Cafe Bucky

The last few days have been very pixel oriented. There’s desire, and reality. Desire is: cameras I don’t have to clean, a movable type template that doesn’t get wierd on me when I use a large thumbnail size, and something saner than CSS.

And then there is reality.

I decided to try some photos with my 80-400 zoom on the D1. As a quick refresher, the Nikon D1 is very much an SLR, with the image sensor tucked away behind the mirror. It attracts little specks of dust. When you have a high f-stop, like f16 or so, the little specks start getting really obvious. I cleaned and cleaned, and snapped and snapped. Yuk, spots. I hear that using an AC Adapter on the camera to keep the mirror up while cleaning (as opposed to manually holding the shutter down on “bulb”) is the bees knees. We have one - In California. I’ll get to try it when Snapper Susan gets here. In the meantime, it’s going to be a perfect time to work on shallow depth of field shots …

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Long Walk Saturday! I went from 60th and Park Avenue, down to Union Square, and from there down Broadway to Battery Park. Somehow, any photo trek for me always includes a healthy dose of excercise.

I gave myself an assignment: try to face south (no turning around to snap something I just passed), avoid retakes, and do mostly zoom blur shots. Sort of an “art done with a little bit of discipline” deal. I did everything at 1/20th with a 70-210 zoom (using much of the range of the zoom for most shots).
In honor of Ferarri and Michael Schumacher, who may be winning his 6th Formula One World Championship in a matter of hours from now, I have included an impression of a 550 Maranello on Park Ave. South.

And there are more threads to tie in besides photography, F1, and New York :-) I will soon be launching SnapSmith.com, which will feature my personal photography. SnapSmith will also be an example site for FlexiPhoto. Some of what I took today will be available there. I’m aiming for sometime in the next two weeks.

Crossing streets. Crossing from one FlexiPhoto goal to the next. Gradually Crossing from the Left Coast into a New York state of mind. Go go go.

I am so happy to be in New York. But I won’t be getting out and about too much today. I’m wrestling a bit with my old pal, Cascading Style Sheets. The picture here (popup version should be legible) is an example of what I am trying to get together. I know enough CSS to be dangerous, but always get thrown a bit when it comes to nesting DIVs. Captions and Keywords are just containers for text. A collectionContainer holds collectionElements (individual photos and their info). Earlier on in developing FlexiPhoto, I had a set number of columns. I have chucked that for this page [1], and let collectionElements flow, one after another, adjusting as a page is a resized. A goal for today is to get this nailed.

[1] for the default look and feel (UI) … There can be many. I’m just trying to nail down what elements are available on a given page. Good thing I’m going to a web designers Meetup tomorrow night. I’ll be like a goldfish wandering into a bowl of Piranhas :-)

33rd and 9th Avenue. Cheyenne Diner. Pastrami. Yum and wow.

And I deserved it, having gone through the hustle and bustle of getting to B & H Photo, the best damn photography store in the country. Everything is on display at B & H, even little foam covers for ear buds. B & H is photo-nirvana.

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Tech: The full sized-popup is not high-res. The original is about 1 meg. I am thinking of shooting Tiff, which will push the file size up to ~7-8 meg per picture. This would somehow (more CF!) involve collecting on my J & R favor :-)

Having recharged the batteries of the venerable Nikon D1, I set out to work on a technique. More to come …