Each one of those photos was a constant reminder of how I had let my life get out of control and how it was causing me to become less and less healthy. It was not until our trip to Disneyland last October that I came to the conclusion that I needed to stop the spiral of bad eating and health choices I was making or this very well could be the last family vacation I would ever take with my children.

I had already had two cancer scares and I was still being tested to see if perhaps there was yet another potential cancerous cell in my body. My blood pressure was medicated and was still nearing stroke level despite two medications. My asthma was making it more difficult to breath without the use of a breathing machine. In short, I was a mess.

Today I happened to be loading the pictures from our Disneyland trip and came across a photo of our family in front of the giant pumpkin on Main Street. As I looked at that picture I had the uneasy thought that there were actually two giant pumpkins; one we were standing in front of and me.

I sat and stared at that photo with a sense of sadness that I ever allowed myself to get into that kind of shape. While I didn’t look gigantic by any means and I could always justify my weight by looking around me and seeing others who were just as heavy or more so than I was it was still a depressing thought.

On the other hand, that photo really was the trigger for starting me on the path to finding an answer to my slow weight gain and unhealthy life choices. It led me to Take Shape for Life and the weight loss journey I am on.

In comparison, I took my family to an Arizona Diamondbacks game yesterday. At the game Trina took her camera to get a few pictures of our granddaughter Lily at the game. During the pregame she shot a picture of me standing in the grass beyond the outfield. As the picture came up on my computer screen later that evening I was shocked at the difference.

I was now seeing myself the way others now saw me. The parents at Dakota’s soccer game were right, I had lost a lot of weight. Not so much from a pounds perspective but there was clearly a physical difference compared to when I started. Perhaps now I won’t be so self-conscious and maybe I’ll be in a few more family vacation photos to remind myself of how great it felt to be healthy again and not carry around the extra weight that was really unnecessary.

Nikon has continuously been developing their software and web presence to add value to their product line. This coupled with their Nikon Schools educational arm provides a wealth of information on just on cameras but on camera techniques.

Today I received an email introducing another educational opportunity available. Nikon has developed an iPhone App called Nikon Learn & Explore. This free app provides access to articles and information from the Nikon educational archives.

The interface to the app is well laid out. You can select information by image with a matrix of photos displayed. Selecting a photo thumbnail displays a larger version of the picture as you would expect.

From there you can click on Info to get information about the photo including photographer name. You can also select View Article, which will show the article from Nikon World magazine that featured the photo. Where applicable there are also videos about the photo or the article.

Next to the Image tag on the main screen is a learn icon that provides Insights & Techniques including imaging editing, shooting techniques, and fundamentals of photography. These lessons are well done and very helpful.

The Nikon World magazine is a valuable tool and the app provides digital access to the information separated by issue.

The app is like having a desk reference and photography teacher right at your fingertips. It is a great app with a good interface and invaluable information. For anyone interested in taking pictures whether you use a Nikon camera or not you will find valuable information contained within it.

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.

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.

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.

The larger sensor sizes in the DSLR cameras provide better noise management especially when using higher ISO settings for lower light shooting. The ability to have a hot shoe flash that moves the flash further away from the sensor plane is also a huge advantage as it results in fewer red-eye pictures being taken. I have never been a fan of red-eye reduction flash since all it really does is pre-flash to fool the eye.

The problem with this is that the subject thinks the pre-flash is the actual picture so you end up many times with people moving or closing their eyes since they think the picture has been taken. That drives me crazy. But for all the benefits of a DSLR there is one thing about them that can be troublesome, their size.

There are just some times when you can’t justify the bulky body and lens combinations that are required for a DSLR. If you have to carry a camera all day with most of your activities being non-photo focused; it can be a pain carrying a DSLR with lens. And I mean pain literally since some of these combinations can be quite heavy. It is situations such as this where a point and shoot camera can be justified.

You may just want to document a moment without going through the creative process that a DSLR requires. Another justification around our house for a point and shoot camera is one of ease of use.

While I feel right at home dealing with f-stops, shutter speeds, and ISO settings; there are others (namely my wife Trina) who just want something where they can press a button and take a picture. They don’t want to have to worry about 54-element auto focus screens, the differences between scene and spot metering, and other nuances that accompany a DSLR.

I tend to get frustrated very quickly with the limitations of a point and shoot camera. I love the small size and the ability to slide it into my pocket when I want to take a camera “just in case”. In the end though I usually am unhappy with the results due to the camera not living up to my expectations of what a real camera should provide.

So Trina and I are constantly at odds with one another about whether we should get a point and shoot or remain a DSLR household. For the most part the DSLR wins out but every so often she talks me into a point and shoot.
The latest in this back and forth tug-of-war occurred this weekend.

Trina again complained when he pictures did not turn out the way she wanted them due to the camera being “too technical”. Rather than listen to this argument for the millionth time I decided it was once again time to try a point and shoot camera. After a lengthy research of what cameras were available I finally decided upon the Canon G9.

It is a point and shoot camera by form factor only. It is one of the few non-DSLR cameras that offer RAW as a capture format. I am a big fan of RAW files as it gives me an opportunity to adjust things in post-production that may have been missed during shooting. When dealing with a wife and children who may not be willing or capable of remembering all the settings they want RAW gives me an added line of defense.

It does mean that I have to deal with the photos after the fact rather than just taking the memory card to the local photo-mart for prints. Still RAW has save me on too many occasions to discount its importance.

The G9 also provides the ability to shoot with pictures closely in aspect ratio to what I get with an SLR. Since many of our photos end up in videos and slide shows I like the aspect ratio to be similar among all the cameras to minimize the amount of cropping I have to do to make the pictures consistent. While I may lose time dealing with converting RAW files, I make up the time by not having to crop files for consistency.

I was also impressed with the Canon G9 having a hot shoe that will allow the use of a full flash unit. This will eliminate a lot of the red-eye and give me the opportunity to do some creative flash shots that would be impossible with an in camera flash. The G9 is obviously positioned to the upper end of the point and shoot spectrum and many of the features would be wasted on those who normally buy cameras to document life events.

It may just be the perfect compromise to allow ease of use for Trina while giving me the control I want in a smaller form factor. As I start to get more familiar with the camera I’ll post some photo examples and provide a more detailed entry of what I think of the camera.