At The Huntington Gardens

First of all, I should mention that while the original method still works, as of WP 2.6.2, the “normal” method of embedding Picasa slide shows into a web page seems to work just fine.  This involves getting the embed URL directly from Picasa and adding to the post.  A word to the wise though – you have to add the embed code in HTML mode in the editor.  If you do it in Visual mode, it doesn’t seem to work too well.  Oh well, its a small price to pay, and much easier than my original posted method.

For example if you copy this code from Picasa:

< embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf"
width="288" height="192" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com
&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2F
picasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi
%2Fuser%2Fmilowerx%2Falbumid
%2F5053811777489218721%3Fkind%3Dphoto
%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com
/go/getflashplayer">< / embed >

it becomes:

when it is in your post.  Nice!

Alternative Methods for a simple Slideshow

I’ve written a plugin to help folks with this task. Welcome Postcasa, a simple Wordpress plugin to add the slideshow directly from the album RSS feed. Its easy to use and works regardless of if you are in visual or HTML mode.

Other Fancy Picasa Plugins

That said, there are many Wordpress plugins that have been created that work well in their own right.  Most of them put album thumbnails directly into the post (instead of having one picture location that cycles through all the pictures).

Some of my favorite are:

• kPicasa Gallery – this great plugin is extremely simple to use and has a lot of configuration options.  The one downside to the plugin is (supposedly) that the gallery must be by itself on a page (i.e. it can’t be inline, meaning resident on a page with other information).  A second downside is that the plugin only supports one Picasa username for the entire blog.  You ARE able to specify which albums go on a page, etc. but they must all be from the same Picasa login.   Darn…
• KB Easy Picasa Web – this plugin is exactly as described.  Its easy.  All you have to do is put the hyperlink to an album in a post, and this plugin replaces the link with the album contents.  Very nice for certain situations.  The only problem is that it puts EVERYTHING in that one post, doesn’t paginate at all, and you can’t set the number of columns to use.  There are some formatting options, but they are fairly limited.  This is nice for someone who doesn’t need a lot of sophistication, and simply wants to “get to it” without having to add any shortcode to posts, etc.
• GoldenGate – this plugin doesn’t allow you to add an entire album at a time, but it DOES do something that is very unique.  It adds all of your Picasa photos to the MediaLibrary portion of the Wordpress post editor in real time using Google APIs.  This is great for allowing you to store your photos on Picasa, but use them in posts in Wordpress.  Very slick.
• Shashin – this is one of the members of the Picasa plugin Royal Family.  Its a great plugin and has a bit different behavior than many of the other plugins listed here.  It displays albums as well as the photos themselves as most do, but it also allows you zoom in on any picture using Highslide, which is free for non-commercial use.  The neat thing is that this zoom is in context of the page, not in a page covering popup viewer.
• altPWA – One of my favorites, this plugin allows using albums from multiple users and also has a bunch of settings to allow you to make the galleries look the way you want them to.  There is one challenge though – it uses the PHP function file_get_contents(), which isn’t allowed by many web hosts.  Since it is made available under GPL, I’ve modified the code to use CURL instead, which is allowed by most hosts.  I’ve sent mail to the original author offering the changed code to him so that his great plugin will be accessible to more people.  Its a very nice piece of work!  A few feature requests: 1) allow a page that displays a number of album roots (i.e. NOT the actual photos, but the actual listing of available albums) to also allow a column display rather than just one after the other and 2) add more CSS around the photo thumbnails so that they can be more easily stylized.  Minor, minor stuff, but desirable in my opinion nonetheless.

As you can see, if you are a Picasa / Google Fanboy like my brother, there are lots of options for integrating your favorite image manager with Wordpress.  Life is good again.

I can’t wait until next year!

Lounging Around...

Contemplation

Amazing what a 4th generation, 15 megapixel CMOS can do…  I love to shoot ambient light, so the low-noise of these really makes me drool!

These photos found on Canon Rumors.

Behold, the Canon EOS 50D:

Canon EOS 50D

Canon is a leaky product company, and the 50D is no exception.  Apparently someone inadvertently put up a Chinese web page a few days early, only to have it taken down shortly after.  Then, a scant three days after the first blunder, test shots and product pictures started showing up on other web pages that disappeared fairly quickly.  What could Canon do but finally clean up the mess and make an official announcement?

