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A Little Late but…
By the-Vyper, on February 5, 2010

Yes, yes, yes, this post is a a little on the late side but I have been sick and sleep has been my friend. That and FarmVille. Last Saturday afternoon the stars aligned, or at least the weather, and I was able to go my first photowalk with the TriCity Photo Club around Granville Island. There had been several cancelled outings in the last couple of months. Also the aforementioned club now  has a brand spanking new web design that is live, it is no where near finished. so consider it a work in progress. I am hoping to get out this weekend and join another photo group for a walk around Steveston in Richmond as long as the weather holds. I do have to update this blog more often or else what is the point of having it.

As I was saying, typing, I went out with the TriCity Photo Club for an afternoon walk around Granville Island in Vancouver, a tiny spit of land dedicated to artists, and cement manufacturers. The last couple of outings for this group have been rained out, and this weekends outing was almost going down the same path. The weather held but just barely. This limited the amount of people, who were willing to brave the possible rains with high end electronics, to three but it was still good to get out with the camera.

In the last couple of months I have been on Granville Island with my camera three or four times and a couple of other times without my camera. Combine that with very grey skies and it being pretty bright out meant I wasn’t feeling very confident. I did manage to capture one very nice image while out there.

moss on rust
moss on rust

A close up on some tiny moss on some old logging equipment on Granville Island. The equipment is underneath the antique crane on the back side of the island. The grey skies were a boon to this shot, since I could use them as a soft box to diffuse the available light.

This was take with my D200, and Tamron 17-50mm lens.

  • Focal Length: 44mm
  • Shutter: 1/2s
  • Aperture: f/4.5
  • ISO: 100

I joined the TriCity Photo Club in September and they were without a website. Do mainly to the fact they did not know who was in charge of it. So I was asked if I could make a new one for them. It didn’t take too long to design and execute but it was a little frustrating to get the site launched. But the guys and gals at BlueFur.com, their support team and I did manage to work it all out and the site was up in time forthe last meeting of the club. Please take a second to check out their new site at TriCityPhoto.ca. The group is happy with the look and I know there is a lot of work to be done. As soon as I get some info from them I will update the site. I am also on the hunt for a good WordPress image gallery plugin that does not rely on flickr. Since most of the members are not on flickr.

I am hoping to get out this Sunday with the No Compacts Allowed! photo group and go on a dusk tour of the Steveston area in Richmond. Again this is weather dependent, but if the Weather Network can be trusted, it should be decent. This will be the first outing in while for me where I have nothing on my mind but photography. I am not going to be stressed about all the little things in my head. Lets also hope that Sunday night, I get off my ass and publish some of the photos for this outing and not wait a week to do so.

Thanks for the read. Brennan the Vyper

Posted in New Photos, Photo Walks, Stuff in General, TriCity Photo Club, Web Design | Comments (0)
Rocky Point in the Fog.
By the-Vyper, on November 27, 2009

This month’s challenge for the Tri-City Photography Club is to capture images of Fog. Not as easy as it sounds since it has been rainy for forty days and forty nights. Last night I got lucky, the fog rolled in and the rain rolled out (for a couple of hours at least). So after work, I went home, kissed Sam and grabbed my camera bag, then headed down to what can only be described as my favorite place to take pictures, Rocky Point Park in Port Moody.

This first image is of the walkway just off to the east of the boat launch.

rocky-point-foggy

The next two images are of the Pier itself. I used small apertures and long-ish exposures to get the glow I wanted. The first of the two I left in colour to show the different lights that are used, some are redder than others.

rocky-point-peir-foggy

rocky-point-peir-bw

The fog was very thick last night, since you couldn’t see any of the lights across the Burrard Inlet. It didn’t stay that way for long though, as not long after I captured the last of the three images the fog started to lift.

