ZachIsHere

More Max

// January 30th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Thoughts

He always looks so happy and excited around the house but he seems to be so sad in most of the photographs taken of him.

Interactive Maps and Photos

// January 28th, 2008 // No Comments » // Thoughts

Below is a map of Kansas City with plotted points representing a few of my photographs and where they were taken. There had been some good work done to streamline the map making and embedding process since I last looked into all of this.

Max Exploring The House

// January 22nd, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Thoughts

Wrestling With Technology Part 2

// January 20th, 2008 // No Comments » // Thoughts

Flash is amazing. I have the most respect for people who can master and work with it day in and day out. There are so many ins and outs it is tough for me to wrap my head around. Luckily the things I have needed it for are not particularly difficult.

There was a time where I was flirting with commercial templates as the main face of my photography site a while back when I first registered it. Saw a sharp little site and thought I could switch out their pictures and throw in mine and everyone will be happy. Right?

No.

I didn’t understand the flow of content from how things are pulled as sources to when everything is published. You save a .fla file, ok I can hang with that. You export a .swf movie, I know this is flash but a straight up movie looking file? You export an html file as well. What? I looked like the Kansas City Chiefs trying to put together an offensive drive. There was a lot of confusion with apathy sprinkled in. The site got going but it wasn’t what I had in mind and it got scrapped. I pretty much got dominated.

Flash forward to the present. The experience a client has when they are viewing their photographs for the first time is important. Every little thing matters when it comes to the user experience. I wanted Flash for a few reasons. Its aesthetic appeal draws me in and can be used in a lot of ways to add drama. It makes it tougher for most of the computing world to steal the pictures. If used correctly it can add a lot of flexibility. There were a few key things that are needed.

• Visually Appealing
• Ability To Add External Links
• Ability For User To Identify Photos (Names, numbers)
• Ability To Easily Integrate Into Existing Website
• Ability To Roll Out Collections Quickly Without Wanting To Stab Myself

There are a few other small things but that is the big picture of what is needed. I found a lot of different options. I would say too many options…like spending whole afternoons messing around with some random flash thing that some Johnny B. Codington turned out because of god know why. What I needed wasn’t showing itself. There were a lot of good products that had some of the things listed above but not all, it was like some venn diagram joke where the punchline circle was sitting there not intersected with anything else. Then SlideShowPro fell into my lap. It is quite a piece of work. It is as if someone read this post, blew the dust of their flux capacitor, and went back in time to have this product ready for me in what the movie Spaceballs would refer to as “now now.”

All of the required reading gets done and I throw some money on the table for this quality product. Now it is my turn to make it work. I have to face Flash once again. Unfortunately it seems as thought the CS3 version of Flash can smell fear.

A folder pops up on my desktop with a random set of pictures to use as a test set. The back end of this process goes off without a hitch. The photos are resized accordingly and all the meta data fits nice and neat into the XML file. Let the flashing begin. I load up the SSP component and everything is laid out really well. The source XML path gets added so we should be go for launch. I click publish…

*Heavy sigh*

Ok, so…the files don’t seem to be there. Lets check where they are being exported and fix it. After a few more rounds with the publish settings menu I find what I have been trying to export the whole time. The slideshow looks great when it gets previewed in Flash. A few clicks and everything is uploaded to FTP. When I load it a grey box appears. No photographs.

But why get caught up in the little stuff details. You have to keep trying new things. The most important thing is to isolate what is and isn’t working. Time passed and I kept working on it. Some reading, tutorial watching, listening to music, staring off into space, e-mailing, a few episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, and tinkering finally got me there. At 2:43 in the morning no less. It works!

Now the photography site will have a sleek sideshow format for clients to see the photographs they get to enjoy. They can easily relay to me which photos they are interested in and if I choose to go down the true e-commerce path they will be able to purchase a photo by clicking through it. I am sure that project will have its ups and downs as well.

