light reading

I have built up a google page rank of 5 with this site and it has been very pleasing. But I want to run the site on its own servers, so I have moved it and all future postings HERE so this is probably going to be my last post on this site.

Do visit the new site and visit often. And if you have a site of your own, then absolutely feel free to link to my new site as well or instead of to here.

And today 25th March 2008 I have posted a comparison of image quality of the Nikon P5100 compact camera and the Nikon D200 dSLR.

I built photographworks.com using WordPress and if anyone wants some plain-English advice to how to set up a wordpress site on a web server, ask and I will try to answer.

What it involves though is this: the first thing to know is that WordPress comes in two flavors. This blog is one kind and its defining feature is that it is hosted on WordPress’s own servers. The other kind is where you download WordPress’s files and upload them to your own server. For the vast majority of people that means uploading them to a commercial web host. WordPress’s files contain the functionality of the site and also a couple of themes.

Themes are like different costumes that a person might wear. Some costumes are colorful; some have pockets where you can put things, etc. In the same way, not all themes make use of everything that the WordPress files have to offer, and it is interesting trying on different themes to see what they can do.

The makers of WordPress are giving you all its functionality for free and you are free to tweak it and alter it and do pretty much what you want with it. If you have expertise in CSS, you can change the appearance in other ways than just to swap themes.

For me, having WordPress hosted on a commercial host means I am free of the no-commercial-use restriction on wordpress.com sites.

Both kinds of WordPress are essentially the same thing, which is that they are content management systems. That means a software system that has a ‘front-end’ that the viewer sees and which is laid out with all the bits in the correct place, and a ‘back-end’ where you, the ‘owner’, can input information without having to go into the guts of your program and write code. That going-behind-the-scenes via a content management system is what a blogger does every time he/she writes a post, whether he/she is aware of it or not.

So if you want WordPress on your own site, the first thing to do is to go to wordpress.org which is a sister site to wordpress.com. Once there, read up about things and then press the DOWNLOAD button to download the WordPress files and images to your desktop.

As I said, WordPress offers these for free, for which you say thank you.

The folder of files and images is not very big, so it’s not a lengthy job to download them.

Open the WordPress folder and look around. You won’t break anything if you don’t change anything.

Now you need:

An html editor (I use TACO AVAILABLE HERE because it works; because I am on a Mac and it works with Macs, and because it is free.

A web host - in other words, a commercial web hosting company that will sell you a bit of space on their servers. Space on a shared server is fine and you can get something for a few dollar a month. Not all hosts are the same so it is good to know that some are set up to make activating a wordpress blog easy. WordPress. org has a few recommendations HERE .

A domain name - go to a registrar such as godaddy.com or another reputable one - and buy your domain. Some hosts offer a free domain name as part of their package.

Now you need to log in to your web host and navigate to your database and make a specific database to handle your WordPress site. That’s because the way WordPress works is that it stores information in a database and collects it to present as a post when the visitor clicks around the site.

Now open your html editor and open the file that is going to tell WordPress where the database is and how to get into it. It is a config file and the wordpress.org install page explains just how to fill in the necessary information.

Then upload the WordPress files to your chosen web host and follow the instructions on the WordPress install page, and bingo! you are now the proud owner of a site that has all the functionality of WordPress.

And if all that sounded way too difficult, well it sounded that way to me just a short while ago, but it gets easier - much easier - with practice.

Enjoy!

People are looking here at my review of the Nikon P5100, so here are some more shots:

Macro

Ken Rockwell has posted what I think is one of his most interesting observations on which lens to use for taking a PORTRAIT shot of some.

The post is HERE but the starting point is that we should be standing 15 feet (5 metres) from the subject. That makes a lot of sense to me.

This shot was taken with a 105mm lens on a dSLR and I think part of the reason it works is that the woman has an Asian face, so she can take being nearer to the camera.

The risk is that if the face has stronger features, the result might be rather different.

In the post, Ken Rockwell states which focal length to use to capture just a face, or head and shoulders, or more, and whether you are using a digital camera with a crop factor, or a full frame camera.

Doubly interesting to me is that from a psychological point of view, 15 feet gives a very different vision of reality than closer up does. I like talking to people across a room. Strangely perhaps, I find it quite intimate and feel I can really see what is going on between us. It could be that as an Englishman, my preferred social distance is greater than is that case with some other cultures but somehow I think something else is going on.

On a related but ‘reversed’ topic, I saw an interesting article once about the distortion caused by shooting a subject with a short focal length lens. In this case the subject was a car, and the shot was taken extremely from just a foot or so away, with a wide angle lens. Viewed from a normal view distance the car looked distorted. Viewed from just a couple of inches from the print, the car looked normal. Try it for yourself!

Which leads me to this final comment, which is something I read just a short while ago. I cannot remember where I read it, or I would give the attribution, but the comment went something like “the viewing distance for a photographer is the length of his nose.”

I went to the Focus On Imaging annual imaging show at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham today, and had the opportunity to use the D3.

I took a couple of shots without flash and as one would expect in this kind of venue, the lighting was difficult. It was mixed, with a halogen spotlights over the stand, and tungsten background lighting. I shot at 3200 ISO and 200 ISO, with the camera set on automatic white balance.

I processed these images in Camera Raw. The faces were very yellow - not surprising that the automatic white balance couldn’t cope to perfection in the mixed lighting, so I used the eyedropper on the white of the subject’s eye to get the white balance in post-processing. Then I used the same settings for the next image.

Later on I took a couple of shots with an SB-800 on-camera flash. I wanted to do this to get a full spectrum of light on the subject. Unfortunately, I was offered a different camera body to use and on this camera the image size was set up at 2784 x 1848 pixels instead of the full size of 4256 x 2832 pixels (which I didn’t notice) so the shots are not directly comparable with the earlier ones. And there was a different lens on the camera so the test has its limits. And in the circumstances, my focusing is not perfect either.

I think that as a test of shooting at 3200 ISO, however, the results are clear. What do you think?

200 full frame - no flash

200 crop - no flash

3200 full frame - no flash

3200 crop - no flash

3200 arm - flash

3200 crop - flash

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And one last shot of Justin Focus, the power behind These videos

Nikon P5100 - flash