Tag Archives: Photo-A-Day

Grab Bag

Podcast: Scobel Show

Since recently discovering Robert Scoble and following his blog’s RSS feed I discovered a very interesting photographer, Kris Krug. On the podcast the Scoble Show Kris talks to a group of people at Photo Camp at Northern Voice. I watched the podcast and was inspired to play around with my point and shoot camera, The Canon SD800is, to get a good Photo for Photo-A-Day today.

On my camera there is a whole set of cool settings that can only be accessed through the manual use of the camera. Don’t be scared you can leave the world of automation and have a good time. As I was listening to the podcast and hearing some of the things that Kris suggested I started taking some photos according to those suggestions, changing my angle of perspective, playing with light, things like that. Well, I didn’t get a very good photo while I was doing that because I was playing with photographing one of my Transformers. It was kind of a bland subject and the light inside is not that good. I must get more shots earlier in the day.

I found and started playing with the Color Accent setting of the camera. It is really cool. You aim the camera at the subject and you can pick out what color you want to be the accent color and everything else goes to a Black and White feel. The color picker is a simple little eyedropper icon and you select through the colors in the scene. I was attempting to get a really yellow shot of my cat Duncan. He has these yellow cat eyes and he is black and white. Well, in order for the color accent setting to work properly you need to avoid using the flash, flash washes out what you were attempting to do.

I set the color Accent to Yellow and took a few pictures of Duncan. I also noticed that he was on Allison’s big box for storing greeting cards. The primary color of that is yellow and I was able to pick up the yellow in a stack of board games that were behind Duncan and the yellow of the brick came out as an orange color from the chimney behind everything. Even though Duncan is out of focus I like the effect of playing with the color Accent feature.

Head over to The BenSpark to check out Photo-A-Day #725.

Grab Bag

Photo-A-Day #694 03/03/07

The top of the building at my grade school. I never realized that the building was built in 1923. Allison and I took Taylor out for a walk and as we went by the school I looked up and saw this part of the facade and thought it looked interesting. I never realize how often I don’t look up as I walk around, and when I do I notice how many buildings in my town are so well adorned. I love old stuff like that.

I spent a good deal of time today working on the new blog. The new domain is www.benspark.com. I haven’t done much editing to the theme but that is up on my list. I will most likely have to hand transfer my posts from this blog to the other blog. But as I do so I will make edits and fixes as well as categorize things for better organization of the blog.

Through the past four years of blogging I have learned many things and if I can go back and fix the mistakes and improve the quality of my blog then the time it takes will be worth it.

You may ask why I am doing this by hand rather than an automated way. Well, because I signed up for blogger in 2003 I wanted to be able to do more so I also signed up for BlogSpot*Plus. Now, when new blogger came out I finally transferred my stuff from old Blogger to new Blogger everything transferred correctly. The problem was that sites that were on Old Blogger cannot have custom domains. Sites on New Blogger can have their own custom domain names. So I purchased two domain names on Tuesday. I added domain name www.wiredkayaker.com to my wiredkayaker.blogspot.com blog. So when I move that blog to another host I won’t have to go and start from scratch on my Page Rank.

The problem I will have and I am having now is that WordPress converts old blogger but not new blogger posts. Hence the hand moving of posts. Which in the long run is going to be a good thing.

Today I also dove into working on the FuelMyBlog Forum. I am a moderator for the FuelMyBlog Forum. Kevin asked me to be one and this has been a nice experience so far.

There is also a Blog Party going on. It has brought in some very nice visitors to this site as well as to my Flatwater site. So this has been a great day for link exchange.

Tonight we are watching Bottle Rocket. It is quirky and fun. I’ll post more about it tomorrow.