Monthly Archives: July 2011

Photo Sorting Criteria

To be consistent with myself, I’ll document the meaning and process I go through when sorting through images from a shoot.

0 star – images are brought in at no stars. (not kept)
1 star – technically good image. either sharp, or interesting (not kept)
2 star – image shows good emotional content or is visually interesting. would not be embarrased to show this image. keep to have a variety of images of same event. when choosing from several very similar images, one gets 3 stars, while the other stay at 2 stars (keeper)
3 star – image shows great emotional content or very visually interesting. these are images that I show. (keeper)
4 star – used in conjunction with 3 star, if finer granularity is needed. (keeper)
5 star – outstanding image. when having to choose only several images from a large set (keeper)

The most time consuming portion of the sorting is going from 0 stars to 1 star. At least in my current state of photographic competency, a lot of images get discarded due to out of focus result. This can result in moving only 1/10 (or less) of the images to 1 star, yet I still have to look through all the images. Each subsequent step is much easier as there are less images to look through.

photo website update

I’ve updated my photo.onsendesigns.com site a few times, but I’m still not happy with the way it’s setup. Initially I had a wordpress blog and ZPgallery as the gallery. I didn’t like that setup because while I made two themes to maintain the look between the blog and gallery, I didn’t want to be creating themes every time I wanted to change themes.

So I changed entirely to ZPgallery (which now has rudimentary blogging features thanx to ZPage)  in order to maintain only one theme, but I’m not happy with the the theme selection for ZPGallery.

So I’m thinking of changing things up again. Reinstall wordpress and ZP gallery. Showcase all the work in wordpress (there’s some nice photo-blog themes out there) and keep zpgallery as the backend which is not used to show anything, just serve up images.
Will setup this arrangement on a test server to see how it look.

Camera Aid idea

In concert photography, where light is at a minimum, the capturing of images is tough. But sometimes, bright lights flood the stage in often seemingly random intervals and for brief periods of time. I’m not talking strobes, but spot lights that come on and then go off again in matter of 1 second. Enough time for me (the photog) to realize there’s lots of light, but by the time I push the shutter, the light is gone.

Yes I realize that training the photographer is simpler and cheaper, but I’m a geek that like to build shit.

Build some sort of device that triggers the camera to take a photo which when turned on will focus and snap a photo based on light levels passing a certain threshold. The light sensitive are should be directional. I don’t want it going off just because buddy’s flash went off 3 feet from me.

Software I’m not happy with: and what I plan on doing about it

The need to innovate and improve is certainly consistent with my personality 🙂

Two pieces of software I’m not 100% happy with, but have no alternatives: except to write my own. (actually there’s probably more, but only these two I’ve given serious thought about pursuing)

NAS Solution

One is a free/open source NAS solution that is OS independent. I know of FreeNAS and OpenFiler but both are plagued by the same disease. Extremely slow support and very infrequent updates.
I’d like to put together an OS independent linux file server front-end. Building on  what webmin has done (maybe just a webmin plugin that consolidates all the file-sharing tools in one location). Building on webmin would be easy as it’s already making use of all the tools that are required to manage a file server (though the webmin interface is not particularly oriented to file server management).

The other tool I am not happy with is ZenPhoto. I’m not happy with it due to its very limited selection of themes. WordPress has endless theme selection but (compared to ZenPhoto) poor photo mamagement tools. I love the photo management tools in ZenPhoto. If somehow WordPress and ZenPhoto could be merged in a seamless manner I’d be thrilled; unfortunately I haven’t found such a solution yet. There are some plugins out there for wordpress to bring in photos from ZenPhoto, but it’s cumbersome.
I really like that (in ZepPress) all I need to do is FTP some photos in a folder and they get posted on the ZenPhoto site. No extra messing with front end interface to import or set up albums. The file/folder structure is reflected in the structure of the image folders/sub-folders. I like that.

Photo Gallery/Blog

Part of what I want is a web-gallery and blog to have the same theme allow for seamless navigation from blog to gallery and back.  Also having to manage two separate systems (zen photo for photos and wordpress for blog) is more time consuming. I have used the ZepPage features of ZenPhoto, (to integrate the blog in ZenPhoto) but there are only 1/2 dozen themes available for zenpage enables sites.

I know I could just write a theme to my liking for ZenPhoto/ZenPage, but if I’m going to do some coding, I’d prefer to do some higher level stuff, where ANY theme could be used, hence using wordpress as the frontend, and work on integrating zenphoto photo management into wordpress.

To Do list

Sports
– Fix bike front brake

House
– Buy light bulbs : some 60wat bulbs for master bathroom, and some globe light bulbs for E’s bathroom
– Fix caulking in living room crown molding.
Fix shower door

Software
– Write FileServer interface (similar to openfiler) using webmin as a base.
– Playlist manager plugin for wordpress.
– submission website
– Update “Discogs album release” plugin
– Update “Multi-RSS Digest Plugin”

Photography
– Sort through Kinekit 4 photos
– Make photo book from Kinetik 4 photos
Make a 468×60 banners for Edwin

OpenFiler challenges (and solutions)

I’ve been having trouble getting samba shares to work.

This may help:

https://lists.openfiler.com/viewtopic.php?id=6031

Had trouble connecting a LDAP explorer/browser to the Openfiler LDAP server.
Figured it out.

IP: Openfiler’s IP
Port: 389
user: cn=Manager,dc=openfiler,dc=nas
password: ‘password in openfiler’s LDAP screen’
base dn: dc=openfiler,dc=nas

To Change home FTP folder: Login in with any LDAP explorer/browser (I use JXPlorer) and navigate to the user. In the user view, change the attribure homeDirectory to whatever folder you want. (currently set to /mnt/storage_vg/data/incoming/)