Shortly after joining “the program”, I received my first email from my personal health coach Amy. She gave me all of her contact information so I could contact her whenever I needed. I’ve decided if I ever want to become a stalker I am going to go out and join diet web sites and get people’s information. Not only do you have access to people they are likely in better shape than you are.

At first I thought this was the standard welcome message then I realized that this email had a purpose. Attached at the bottom of the email were three documents. I had to go back and re-read the message to find out that I actually had homework!

Nobody told me there would be homework. I had to go back and check the web site. Did I make a mistake filling out the forms and put that I was going to take this diet for credit? The last thing I need is to flunk diet; that would be embarrassing.

My first inclination was to suggest to Trina that maybe she should do the homework since she was the one who thought this was a good idea. But then I remembered the last time Trina helped one of the kids with their geography homework. Let’s just say Trina’s license plate “IBLOST” is not a coincidence.

The homework didn’t look too bad. There were two PDF files that talked about fat burning and getting started on a diet plan. Those two weren’t too bad. I was kind of thrown for a loop when the third document was Lesson 8 from some book and it referred to other chapters of the non-existent tome. I was about to call foul when Trina explained that the book was coming as part of my “Welcome kit” that was being shipped to my house.

The final part of the homework was to go out and take a quiz. Wait what? First homework and now quizzes; this is not good. I figured I better nip this in the bud right now before I was asked to write a research paper on fat or something.

A quick email to my personal health coach and I was told that it wasn’t really a test as much as it was a baseline to understand my weight loss goals. Hopefully one of the test answers is that I am being forced into this by a nagging liver and a wife who never gains weight.

I was beginning to feel a little better about this until Amy suggested that one other item I would need would be a before picture. I’m pretty sure we have all seen these pictures that look like someone just swallowed the yellow short bus with a marshmallow chaser.

This is not good at all. It is an absolute no win situation for a person beginning a diet to provide a before picture. If the diet is successful you will forever see the before picture as a constant reminder that you were one fish away from being Shamu’s roommate at Sea World.

On the other hand, if the diet is not successful you will have that before picture that looks the same as the after picture except that at least in the before picture you have the look of hope on your face whereas the after picture looks like you are depressed to find out you are having fish for dinner and Shamu is still looking for a roommate.

Neither of these two options sounded like a good idea for me. No what I needed was a picture that no matter what the outcome of this diet may be I would at least feel better about myself. And since I have a copy of Adobe Photoshop and Google I have all the tools I am going to need.

After a quick search, a download of a file, and a couple of small edits I had the perfect before picture for my diet. If at the end of this adventure the diet works I am going to look amazing compared to this picture. If the diet fails I can be content knowing that it could be worse, I could look like that guy in the photo.

After my edits I was ready to unveil my picture to my family. A couple of things to note, never show pictures like this to anyone drinking milk or if you do be prepared with a camcorder to get a great video of milk snort out their nose. These kinds of pictures also seem to cause involuntary spasms in children especially teenage children.

Trina of course had to pretend to be the responsible parent and chastise me for my photo selection. She exclaimed that it didn’t look as though I was taking this seriously. I had to look around at whom she was talking to; it couldn’t be me could it? Of course I’m not taking this seriously it’s me.

It’s not that I am not taking losing weight seriously it is that it doesn’t have to be that serious. I mean I’m trying to lose weight not my sense of humor. I seem to remember a similar conversation we had after one of my doctor visits when I was asked whether I had any side effects from a particular medication and my response was, “other than hair growing on the tops of my feet and the ability to speak telepathically with dolphins things seem normal”. Hey they’re the ones asking, not me.

I’ll probably end up having to have a photo taken but for now I’m really thinking of going with this one.

When I first purchased my Gitzo Series 3 monopod I needed a head to hold the camera. At the time I selected a Really Right Stuff BH-40 mid-sized ball head. The ball head was amazing and was perhaps the finest engineered photography accessory I have ever seen in my life.

