Posted on January 27th, 2006 in by jud || Add A Comment
I’m going to have a booth at the Brocade Bridal Show in Fremont on Sunday. The bridal show is at the Fremont Marriott (46100 Landing Parkway, Fremont, CA 94538) and runs all afternoon (11am 4pm). I’ll have some of my storybook albums there and other samples, and it’s a great time to ask questions and see my work. Stop by if you get a chance!
Posted on January 13th, 2006 in , , by jud || Add A Comment
Wow! It’s been a long time since I posted anything! After quite a lot of time going back and forth, I have decided to create a separate site, http://www.dagnallphoto.com, devoted to my professional photography, and in particular, my wedding photography business, Jud Dagnall Photography . Although I may eventually move some of my fine art and nature images there, for now they will remain here on dagnall.net. In the end, a specifically targeted .com domain seemed like it would be easier to remember, particularly since another photographer already owns the dagnall.com domain!
Posted on September 29th, 2005 in , , by jud || Add A Comment
Here are a few sites that I discovered recently:
Techniques and tips, including good information on measuring the black point of your printer:
zuperphotographics
Cool nature photos from the winner of this year’s Popular Photography contest:
soocool.com
Microsoft is getting into the photo game with some useful content:
Microsoft Professional Photography
Posted on September 21st, 2005 in , , by jud || Add A Comment
Magda and I have now been married for over a month! And I’m finally ready to post some wedding pictures :) Most of the pictures were taken by stefanka photography, and by my friend Alex Meyer. I have cropped and/or edited all the photos, however.
Posted on September 19th, 2005 in , , , by jud || Add A Comment
ImageMagick is an open source, free, cross-platform set of image processing command-line tools. I use IM to process some of my images for presenation on the web. The sharpening functionality (unsharp mask) is not very well documented, and I found a pretty thorough explanation of
how to use unsharp mask in ImageMagick.
Posted on September 6th, 2005 in , by jud || Add A Comment
Mike just sent me a link to some free reference cards for geeks. Subjects include perl, apache, emacs, xml and xpath. I’m using the one for the perl template toolkit, and perl regular expressions.
Posted on August 29th, 2005 in , by jud || Add A Comment
Getting good information about flash photography can be difficult. Here’s a site that’s all about Canon flash photography.
Posted on August 2nd, 2005 in , by jud || Add A Comment
I see a lot of questions regarding the resolution (DPI or dots per inch) of web images. There is clearly much confusion about how to size images for the web. So here goes…
The image DPI resolution does not matter for the web. I don’t know of any web browser that pays any attention to this setting. Image pixels vs. monitor resolution determine the size of web images. Monitors are at a fixed resolution (they only show a certain number of pixels at a time, typically between 800×600 and 1600×1200). So a 600×400 image will be about 1/4 of the size of monitor at 1200×800, regardless of the DPI setting. Just to confuse things a bit, most monitors the US are now at 1000×800 or 1200×1000 pixels, and this will continue to grow as larger monitors become cheaper. And finally, many modern browsers will resize large images so that they fit onto the screen, and then provide a magnifying glass (or some other tool) that allows the viewer to see the full size image by clicking on it.
Keeping your images under 600 pixels wide (and ~400 pixels high) allows the majority of people (on the majority of monitors and browsers) to see the whole image on the screen without having to scroll, including any other things that the website puts above/below/beside the image, like borders, navigation, ads, etc…
Because most monitors are in landscape orientation (wide not tall), the max height of web images should be smaller than the max width (once again to prevent scrolling). This is also an issue when using a digital projector… vertical format images get shrunk (or cropped) more than horizontal images.
For example (ignoring all margins for simplicity), if I have my monitor set at 800×600, I can just display a horizontal image that is 800×600 pixels. However, the same size image in vertical format (600×800) won’t fit (the image height at 800 pixels is greater than the 600 pixels my monitor can display). So I need to shrink the image down 25% to 450×600 pixels so it will fit vertically.
Posted on May 31st, 2005 in , by jud || Add A Comment
Create self-signed certificates is useful when managing apache and dovecot imap servers. I have always found it to be a pain to create the certificates. Here’s simple instructions for creating one.
http://www.technocage.com/~caskey/openssl/
In a nutshell,
openssl req -new -newkey rsa:1024 -days 365 -nodes -x509 -keyout www.example.com.pem -out www.example.com.pem
You can then use the file above in apache with the following two lines
SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile www.example.com.pem
In my case, I created a separate cert and private key:
openssl req -new -newkey rsa:1024 -days 365 -nodes -x509 -keyout private/www.example.com.pem -out cert/www.example.com.pem
and installed them so that dovecot (and thunderbird) would use them. I added the year in the cert UO field.
