It seems like a couple things converged to get me back into this blog. I got a new lens and a major PixelPost upgrade just came out. I updated everything late this afternoon. One new feature that I am seriously excited about is the beefed up spam protection. Pixelpost now includes Akismet, which works wonderfully on my WordPress blogs. I had actually considered dumping Pixelpost over its vulnerability to spam comments alone. I was getting some nasty ones.

I got the following email today via the contact form.

I am president of a local non-profit organization of building managers. I would like permission to use the picture of the hunter and glass bridge in a brochure that would only be distributed at a conference.

My wife actually talked to this person, then called me at work and then called her back giving permission. I have never tried to sell my photos, so I was flattered when the assumption was made that it was okay if I said no (i.e., if I made my living from my photos…as they could not afford to pay a royalty for it).

This is the shot in question (posted even before I started sharpening my shots). So, the question is should I hang a shingle (on the side)? It’d be nice to sell a shot here or there just to help pay for the hosting, but I really do not see myself ever going pro.

I use an IBM T41 for work and a desktop PC at home. Up until recently my cubicle set-up was the laptop and a full sized keyboard. However, after months of stooping and squinting due to the distance and eye level of the screen in relation to my head, I decided to break down and request a full sized monitor.

The 17″ CRT that the tech guy delivered to me is fine in terms of size and height. It really is true, though, that a 15″ LCD has as much usable space as a 17″ CRT (I am staring at one right now and I swear it is no smaller). That, however, is not my disappointment. The problem is how dull and boring my photos look on that monitor! Besides that, the header color of the template is all wrong.

I tried to adjust the settings, but the low-end monitor is not sophisticated enough to allow for adjustmetns to the RGB balance. I am planning on switching to an iMac later this year. When that happens I may just have to take my little Samsung LCD monitor to work.

Here it is after midnight on 1/28 and I just posted the photo for 1/26. I am remiss for not posting! It started out only as a day behind, but then last night I got hit with a comment spam attack. The purpose was to highlight the vulnerability of PixelPost and light a fire under the developers’ collective butts. Read about it on the PixelPost Forum.

As annoying as it was the attack seems to have worked. Not only are patches being posted, but this evening I upgraded to PixelPost v1.5beta. Unfortunately, my selective background hack has to be recreated. For the time being all of my image backgrounds will be white.

Hopefully by end of day tomorrow I will have the 1/27 and the 1/28 photo up…

I so need to find an affordable way to calibrate my monitor to my inkjet photo printer. I have not yet wasted money printing anything at a photo lab, but yesterday I tried to print this photo of my kids and it came out so yellow it looked like Isabel had jaundice.

When I first got into photoblogging the website was called Scott’s PDA Photoblog. Since I always had the PDA with me, I posted a photo that was taken on the actual day of the post. It was a way of chronicling my life.

For a while I have felt a pressure to perform by posting perfect photos all of the time. Oftentimes I sit here late at night browsing the archives looking for the right shot. This is clearly self-induced and influenced by the great photoblogs that I peruse on a daily basis.

I want to get better at what I am doing, but in my quest I have been making too many comparisons and have become somewhat consummed. I have enough idols that I am dealing with in my life. I do not need photography to become another one of them. When it ceases to be fun it is not worth it anymore.

Lately I have been posting more of those “day (or week) in the life of” kind of photos and frankly, good or not, it is kind of a freeing feeling. I hope you do not get too sick of seeing Christmas photos, although I will try to mix it up a little.

I finally corrected the date and time on my Rebel XT. It was set fourteen hours ahead of the actual time here on the East Coast. Now future shots will not look like they were posted before the pictures were taken.

Over time photographers tend to develop their own style, or so that is what I have been told. I see it on the photoblogs that I visit–underexposed, overexposed, muted colors, bright colors, grainy, noisey, etc. There are also differences in composition, framing, depth of field…the list could go on.

I bet that if you showed me a set of photos from the thirty or so photoblogs that I regularly visit, that I could probably identify most of them by the blog that they came from. I wonder if someone could say the same about my photos? Am I starting to develop a particular style?

The other day I went out to shoot and discovered that my CF card was at home. Today I made sure I had everything, including an extra battery and the charger. I took one photo before realizing that the CF card was full. Aaarrrggghhh!

The RSS link on the banner is for Chromaticus’ main photo page. The RSS at the bottom of this page is for the Scriptum section only. I had to remove a link from an image description, because the feed did not like it.

http://www.gnomaticphoto.com…index=3&id=1003

The error I received due to the above (truncated) line was:

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: http://www.chromaticus.net/index.php?x=rss
Line Number 34, Column 228:

Anyone have any idea why the link to Matt’s site would have caused this to happen?