Random Brain Dump

Halloween is always one fun event the kids look forward to. This year both of the girls dressed up as Minnie Mouse. We took them to Great America (an amusement park) for the Nickelodeon halloween parade. Suzanne & Betty then took the girls for a quick round of trick-or-treating, after which they, of course, gorged on the candies they worked so hard for!

Check out the October pics:monthly/october_2005

I have been using Coppermine to manage my photos last few months. While powerful, its cool features are eclipsed by the overly complex interface. In addition, I had a hard time trying to integrate it with my blog. I ended up with two completely different skins for the blog & the gallery.

I stayed up late last 2 nites redoing my photo gallery. I dumped Coppermine and switched over to Gallery mainly because a plugin called WPG2 that enables photos from Gallery to be embedded within my blog. Finally, I used Peter Near’s theme for get the same look of my blog for gallery.

I had to spent a few hours hacking things a bit to get everything working together. So now, what do I get for 2 sleepless nites?

• Uniform look for both the photo galleries & blog
• Random image in the sidebar
• Albums can be embedded in the blog
• Individual photos can be embbedded in the blog

A few broken links here & there but I’ll get to fixing those later. I’ll take me a while to migrate all the photos. For now, things should be more seamless now. I’m quite satisfied with the result! 🙂

Adobe Photoshop Elements (PE) started out as a poor stepchild version of Photoshop. Starting version 3.0 though, Adobe added photo management functionalities by merging Adobe Photo Album into PE. It has since grown into a full blown photo management/editing package.

I’ve been using Photo Album to organize my digital photos since version 1.0. So I was naturally looking forward to v4.0 when I first saw Adobe’s announcement of the upgrade last week. After rushing the kids to bed this evening, I got to spent about an hour playing with it and here’re my initial thoughts of the new version.

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RAW is a picture format that is available on the high end cameras like dSLRs. Unlike JPEG, its data is uncompressed. The photo information is recorded pre-processed representing the digital equivalent of film negative. On the flip side, RAW isn’t the easiest format to work with. RAW files are large and processing software isn’t readily available on most systems. In addition, up until the announcement of the unified format of Adobe DNG, most format have been vendor specific.

There are a lot of confusion out there as to the use of RAW, but are some links that I find to be useful on this:

• Wikipedia entry on RAW
• Ron Bigelow’s “Why RAW?“
• “RAW, JPEG and TIFF” by Bob Atkins
• Microsoft RAW viewer for WinXP

Check it out…

This photomosaic of Van Gogh’s painting is composed with over 200,000+ photographs. You zoom in to see the individual photographs!

Very cool.

In June, I quit Vitria and we sold our house. Needless to say, it was rather hectic 3 months for me between April and June. I had a week off between jobs and needed to unwind; so I grabbed my camera along with a tripod and took off to Yosemite by myself for 2 days.

Yosemite Valley was just spectacular in June, prettier than I ever remember. The heavy and wet winter fuels the waterfalls, wild flowers were blooming everywhere, bears and deers were out feeding… It was a great place to unwind and take pictures. I finally get a chance to try experiment with my new camera. I did wish that I had a wide angle lense. Though only a few of the pictures came out decent, I was satisfied with the results. Not bad for the first photo trip. I can only get better… 😉

Here’s the photo gallery of the trip:/trips/yosemite_2005

We took the kids on a week trip to Oahu at the end of July. First real vacation trip for both Katelyn & Allison. The kids had fun and didn’t give Daddy & Mommy any troubles, so all in all it was a good summer trip for the whole family.

Here’re the photos:trips/hawaii_2005