Posted on May 11th, 2005 in , by jud || Add A Comment
I’ve been working with photoshop javascript scripting, which is relatively simple. For example, as an experiment, I’m in the process of automating the way I frame images for the web. This little script is step one in the processes, and provides a bit more detail about manipulating text. Copy the code to a file called Sign.js, and place this file in your *photoshop*/Presets/Scripts folder, and (after restarting photoshop) you can run it from the File->Scripts menu as “Sign”.
Note: I tested this code using Photoshop CS. It should work on CS2, and on Photoshop 7 with the scripting component installed, too.
// Sign.js - put your name in the lower right corner of the document
// preserve the existing settings before changing them
var strtRulerUnits = app.preferences.rulerUnits;
var strtTypeUnits = app.preferences.typeUnits;
// set our units to what we expect
app.preferences.rulerUnits = Units.PIXELS;
app.preferences.typeUnits = TypeUnits.POINTS;
// creates a new document, 400x600 pixels @ 72DPI, with a title "Hello World"
var docRef = app.documents.add( 400, 600, 72, "Hello, World!");
app.displayDialogs = DialogModes.NO
// Create a text color (red)
var textColor = new SolidColor;
textColor.rgb.red = 255;
textColor.rgb.green = 0;
textColor.rgb.blue = 0;
// Create the text layer that we'll manipulate
var artLayerRef = docRef.artLayers.add();
artLayerRef.kind = LayerKind.TEXT;
var textItem = artLayerRef.textItem;
textItem.justification = Justification.RIGHT;
textItem.font = "Papyrus"; // this is a Mac default font. Try "Arial" for cross-platform compat
textItem.contents = "Jud Dagnall";
textItem.size = 10;
textItem.color = textColor;
textItem.position = Array(400, 575);
// The next two steps aren't terrible relevant, but are part of the greater plan :)
// flatten the image
docRef.flatten();
// make the background layer edit-able,
docRef.layers[0].isBackgroundLayer = false;
// clean up and restore settings
app.preferences.rulerUnits = strtRulerUnits;
app.preferences.typeUnits = strtTypeUnits;
docRef = null;
textColor = null;
newTextLayer = null;
Posted on March 22nd, 2005 in by jud || 24 Comments
On our recent trip to Mono Lake, Magda Jusinska agreed to marry me! I’m very happy and excited. No date has been set yet, but we’re planning to get married this year!
UPDATE
A few people have asked how these pictures were taken. I put the camera on a tripod, and, using the Canon Timer Remote Controller TC-80N3, I set it to interval mode so that it would take a picture every 2 seconds. I had told Magda that I wanted us to take a picture together, and so we did!
Posted on March 15th, 2005 in , , by jud || Add A Comment
I have posted a new collection of images, titled Mono Lake Winter Wonderland, which is also the title of one of the images.
Magda and I took the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day off, and turned out to be much more of an adventure than we’d planned. I should write a separate entry about everything that happened, but suffice it to say that it involved a car accident ($5000 worth of damage caused by a large rock), a tow truck driver from Deliverance, a separate rescue by the Mono County Sheriff, getting snowed in, and a number of really exciting photographs! Enjoy.
Posted on March 14th, 2005 in , by jud || Add A Comment
Inspired by the new wordpress templates, I’ve given the whole site a facelift. There’s now a relatively uniform look for all of the site, although it is still best when viewed with firefox. Major tweaks to the header and navigation, minor tweaks to the image gallery. CSS makes all of this so much easier. I deleted a few lines of PHP, and add 2 div tags in my html, and everything else was done via CSS. CSS ROCKS!
Posted on March 11th, 2005 in by jud || 3 Comments
I’ve upgraded my blog software to wordpress 1.5. The upgrade process was completely painless, and so far everything looks good. I also like the new layouts (although the photo is mine!)
Posted on March 10th, 2005 in , by jud || Add A Comment
I’m excited to be part of a photography exhibition currently on display at the Modernbook Gallery in Palo Alto, California. Twenty Bay Area photographers were each selected to present two images, and the result is a diverse
and compelling show that includes timeless landcape and nature, black and white street photography, hand painted photos, artistic recreations of childhood memories, and special topics like antique neon signs and colorful details from Europe. More information can be found here. This is my first
gallery exhibition, and I have included two Mono Lake images. I also have a number of other matted prints available for viewing (and purchase) at the gallery. Check it out, and let me know what you think.
