This image was taken at the aquarium at the Houston Zoo. As dark as it was I had to put the camera on a monopod and lean against the railing to make myself into a tripod.

One of my web projects met a milestone a few days ago with the 1.0 release. It took me over 2 years working part time, but 1.0 finally contains the full feature set that I wanted when I started writing ProofBuddy in the fall of 2005.

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.

Yes, another shameless plug for a project of mine. For the past few weeks I’ve been setting up an osCommerce store (my first) to sell Photoshop templates. These are the types of templates that you always see at photo labs around Christmas time for holiday mailings, although I’ve got several other styles of templates as well.

The site is called TikiTemplates.

Finally growing tired of the default Kubrick theme on my WordPress blog, I decided it was time to go for a face-lift.

Most of the page layouts I’ve done in the past have been done with HTML and CSS, but only enough graphics for the logo and a few small images just to keep it interesting. So, all my designs wound up with borders and colors, but no real interest. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, maybe I should have checked my comment form. I had installed a captcha spam blocker to the form, but never actually put the image code in. And it never occurred to me that I was getting tons of comments (mostly spam) on my other blog, but none here. Oh well, every comment gets moderated first anyway before it shows up, so here comes the comment spam.

For those that have never used SimpleViewer, it’s a free Flash application that makes great portfolio pages.

To start, I wanted an easier way to update my gallery. I didn’t like the idea of having to rewrite the page or rebuild the gallery every time I wanted to add a picture. So I wanted to make it as automated as possible. Ideally I should be able to upload a full sized image and a thumbnail and the script take care of the rest, and it does. Read the rest of this entry »

If you look through any digital photography forum you are certain to see debates of RAW versus JPG. Being the obsessive compulsive that I am, I can’t take anyone’s word for it. So, I went out to do a series of tests. This is the first of those tests. Read the rest of this entry »

While working on a web application, I found myself with the need for a Javascript function that would format dates to a consistent state. Several different functions exist out on the internet to perform this task, but none were exactly what I was looking for. Most of them did a fairly decent job of taking a time like ‘6:45′ and plugging the am or pm onto the end. Some even allowed military time so ‘20:30′ would convert to ‘8:30 pm’. What I really needed was one that could format a time entered in a normal fashion, but also format if I enter a time like ‘0645′ or ‘2315′. So, I wrote my own. Read the rest of this entry »