The Levee

// January 19th, 2008 // No Comments » // Thoughts

Saturday night on the town. There is only one staged photo here and it is at the very end. As best I can tell these are Danny and Sandy’s “I am ready to go home” faces.

Wrestling With Technology Part 1

// January 18th, 2008 // No Comments » // Thoughts

Technology is making our lives easier. Right? Right?!?

A good portion of this week has been spent wrestling one bit of technology after another. Ok, maybe I am being dramatic. I enjoy taking on the challenges and learning new things that enable me to present things in a new exciting way or make it so I can bring in revenue.

Google Apps was the first mountain to climb. Google has set up a system where you can integrate some of their services with your own domain. There are a lot of different ways this could be useful especially in the business world but I only had one thing in mind. Google Mail. I absolutely love GMail, it is so quick and the search\organization features are fantastic. I really liked the idea of being able to use a @ZCPhotography.com domain mail name with the GMail interface. I skimmed through the documentation and for the most part it was a simple and straight forward process. The protocol for checking that you are the owner of the domain was as simple as adding a small html file with one line of code in the root directory. After picking up on that you sign in, through Google’s servers you can manage and set up the different services they offer for your domain from a dashboard area. I went to set up the e-mail portion and the process involved changing your servers DNS MX records. They list instructions based on the software that is used to control your back end. I was surprised that Plesk wasn’t on the list, back end software is not my department but I thought it would be there. There was an option that was for any of hosts that were not on the list and the process seemed pretty easy. Gave me the information I needed to check the records. I did as it said and waited. Feeling impatient I went ahead and tried to sign on and to my surprise it was already set up. I sent some mail to myself and everything seemed to be in place, even sent an e-mail to everyone telling them of my change of address. Woops, only fools rush in. Turns out I could send messages but not get them. There was something wrong in the settings. I did a lot of digging around some different forums and found out the problem. Hopefully someone digging around for the solution to same problem will find this page.

Geektalk warning…

If you are setting up GMail with Google Apps on your domain and using Plesk there is something it doesn’t tell you. When you put in the MX records and values don’t put anything in the “enter mail domain” field.

mail.zcphotography.com. ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. MX (10)
zcphotography.com. ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. MX (10)

The account worked instantly after the “mail” subdomain was left off and the records were put in correctly. I really like this option because I hated using most POP3 webmail programs and have fallen in love with GMail. It is important to have an e-mail address from the domain and company name I am using, it adds trust.

Part 2 will deal with my experience in Flash.

The Cheap Camera

// January 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Featured, Thoughts

I stumbled into photography accidentally. Took a class that provided me with a cheapo digital camera and let me run free with it. I must have canvassed the whole town; nothing was safe from that lens. Walking down the streets in a very deliberate fashion looking for the angle, the reflection, the interesting person, or the narrative jump out at me. Standing in the middle of a sidewalk just gazing into an empty alley trying to ignore the people around me that were justifiably confused as to what was going on or what I was doing. I remember being out in the middle of the night taking pictures in downtown Springfield. Nobody was around…even the bar crowd had cleared out. The whole place is usually so lively but it was empty right now and the feeling was eerie. Moving into the middle of the street and getting close to the road I took a few shots.

I remember being floored by this photo. Being absolutely in love with it. These days? I might not give this a second look. The whole thing is too yellow for my liking and the closeup road thing is cool but you see too much asphalt…being able to see more beyond the road is more interesting.

But who is right? The person now or then? I am not sure. These days I am blessed with a really nice rig. A camera setup that lets me do everything I could dream of but there are times I feel like I was a better shooter with that $75 camera. You had to work harder for it. The technical limitations of the camera forced you to go about things in creative ways to get shots.

I wouldn’t trade what I have now of course. I am able to do a lot of interesting work in almost any setting. But sometimes I wonder if the L series lens and the fast shutter speed have made my eye for the “real” shot lazy.

After Bars

// January 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Thoughts