Posted in New Photos, Night Time | Comments (0)
More Light….
By the-Vyper, on November 4, 2009

In the last couple of months, I have managed to break a fair bit of gear. I broke both of my bounce umbrellas, and I managed to severely damage a speedlight. Not a large amount of gear, not like last years Crystal Falls incident but more than a little annoying. The good news is the umbrellas were cheap and really needed to be replaced, plus it taught me to be more careful with how I place ballast on the light stands when outside. The speedlight, however, was a more costly mistake but at least it was my Nikon SB-600 not my SB-800 that broke.

This week I replaced the broken light with two SB-600’s. I could have bought Nikon’s brand new SB-900 (a more powerful replacement for the SB-800) but what I needed was more light, not a shiny new gadget. I now have three speedlights which if your a speedlight fan gives you a lot of options for lighting. As a Nikon Creative Lighting System (CLS) user, three lights is not quite enough I will have to get a fourth light at some point. Maybe then I will be able to afford a SB-900 or I could stumble over a good used SB-800 (discontinued and becoming rare).

Just taking some quick test shots yesterday was a revelation with the three lights. I am so looking forward to learning how to light with three sources. Sam will be annoyed as she is my principle target for testing. I do manage to take a good quantity of bad shots of my wife.

I may get some practice this weekend with the Facebook photography group, No Compacts Allowed!! and on Monday with the tri-City Photography Club.

I wonder if Sam will let me spend more money on gear so I can replace the broken umbrellas with some nice 46 inch convertible umbrellas? No, I guess I should pay off the new SB-600’s first.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)
VyperPhotos.com Complete Redesign
By the-Vyper, on October 31, 2009
I needed a new site and I wanted to break away from the design I had been using pretty much for the last 6-7 years. The one with the thumbnails to one side and a medium sized image on the other. Over the years that site had seen 6 evolutions. as I learned more about scripting I would rework the site. This time I started with a clean sheet of paper (or rather computer screen).
This time around the design would not use tables (except for tabular data in the admin panel), thereby protecting young primates from untimely death (inside joke for my cousin). The site conforms to W3C standards for XHTML and almost passes W3C CSS2.1 standards (more on that later). the first part of that statement means that my site will look and opporate the same on all browsers with the possible exception of Explorer 6. This was the stated goal back in May of 2008. The site will also use for the first time in my scripting life MySQL. Something I had been trying to use for years, but could not wrap my head around. Turns out it is not as complicated as I had feared. I can almost say that MySQL is very user-friendly and pretty logically laid out for commands.
The new site also relies heavily on javascript and ajax, by using the very complete JQuery library. I make use of various scripts from various developer that have been reworked to fit what I needed them to do.This helps power the carious slideshows, the scroller on the top of this page, and the thumbnails and picture info in the portfolio pages. Jquery definitely was the saviour for my design, it allowed me to build my site using XHTML instead of relying on Flash movies to do the work.
The blog is all new and is powered by a custom-themed version of Wordpress’ software. It is pretty easy to use and is incredibly powerful. In the old site I used a flat-file blogging script that was a pain to update. I no longer hae that problem. I hope to be more faitful in updating the blog since it is so much easier.
The look of my site is something I am very proud of. Sadly, this is the most complicated design I have ever done. It is supposed to look like the popular Flash movie sites used by some of the most popular photographers in the world. I wanted something siple, clean and easy to use. I think I have nailed that this time. The design like I said above is completely compliant with the W3C’s web standards for XHTML, this is something most people or designers don’t care about, for good reason. It takes forever to do and there really isn’t very little to gain. As to the CSS2.1 failure, I don’t really consider that much of a failure. I pass on all points except for a couple of Firefox and Safari specific filters. These are not techniquely compliant but they do not affect the site in use on other browsers. So I did not worriy about it.
The biggest part of the site and the part I have worked the hardest on is the adin panel. I will admit it is not ready to see the light of day yet. I basically have to start over on the admin panel, but this does not affect the part of the site you are looking at. The admin panel allows me to maintain this site easier. I can upload new images to the website, and the scripts I wrote will automatically make 4 versions of the file (thumnail, small, medium, and large). The script will also search the EXIF data from the original file for ISO, shutter, aperture, focal length. camera type, date taken and file this information into the database. It will also ask me for a title, caption, and keywords for the image and allow me to edit the existing EXIF data. It also allows me to create, move, change, and delete images or whole groups of images which is nice.
While the large version of the file and the keywords are not employed, yet, by the site it does allow me some room to grow with the site. I can add a keyword search feature, and hope to use JQuery’s Lightbox script in the near future. One other thing that makes my new site such a beauty to use is the simplicity of changing the whole look of the site on a whim. The design uses templates, upload a new template and set it up inthe admin panel, presto a new site. This should come in handy if/when I offer the script to others.
Hopefully, everyone will like the site, use the contact page to leave me your thoughts or to report any problems. Thanks for taking a look.

