Here is something I wouldn’t have expected: I managed to use my iPhone (with the Wordpress App) to retrieve my last 10 posts. After I lost all my previous 2 1/2 years posts I was trying to decide if I should “re-blog” some of the older posts or just skip it and move on. I fired up the iPhone WP app yesterday, and it could not connect to the server (I had changed my password – and it’s a good thing too). That’s when I noticed the last 10 posts were cached on my iPhone and because WP could not connect to the server to retrieve or update posts they were all just sitting there. If I hadn’t of changed my password on the server WP would have connected and wiped out all the locally cached posts (because they were all gone off the server) – and, yes, I did test this after I had all the posts off the phone. I updated my password and *bam* all the local cached posts were cleared and my last (and only) post was downloaded.
It turns out that WP for iPhone can be configured to cache 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 of your last blog posts. By default it is set to 10 and I had never changed it. Not that anyone should ever use this as a backup method (it’s a pain), but I thought I’d at least share how I got my last 10 posts back. Please note: I have since fixed my backup scrips, so unless I lose the whole VPS or the drives I won’t be experiencing a Wordpress database loss again. However, since I have set my cached posts in WP app to 50 :-)
Getting the 10 posts back wasn’t hard – just tedious.
- I opened WP app
- Selected the post I wanted to save
- Double-tapped on a word in the post
- Tapped on “Select All” on the pop-up menu of iPhone 3.x
- Tapped on “Copy” on the following pop-up menu
- Pressed the home button
- Selected the “Notes” app
- Tapped ‘+’ to add a new note
- Double-tapped in the note and selected “Paste”
- Tapped “Done”
Did that 10 times, to get all the posts into Notes. Then performed a sync with my MacBookPro and all the notes showed up in Mail. Then it was just a matter of copy/pasting the html from the note to Wordpress, fixing the publish time, setting the tags and categories (WP app for iPhone had that information too – I just looked at it on my phone and reentered it). Since I still had the directory structure on the server and did not lose any files in the file system (only the Wordpress database), all the links to photos and images still work just perfectly – that was nice.
Now I really have only two more things I need to do:
- Galleries didn’t come back – there are no html links in the post to a gallery – they are just WP tags (like [ gallery order="title" ]) and the gallery information was stored in the database. So I have some posts with no galleries now, and I need to look at how to recreate the gallery information because all the photographs are still in the same place.
- Since I store all my images/photographs for this blog by date, I might go back and find images and galleries that were posted in the last 2 years and create blog entries for them and add a short piece of summary text. We’ll see how much time I have.
I was originally going to use Evernote to get to posts off my iPhone and back to my server. I had, in fact, performed that whole process outlined above saving the text in Evernote, only to discover after I was done that Evernote has, what I consider a severe flaw. It recognized all the links to images in the text as real hyper-links (well they are). Apparently Evernote doesn’t allow rich text like that on the iPhone and it now refuses to sync (Syncronization failed. Unknown Error u11) – that’s helpful. Currently, my Evernote for iPhone won’t sync *anything* – I did a Google search and found that Evernote has problems with hypertext on the iPhone. I imagine when I delete those notes from my iPhone, it will once again sync with the sky (or the cloud), but currently, it’s raining.
Note: I love Evernote – I use it for a lot of things. I’ll continue to use it. Failing to sync because there is a hyper-link in the note – that’s inexcusable.
Yup, really it does…
I’d been thinking that 2009 wasn’t that great and that 2010 just had to be better. I hope so…
The last week of December (2009) I was upgrading my Linux server OS and there was a slight little problem with the upgrade. That’s happened before, and usually no real big deal. I decided to install the latest version of Ubuntu (9.10). Somehow in the process my Wordpress databases got wiped out. Well, okay, no problem, I’ll just go back to my backups and restore all my blogs. Darn! It’s still 2009, and my backups are corrupt.
