Mastering the Newest Tool in Your Camera Bag

Posted on January 8, 2013 by waywest

Cover of The iPad for Photographers bookJeff Carlson’s new book from Peachpit Press, The iPad for Photographers: Master the Newest Tool in Your Camera Bag, does a great job of rounding up tools and tips for how to make your iPad part of your field photo kit. And the eBook version, at $15.99, can go right onto your iPad.

If you consider the iPad just a photo-viewing device, think again. I use Lightroom, always shoot in raw format and depend on my iPad for my field-to-desktop workflow. Thankfully, we’ve come a long way from the embryonic days when the release of the iPad-camera connector was a big deal.

Btw, his web site keeps you up to speed once you’ve absorbed the book’s info. Jeff’s also published an eBook on using Photosmith, which shows you how to use that app to tag and organize your photos while you’re away from your desktop copy of Lightroom. After repeatedly hitting the wall with the app’s own chock-full-of-blind-spots documentation, I found this the best $4.99 I’ve spent on photography.

Posted in Tools | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

New Seattle totem honors native woodcarver

Posted on February 27, 2012 by waywest
Volunteers carry totem

Paced by drums, volunteers carried the 34-foot-long totem more than a mile.

On Sunday, the first totem raised in Seattle in 100 years was installed near the Space Needle. A beautiful tribute to John T. Williams, a native wood carver shot by a Seattle policeman in 2010, the event drew hundreds of supporters.

The totem, which weighed 3,500 pounds, was carried by more than 90 people from the Puget Sound pier where it was carved to Seattle Center about a mile-and-a-half uphill.

First Nations people from across the Northwest turned out for the totem dedication. Hoisting the totem into position was done with poles and ropes—an amazing and hair-raising thing to watch.

mother and daughter in native garb

A mother and daughter in traditional button blankets and cedar-bark hats at the totem raising.

Posted in Seattle | Leave a comment

Finally

Posted on February 23, 2012 by waywest
seattle_viaduct_demolition

Viaduct coming down to make way for deep-bore tunnel

Nearly 11 years after the Nisqually earthquake showed how vulnerable the Puget Sound area is to major shakers, the waterfront Alaska Way viaduct is well on its way toward being replaced. It’ll be another three years before completion of a deep-bore tunnel enables the city to completely remove the double-decker behemouth. Once it’s gone, a whole new zone of the city will open up—and a whole lotta noise will be shifted underground.

Posted in Photography, Seattle | Leave a comment

Field work using Lightroom

Posted on February 22, 2012 by waywest

Over on my Lightroom Insights blog, I’ve posted a quick roundup of links related to working in the field with Lightroom and an iPad.

Posted in My Peachpit Books, Photography | Leave a comment

Installing a responsive theme

Posted on February 21, 2012 by waywest

The previously installed Basic Maths theme did not work as well as I hoped. Its layout did change depending on the device you used to view it. But somehow it seemed clunky (that’s a technical term). So I’ve reinstalled WordPress’s TwentyTen theme, plus added a child theme that is responsive to the viewing device. Aptly named “Responsive Twenty Ten,” it does the job.

Posted in Mobile/Responsive Design, WordPress Themes | Leave a comment

Switching to Basic Maths

Posted on December 27, 2011 by waywest

I’ve been busy doing paid work, so only now returning to this work-in-progress. I’ve switched away from WP’s own TwentyEleven theme to Basic Maths for several reasons.

  • As seen in a previous post, Twenty Eleven is not designed to respond to small, mobile-based screens. In this day and age, that’s two strikes against it right there.
  • Basic Maths theme, which is on sale for $30 until Jan. 1, automatically reformats its layouts for the iPhone. It’s also grid-based and—I think—simple enough to be reconfigured as I need.
  • Basic Maths was created by and Allan Cole. From 2006 to 2010, Vinh was the design director for NYTimes.com, which he helped turn into one of the Web’s best-looking and easiest-to-use news sites. I’ve followed his Subtraction blog for years.

With the theme nailed down, it’s on to customizing the general look before building various one-off pages.

Posted in Learning WordPress, WordPress Themes | Leave a comment

Mobile menus

Posted on December 1, 2011 by waywest
Site menus as they appear on iPhone

Not what I expected

I’m not quite sure what I had expected, but this is how the site appears on my iPhone. The menus don’t scale down; instead they wrap and stack down the screen. This underscores the main point of the “Mobile First” approach to building sites. I downloaded Luke Wroblewski’s book to my iBook shelf as soon as A Book Apart released it, but I’ve been reading Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte, so hadn’t gotten to it yet. Seems like I’ll need to read them simultaneously.

Update: I’ve since realized that stacking menu items for the phone view is pretty standard. Still, it seems like there’s probably an more elegant solution where those items would scale down at least a bit. To be continued…

Posted in Learning WordPress, Mobile/Responsive Design | Leave a comment

Breadcrumbs into the jungle

Posted on December 1, 2011 by waywest

Consider this post part of a trail of breadcrumbs left behind as I upgrade the site to WordPress. The journey’s hardly begun, but it won’t be long before I’m hip deep in php and sql files. Having a record of my day-by-day progress just might  keep me from wandering too far off the trail.

Regarding yesterday’s machette exercise, it turns out there was a bug in the previous version of Twenty Eleven theme that kept it from working properly with WordPress 3.04. But to update to WordPress 3.2.1, I had to back up my directories and the site’s .sql file. I hadn’t done that  because the site’s really too new to have much to back up. Something I’d have to do sooner or later, so I did it today. And now I’m set.

Oh, and the Twenty Eleven theme update then installed perfectly. Of course, the theme has way too much air in the text and the heds are gargantuan. So there’s work still to be done. Two steps forward…

Posted in Learning WordPress | Comments Off

Custom menus added, thwarted by theme

Posted on November 30, 2011 by waywest

Today’s additions:

  • Using Appearance panel’s Menus choice, I’ve now added custom menu links to the landing pages of my main books. Plus I added a Contact Us link.
  • A thwarted attempt to switch to the sleeker-looking Twenty Eleven theme from the current Twenty Ten. Unfortunately, when I switched the theme I also had to change up the size of the header photo (940 x 128 to 1000 x 288).  For reasons still mysterious, that change prevented the entire header from appearing. Redid photo, reuploaded, zilch. So back to the Twenty Ten theme, whose narrower banner image proportions I like better anyway.
Posted in Learning WordPress | Leave a comment

Digging in

Posted on November 29, 2011 by waywest

Finally, I have some time to switch WayWest over to WordPress. This will take several weeks. In the meantime, you can still reach the companion sites for my various books at their original URLs:

Questions? Contact me.

Posted in Learning WordPress, My Peachpit Books | Leave a comment