Dave Daniel Photography

Coconino Plateau – January 27, 2008

These shots were taken on January 27th, 2008, at the start of my drvie from Page, Arizona back to Phoenix on the Navajo Reservation. The day was scheduled for a day of shooting in the slot canyons, but the weather was not cooperating. The bad weather provided the opportunity to get some interesting shots, as you can see.

The heavy rains did point out one thing – Arizona’s DOT has no idea on how to build highways that shed water. There were more accidents than we would have on a 10″ snow day in Indiana. Go figure.

White Pockets – January 26, 2008

Over eight months after the trek across the high desert in Arizona, I managed to get the photo set processed for White Pockets. These were shot on the same day as the Coyote Buttes.   I hope you enjoy

After a 24 mile off-road trip to the rarely-visited White Pockets, I shot the following images back on January 26th, starting around noon-time and finishing off with a sunset shot of the castle.  White Pockets is located in northern Arizona, near Page, on the Paria Plateau.

GPS Coordinates:

36°57.328 N
111°53.734 W

600 w/s Studio Strobes

They use standard Bowens-type attachments, which is a real plus considering the complement of light boxes that I already own.  I would hate to have to replace the speed rings for another brand.

In use, I am very happy with them.  Checking output with a flash meter indicates consistent output on multiple flashes.  Once the capacitors were tuned with a heavy warm up, I was able to get consistently fast recycle times.  The onboard flash sensor works very well, including the pre-flash setting which ignores digital SLR TTL pre-flashes, but still allows use of on-board flash to properly trigger the strobes.

I am somewhat disappointed that the bulb protector isn’t usable with the modeling lamp in the unit – that’s just plain stupid.  Another faux-pas is the tightening wing for the mount bumps up against the housing, precluding a full-circle tighten.  It has a spring release, but it would be so much easier make the design right from the beginning.

The only missing feature would be built-in PocketWizard radio remote capabilities, but that would add significantly to the price.  All in all, a good purchase.

You might have noticed a few changes to the site, most notably the site design.  What you don’t see is an entirely new engine powering the blog.  I’ve converted over to WordPress, and my initial response is very favorable.

I was approaching the time to rewrite my weblog, not just because it was old code, but a number of security vulnerabilities have cropped up.  For example, I had to disable my guestbook and commenting features due to bot spamming.  It’s a true shame that people feel the need to be parasites on someone else’s property.  I could easily have added captcha capabilities to slow down the spamming, which led me to the conclusion that is was likely time to rewrite.

So, I thought I’d look at a 3rd-party package to handle my site.  The requirements:

• Appropriate for my site (see content demands below)
• Up-to-date code base
• Secure
• Modifiable presentation tier
• Database driven
• Low or no cost
• Runnable on my own infrastructure
• OS agnostic (Windows or ‘Nix)

Of course, it has to be able to be able to serve up a variety of site content, including:

• Formatted text
• Inline code display (can it display HTML snippets)
• CSS-driven
• Flash pages
• Photos
• Off-site content, such as YouTube
• Secure content upload capabilities

The shopping list really isn’t any more demanding than my old site could handle (and handle quite well, except for the security component).  During my review, I considered a wide number of options, from the packaged .NET sample sites, the Nuke variants, and a number of others.  I finally landed on WordPress, which easily met ALL my needs, with a very simple yet powerful code base.  The only negative I could see was that it was written in PHP (my opinion is that a scripting language is not as secure or powerful as a compiled language such as .NET or Java).  It comfortably met all my other demands, and more.

I won’t go into all the installation details, but will mention that I’ve got my Windows 2003 web server box running PHP and MySQL to run the site.  Since MySQL is now available, I also took time to install and configure a wiki install that you can see here.

I’ll be writing more about the install and tweaking of the site in the near future.  For now, I’m going to take the time to figure out how I can import my old data into the site.  It is supposed to be able to take an RSS import, but for some reason it is not behaving with my feed.

Enjoy!

I was preparing  to create some code for creating on-the-fly thumbnails for my photo submissions.  With an Apache install on a nix box, this would be virtually automatic, with GD already installed with PHP.  However, in a Windows box running IIS, it’s a slightly different case – the main issue being that you have to find the appropriate dll and properly reference it in the configuration files.  The following assumes you already have PHP properly installed.

1. Open up your php.ini file and search for the line: ;extension=php_gd2.dll and uncomment it by removing the semi-colon (’;’).  If your ini file was like mine, the ;extension=php_gd2.dll line doesn’t exist.  If not, just type it in (without the semi-colon.
2. Copy C:\PHP\php.ini to C:\WINDOWS\php.ini. If you wish, you can probably get away with creating an alias (symbolic link) in the C:\WINDOWS folder that points to the original php.ini file. It is important that there is a link or the actual file though, since this is where IIS will look for the configuration file.
3. Finally, for each extension you enabled in the php.ini file, locate the corresponding dll file in C:\PHP\ext\ and copy it into the same directory as php.ini (C:\WINDOWS\).  Again, my install did not contain the dll file, so Google for the file and download from a safe location. I would recommend grabbing it direct from the PHP site.  Drop it into the C:\PHP\ext\ folder, as well as the C:\Windows\ folder.

There you go!  It does work, at least on Windows 2003, with IIS 6, in September.