Based on a suggestion by Raul, I'm going to talk a little bit about my entry into photography. I originally got into a photography because I wanted a hobby that exploited my creative side without all the trappings of the math and science I typically deal with in my day job. Photography to me has always been a bit of a release, a way to unwind and simply see only a small portion of the world at a time. It's like turning the power off and noticing your ears are ringing -- it represents a way for ...

I finally got around to finishing off a little project of mine at home. As everyone knows, I take a pile of photos. So many in fact that I have a hard time finding places to store them all. In the old days I would just make a DVD every few weeks and be done with it, but now that my digital camera is 10.2 MP, I can easily fill up a DVDs worth of photos in a few hours. Of course, I don't need to keep all of these, and routinely I don't. ...

I've spent a great deal of time in the last few months trying to understand how search engines work, and how sites get indexed. In my last article, I recommending that the XML Sitemap generator for Wordpress should be installed on sites to help with search engine crawling. On this site, Google has gone from around 400 indexed articles (about 20%) up to around 1600 articles (about 80%) for my website -- a substantial increase, entirely due to the sitemap. I want to write briefly about Wordpress title tags in the context of search engine optimization. ...

There are a lot of different ways you can increase the speed of your website, even if you have relatively cheap hosting. If you're lucky, your blogging platform already has a caching engine built in (Drupal does). If you're unlucky, and running something like Wordpress, you have to do a bit more work. Caching makes a website more responsive because it takes an expensive operation (such as a long database query) and stores it so that next time it doesn't have to recompute it entirely. For example, when you go to this website, ...

I've been dabbling with a new caching engine for Wordpress over the last few weeks. While WP-Cache does a pretty decent job, it falls short in a few areas, and it's something I've been trying to fix. In particular, here's what I don't like about it: It relies on the entire Wordpress engine to do it's caching It doesn't make use of proper HTTP caching headers The problem with the first item is that even if you have a cache hit, the entire Wordpress PHP core is parsed and partially executed. What that means is the caching system will ...

I've decided to do a multipart series on how to take your Wordpress installation to the next level. Most people seem to have an out-of-the-box Wordpress installation, and I think they are really missing out on a few things that can really improve the quality of their blog. The first topic I'd like to cover is search engines. Most of you know how a search engine works, but for those who don't, here's a really quick primer. Search engines employ little agents called "Bots" that basically roam around the internet taking snapshots of the content. Google's ...

One of the main advantages of digital photography over film photography, at least in my mind, is the ability to view the histogram shortly after taking the shot. While viewing the image on the LCD is obviously an advantage as well, it's difficult to tell if the shot actually turned out based on a small image on a 2-3" LCD. An example histogram from Luminous Landscape A histogram shows you how many pixels in the image (shown on the vertical axis) are at each intensity level (0-255 typically, shown on the horizontal axis). If the histogram is ...

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, the other day I had a chance to photography my first wedding. All in all, it was a pretty rewarding experience. The day started at around 11am for me and Hesty. We suited up, did some last minute charging of equipment, and then got in touch with the groom. Normally the photographer heads over to the where the bride is getting ready for some photos, but Kim's aunt wanted to do those ones, so I was relieved of that duty. We met Mike and the groomsmen down at the Holiday ...

Tonight I did something that I've been thinking of doing for a few weeks now -- I picked up a film SLR body so that I could once again shoot film. And to even write that statement down now seems a bit weird, since I left the world of film years ago, thinking I would never ever shoot a roll of film again in my life. However, a lot of friends of mine who are into photography have started dabbling once again in the forbidden art, and it has caused me to take it seriously once again. I have ...

So there's this buzz amongst photographers about this new technique called HDR (high dynamic range). The basic idea is that a camera isn't capable of capturing nearly as much dynamic range as what our eyes can capture.? With HDR, you take multiple shots of the same scene using a digital camera on a tripod, and create a new photograph using the information from all the shots. That new image contains a much larger dynamic range than would be possible using any one shot. Here are some cool examples from flickr. I bought a new tripod and a remote shutter ...