onfocus

When I started this site in 1998, one of the first things I posted was a set of pictures I took on a walk through Downtown Lincoln, Nebraska. The gallery is a bit clunky (both the photos and the design), but I put it together by hand and it worked. Over the years I've posted numerous galleries here, as you can see on my photos page. In 2003 I set up a way to automatically publish pictures from my cell phone to the web: Mophos Moblog. (It still has my old design.) In 2004 I set up a separate photoblog (2004 archive, 2005 archive) where I could easily post any photo without interrupting my text blog or without having enough photos for a full gallery of related pictures.

Even though I have all of these home-grown tools for posting photos, almost all of my photo activity here at onfocus.com stopped in 2006. (The last photo on my photoblog is from July 3rd, 2006. And the last gallery I posted is from February 27th, 2006.) Part of the problem is that I'm simply not taking as many photos these days. And the other problem is that I'm using the fantastic photo-sharing application Flickr (my Flickr photostream). Every photo that I want to share online goes directly to Flickr where I know it will be seen by my Flickr pals. And if someone isn't yet a Flickr pal and I'd like them to see a photo or two, I just send them to my Flickr photostream. I love Flickr so much that I even wrote half of a book about all the cool stuff you can do with it called Flickr Hacks. My online photo life has moved entirely over to Flickr.

Unfortunately, my inner geek isn't completely thrilled with my move to Flickr. As much as I believe Flickr is a revolutionary application, a part of me is sad to see onfocus.com go without photos. And another part of me thinks that all of the awesome stuff that Flickr enables (community, conversation, collaboration, cataloging, aggregation, and so much more) should be done in a distributed way across the Web. The Web geek in me feels that photo sharing shouldn't be owned by any one company, and photos themselves should ultimately be under the control of individual photographers.

I know this vision of distributed photo-sharing doesn't seem realistic right now, but it is happening. Photobloggers post across servers and domains with widely varying software and somehow aggregators are able to pull their photos together in unique ways thanks to standard feed formats. (I still use blogging software I wrote myself, yet I can join in the larger blogosphere because any news reader can pick up my feeds.) Of course enabling ad-hoc groups is impossible without a centralized application—and identity management/access control (photos for friends/family only) is next to impossible in a distributed fashion. But I believe the tools will get there. And I'd like to start living in my distributed-photo-utopia once again.

I realize that not everyone has the means and ability to manage their own server space. But as a do-it-yourself Web guy I have both, and I'd like to get back ultimate control over my photos. Over the next few weeks (months?) I'm going to re-write my personal photoblogging software from scratch. My first task will be to gather the 500+ photos I've already uploaded to Flickr, because their API makes it possible to export my photos. I'm hoping to document my progress along the way, in case my steps can help anyone else out there who wants to go the DIY route. Going off the grid (so to speak) won't be easy, but I just need to remember that I've been there before.

Progress so far:

• OTFG Step 1: Setting the Stage
• OTFG Step 2: Thinking about Photo URLs
• OTFG Step 3: Registering the Import Script
• OTFG Step 4: Running the Import Script
• OTFG Step 5: Setting Up Sets
• OTFG Step 6: The Trouble With Comments
• OTFG Step 7: Importing Notes
• OTFG: Woops, Rotating Images
• OTFG Step 8: Resizing Images
• OTFG Step 9: Authentication
• OTFG Step 10: Adding Photos
• OTFG Step 11: Displaying and Editing Photos

The US Department of State mentioned this site in their monthly eJournal, an issue called Media Emerging. It was in an articled about online photo journals, and you can see the article here: Online Albums. Click Enter Album to see all of the photoblogs mentioned. They also have an article about blogs: Bloggers Breaking Ground in Communication. It's great to be mentioned as a photoblogger even though I don't necessarily think of myself in that category anymore. But it's a good reminder that I should keep posting photos. They contacted me about the article a week or two ago and it was strange to see an email in my inbox with the subject, request from U.S. Dept of State.

If you like photos of statues and water check out 10 more photos from my trip to the Mexico Coast.