So, now I’ve lost 2 1/2 years of blog posts – not fun. It’s 2010, no use crying over lost posts, just fix the backup and move on – 2010 *will* be better :-) The question now, is: Rewrite old blog posts that I know the approximate dates for, rewrite them as new for 2010, or skip it and move on?
2010 Hudson’s Bay senior, Lindsey, came over for a senior photo-shoot and we had a great time. Lindsey is a bundle of energy and a *lot* of fun. Throughout the shoot we talked about her school, what she’s working on, her plans for college, classes, grades, etc… Wow – she’s a busy girl. Here are a few of our favorite photos from her session.
Tags: photo shoot, photography, senior
I spent Labor Day weekend in Tulsa, OK and had the opportunity to eat Sunday brunch at the Osage Restaurant. The food was excellent and I enjoyed the view of the Osage hills from our window-side table*. After brunch we spent a few hours in the Gilcrease museum viewing many paintings, art, statues, Native American artifacts, and much about American history including historical manuscripts, documents and maps. Gilcrease Museum hosts the world’s largest, most comprehensive collection of art and artifacts of the American West – and it shows. I spent much longer inside the museum then I had intended. After our museum visit I went outside to the garden with my IR camera.
What I really want to write about today is black-and-white infrared photography. In previous posts, I’ve shown “unprocessed” IR images here and here, and some “false color” processed images here. Before digital cameras infrared photography was done with IR film and many photographers used black-and-white IR film primarily to create eye-catching black-and-white images. I believe there was quite a bit of “false color” processing with color infrared transparency films, but what has always stood out about IR photography is the fantastic contrast and range of infrared – not to mention striking aspects like dark skies and white trees. I finally got around to processing some of my infrared images of the Gilcrease gardens this last week and I really like the black-and-white results I’m getting. (I know, it’s been almost a month – you can complain about it in the comments ;-) It’s taken some experimentation and a couple of attempts to develop the images in this gallery and I’m sure I’ll continue to refine and improve my IR black-and-white process and development. These were processed using Adobe Lightroom 2. After developing a number of black-and-white IR images I believe I have a good starting point in Lightroom for B&W IR and I will share that preset along with my other IR presets in a later post. Meanwhile, here is Gilcrease Garden in black-and-white infrared.
I’d like to thank my hosts for hanging out and letting me spend several hours in the garden. I’m pretty sure they were ready to leave before I finished inside. You can find more information about the Gilcrease at Virtual Gilcrease.
*I just noticed while on their web site that the Osage Restaurant has been sold and will be managed by Sodexo. Too bad – I have nothing good to say about Sodexo (and I’ll just leave it at that).
Tags: black & white, Gilcrease, infrared, photography
At least I think it is….. It took several days of the little spare time I have to complete the migration from Blogger to WordPress, but I think I have everything done. I had to fix a lot of broken links and move (or re-create) all my images and load them on my server instead of Google’s. In the process I had to edit some old posts and I took the opportunity to use WordPress galleries and thumbnails to make things flow a little nicer and make it easier to read. Hopefully everything is working now. :-)
Tags: wordpress
I’ve decided to move my blog from Blogger to WordPress…. No offense to Google – ya gotta love ‘em, but I’ve decided I want a bit more control over my blog in terms of customization, and I’d like to specify when/where/how images are stored.
I have a Linode (VPS) set up at http://www.linode.com/ with Apache 2.x, WordPress 2.8, Virtual-Multi-Blog plug-in (which really isn’t a plug-in – but rocks), Rails, Git, and a few other development tools I use. Once I get my blog migrated and move my domains, code and other items from my current web host I will detail the configuration and outline the steps needed to get up and running at Linode.
In the mean-time the blog may be unavailable for a short time, and I’m not exactly sure what will happen to RSS/Atom feeds after the move. I’ll be checking into that after the move and reviewing previous blog entries to make sure everything is still working. If you find something amiss, please leave a comment and let me know so that I can get it fixed.