It works perfectly securing the camera or the lens. The only issue I have with it is the fact that it is too versatile for what I need. The BH-40 was designed to be a tripod ball head. It is designed to adjust on any axis.

The problem with the monopod is that I really didn’t need that kind of flexibility. What I really need is a smaller head with forward/aft adjustments. The other axis is easily adjusted by leaning the monopod rather than adjusting the ball head and trying to keep the monopod perpendicular.

The BH-40 ball head is larger and heavier than what I need for a monopod. Reluctantly I began searching for a monopod head to replace the ball head. I should note that in no way am I unsatisfied with the quality or workings of the BH-40. On the contrary, it is so good that I am now planning to replace my tripod with a new one just so that I can use the BH-40.

As I began searching for a new monopod head I again turned my attention to one of my favorite photography accessory vendors. I went to the Really Right Stuff web site to see if perchance they made a head specifically for monopods.

After perusing their web site I finally found what I was looking for, the MH-01. I say perusing the site not because it is hard to find things there. Rather there is so much good information that I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time reading.

The web site not only has product information but also contains several articles about choosing the right ball head, tripod, camera plates etc. This information should not be overlooked as it gives the reader a very good idea of what they really need and more importantly offers suggestions for accessories or configurations you may not have thought of.

After going through the various configurations I settled on the MH-01 LR with B2 AS II Clamp. I selected this particular configuration, as I liked the idea of having a quick release clamp with the monopod head.

Most of time when I am shooting with the tripod I am doing so at sporting events. When I have to change cameras or lenses I like the idea of just pulling a quick release rather than rotating a knob to remove the camera from the head.

I am usually doing this by touch and since the fore/aft adjustment is already a knob I didn’t really want to confuse the two knobs during a shoot. It’s more personal preference than anything. On the BH-40 ball head I went with the B2-Pro II clamp because I wanted the security of a knob for keeping the camera attached to the head.

The great thing about Really Right Stuff is that no matter which one you choose it is easily adapted to another clamp with just one Allen screw. So if I decide later that I really like the knob configuration of the clamp I can interchange it with the BH-40 to give me the setup I want.

The MH-01 Monopod Head is of the same high quality as the other Really Right Stuff products. It is precisely machined to very tight tolerances. From a user’s perspective it feels well built and works just as you would expect.

With the cost of digital SLR cameras and lenses the last thing I wanted was to trust a cheap ball head to secure my equipment. With Really Right Stuff that is never a concern. The clamps and the head are secure and remain so in almost any condition.

The knobs and adjustments are easy to grasp and turn even when wearing gloves during cold weather. This is especially helpful when in the field and you need to make a quick adjustment to capture the shot.

Overall I have been extremely impressed with the MH-01 and would gladly recommend this product to anyone who is looking for a monopod head that will securely hold your camera equipment. It’s manufactured to the highest quality making it a piece of equipment that will last a lifetime. This may very well be the only monopod head you will ever buy.

Recently I wrote about the WordPress plug-in Yet Another Photo Blog which I used to create my 1Photo2Share photo blog. This plug-in is amazing and provides all the functionality to create a very professional photo blog.

It allows you to create a WordPress post that contains a single photograph per post. This is all you need if you want to create a post every day. My problem is that I am never organized enough to remember to post each day.

What I need is a tool that will allow me to go through all of my photographs at a single sitting then identify which ones I want to share on my photo blog. Once I have a batch of images that I want to share I need a way to create a series of posts at one time.

Luckily I am not the only one who thought this would be useful functionality. Jon Haywood created a plug-in aptly named Yet Another PhotoBlog Importer/Exporter. This plug-in extends the capabilities of Yet Another PhotoBlog by giving you the tools to do a batch import or export of data from the WordPress databases.

The plug-in installs through the standard WordPress Administration Tool process. Once installed it adds an entry under Tools called Export YAPB. This will allow you to create an export file which is an XML file with all the information about your photo blog. It includes the option to restrict the file by a single author or all authors.

The second option that allows importing can be found under Tools->Import. At the bottom of the choices is YAPB Importer which will allow you to import an XML file of the format created under the Export YAPB tool.

