I’ve been using IrfanView for years as my default image viewer. Today the author released version 4.0.
Changes include Vista compatibility, toolbar skins, EXIF improvements, along with a host of smaller improvements.
These are from a few months ago when I went down to the Houston Police Officers’ Memorial because I had heard there was a good angle on the Houston skyline. Turns out the memorial itself was much more interesting, both from a historical point of view and photographically.
The first image is from the top of the memorial. In the center of the top level is a small pool surrounded by names of Houston police officers that have died while on duty.
If you’ve got an osCommerce store set up you are probably fighting a duplicate content problem with the search engines. The problem is that OSC has an almost limitless number of ways to view any one particular product page - 1 for each category that the product is in plus one without any category information. The cPath variable in the query string is the culprint.
Here’s how I got around it and my search engine traffic, as small as it is, has been growing. Read the rest of this entry »
A few months ago I started my first ecommerce site at TikiTemplates.com where I have several Photoshop templates aimed at photographers available - some free, some for sale. And to try and draw a few visitors over there I’ve posted a couple times here with new templates. Fortunately I found a post on embedding WordPress in osCommerce and set up a new blog on my TikiTemplates.com site and this blog will get to go back to the random photography and PHP postings that fill up the most space.
I spent some time in Photoshop today coming up with some spring themed templates for portraits, and I can up with a matching set of 4 with a dark blue border and orange flowers in the corners. They’re not free like the last template I posted but they are either $1 or $1.50.
There is both a horizontal and vertical 4×6 and a horizontal and vertical 5×7.
I’ve got a web client having some really odd problems with a program of mine logging him out randomly. Normally I upload a phpinfo file and use that to see if I could find out anything but when I did that I got an error that phpinfo had been disabled for “security purposes”. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve got some time to kill, or are really bored at work, give Desktop Defense a try.
For the past couple of months I’ve been funneling saving money to pick up a couple more Canon Speedlites to get myself 4 lights so that I can start trying out wireless E-TTL setups. Last week UPS delivered my 4th flash, a 430ex and I was ready to go, or so I thought.
I took out my 4 flashes; a 550ex, a 420ex, and 2 430ex’s; and set up a small makeshift studio. The second 430ex would fire when on the hotshoe and would fire when set as a slave, but I couldn’t change any settings. All that was on the LCD was “ETTL” and a flashing “Zoom — mm”. Worse, none of the buttons did anything. After a few minutes of cycling on and off I started hearing what I assume to be the zoom motor trying to move the lenses inside the flash head. Hearing the zooming was new for me since my other flashes are almost dead silent while zooming. So I guess that the zoom motor is bad and I’ll be sending this little flash back to B&H Photo when they reopen after Passover. Fortunately B&H has one of the easiest return policies of any mail order place I’ve ever had to exchange equipment at.
This was the second 430ex that I’ve bought and had to ship back for a replacement. The first one blew a capacitor the first time I pushed the pilot button. It sounded like a gun going off in my hand which comes as quite a surprise when all I was expecting was a little light.
So out of 3 430ex flashes, I have one that works. Anybody else have that kind of luck with these flashes?
That said, the one that does work works flawlessly and I like it better than the 420ex it replaced.
This is a simple template I did for another site of mine and wanted to share it as a free template. There are two 5.5×4.5 inch openings on the bottom and three 3.33×3.5 inch openings across the top.
The template is saved as a PNG file with transparent areas for the 5 images.
The template can be downloaded from TikiTemplates. Images are from iStockPhoto.