I needed a new site and I wanted to break away from the design I had been using pretty much for the last 6-7 years. The one with the thumbnails to one side and a medium sized image on the other. Over the years that site had seen 6 evolutions. as I learned more about scripting I would rework the site. This time I started with a clean sheet of paper (or rather computer screen).

This time around the design would not use tables (except for tabular data in the admin panel), thereby protecting young primates from untimely death (inside joke for my cousin). The site conforms to W3C standards for XHTML and almost passes W3C CSS2.1 standards (more on that later). the first part of that statement means that my site will look and operate the same on all browsers with the possible exception of Explorer 6. This was the stated goal back in May of 2008. The site will also use for the first time in my scripting life MySQL. Something I had been trying to use for years, but could not wrap my head around. Turns out it is not as complicated as I had feared. I can almost say that MySQL is very user-friendly and pretty logically laid out for commands.

The new site also relies heavily on javascript and ajax, by using the very complete JQuery library. I make use of various scripts from various developer that have been reworked to fit what I needed them to do.This helps power the carious slideshows, the scroller on the top of this page, and the thumbnails and picture info in the portfolio pages. Jquery definitely was the saviour for my design, it allowed me to build my site using XHTML instead of relying on Flash movies to do the work.

The blog is all new and is powered by a custom-themed version of Wordpress’ software. It is pretty easy to use and is incredibly powerful. In the old site I used a flat-file blogging script that was a pain to update. I no longer have that problem. I hope to be more faithful in updating the blog since it is so much easier.

The look of my site is something I am very proud of. Sadly, this is the most complicated design I have ever done. It is supposed to look like the popular Flash movie sites used by some of the most popular photographers in the world. I wanted something simple, clean and easy to use. I think I have nailed that this time. The design like I said above is completely compliant with the W3C’s web standards for XHTML, this is something most people or designers don’t care about, for good reason. It takes forever to do and there really isn’t very little to gain. As to the CSS2.1 failure, I don’t really consider that much of a failure. I pass on all points except for a couple of FireFox and Safari specific filters. These are not technically compliant but they do not affect the site in use on other browsers. So I did not worry about it.

The biggest part of the site and the part I have worked the hardest on is the admin panel. I will admit it is not ready to see the light of day yet. I basically have to start over on the admin panel, but this does not affect the part of the site you are looking at. The admin panel allows me to maintain this site easier. I can upload new images to the website, and the scripts I wrote will automatically make 4 versions of the file (thumbnail, small, medium, and large). The script will also search the EXIF data from the original file for ISO, shutter, aperture, focal length. camera type, date taken and file this information into the database. It will also ask me for a title, caption, and keywords for the image and allow me to edit the existing EXIF data. It also allows me to create, move, change, and delete images or whole groups of images which is nice.

While the large version of the file and the keywords are not employed, yet, by the site it does allow me some room to grow with the site. I can add a keyword search feature, and hope to use JQuery’s Lightbox script in the near future. One other thing that makes my new site such a beauty to use is the simplicity of changing the whole look of the site on a whim. The design uses templates, upload a new template and set it up inthe admin panel, presto a new site. This should come in handy if/when I offer the script to others.

Hopefully, everyone will like the site, use the contact page to leave me your thoughts or to report any problems. Thanks for taking a look.

Posted in Stuff in General, Web Design | Tagged , , | Comments (0)