This provides you with the file formats that you can insert a batch of entries into Yet Another Photo Blog. With this tool you can schedule several photos to be published at a specific time and date without adding each individually.

For anyone who uses Yet Another PhotoBlog, this is an extremely useful plug-in that comes highly recommended.

It’s interesting how the migration of photography from film to digital has changed the way we take and share pictures. During the film era I was very judicious of what I took pictures of. After all, I only had 24 or 36 shots per roll so I had to be careful in deciding what would be captured. It was always hit or miss as to whether the shot I just took would turn out the way I wanted or if it would be yet another failed attempt to capture what was in my mind’s eye.

After the film was developed, I would review the shots and pick out my favorites. The remainder of the pictures would go into a pile that would rarely be viewed again. There may be times where I might have a second set of images printed to send to parents or grandparents but mostly the pictures stayed in an envelope.

At some point my wife Trina decided to take up “scrapbooking”. She was going to take the hundreds or thousands of pictures we had taken in our lifetime and sort them assembling photo albums that could be looked at by friends and family.

The problem was that you had to be at the physical location of the pictures in order to enjoy looking at them. For parents and grandparents that meant that they rarely saw the pictures or if they did it was during a visit.

When digital pictures began to be prevalent, things substantially changed. The photographer had immediate feedback to determine whether the picture turned out or not. The number of pictures you could take was dependant on the size of your camera’s memory card.

With the continual reduction to the price of memory, camera photo cards became very inexpensive and hence people began taking a lot more pictures. Initially the digital pictures suffered from the same problem as their film counterparts. They were stored on a hard drive somewhere and rarely looked at.

As the Internet became more pervasive it became easier for people to keep in touch through email, social media sites, and via web sites. Before long people wanted to share their photos with others who were not necessarily close.

One such program that facilitated the sharing of photos was JAlbum. This software allows you to create on-line photo albums that can then be uploaded to a web site where anyone can view them.

JAlbum is written in Java and has been ported to several platforms including Windows, Linux, and Macintosh OS X. This makes it extremely valuable since it will run on any standard operating system the person may have.

Creating an online album is relatively simple with JAlbum. You simply select the images you want to include to decide where you want the album to be saved. JAlbum offers the ability to modify the look and feel of the album by using one of several themes or skins.

These skins modify the overall look of the photo album while keeping your pictures the same. There are skins that look like wedding albums, birthdays, and several color and sizes to give your album a unique look and feel.

Once you have decided on a skin and identified the photos that should be included in the album, the software allows you to generate the photo album. The software then creates the pages with the appropriate HTML and CSS values to produce a finished photo book.

You can provide JAlbum with the address of your web site and it can automatically update your web site with the new photos or if you don’t have your own web space the software can assist you with finding a place to host your photo album.

The software also allows you to share your album with other JAlbum users creating a photography community where you can find others who share your passion for photography or inspire you to create new and exciting pictures.

JAlbum is maintained with new versions coming quite regularly. The software updates are fairly simple to install and activate new software features. I use JAlbum quite often when I need to publish photos.

Two of the more popular online albums are Dakota’s soccer pictures and My Scrapbook. Now with JAlbum my pictures are no longer banished to a box or hard drive but are being shared with family and friends.

I seem to have a plethora of blogs now running. There is my personal blog which you are reading. I also have a baseball blog – Diary of a Diehard and a photo blog – 1 Photo 2 Share where I post a single picture per day. Until recently I was running all of these through Movable Type but as I’ve documented previously I’m moving all the blogs to WordPress.

The text-based blogs were relatively simple to move. There are migration scripts to manage the entries allowing you to export the data from the Movable Type databases and import the data into WordPress database formats. When it came time to migrate the photo blog, it was anything but trivial.

Under Movable Type I had to tweak the template system to support images rather than text as the only information. I further had problems with the commenting system causing me to turn off that functionality somewhere along the path. To make a long story short, the data was not the cleanest I have ever seen and the old adage of “garbage in, garbage out” was never more accurate than it was for this blog.