I had an early Christmas with my folks this year, and waiting for me under the tree was a Lensbaby 2.0. I've been having fun figuring out how to use it. Here's one of the first pictures I took with it:



One thing that's frustrating about the lens is that you can only change the aperture by physically adding small metal discs to the lens which are held in place with magnets. It's a bit cumbersome when you're out and about trying to take blurry pictures of trees. But I guess that's a limitation that comes with a flexible, bendy lens.



Also, I have no idea which aperture was in for a given picture. I'm so used to being able to check the exif data on a digital picture, that it's frustrating to loose that. I can't just load the picture and see what the aperture was set at. I might have to resort to carrying a notebook and jotting down aperture disk switches.



What I like about the Lensbaby is that you loose some control. While I usually try to have everything in focus, avoid motion blurs, lens flares, and all of the annoying accidents that can ruin a photo, they're all a part of the grammer of photography. That's why Holgas and Lomos are so popular—not because they take spectacularly clear photographs, but because so many happy accidents happen while you're using them. The Lensbaby is also an accident enabler.



I took these photos on a walk just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska last week.

sk and I just got back from a weekend in Bend, Oregon. It was our first time there and we had a blast. Our first night in town, we met up with Jake and his wife and heard about Bend through the years. Other highlights included visiting several Cascade Lakes for canoing and hiking, dinner at the Blacksmith, a quick hike at the Lava Lands Visitor Center, a noisy thunderstorm, and some time at the High Desert Museum. This morning we drove to the top of Pilot Butte and got a sense of how Bend is laid out, and saw a 360 degree view of the mountains around Bend.

The top highlight for me was an early morning canoe trip around glassy Elk Lake.


The top photographic highlight for me was Sparks Lake, and I took quite a few photos there including this shot of Mt. Bachelor and some lava formations:


We also rode the ski lift to the top of Mt. Bachelor for an overview of the Cascades. Here's a look at the Three Sisters and Sparks Lake from above:


I put up a gallery of 13 more Bend photos if you want to see more scenery from the trip. There's so much to explore around Bend, I feel like we've just scratched the surface. I'm already looking forward to my next trip there.

Aloha! sk and I just got back from our Christmas in Hawaii. We went to Honolulu and stayed in one of the many, many hotels in Waikiki. (Our room had an amazing view of the beach.) It's the closest I've ever been to the equator, and as you might expect the weather was warm and humid. (Not quite as warm and humid as Nebraska in late August, but close.) The city seemed like it was inhabited only by tourists, and it was rare to see a Hawaiian going about their daily routine that didn't involve tourism. (Especially in Waikiki.)

Of course news of the tsunamis cast a shadow on our trip. The ocean is ever-present in Hawaii, and it's hard to imagine something so beautiful causing incomprehensible destruction. The local news assured everyone that a tsunami wouldn't be as destructive in Hawaii. I feel strange posting tropical vacation photos in light of the worst natural disaster of our lifetime. Even though the pictures and videos we're all seeing of waves, palm trees, and the ocean are devastating—there is a peaceful side.

Now my feet are back in their sock-prisons, I'm re-learning what day of the week it is, and I'm getting used to seeing the outside world through windows. Here are some photos from the past few days.

I had a great time in Hawaii—hopefully I'll get to visit again sometime. Happy New Year!

If you want to convert a color photograph to black & white in Photoshop, there are a bunch of ways you can do it. For the longest time, I used the Hue/Saturation dialog—taking the saturation down to -100. The shortcut for this is: Image -> Adjustments -> Desaturate. This works well, but I found a new technique in the oct/nov issue of Photoshop User that I'm hooked on called ring-around. I won't go into the gorey how-to details, but it uses "Channel Mixer" adjustment layers to produce twelve separate images with different settings from the source color channels.



It's hard to tell from these tiny images, but each one is slightly different. (Take a look at the dot in the center of the clock.) Each image is a blend of color channels in different percentages. One is 100% red, another is 75% red and 25% green, and so on. Using a Photoshop action, this whole process is automated. So I create the 12 images with a click, and then I can go through each one to see which had the best conversion. From there, I go back to the original image and mix it to blue 75%, red 25% (or whatever) in the channel mixer with the output set to Gray. (If the final output is print, you could print all of the samples to see which looked best in its final form.) It takes a bit longer than hitting Desaturate, but I like the extra control over the conversion.