Mistake or Marketing?  Who cares, as long as the product is real! And, this time, it is…

Here are the specs:

• 15.1 megapixel APS-C sized CMOS sensor (not a full frame…)
• DIGIC 4 image processor, up to ISO 12800 support
• 3.0-inch LCD with face detection Live View
• HDMI output
• 6.3fps burst mode
• same AF system found in Canon’s 40D with new Microadjustment feature

Apparently it will be ready for the holidays (shipping in October) for an estimated $1,599 with Canon’s EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM zoom lens and in a body-only package of $1,399.

Now that this is cleared up, how about something similar happening for the long rumored Canon EOS 7D? Apparently, it is supposed to be a full frame $1900 body-only beauty.

Rumored EOS 7D

Just when I thought it was safe to upgrade… *SIGH*  Still, $500 more for a full frame sensor MAY be worth the extra price and the wait.  The final specs will tell.

Too bad these other items seem to be going on the fritz at the same time:

• Our video camera
• Our main family room 65″ Mitsubishi Widescreen Television
• Our Logitech Harmony 880 Universal Remote that makes all of the techno magic happen with a single press of the button.

Oh, yeah, and I’m supposed to be building a new home office in one bay of my 3 car garage, buying new furniture for our master bedroom so that we can give our older stuff to my baby boy who is due late in October (just like the EOS 50D), AND resurface our pool after this summer season, because the plaster is falling apart right before our very eyes.

Just like me, when I think of all these things we have to pay for.

Oh well… To quote a good friend of mine: “It’s just money.  I can make more.”

**caps off the bravado with a sheepish grin**

Meet Eye-fi.  Its an SD card plus Wi-Fi, so that your camera automatically downloads photos to your computer, sans wires.

A pretty cool idea if you ask me!  I hope they come up with a CF card soon, as my Canon 10D doesn’t speak SD.

Hmm… I wonder if a brand-spanking new 40D can take an SD card?  I wish! 

And, while I’m on the topic of digital camera reviews, you can also check out these sites:

• Steve’s DigiCams
• Digital Photography Review

Between these three sites, you should be able to find any bit of photography information that you are looking for.

And, the camera has been good.  It has allowed me a degree of flexibility with creativity that really does surpass 35MM cameras.  Both the immediate histograms and the ability to zoom in on a captured picture while you can still get another shot have literally changed the way I take photos.  The benefits of the degree of control and the quick focus and lightning shutter response are almost immeasurable compared to a point-and-shoot digicam.  Most people I know with a non-slr camera always complain about the lag time between hitting the button and the picture being taken.  The memory of a generation of children has been lost to shutter lag, I’m convinced.  But, the 10D changed all that for me, and all was right with the world (or at least with my camera).

But as is the way of things, time has moved on and so has technology.  First the 20D was released, and it was a significant step forward.  Two more megapixels and a second generation Digic II processor made this camera a sweet replacement.  People say that you can take almost noise free pictures at up to 800 ISO with this puppy.  For an ambient light photographer like myself, that’s a major deal.  But, I held my techno-lust at bay and never made the leap, though I tried to talk myself into it on more than one occasion.

Then Canon has the audacity slap my face one again by releasing the 5D, a full-frame CMOS camera, meaning that it doesn’t suffer from the 1.6x lens magnification factor like the 10D and 20D do, where a 50mm lens is akin to 80mm.  Hey, that’s great for telephoto, but you get killed on wide angles.  This camera is a beauty!  A huge LCD on the back, improved Autofocus and massive internal memory make this camera the pro-sumer king.  And, for only $3500.00 this 12.8MP bad-boy can be all yours.  But, sadly, not mine.  My only consolation on this is the slight banding issue that seems to plague a small subset of units.

Now, Canon is delivering another sucker-punch with its announced release of the 30D.  How does this compare to the rest of the Canon line, and specifically the 20D that it is replacing?  Good question!

I see it largely as a hybrid, with the same sensor as the 20D, but with some of the more advanced features of the 5D, such as the 2.5 inch LCD and the ability to turn off sharpening while shooting JPG’s (typically only possible with RAW formats).  The biggest thing that I like about this camera, is the inclusion of a spot meter – something that I’ve sorely missed on my 10D.  Its a 3.5% center positioned meter that allows you to pin-point the exact portion of the photo that you want metered for proper exposure.  Simply point to the most important subject in your photo, spot meter and exposure lock, then reframe, focus and shoot.  Almost guaranteed results as you want them.