It took me several days of data manipulation of the export files to get them into any kind of shape to be imported into WordPress. The question still remained, would WordPress handle the imbedded image files any better than Movable Type.

After an initial failure of just loading the images directly I set out looking for a possible WordPress extension that would make creating a photo blog easier. Although I found several extensions claiming they managed images, there was one plug-in that seemed to come up in each conversation.

Yet Another PhotoBlog written by J.P. Jarolim was exactly what I was looking for. Installation of the plug-in used the standard WordPress administration screen. Once installed, the plug-in adds a new page to the administration tool under settings.

Within this page you can define how you want the plug-in to manage the images. The configuration is quite powerful. You can have the system collect image information from the EXIF data and use that as the post publish time and date.

You can have the system tag photos based on EXIF data contained in the pictures. If you have ImageMagick installed on your server, Yet Another PhotoBlog will use that to create thumbnails of your pictures.

The plug-in has a fairly robust feed section where you can define RSS information for your images as well as using Yahoo Media RSS. You can adapt the plug-in to display your photos in various ways and can also include custom CSS tags to get the look of the images just right on your page.

Once installed, Yet Another PhotoBlog will add an image box to the post entry screen where you can upload an image to be included in a post. From there the plug-in does the rest showing the image in its appropriate size.

Overall the plug-in has worked flawlessly. It has make it quite easy to add new posts containing images. Unfortunately the way it manages images is not compatible with how Movable Type did it meaning after importing the data from the old system there was a tremendous amount of work to be done before it was ready for publishing.

If you are starting anew building a photo blog, this is a very good plug-in. If you are migrating from another platform there is a lot of pre-work but in the end it is worth the trouble. The plug-in is actively being developed with new versions coming out regularly to fix bugs or add new functionality. If you’ve always wanted a photo blog but weren’t sure how to do it, take a look at Yet Another PhotoBlog, you’ll be glad you did.

When I undertook an update to the look and feel of my Now Hitting web site that chronicles the history of the Arizona Diamondbacks I made a conscious decision to turn the home page into a revolving slide show of images I had collected over the first 12 years of the team’s existence.

I wanted this to give the visitor an idea of what they may have missed from the first dozen years of games played by the team. The issue I had was I needed a software application that would be graphics intensive yet allow for other content on subsequent pages.

The back-end of Now Hitting is the Joomla content management system. I chose this because of its power and ease of use. I also liked the idea that I could extend the product with new features as I deemed necessary.

It was this extensibility that was most important especially for the multimedia aspects I was planning for the home page. I perused the Joomla extension library, which has thousands of modules that can be installed to add specific functionality to a web site.

I tried several slideshow alternatives and always seemed to come away disappointed. They were either extremely slow or not robust enough to allow them to be used on a site that receives regular visitors during the baseball season.

I was about to give up and try something new when I came across an application that did exactly what I was looking for. SlideShowPro by Domney Design Inc is a Flash-based plug-in that will produce a slideshow for web-based sites.

It allows not only a rotating photo display but will also enable the use of video should I decide to expand the pictures to a more robust media type. Setting up the software was fairly straightforward.

In my case I purchased two different products. I ordered SlideShowPro for flash that allows the slideshows to be displayed using Adobe Flash. The second piece of software was the companion SlideShowPro Director that allows the slideshows to be created without having a full Flash development system.

In order to integrate SlideShowPro with Joomla I added the Joomla module EasySSP. This module provides a seamless integration of the SlideShowPro slideshows with Joomla. Once installed and configured it simply became a matter of defining the size of the slideshow component and pointing to the parameters file.

Within just a few short hours I went from a text based home page to an immersive experience that pictorially showed the progression of the Arizona Diamondbacks from expansion team to today.

I cannot recommend enough the SlideShowPro and EasySSP applications. It should be noted that SlideShowPro is licensed on a per domain basis so if you are like me and have multiple domains you will need a separate license for each one. After the success I have had with SlideShowPro I am now considering ways that will allow me to add this functionality to my other web sites.