Although it looks like how I imagine Mars appears, it is, of course, Crater Lake. As you can guess from my last post, these image is from my recently IR converted D200. After quickly processing the Crater Lake photos several different ways I’ve decided that I like the non-white balanced (red tinted) images in this series the best. Unlike the images in my last IR post, these have seen some serious LightRoom edits and some dodge & burn in Photoshop.
Tags: Crater Lake, infrared, Mars, photography
I visited the Oregon Garden last weekend and brought my IR camera along with my “regular” DSLR. Although packing around two cameras was a bit of a hassle, I’m glad that I did. Here are four example photos from several dozen IR images I took on Saturday.
This image is of the Rain Curtain in the Sensory Garden. This is processed by setting the white-balance so the trees are neutral and swapping the red and blue channels then changing the hue of all the elements that are not sky or neutral.
This image is of the grape/hop arbor in the Silverton Market Garden. I really like this shot – it’s very recognizable as a grape arbor and yet looks nothing like the visible-light images. This images is processed by simply setting the white-balance so that the sky is neutral grey.
Photograph of the water feature in the Silverton Market Garden. This is processed by setting the white-balance so that the sky is neutral grey and then rotating the hue until the trees are pink. I also added a light blue photo filter over the whole image.
Now, here is a guy I found meandering through the Conifer Garden. This just reminds me so much of a Jim Henson character and looks to me like he is wandering through a forest visiting his friends. This photo has no color adjustments or processing other then some added contrast.
Tags: infrared, Oregon Gardens, photography
For a while now I’ve been fascinated with infrared photography. Now that I have a new studio camera I decided I would have my Nikon D200 converted to infrared. It arrived back just hours before I was to take a short trip that put me at Crater Lake, Oregon for a day. I was able to spend some time taking some IR photos and I love it. For a first attempt I think they turned out better then I expected. I’m sure as I get more experience with this I will find many things I want to improve about my technique. Here are some samples of Crater Lake in IR.
This first example is what the image looks like when I unloaded the RAW file off my camera and into light room. It has some contrast applied and the white balance is set so that green is white (so that pretty much plants, tree, grass is white in the photo). This really shows that plants reflect a lot of IR and there is not much IR in the sky at this angle – the sun is about 90° to my left.
Here is the same image with a custom camera profile for IR and white balance set so that the sky is neutral grey.
Here is another photo from the camera with no processing. Uses the default ‘Adobe Standard’ camera profile in Lightroom 2.4
Here is the same image with the custom camera profile I created and no white balance set at all. I have set this profile as the default for my IR camera so now all images from my D200 are assigned this profile when they are loaded into LR.
I have quite a few more images from the trip, but those are a few samples. I can see that a custom camera profile for IR will help a lot and I already have some examples of why it’s a good idea to have the custom IR profile and start your post processing from that point. Having said that, I have to say that for the Crater Lake photos I took, I really like the deep red images straight from camera. They have an ‘other world’ feel. I think that first picture is a coral for invisible animals on mars. :-)
I’ll probably post more IR samples soon, and I’m completing a work-flow that I’ll use for IR photography. If *anyone* posts a comment asking for more information about this I’ll post my workflow when I’m done and some tips about using LR and Photoshop for IR photography.
Tags: Crater Lake, infrared, photography
Well, the first model shoot I had with Natalya must not have been too awful – lol. She called and asked to schedule another shoot if I was interested. We thought about themes and decided on a 60’s style and she would bring the clothes and I would get some props. I was hoping to find some thing that would give the impression of a 60’s ’soda shop’ or something along those lines. Didn’t actually get what I was looking for, but I did manage to build a somewhat portable 8×8 foot black and white tile floor. The floor worked out great though it’s not actually in many of these shots. Here are my favorites from our “60’s shoot”.
Tags: model, Natalya, photo shoot, photography