But, the big question is, will it be mine?  I don’t know…  If Canon follows their normal release schedules, this October will bring a replacement for the 5D, and I’m thinking that the Nikon D200 is looking awful sweet compared to the 30D.  Of course, then I would need new lenses, more batteries, a strap that says Nikon and not Canon… *SIGH*

It’s a never ending battle…

Digital Photography Review reports that Konica Minolta is getting out of the camera business! I am totally shocked and a bit sad as well.

My first SLR camera was a 35mm Minolta Maxxum 7000i as seen to the left. My Dad bought it for me when I was 16, and I spent almost every dollar I made in High School on lenses, accessories, film and photo processing. In fact, often I had no money to develop the film, but that didn’t stop me from buying and shooting more of it.

The 7000i had an expansion port built into it that would accept little cards about the size of modern day SD Cards. These cards would hold various programs that would make shooting certain kinds of photography easier – like a portrait card and an automatic exposure bracketing card, etc. Today most cameras have these programs built in, but this was a major breakthrough in consumer cameras for the time.

Oddly enough, I used to dream of being able to stick some kind of memory module into that slot so that I could take a picture and have it saved to the module instead of exposing it onto the film. Why? So that I could somehow load it up into my Apple IIgs and print it out on my 8 color Imagewriter II dot-matrix printer! We’re talking back in 1988 – way before I had ever heard of a digital camera. See the crap I invented before it was even invented?? Don’t even get me started on noise cancelling technology…

Anyway – I had actually wanted a different camera to begin with – the Konica FT-1. My mother was working at Konica in the parts department for their copier division at the time, and I begged her to find out what cameras she could get at an employee discount. At first, I didn’t even know that Konica made cameras but a friend told me that his dad had a Konica and that their product was first rate.

My mom brought me back a price list and a bunch of brochures about their equipment and I fell in love with the top of the line, as I usually do. The FT-1 was the badest thing I had ever laid eyes on (this was before I saw the 7000i) – and despite the fact that I had NO clue how to use a manual 35mm, I was convinced that I would die if I didn’t get one.

It was about $800 at the time, if I remember correctly, but I could get it for around $600 with the discount. Then came lenses, etc. Basically I needed a big ‘G’ to cover the bill. With about a tenth of that to my name, I asked my mom to check into the availability – how soon I’d get it, etc and she gave me the horrible news. They had stopped making it the year before, and they had no stock left for sale to employees. They didn’t really have a new model in its class as a replacement, so I was pretty much out of luck.

About 6 months afterwards, I found out that my uncle knew a guy that could get Minolta equipment at the employee price. They had just come out with the 7000i at the time and I was enthralled. It was WAY more than I could afford, but boy could I dream. Then, somehow, my Dad and my Nana decided that they were going to buy it for me for Christmas that year. I was in heaven! It was an awesome camera.

My Maxxum took all the pictures for my High School yearbook, gave me an excuse to study through a lens the woman who would become my wife, took over 1500 pictures of our trip to the holy land and captured thousands of memories over a decade of use. It was my main camera until I finally gave in to the digital bug and bought a Casio 3000EX point and shoot camera in early 2000.

I always missed that 7000i though – the flexibility and creativity of an SLR is far superior to a point and shoot camera and my photographic style was cramped for years. When consumer priced digital SLRs started coming out, I waited patiently for Minolta (then merged with Konica, the very company who started my photo jones) to release a version that would use all the Maxxum lenses that I had acquired over the years, but it just didn’t happen in time.

When we found out that we were expecting a daughter, I bit the bullet and bought a Canon 10D with several lenses, thinking that Minolta would never make the jump. They did about a year later, much to my chagrin. Their foray into the D-SLR field was fairly successful, but I guess it was not successful enough. Sony is acquiring the photo assets of Konica Minolta and will continue to develop for their lens mount, but it just won’t be the same.

I’m a bit sad at loosing, at the same time, both of the companies that turned me on to photography.

So long old buddies, and thanks for the memories…