dancingfish news

I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.6.1. Please let me know if you see any anomalies.

In other news, I went diving in Puget Sound again on Sunday, and I’ll post some photos soon.

I’ve finally gotten a few photos up from a trip to Keystone Jetty last September. I had some equipment issues, so it’s miraculous I had any photos at all, but it’s just a few.

The gallery is at http://www.dancingfish.com/gallery/list.php?exhibition=43&ee_lang=eng.

If you are subscribed to this news page, and notice anything broken about the feed, please send me a note. I’ve made some changes to the feed templates, and want to make sure I’ve not broken anything.

Thanks!

I’ve gotten my 2008 calendar done and uploaded to Cafe Press. You can look and purchase one here, or click on the calendar image.

I have now posted the gallery for the 2007 Lembeh Strait trip:

Gallery

Also on that page are PC (EXE) and Mac (Flash) versions of a multimedia slideshow.

Enjoy!

The galleries and slideshows are up for my recent trip to the Solomon Islands and Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia, where the leafy sea dragons live. I was even able to once again create a slideshow that works on the Mac. It’s Flash based, and a larger download than the PC slideshow, but I’m happy to be able to support that platform again!

Here’s the link to the main gallery page, which has links to the slideshows as well:

Gallery

I have updated my gallery engine to Exhibit Engine 2.01, so it’s looking a bit differently. It also doesn’t display perfectly in IE 6 and earlier, because of IE bugs, but there shouldn’t be any serious gaps. While some things look differently, and some link names have changed, most all the old functionality and more should be there. If you notice some funniness, I’d really appreciate it if you could send me a note. Thanks!

I was off last month to Lembeh for a quick trip and back. Unfortunately, our cottage at the end of the beach was not within wireless range, which limited how much I was able to connect, so I decided to focus on sleep and diving rather than uploading images. I took my new Macbook Pro with me, and it proved to be up to the task of downloading, sorting, culling and browsing photos. I didn’t do any editing on the trip, however; I left that to do at home. I was actually done working through the photos very quickly. This was an all-digital trip for me, my first, even though I’ve been shooting digital for four years now. I needed to trim my luggage down to the minimum, and that meant just one camera. Since KBR doesn’t have E6 chemicals right now, I decided to go with the digital. I did miss my Subeye though!

Anyway, I was able to stamp IPTC info into my images as I downloaded them (using Photo Mechanic), and just added caption information when I got back. I then wrote a new Imatch script to populate my normal Imatch properties with the EXIF and IPTC info, which I then can export to SQL using my other custom scripts. This SQL can be imported into my gallery database (Exhibit Engine). I was also fussing with the slideshow, since I was fairly uninspired about the music for it, but I’ve now found some music that I thought was a fit. Couldn’t get Liveslideshow to behave this time with my photos, so I only have a PC side slideshow for now (I can run these using Parallels on my Mac, but it makes it less convenient for others if they don’t have a Windows VM or use Bootcamp), but I’ll update the page later if I can get a QT slideshow created. Soooo without further adieu, the gallery and slideshow are finally ready.

Lembeh May 2006 Gallery

Something I thought would be fun to do would be for me to post a favorite from this trip, periodically, to this news page over the next few weeks or so. Here’s the first of my favorites:

This is a Xeno crab, which is a tiny critter that lives in camoflauged comfort on a wire coral. They are usually found fairly deep and all the ones I’ve seen before have been monochromatic. This is the first one I’ve seen that was rather colorful, and it appears to be due to the coral polyps that he seems to be wearing on his shell. I’ve have to research this more; I wasn’t aware that they did that.

I have spent the last two weeks wading through and processing photos, getting slideshows ready and my website updated with new galleries and shows. I hand mounted nearly 700 slides, reviewed about as many digital photos, and edited about 800 photos. After more culling, there are nearly 600 in the two galleries for Wakatobi and Lembeh. It was a good trip!

I’ve also been experimenting with a couple of Flash applications. One is a gallery generator and I used it for a summary gallery for the whole trip. A good solution for folks who don’t want to look at 600 photos! Also, I normally make my PC slideshows using PicturesToExe and/or Proshow Gold/Producer. I also try to make one for Mac users, and have been using LiveSlideshow, which is really buggy and a pain to use. I tried exporting video from my PicturesToExe slideshow and creating a Flash based movie out of it with Riva Producer, but it is huge and requires streaming, which doesn’t work so well from my site when tons of people might be trying to download or stream at once (when the links are announced). Anyway, I went back to LiveSlideshow, but I have got to find a better way!

All right, so the gist of this is that the galleries are up, and now linked from my main page. The slideshows are up as well. If you like, take a look:

Indonesia 2005