My Photo Gallery

To the right under My Links is the link to my Photo Gallery Web page. This site is hosted on one of my servers. It is not the fastest but it does host almost all of my digital photos. Feel free to visit. If you see a shot you like please rank it. Consider any ranking as a good thing. If you don't like a photo please leave it alone I probably already realize it is not attractive. Consider 5 stars as "Wow, that should be in a magazine" and 1 star as "Hey, that's not hard on my eyes". Thanks for taking a look.

4th of July Parade on the 3rd

Just added the 4th of July Parade shots to my album. With the 4th being on a Sunday many of the towns in the area celebrated on the 3rd of July. Some celebrated on the 5th of July. You can find the new shots HERE. And here is one of my favorite shots from this group.

African Scans and Indexing Completed

I've been working hard (surprise surprise) and I've completed scanning in my South African Slides. I've indexed them with keywords and posted them to my website. Please feel free to take a look. The most recent adds are in the East London section. Here is one of my favorites from this group.

If I remember correctly this was taken on a Christmas day. The only way I know of to have a white Christmas in South Africa is to visit the beach.

Where Have I Been?

My daughter Nicole mentioned awhile back that the Blogs she liked to follow hadn't been updated for awhile. A shot of guilt ran through me knowing that I had not updated anything for a bit. I than felt a sense of relief when I thought longer on the subject that there was a good chance that my Blog probably wasn't one that she like to follow anyways.

Christmas has come and gone and yes Santa (more specifically Mrs. Clause) was really good to me and I got the camera I had been hoping for. The Pentax K-7 along with two lenses the 18-55mm and the 55-300mm Pentax. And I have been very busy trying to learn about the camera and all of its buttons and functions. I need some kind of training class I think. I'm usually not to intimidated by new technology but I felt like a kid in a grown-up's world.

I'm now trying to learn how to get cool pictures out of it. My biggest fear is that I will learn that the equipment just isn't that big of a part of what makes good pictures and I'll have to try to become a real photographer.

By the way the digital photo processing thing is overwhelming me as well. Enough said how about a picture?

Here is a shot I took the other day while snow shoeing up Farmington Canyon. One shot is basically how it came out of the Camera and the other is with a little digital enhancing to get it closer to how I remembered it looking.

As I remember it.

As the camera took the Picture.

I have a new toy. It's the Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED Film/Slide Scanner. I am now able to digitize my slides. I started with some of my favorites from South Africa. (Most of my slides are from South Africa) So I have some up on my Photo Web Gallery (see link to right). Please feel free to go to my Gallery and Checkout my Photos from South Africa.

Your Opinion Please

I have been playing a little with different methods of tone mapping. I have several photos I've been working with and would like opinions on which one folks like the best you can vote on the right.

Image A

Image B

Image C

I do not consider these a finished product. I have been experimenting with methods to transfer slides to a digital format. This shot was originally taken in 1980 on Kodachrome. This was transfered to digital by projecting in onto the wall and photographing it with my digital camera. I thought the texture of the wall might give it a unique look and make it look older. I think the walls texture and semi gloss finish shows a little too much. I will also try projecting onto a white sheet and then onto an actual screen.

Adding Keywords and Indexing Completed

After looking at 2001, 2002, and 2003 it looks like I had already Keyworded those photos. So the indexing and keywords on my Photo Web Pages is now complete. (And there was much rejoicing)

It seemed like I have had to many "text message only" posts so I needed a picture. I photograph a lot of flowers. While I was indexing 2004 I saw this one and actually liked it.

2004 Is Now Keyworded and Uploaded

Quick turnaround time on getting 2004 updated. Take a look at my Photo Web Page through the link to the right.

2005 Keywords Added on Neal's Photo Gallery

I've been working backward adding Keywords and Indexing on my Web Photo Gallery. I just completed 2005 and will be finishing up 2004 shortly. What this means is that if you go to "Neal's Photo Gallery" link to the right and search for photos using the search function you should find more pictures.

Crop a Little Gain A Lot

JoAnne teaching Drew on Easter, "tootsie rolls without wrappers are not tootsie rolls"

Occasionally we might not frame the photo perfectly when we click the shutter. That's were a little cropping of the original can make an okay picture worthy of display on your fridge. Cropping can help focus the viewers attention on what you were looking at originally. And remove distractions from the background (no offense intended Mike). Compare the cropped photo above with the original below. No other retouching has taken place on these photos.

Sometimes I do okay with the framing of my original shot. This one makes JoAnne smile.

My First HDR Photo

This is my first attempt with creating a High Dynamic Range Photo (HDR). It is actually the combination of three different photos each shot at a different exposure. Once the images are combined a process of mapping the different tones is used to display more details in the otherwise hidden areas. Below is what the photo would have looked like with a single exposure.

Why Gallery2

Recently I have been a quest to determine which or what application to use for setting up a Web Photo Gallery on my home server. I decided on Gallery2. I just wanted to share some of the background info I discovered and share why I chose what I chose.

What I Wanted

I was looking for a method to share my photos with others.

Provide a backup or second location for storing my photos. (This came later at the suggestion of my friend Casey King)

Low maintenance application.

Local storage. (Let's face it I'm cheap and I don't want to pay for someone else to host my photos)

What I Tried

Most of what I looked at were freeware applications that could generate web pages. I tried JAlbum, Jet Photo, Pica Photo, Thumbsplus, and others. The most common trait that I discovered is that all of these applications wanted to generate static html pages. Initially I thought that would be fine. However on a second consideration I realized that with static pages I would have to generate new pages everytime I changed or added anything to my gallery.

Some of the applications were just hard to get to work. I had an extremely rough time trying to get PHP (a Web Scripting Language) to work on a IIS server. I still don't have it working on the IIS portion of one of my home servers. I found much more success getting it to run on my Apache server.

What I Liked

One aspect of Gallery2 that I liked was that it was a total Photo Web Gallery solution that was designed to be run on your own server. It was not a set of static HTML pages. It was a server that could generate Thumbnails on the fly and adjust to changes in the file structure. It had built in user resources and a huge community for support and plug in development.

There are a myriad of Themes to choose from and each one is customizable. I like that if I change or move file or directory that I don't have to regenerate pages. I can control the look and feel of each page.

As the system imports new Photos it has the smart to read the keywords stored in the JPG files. These keywords are search able. Someone using the system can quickly search for all of the pictures of a particular person, or all the images of elephants. It is there to be searched and it is relatively fast.

The system also allows the ranking of photos by visitors. Not a critical part of the system but a big plus. The gallery can also sort each album using different criteria one of which is the photo rating.

Getting Started

Some time ago I considered myself a bit of a photographer. A very worth will hobby. Over the years I've accumulated a few shots here and there. Some worth seeing, some worth seeing because you know the subject, and some just worth seeing. I would like to share and highlight some of those photos. Not all of them are in digital format yet and not all have been indexed. I will try to display some of my favorites here.