to rape a chid but she manages to escape, you would just shrug it off because it was not egregious.

 

mistergarth (1 hour ago)

“…an organized ATTEMPT at voter fraud…”

There was no attempt at vote fraud. You ACORN conspiracy loons have to realize that voter registration fraud is not the same thing as voter fraud. ACORN workers were paid by the number of registrations they turned in. A few of them registered Mickey Mouse, or random names from the phone book, to get paid more.

“ACORN also has ties to SEIU…”

Oh NO! People working together to organize workers to get better pay and working conditions! The horror!

 

3monkeysmomma (1 hour ago) 

Clearly you are so blinded by your ideology you are going to gloss over ACORNS CRIMINAL activities no matter what.

Enjoy your kool-aid.

While the initial comment was somewhat tangential to the video we were supposedly critiquing, it soon veered off the alleged topic entirely. It’s amusing that 3monkeysmomma never bothered to even attempt to answer my initial question “Do you really, for one second, believe that he chose to work as a community organizer because he had no other options?” No direct answer, just change the topic to the dastardly ACORN. Especially amusing is 3monkeysmomma’s creative mix of parroted accusations about the dastardly ACORN’s horrific misdeeds  and total non sequiturs, like “guess who else worked as a ‘community organizer”? Jim Jones!” WTF?

What is it about community organizers, anyway? Don’t right wing groups have their own community organizers?

Next up… scientific debates with creationists!

Some months back, I wrote an essay on the differences between designing for the web and designing for print. While that essay was primarily looking at the visual aspects of design, now I’d like to look at the differences between writing for the web and writing for print media.

Writing for print is almost always constrained by the mechanics of the project. The text has to fit in a designated space. If you’re creating a trifold brochure, for example, you need to make sure that the text can fit (at a reasonable type size) comfortably on two sides of a sheet of paper with enough room left over for the graphical elements. If you’re writing a book, you can generally only add pages in multiples of four, eight, or twelve. Most of the time, you want to say more than can easily fit into the designated space, so the medium requires that you write concisely; using abbreviations, eliminating modifiers that aren’t absolutely necessary, etc.

The web has no practical space constraints. Your pages can be as long as they need to be. Your site can have as many pages as it takes to say what you want to say. Text is efficiently stored and transmitted in the digital world. A novel’s worth of text uses the bandwidth of just a few seconds of video. The web is highly tolerant of verbosity, in fact, more verbiage is often helpful in improving rankings for competitive searches; the site with a larger volume of content looks like a more substantial resource to the search engines.

Let’s briefly look at an example of converting a print document to the web. One of my web clients is Digging Dog Nursery. They produce an annual catalog of the plants they sell. They list several hundred selections in their catalog, and they’re forced to use a series of conventions for concision. Here’s a sample of the print catalog:

Compare that print sample with this web page for Monarda ‘Jacob Cline’. The Digging Dog folks have established quite a few conventions for their catalog which are fine for the print world, but would be yucky on the web. Let’s look at a couple in this example:

Abreviated keywords.

Look at the line “M. didyma ‘Jacob Cline’ ” The M abbreviation for Monarda is perfectly fine in the print world. It’s a long established convention when working with scientific names to abbreviate the genus once you’ve established that you’re referring repeatedly to the same genus. Through the course of a long catalog, this convention save a lot of space. But online… why abbreviate your keywords? It’s easier for your human readers to have the full name, and the web page will rank higher for searches using the keyword “Monarda” when that word is used in full several times.

Necessary context

What does ” 4–5′ x 15″; late June-August ” mean? If you were reading the whole printed catalog, you’d be able to figure it out. It’s the height and width of the plant, and its bloom season. The catalog’s author uses the same format throughout the catalog. If you did a Google search and happened on to a web page with that string of information, you’d probably be perplexed. Which bring us to an important lesson: visitors to your website do not start at the beginning and read straight through to the end. They’re far more likely to start in the middle somewhere, skim the page a bit, find the critical piece of info they’re looking for, and… go to some other site, or buy your widget, or something.

In the print world, you can define a term in chapter one, and use it again in chapter five without re-defining the term. Since your readers have read chapter one, they know where to find the definition if they’ve forgotten the details. In the web world, chapter five needs to be able to stand on its own. Maybe the re-definition is incorporated into chapter five’s text, maybe it’s a simplified or re-worded definition. Perhaps your site should have a sidebar with definitions.

———

Stuctural Clarity

Since your readers are likely to start reading your work somewhere in the middle, they’ll need clues to figure out where the snip they’re reading fits into its larger context. Generally, that means you’ll need to structure your document so that it lends itself to a logical system of headlines and subheads, with other structural elements like lists and cross-referencing links.

Pretty much anyone who has written a term paper knows how to write an outline. For web writing, outlines are super-duper important. They not only keep your writing focussed on the immediate topic and the overall flow, but they also determine the pages of your site, the headlines, subheads, and lists. Follow a well thought-out outline, and coding your site becomes easy, search engine optimization becomes easy, and your readers will be able to find the information they’re looking for easily.

I just posted a video on YouTube. It’s old and new at the same time. While I just barely did the video editting, I took the footage in July of 2006.

Andi and I were walking up the bed of Usal Creek, on Calfornia’s Lost Coast. We heard an odd crackling sound. We looked around… was it water gurgling over rocks? Was it… we looked up at the ridge above us. It was a wildfire! We walked through the nearby campground, making sure people knew what was happening. One group had a cell phone, and knew where the nearest place with reception was. They hopped in their truck and sped off to report the fire. Other groups started rounding up their people so they could evacuate quickly if they needed to. Andi and I got in our car and started to leave.

Usal Creek and the campground are in the bottom of a canyon. The fire was on the ridge to the north. The road back to civilization goes south, over another ridge. From about halfway up that ridge there is a large clearing with a view across the canyon. Here, at a safe distance from the fire, I set up my tripod and shot some video and some stills.

You can view the video here.

Here’s one of the stills: