Mark Groves

Alto’s Adventure

2015-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

I found my new favorite iOS game this weekend. Alto’s Adventure is a fun, and additive, snowboarding game. Beautifully done…

Getting to Inbox Zero with Todoist

2015-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Having a cluttered email inbox just doesn’t work for me. Having both new items, emails masking as tasks, and random messages in my inbox is stressful. If you share this need for a clutter-free inbox, you may find my solution helpful.

My email processing is an ever evolving process. Being a product manager ensures I get well over a thousand messages on any given week. Many of the messages contain important follow-up material necessary to complete my work.

A common practice that I have done in the past is flag the message for follow-up. Every email client has some concept of flagging a message. This practice is not terrible, but it does have two downsides, 1) you have to remember why you flagged the message, flagging the message does not enable you to provide a note, and 2) if you are not great a cleaning up the flagged messages it can cause a situation where you have an overflow of flagged messages, making it difficult to understand what you need to get done.

I have been using various tools to help keep control of the items I need to follow up on. Todoist has been my latest go-to task tracking system. It works on all the platforms I use and has a great REST API that enables integration between tools.

Lately, I have been back to using Mac OS X Mail as my email client. I was loving Airmail, but a recent beta bug caused me an email nightmare, so back to Mac Mail. One feature I missed from Airmail was the ability to create a Todoist task from a mail message. Mac OS X Mail does have the concept of a link to the message, it is just a bit more hidden. So some scripting was required.

The Solution

My solution to keep a handle on my inbox and keep track of the tasks I need to do is to integrate Mail with Todoist. The high-level flow goes like this:

Review the mail message that requires following up.
Keyword to start the workflow
Create a new Todoist task with an action required for me to take next
Pull the link to the Mail message, and embed the link as a note within the task

This method does require Alfred, a very powerful launcher for Mac OS X. Not only is Alfred a powerful launcher, it also allows you to write workflows that can kick off based on specific keywords or keystrokes.

As a message comes in during the day, if I can’t respond to it in a few minutes, I will flag it for follow up. This is just a reminder for me look more closely at the message and decide what the next step I want to take on the topic would be.

Then when I want to clean up all the messages I didn’t get to during the day, I just filter on my all the flagged messages, and create new tasks in Todoist, then remove the flag. The benefit to this workflow is when I get to the task, I can open the mail message, get more details on the context and take action. No longer to I need to keep the message in my inbox.

You can download the Alfred workflow here

Or take a look at the code on Github: mgroves84/MailSendToTodoist

seattle skate park

2015-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

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Rethinking Agile in an office-less world

2013-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

Agile practices over the last several years have focused on high bandwidth communication. It could be standup meetings, pair programming, or even just that over the shoulder code reviews. As a product manager I completely understand what DHH is talking about when you have remote team members. Being able to have an ad-hoc conversation with developer keeps things moving enabling quick decisions.

It’s an optimization for the assumption that we’re all going to be in the same place at the same time. Under that assumption, it’s a great set of tactics.

But assumptions change. “Everyone in the same office” is less true now than it ever was. People are waking up to the benefits of remote working. From quality of life to quality of talent. It’s a new world, and thus a new set of assumptions.

…

It’s time for a reset. We need the same care and diligence that was put into documenting the agile practices of an office-centric world applied to an office-less world. There’s a new global maxima to be found. Let’s chart its path.

It takes more effort to initially run an agile team when not everyone is in the same location, but it is possible of you are motivated enough. It requires both all members of the team to make this possible, ensure communication with remote team members are kept up.

I have started working from home at least once a week. And keeping the communication level high while I am not in the office takes a bit of extra work for everyone. But tools such as HipChat and Campfire really help lower the barrier.

Repaying your mentors

2013-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve had several mentors over my career. Most of them informal mentors that were able to see something in me and help guide me in a more productive direction. Sometimes they were managers, or often friends that provided a different point of view. In most cases I still don’t know what they noticed in me, or why they helped, but damn I am glad they did.

These relationships have been critical to my career. These are the people I will forever be in debt. These people didn’t provide their guidance out of a work obligations, in fact my experiences with formal mentorships have always been a flop. They just don’t work.

Do you have these people in your life? When was the last time you caught up with a previous mentor?

Do how you do you pay these people back?

There are two ways:

Deliver.
Pay it back.

Deliver - this should be the easy one. Make them proud that they spent their time with you. Be as good as they think you are. Don’t waste their time.

Be a mentor - You know all the good karma, pay it forward stuff. No really, take time and be open to working with people. Find the right fit. Is there someone in your company that could use some of your perspective? In most cases you won’t need to seek out these opportunities, they will find you, just be open.

Here is the sneaky and possibly selfish part of being a mentor. You get to think through how you would solve a problem. How have you done it before? Can you really explain your position on a given subject? Mentoring someone allows you to work through your positions, what do you stand for?

If you are open to it, I think you will find that informally mentoring a few people a year, will make a big difference in how you think about what you know. And you will be paying back all those people who helped you out along the way.

On Leaving Microsoft

2013-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

April 22, was my last day at Microsoft. I have thought a good bit about how I would talk about this publicly. Would I write a blog post? Would I just leave it to a short messages on social various networks?

I finally decide that it was necessary to write this post as a record of my thoughts for my future self.

This post is not an indictment of Microsoft, if anything it is the exact opposite. I was at Microsoft 7 1/2 years. It was easily the most amazing organization I have ever been a part of. I am proud to be part of several product teams that shipped products that helped developers. And most important, got to work with some amazing people that truly care about making developers more productive.

To understand why I left, it is important to understand why I decided to join back in 2005. I had been in the software industry for ten years, bouncing between startups, riding the dot com bubble. At the time, I found myself pushing my employer to improve their development process. But personally I was frustrated that I was not learning from people with more experience shipping professional products. I was faking it in a big way.

After encouragement from a few co-workers to pursue my goal to work at Microsoft, I took the leap. Microsoft was to become my master’s program in software product development. Not many companies ship software at this scale and have the ability to impact so many lives. This was my chance to play in the big leagues, and learn from some of the best in the software industry.

Not only did I learn how to ship software to millions of developers, I was a member of teams that helped change how we executed. Moving from 2-3 year milestone based development efforts (waterfall) to an agile iterative release cadence that is now producing quarterly updates for Visual Studio, and updates to Team Foundation Service every three weeks.

There were plenty of barriers to moving an organization and product the size of Visual Studio in this direction, but it is damn rewarding when you start making progress.

Along the way I learned a ton about designing and building products. Mostly by making mistakes along the way. Are the products I worked on perfect? Far from it, but I valued the tradeoffs to ship. Shipping is a feature after all. But each of those tradeoffs, taught me something for the next time around. Make new mistakes. This to me is one of core values of shipping frequently.

Microsoft is a very large organization, easily the largest organization I have ever been a part of. Hell, Developer Division is larger than any place I have worked before. And there are aspect of working for such a large organization that exhaust me after a time.

I am proud of my time at Microsoft, but it is time for a refresh, a reboot if you will. I believe change is a good thing, gives you an improved perspective, keeps you learning and improving.

What’s next?

I start my new position at Splunk Seattle tomorrow. In one aspect a completely new space for me, I have never done much with big data. There are familiar aspects that I know I love, working on products for developers and IT. Learning new domains always bring new challenges, wish me luck.

Favorite Productivity Tools for 2012

2012-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

I added two productivity tools to my arsenal in 2012, Writemonkey and Trello.

##Writemonkey## I can’t live without a simple text editor that understands markdown. I have shifted over this last year from proprietary note taking application such as OneNote and Evernote, to simple text documents saved in the cloud. I used markdown for taking notes, specifications and blog posts. If I have an idea I usually start with a new markdown document followed quickly with a card in Trello (more on that in a moment).

Writemonkey is a great markdown editor for Windows. It is a portable application. No need to run an installer. I keep in SkyDrive and have it available on all my machines.

####What I like:

Lightweight - takes less than 11MB of disk space.
Clickity-Clack - I know is seems silly but ability to enable keyboard sounds is pretty nice.
Distraction Free Mode - I don’t use this often. But being able to put the editor into full screen mode is quite nice.
Auto Save and Backup - You can configure Writemonkey to auto save and the ability to have a backup location. I save the majority of my documents in SkyDrive and have Writemonkey backup to Dropbox. Nice extra insurance.
Export as HTML - You can configure CSS templates if you want to preview your writing, send the document to Word, or copy the text as HTML using CTRL-SHIFT-H
No auto spell check - This may sound like a missing feature to some, and based on my poor spelling it may be. But I found that having my text editor constantly telling me a word is spelled incorrectly is distracting. I’d rather run spell check at the end of my writing reducing the distraction.

####Improvements I’d like to see:

Default file type - I’d like to be able to configure the default file type to be markdown. Currently it defaults to txt. Which is fine but I find myself aways changing it back to markdown when I create a new file.
Win8 App - This might be much to ask, but if the makers of Writemonkey were able to produce a high quality Windows App Store application I’d buy it is a second.

##Trello Finding a system to keep my life in order has been a journey the last several years. I have several practices on how I handle email and reminders. But one area that I never felt that I had a great solution was keep track of all my projects and tasks that I need to organize on a regular basis.

Trello can be used for many things since it has a three simple concepts, boards, lists and cards. Cards live on lists, lists live within boards. You can create a simple set of lists such as to do, doing, done. And each task you want to track moves through those stages. You can order the tasks to give you a better idea of what you should do next.

Currently I have a few boards to track work going on specific projects, then I have a board where I keep track of the majority of my work tasks. Currently this work board has five lists, To Do (my backlog), This week, Today, Waiting on others, and Done. How I got to this process is worthy of a post on its own. And I am sure I will continue to tweak the process.

####What I like:

Really simple - There are no rules within a Trello board, I can make it bend to my needs. If I want to add an extra list to a board to try something out I can, and if I later change my mind I can archive the list or delete it all together.
Keyboard friendly - It is satisfying grabbing a card and moving it to the done list, but being able to do it with the keyboard is even better.
Available everywhere - Well almost, you need a network connection, but I am adding things to my board all day, reminders to setup a meeting, task to check on the status of a project. Being able to do this when I think of it is key for me to not lose the idea.
REST API - Trello has a nice REST API making it pretty easy to integrate into Trello.

####Improvements I’d like to see:

Offline support - Not that I find myself without access often, but having offline support would help enable me to add tasks at any time.
Keyboard shortcut to generate card links - Getting a link to a card is really powerful, I usually add a link into a markdown document for a card that I am working on. But right now it takes a few clicks to pull out a URL to the card. Having a keyboard shortcut would be a major improvement to my work flow.
Display number of cards within a list - Being able to see how many cards I have in a list is helpful to figure out if any one stage has too many items. There are a few nice Chrome extensions (see below) to do this, but they don’t work when you have filters enabled.

##Bonus add-ons Markdown Link Generator

Since I write just about everything in Markdown being able to pull a hyper link from a site and have it formatted in markdown is great. This simple Chrome extension makes grabbing link very easy.

CardCounter for Trello

Mostly solves the lack of being able to quickly see the number of cards within a Trello list. The only downside is that it does not work if the list is filtered.

##Conclusion This is was pretty light year for adding new tools into my process. This may say something about the tools I picked up this year. I pretty much live in these two tools. And of course Outlook, now if I can figure out how to write all my emails in markdown I think I would be set.

In 2013 I will be looking for more of my tools as Win8 Apps to support my Surface. Trello already has a Windows 8 application in the store. There are a few markdown text editors in the store but nothing that is as good as Writemonkey.

What can we learn from a Sushi Chef?

2012-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

I like extremes. There is something pure about seeing something taken to extreme. There are negatives at the extremes. But there is also elements that come out that can provide inspiration.

Take Jiro Ono, a 85-year old sushi chef from Tokyo. Jiro has taken the act of preparing sushi to an extreme level. His goal is to approach perfection. Jiro runs a 10 seat sushi restaurant in the basement of a Tokyo office building. Not the type of place you would expect to be a 3 star Michelin rated restaurant.

In ‘Jiro Dreams of Sushi’, director David Gelb introduces us to Jiro, his family, and the beautiful sushi that they produce.

The documentary is beautifully done, showing how pure something can be done if you really love your work above all else. This in its self is an extreme.

Jiro is focused on every detail. From selecting the very best seafood, to personally organizing the seating chart, to requiring apprentices to take up to 10 years perfecting grilled egg.

Once you decide on you occupation you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. Never complain about your job. This is the key to be regarded honorably. - Jiro Ono

##Spirit of Shokunin##

Within the documentary Jiro mentions shokunin. I was not familiar with this word. My initial interpretation was that shokunin is similar to craftsman, but this does not fully capture the sentiment.

“The Japanese word shokunin is defined by both Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries as ‘craftsman’ or ‘artisan,’ but such a literal description does not fully express the deeper meaning. The Japanese apprentice is taught that shokunin means not only having technical skills, but also implies an attitude and social consciousness. … The shokunin has a social obligation to work his/her best for the general welfare of the people. This obligation is both spiritual and material, in that no matter what it is, the shokunin’s responsibility is to fulfill the requirement.”- Tasio Odate

I believe Jiro also explains it well:

All I want to do is make better sushi. We don’t care about money. I do the same thing over and over again improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I continue to climb trying to reach top but no one knows where the top is. Even at my age, after all these years, I don’t believe I have reach perfection. I love making sushi, it is the spirit of Shokunin.

##Software development as a craft##

The software development profession is still very young in comparison to many professions. I believe as we continue to practice this craft of building software we will evolve towards an craftsman/artisan direction. I would like to see this, not only for developers, but also from product/program managers, and designers.

I believe it starts with mentoring and practices such as pair programming. We are a long way from apprentice programs as common as in other professions, but it will be interesting to see where we end up.

People like Jiro Ono that have such a singular focus towards a profession are extremely rare. But I believe there is purity and beauty at these extremes. Do we have individuals within the software profession that are on Jiro’s path? I don’t know, it may take another 30 years to find out.

I recommend you watch ‘Jiro Dreams of Sushi’ and get inspired to take something to an extreme.

Git deployment of Pretzel on Azure

2012-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

Since I switched my blog over to a static site generated via Pretzel I have been looking for even easier ways to publish posts. @vikingcode has a great post on how to configure a empty shim project to kick off Pretzel on push to Azure.

Jekyll is nice but if you’re not a Rubyist or if you don’t like Liquid (the templating engine that Jekyll uses) it may not be as nice to you. One of the early projects of Code52 was Pretzel which started off as a .NET app with Jekyll compatibility. Since then, Razor has been added as well as other enhancements. The “problem” with Pretzel was that you’d have to prebake the site and commit the site to Git, rather than just the “source” files.

Azure “relaunched” a few months back, including a new product “Windows Azure Web Sites” (WAWS). WAWS is essentially Microsoft’s version of AppHarbor or Heroku - Git (or TFS, or FTP) deployed sites “to the cloud”. WAWS lets you use a whole stack of web tech - .net, node.js, java, php, python and potentially more.

Now thanks to this post I was able to switch up my workflow. Instead of pushing from my desktop to Azure the _site folder. I now have a service hook configured on CodePlex that pushed the source to Azure and then on the Azure side Pretzel is run to generate my site. It is always great to remove a step in any workflow.

If you try this out and have problems with incorrect paths, I submitted a pull request to fix a bug when using the -d switch

Star Wars

2012-11-26T00:00:00+00:00

I think there are a few things that every parent hopes to be able to share with their children. It could be your love of a sport team. I have been successful in teaching (brainwashing) my children to love the Pittsburgh Steelers.

As my kids have gotten older, I was looking forward to the day when they were old enough to experience Star Wars. I still remember sitting inside the theater at 6 years old and experiencing the opening scene of Star Wars. It was an amazing experience as a 6 year old. I had never seen anything like it.

My kids are not experiencing Star Wars the way I did. Not even close. I tried to control how they were exposed to Star Wars, but it was useless. Between seeing the episodes I-III, playing Lego Star Wars, and talking with their friends, their experience is all wrong.

Over this past holiday weekend, I decided to try to do a Star Wars reset on my kids (son 8 and daughter 5). Starting with episode IV A New Hope, then into Empire, I was hoping to undo some of the past damage.

I am not sure how successful I was. My son already knows that Darth is Luke’s father. So the pivotal scene in Empire didn’t have an impact on him. In fact I had to catch his attention, and replay the scene. But of course he already knew that, he just looked at me “dad I know”.

Maybe it is unreasonable to think your kids are going to have the same reaction to the experiences you had as a child. They will never know what it feels like to sit in a theater as see Star Wars before anyone knew what it was going to become. They are never going to know how it felt to grow up in Pittsburgh during the early 70s. They know their dad loves the Steelers, so they love the Steelers. But they can’t experience the same way I did, not reasonable, and not possible.

But that is OK, they will have their own first experiences that their kids won’t understand the same way either. Let the cycle continue…

How I lost 30lbs and kept it off

2012-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

Over the last year and a half I have focused on improving my health. I can’t say I was significantly over weight, but each year it was a little too easy to add a pound or two. Over the last 10 years my weight has bounce around, anywhere from 185 to 210, at 5’ 9”.

Maybe it has something to do with turning 40, who knows, I could have bought a sports car, but I decided to do something about my overall health instead. I had taken steps in the past to work out, and eat better, but for the first time I have been able to keep my weight under control, and I believe I am now in the best shape since I was in high school.

These are the practices that have worked for me. But you should do your own research and see what works for you. I’d love to hear if you have additional suggestions.

##Switch to a standing desk## As I posted last year, I just got fed up sitting all day. When working an office job it is way too easy to be inactive for the majority of the day. It may not seem like much but switching my work station to a standing position really helped kick start my weight loss behavior.

If you work at a large company chances are there are ways to get ergonomic furniture that will enable you to switch to a standing position. And if you can’t get a specialized desk, you should try raising your desk with some bricks. The best part about the adjustable desks is that you can ease your way into standing all day. I don’t ever switch to sitting mode but it does take a few weeks to get used to standing all day.

##Diet## The word diet has such a negative connotation. But how I look at it, sure you can work out like crazy and justify eating anything you want. Or you can look at what you eat and decide if it is part of the problem or part of the solution.

My personal road to changing my diet started by reading a few books. I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and it really had an impact on how I think about food, and how crazy some of the things we call food are really manufactured food-like substances. After my wife read the book, the next thing I knew we were receiving a quarter of a grass fed cow, from a local farmer. Then a local pig, chickens and a lamb, yeah my wife went a little overboard. But we knew what we were eating.

Next I started reading 4-hour body. I had heard good things about the book, and was impressed with Tim Ferris’ marketing style. Tim’s book covers several topics, but there are three major things that really sunk in with me, 1) keeping your blood sugar consistent, 2) get at least 30 grams of protein first thing in the morning and 3) measure your progress.

##Removing Sugar## Cutting out sugar was one of the more difficult aspects of my diet change. And I don’t just mean standard sugar that you would think of in various forms, high fructose corn syrup or cane sugar. But this also includes foods that quickly are converted into sugar such has bread and other complex carbohydrates.

I won’t lie, this was not easy at first. I gradually worked into reducing sugar in my diet. I started minimizing the sugar I added to things like coffee, until over time I was drinking it black. Also during the first four months or so, I allowed myself to have a cheat day, I would eat what ever I wanted one day per week. The cheat day really helped to know that I had an outlet. Tim talks a good bit about the benefit of a cheat day. I no longer find the need to have a cheat day, but this really helped as I was transitioning into this new diet.

##Morning Protein## Until I read the Four Hour Body, I normally would have a bowl of oatmeal each morning before work. There are two problems with this, not enough protein and the grains quickly convert into sugars. Since, I have followed Tim’s advice and start each day with a breakfast consisting of four eggs from pastured chickens, two small turkey sausages and as much spinach as I can fit within a pan. I add a little bit of goat cheese and a couple of teaspoons of habanero salsa and I am set.

##Measuring Progress## Tim Ferris is pretty crazy when it comes to measuring everything, weight, blood sugar fluctuations, and vitamin levels. I did not go that far, but I measured my body dimensions each month, and kept track of my weight each day. Measuring and weighing is a great way to stay motivated. And weighing in every morning did something to keep me honest. The daily weigh in is a powerful motivator, I could quickly see progress and each morning it gave me a bit of reward for my new eating habits.

##Exercise## After I had lost about 25 pounds by changing my diet, I started to add at bit of running into my weekly routine. I had been a runner in high school. OK, I had been a sprinter in high school, but distance running was not my thing in any way.

I became inspired to give running another try after reading Born to Run and talking to my cousin who had just finished an ultra-marathon. It took me several months to build up my endurance but now I am running 20-30 miles per week at a decent pace. I really enjoy running, it has been a great way to get out and clear my head.

##Wrap up## At this point I believe I’m likely in the best shape of my life since leaving high school over twenty years ago. I feel great, I have more energy and I sleep great each night. And I was able to lose enough weight to require a new wardrobe.

I hope my story will help inspire others. We don’t need to be a nation that is overweight. We can change, we just need a little bit of information and the motivation to take to first steps to build healthier habits.

##References##

Twitter is a Corporate API

2012-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

Dave Winer has some interesting thoughts on the reality of attaching your future to an API like Twitter’s. It has always surprised me the number of applications that were being build completely tied to a companies future that was not yet established.

Twitter had been telling developers, for years, that they should develop all kinds of clients. That was when Twitter was just a website and had no clients of its own.

Smart developers will not just conclude that Twitter is unsafe to build on, but also any company that is operating in the Twitter model. If they are running a website, and trying to attract a lot of users, and are going in the direction of advertising, you’d be a fool to think they won’t do the same as Twitter has.

Of course Twitter is not alone here, they just happen to be the a recent big organization that changed their direction regarding APIs. Nothing new, we should not act so surprised.

Vampire's Delight

2012-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Working with the Medium

2012-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

Software engineering is a relatively new engineering discipline. I tend to think that software development is closer to a practice than an engineering discipline. Just like medicine and law, the industry is ever changing and evolving, and sometimes we don’t know what we are doing. The process around software development can come in many forms, Waterfall, CMMI, Scrum, Lean, etc.

Each development process can be successful for many difference types of software. But there are cases when I think we, as software professionals, forget the medium we are working within. Like artists and craftsmen knowing and respecting the medium you are working within is key. A sculptor uses different tools and practices when they work in clay then when they work in marble. There is a big difference between software that is build to power a satellite than the software that powers an commerce site. Careful here I am not suggesting that one type of software development is more difficult or has great importance than another. My point is that each deployment target warrants a different process.

This may seem obvious, but I have seen many instances when this is not taken into account. Mistakes can be made on both ends of the spectrum. Investing little to nothing in testing and environment simulation for software that can only be updated on a major release cadence. Or, holding on to software, building out huge investments in automated testing for a web site that can be updated multiple times per day.

I have seen this happen most when a team moves from building software for one medium into another. A team that has built skills and focus on building out large testing infrastructures for an application delivered every few years may not be prepared to change this when building a web application. In my experience this happens because people like to continue successful practices. Makes sense, if you found that building out a multi-level review processes has kept bad changes from making it into a product, then why would you want to stop that process? For one reason, the variables have changed.

Each medium that we target has a different set of variables. Requirement gathering, design, testing, environment simulation, deployment strategy, shipping cadence, are all variables that change when the target changes. Really thinking about the application environment can be a beneficial exercise. How will you deploy your application? On what cadence will you update? You may need to abandon practices that are not necessary in the new medium, and adopt new practices where you don’t have skills.

You may also need to evaluate the development process you are following. When you are shipping on a multi-year cadence utilizing scrum with a 2-4 week sprint schedule is incredibly productive. But if you are shipping updates multiple times per day, then even a 2 week sprint does not really make sense. A process that utilizes Kanban to track the flow of value is more productive.

The dynamic nature software development is one of the reason I love this industry. We can get stuck in our ways, continuing to apply the same practices even when the medium we are working within has changed. Embrace the change, it gives us an opportunity to learn and grow. Think about how you have been developing software, what would you change? Are you resisting the medium or are you working with the medium?

Fear, The Enemy of Shipping

2012-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Shipping, provides clarity. What ever it is you are working on it does not really exist until you ship it. It could be a piece of software, a photograph, an paper, or an idea. It does not really exist or really matter to anyone until you release it.

This is what we each strive for, to share our ideas, our art, our work. But what keeps us from shipping? What did you not ship today? What are you holding on to?

Go on think about it… I’ll wait…

Still there? OK you have it? Honestly why have you not shipped? OK be honest, what are you afraid of?

Believe me I completely understand. I have this internal conversation just about every day. “When is that email ready to send?” “Does this specification good enough to share?” “Is that feature really what customers want?” “Is that photograph good enough to print?”

Releasing your work can be very scary. You may get critical feedback, people might not like it. Or worse, maybe no one will even care.

I’ll speak for myself, but tell me if you disagree. The fears, concerns, perceived risks that you have created in your mind are always worse than the reality. And I would argue the value of getting your work out there outweighs holding on to it. Shipping provides clarity, it tells you if you are on the right track, where to go next. Iterate, fail fast.

This sounds good, but it is much easier to say this then do it everyday. Take small steps, share something, how did that feel? Did the world end? Of course not.

Find a trusted small group of people you can consult in the situations where you are questioning yourself. I do this. I have a few friends that I test ideas with. Pick carefully, you want people that will tell you how they see it. This does not make them right it makes them honest. This is a form of shipping, you are sharing your ideas, getting the idea out there and evolving.

What do you think? What have you tried? What do you no longer fear?

Deploying your site with Git

2012-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

I have been using Git quite a bit lately, from my work on the CodePlex team, along with several personal projects. Git is pretty powerful, and given its distributed nature, it has some pretty cool capabilities one of them is to push source code from one location to another - “developer ftp”. When I was creating my updated blog, I really wanted to find a nice way to use Git to push changes to my site onto the production web server.

Since I am using Pretzel to generate a static version of this site on my desktop, I just needed the ability to moving the contents of the output folder (_site) onto the my public web server hosted at Bluehost. This would work the same way if I was using Jekyll or any other static site generator. I could FTP the files between machines, but I liked the idea of having another remote location that had a versioned copy of my site. Additionally, if something went wrong, since the site was stored with Git, I could always revert to a previous working version.

The flow goes like this:

Make a change to blog source or create a blog post
Pretzel Bake or Jekyll –server
Commit the changes within the _site folder
Git Push to Remote setup within Bluehost
Within Remote, post-commit trigger does a pull into the www root

With this flow, only changed items are transfered, and git handles the compression and decompression on either end.

####Configuring Git on bluehost#### Getting Git running on bluehost is pretty simple, I doubt that bluehost really supports this scenario but hey it works. For me this is just a small repository that handles my blog, large source repositories go on CodePlex. First you need to request SSH access from bluehost, go to the bluehost dashboard and select Manage SSH Access. Once you have SSH access use something like Putty to SSH into your account.

Create source directory to store git tarball


myuser@markgroves.us [~/]# mkdir src
myuser@markgroves.us [~/]# cd src

Download latest source


myuser@markgroves.us [~/src]# wget http://git-core.googlecode.com/files/git-1.7.11.rc2.tar.gz
myuser@markgroves.us [~/src]# tar xvfz git-1.7.11.rc2.tar.gz

Build Git


myuser@markgroves.us [~/src]# cd git-1.7.11.rc2
myuser@markgroves.us [~/src/git-1.7.11.rc2]# ./configure --prefix=$HOME
myuser@markgroves.us [~/src/git-1.7.11.rc2]# make SHELL="/bin/bash" install

Setup Git Remote to store site


myuser@markgroves.us [~]# export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
myuser@markgroves.us [~]# mkdir -p ~/git/yoursitename.git
myuser@markgroves.us [~]# cd ~/git/yoursitename.git
myuser@markgroves.us [~/git/yoursitename.git]# git --bare init

Now you have a bare git repository setup on bluehost. But a bare git repository won’t do much, we need a expanded working directory within the www root. Since we are going to Git Push to the bare repository we will setup a post-receive hook to do a pull into the working directory.

Setup working directory


myuser@markgroves.us [~]# cd www/
myuser@markgroves.us [~/www]# git clone ~/git/yoursitename.git/ .

Setup the post receive hook

Create a file named post-receive and place it in ~/git/yoursitename.git/hooks the contents should look like:
```
GIT\_REPO=$HOME/git/yoursitename.git
TMP\_GIT\_CLONE=$HOME/tmp/yoursitename
PUBLIC\_WWW=$HOME/www
\#!/bin/bash
cd $PUBLIC\_WWW || exit
unset GIT\_DIR
git pull
exec git-update-server-info
exit
```
The first three lines are just setting up a few default folders parameters. Then we are going to change into the www directory and to a pull. The unset GIT_DIR is necessary since there is a default setting that won’t respect the directory while you are in the bare git repository. The exec git-update-server-info command resets the defaults.

Make sure you set the post-receive hook file to be executable: chmod +x post-receive

So now each time you do a git push into the bare repository, the post-receive hook fires and does a pull into the www folder, updating the site.

####Setup your local repository#### Both Pretzel and Jekyll, by default, are configured to output the “compiled” site into a _site folder. This folder contains a complete folder structure that will working within your www folder on your web server. Since this is the folder that I want to push to bluehost I needed to do a little git trickery to not push the parent folders.

Add _site to the git ignore list
```
\#site build output
\_site/
```
create a .gitignore file within your base site folder, this assumes you have your site within git for development

Git initiate the _site folder to setup a new git repository


D:\development\markgroves.us\\\_site>  git init
D:\development\markgroves.us\\\_site [master]> git add .
D:\development\markgroves.us\\\_site [master]> git commit -m 'initial commit of site'

Setup the remote to the bluehost remote git repository


D:\development\markgroves.us\\\_site [master]> git remote add deploy myuser@mysitename:~/git/mysitename.git

Deploy changes to the server


D:\development\markgroves.us\\\_site [master]> git push deploy master

####Conclusion#### Now each time I do a git push the remote bare repository will get updated, and the post-receive hook will fire updating the www folder and the site. For me this is great, keep everything versioned using git, and with just one additional commant (git push) I get the my site updated in seconds.

Details

2012-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

Dropping WordPress for Pretzel

2012-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

A few months back I read an post by GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner, called Blogging Like a Hacker. It really struck a nerve in me, why had we moved to huge CMS systems for little things like blogs? The idea of “building” a set of static HTML pages and pushing to a web server just made sense to me. Since I don’t get to code as often as I would like anymore, I thought this would be a good opportunity to play around.

###Requirements### If I was going to rebuild my blog again, I was going to take the chance address several goals for my site. But one of my top goals was to learn as much as I could about recent web development trends.

Responsive design.
Enable my photography posts.
Write posts in Markdown.
Utilize Git for deployment.
Improved performance.

####Pretzel#### The team working on Code52 have been working on some pretty cool projects, along with MarkPad they have created a static site generator called Pretzel. Pretzel is heavily influence by Jekyll and shares many of the same technologies, but implemented in C# instead of Ruby. I have played around with Jekyll, and it is great, but I am a little more comfortable in .Net and I wanted to support the work that the Code52 team was producing.

####Responsive Design#### It seems that the latest thing in web design is building out a responsive site. A single site that can scale effectively from a smart phone, tablet, to a full screen desktop. There are several frameworks that exist that can significantly accelerate the design. I decided to utilize the Skeleton grid framework. Skeleton uses a 960 pixel grid system and media queries. It is a pretty simple design, and had just enough of what I was looking for without a ton of features I currently don’t need.

###Photography Posts### My site has always been a location where I share my photography work. So I needed to come up with a way to publish my photographs without a ton of manual intervention. When I was using Wordpress I had a few plugins that would produce multiple image resolutions and extract metadata about the photographs to include within a post. I never loved this approach but for the most part it worked. I was looking for something that would work similar to writing blog posts with Markdown but for my photographs.

####Adobe Lightroom#### Then I remembered that Adobe Lightroom, the application I rely upon to manage my photographs, has a capability call Web Galleries. The out of box Web Galleries that Lightroom ships with are templates that produce either an HTML or Flash site. Neither of these were really what I was looking for, but then I remembered that Adobe has a SDK and they enable you to define your own gallery.

Using the Lightroom SDK I was able to produce a custom web gallery template that outputs multiple image resolutions along with a markdown file I could use within Pretzel. There is enough detail here for its a future post. And once I clean up the template a little more I will share it out for those that are interested.

###Publishing### At this point I have a responsive site design. I am able to write blog posts in markdown. Create photography posts from Lightroom. Using Pretzel I can generate out a static HTML site and test it locally. I can FTP the contents of the _site folder from Pretzel to my server but I really wanted to be able to utilize git for publishing. I am already using git to manage the my site template so being able to publish via git would be pretty cool.

It turns out that configuring a git within Bluehost, was not very difficult. I was able to setup a bare git repository to push the site into. And using a post receive hook, the changes to the site get pulled down into the public www directory.

###Conclusion### So far this has been a really fun project. I learned a ton about responsive web design, a little about git, and more than I ever wanted to now about extending Lightroom. I have shared the source to the site template at markgroves.codeplex.com. Let me know what you think.

No Street

2012-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Fuji X100

2011-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

Happy Memorial Day

2011-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

One for You

2011-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

Moving to a Standing Desk

2011-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

Over the last several months, both at work and at home I got fed up with sitting in front of my computer. There has been several articles recently about the benefits of standing verse sitting. <ul> <li>How Many Calories Would You Burn If You Switched to a Standing Desk? </li> <li>Sitting All Day: Worse For You Than You Might Think </li> <li>Is All That Sitting Really Killing Us? </li> </ul>

At Work

Sitting in front of a computer all day is an unavoidable aspect when you work in the software industry. Like many office jobs, a large percentage of our day is spent in a degrading slouch. Even if you have great posture you are still just sitting on your butt. At Microsoft standing desks are not that unusual, if you have a medical condition, such as a bad back, you can get a fancy motorized workstation. These are very cool, but they require a doctor’s approval, a set of paperwork, and way too much frustration for my interest.

###$10 is all it takes### After a brief Alpha test (involved books and fearful looks from my co-works) I determined the desk height that was going to work for me. From there I took off for my local home improvement store to buy 16, 6” x 6” x 2 1/2” pavers, four for each corner of my desk. This was much more stable then my Alpha build, although I was still getting some strange looks from co-workers.

This may not be the fanciest office desk, but it solves the problem, and I already have a few co-workers building their own versions, a trendsetter, I know.

###At Home### After a few months of using my standing desk at work, I really wanted to find a way to convert my home office desk to the same setup. In this case, it was not going to be as easy as a set of bricks. My home office desk is a large corner unit that I share with my wife. Plus, I didn’t think the landscaping look was going to go over all that well within the house.

Before

No this was going to take some creativity. After spending a bunch of time searching around the web, I found Chris Pollock’s How To: Build a Custom Ergonomic Computer Desk. Chris’ desk design was not exactly what I was looking for, but it gave me inspiration. Taking Chris’ design, I was able to hack it for my purposes. I wanted to reuse my existing desk, but I just wanted the corner section to be about 42” high. After finding all the parts I needed at Simplified Building I was about set, I just needed 4x7’ 1 1/2 inch galvanized fence posts from the local Lowes.

Hardhat Zone

Finished Product

Parts List:

5 X L152-7 Square Flange = $60

8 X L10-7 Single Socket Tee = $75

5 X 133-7 Plastic Plug = $12

4 X 7' Galvanized Fence Post = $48

Total = $195

Not too bad, I was able to reuse my current desk, and did not affect the layout of my home office. Of course now that I have my desk this way my wife is thinking of having me do the same thing to her desk areas both at home and work.

###Get off your A$$### As you can see, with a little creativity you too can build out a standing desk. Try it, I’m sure you will like it, I haven’t even thought of going back.

The Better Half

2011-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

Street Musician 1

2011-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Tune

2011-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

Grains

2011-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Have Love Will Travel

2011-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

She Won't Break

2011-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Rally for the late John T. Williams

2011-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

A rally in memory of the Native American woodcarver, John T. Williams, was held in Victor Steinbruek Park on Saturday February 19th. John T. Williams was shot and killed by Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk on August 30th, 2010 after the deaf woodcarver did not obey officer Birk’s command to drop the three-inch knife Williams was holding. </p>

After Seattle prosecutors decided not to press criminal charges against Officer Birk, there were several violent riots in Seattle. The riots came as a reaction to several incidents of police brutality of the last few years. But the “Carve-In” on Feb. 19th, was a very peaceful rally to remember the slain woodcarver. Prominent members of the Native American community spoke along with John’s brother Rick Williams. A tribute totem is in the planning stages to honor the late John T. Williams.

Checkmate

2011-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Bel Air

2011-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Tis

2010-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Shannon & Her Girls

2010-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

Shannon 3

2010-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Shannon 2

2010-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Shannon 1

2010-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Morning Dew

2010-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Linked

2010-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Got You

2010-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

Higher Daddy!

2010-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

Tracks to Nowhere

2009-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

Print Purchase Highlight: Robert Jaudon

2009-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

The second photographer that I really wanted a print from, as part of Jim Goldstein’s second annual “Buying Prints from Your Favorite Photographers”, was Robert Jaudon.

Rob and I have been online friends for quite some time now, both encouraging each other in our photography. After contacting Rob about this project we decided to take a slightly different approach to the project. We would select photos from the others catalogs, but we would exchange full digital files, including the raw files. And then we would each try our hand at editing the others shot and make a print. It added an additional aspect to the project that was pretty fun.

I selected “Wine Barrel” from Rob’s portfolio, and to be honest it was difficult to think how I was going to try to improve on Rob’s original processing. I didn’t do much, I slightly change some of the color toning to make it slightly more monotone, but not much, I really liked the shot how Rob processed it.

I want to thank Rob again for making this a fun project, and for Jim for coming up with such a cool idea.

Print Purchase Highlight: Nicki Steiger

2009-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

This year I decided to take up Jim Goldstein on his second annual “Buying Prints from Your Favorite Photographers” project. As Jim mentions in his post, “It’s not a photo until it’s a print”, I could not agree more, every time I print one of my shots I am very pleased at the results.

The first photographer that I wanted to contact about this project was Nicki Steiger of mynicki.net. Nicki is based out of Dresden, Germany. I have been inspired by Nicki since I stumped upon his site a little over a year ago. Nicki has quite a photographic range, his darker work first caught my eye, but he also has a lighter side, and is able to capture some incredible child portraits.

Upon approaching Nicki, to be part of the project, he was very interested, and happy to help. Now it was just to decided which of all his great shots was I going to ask for as a print. It wasn’t easy, but I ended up selecting “Autumn” I love the depth of field in this shot and though it would look great printed and framed within my house.

I want to thank Nicki again for taking part, and Jim for coming up with this great project.

Blue Light Special

2009-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Reflection

2009-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

I Got You

2009-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

SR 509

2009-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Awake

2009-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

First Dance

2009-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Sunflower 2

2009-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Father Daughter Dance

2009-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Fall Harvest 3

2009-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

Fall Harvest 2

2009-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

Fall Harvest 1

2009-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Oregon Coffee House

2009-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

Bellingham Bay

2009-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Mushroom with a View

2009-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Abandoned

2009-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

the 'burgh

2009-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

A Sheep, A Monkey, A Toucan

2009-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

Beach Days

2009-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

In Waiting

2009-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

Untitled

2009-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Grain

2009-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

The Hustler

2009-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Don't Smile

2009-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

Lomo Daffodil

2009-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

Suspended

2009-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Super Slide

2009-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Waves

2009-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Yaquina Head Lighthouse at Sunset

2009-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Jim Goldstein's invitation to present your best shot of 2008 has borne fruit!

2009-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

Once again 2008 proved to be an incredibly productive year for the many photographers who read the JMG-Galleries blog. The results of this “Best Photos From 2008” blog project puts a twist to the normal “Best of Photo” list by aggregating links to the work of 93 photographers from around the globe who are passionate and dedicated to their craft. The results from “Best Photos From 2007” by JMG-Galleries Blog Reader’s were impressive, but this year not only did the number of participants exceed expectation the quality and vision of those who submitted were exceptional. This year participants ran the gamut of experience from enthusiasts to professionals. Enjoy and good luck picking out your favorite from these great submissions

"My Top 10 Favorite Photos of 2008" - Jim M. Goldstein
My Favorite Shots of the Year - View from the Little Red Tent by Edie Howe
2008 Favorites - Photine by Laurie Ballesteros
My Nephew - Amit Goyal My nephew woke me up in the morning and was in a very chirpy mode when this was clicked
Another world (+Vorher/Nachher) - Visuelle Gedanken by Martin Wolf
Boy, Hanoi - The Sun Shines & The Igloo Melts by Jon Gresham
Best Photos from 2008 - Abraham Neben
Apocalyptic Capitalism - Sultana Sandwich by James Hill
Top 10 Photos of 2008, My first year in Wisconsin - Sierra Visions by Steven Bourelle
My Best Photos: 2008 - Shutter Photo by D Travis North This past year was a huge growth year for my digital photography skills which I feel is exhibited quite nicely in my photo favorites of 2008.
Best Photos From 2008 - G Dan Mitchell Photography
Protesting Prop 8 - Quan Photography by John Quan
Bir y?l böyle geçti... - Caglar.ca by Caglar Tukel Most of Photos taken during our traveling around Turkey and hiking around our hometown, Izmir.
My best shots of 2008 - Jonesblog by Bryan WIlliam Jones
Flamingo and Desert Landscape - pl?dys's photoblog by Mike Reys Both pictures are from one of the most beautiful places on earth: Chile's Atacama desert. The salt lakes there provide for some stunning colours and beautiful wildlife.
Suspended - Mark Groves Photography
My Favorite 10 Images from 2008 - IM Digital by Ivan Makarov
My Best Photo of 2008 - Matt Ward Photography This photo was taken in Oct at 7am after a cold night in Atlanta, GA.
Highlights of 2008 - Lori Jackson Photography In 2008, I picked up my camera again after a year long hiatus following pregnancy and my son's birth.
Favorites from 2008 - Adventures Through The Lens by Rebecca Jackrel
Top Ten Photos of 2008 - Chris Moore Photography
My Photo Record - Kriz Cpec Photo Blog
Best of 2008 - Catavino by Ryan Opaz
Looking Forward and Back - Graf Nature Photography by Mark Graf
Lloyd's Favorites of 2008 - L.D. Cross
My Favorite Photos from 2008 - Epic Edits by Brian Auer A selection of my favorite photos from 2008, broken down by each month and supplemented with a few thoughts.
Derryclare Lough - Focus Pocus by Albert MacSweeny My best photo of the year was when I was lucky enough to get a still lake in the usually turbulent west of Ireland
Best of 2008 - News and Views by Dave Wilson
Needle - Andel's Photoblog by Andel Früh This photo has been shot with the kit lens (18-55mm f/3.5-5.6) in retro position (front lens to the camera)
Year in Pictures - Marcin Retecki
2008 Top Ten - Lois Elling
My Best Photos of 2008 - Out of My Mind by Steven L. Mullen These are travel and nature shots taken in Michigan, China, and locally.
One from 2008 - Hockley Photography by Aaron Hockley It's a photo taken at night, looking across a bridge towards another photographer also taking a picture of the same ferris wheel as I was.
2008 in Pictures - Sawlani Photography by Hitesh Sawlani
My Top 10 Photos for 2008 - by Neil Creek Photography
Best of 2008 - The Quiet Picture by Minna Kinnunen My 10 favourites from 2008, everything from flower closeups to landscapes and starry nights!
Best of 2008 - by Stig Nygaard Just a quick little mixed selection of what I consider my best photos from 2008
My Top Ten Photos from 2008 - Korn on the Blog by Justin Korn Of the 1,800+ images I uploaded to Flickr this year, these are what I thought were my top 10.
<a title="Blog Project: "your Best Photos from 2008"" href="http://dforty.blogspot.com/2009/01/blog-project-your-best-photos-from-2008.html" target="_blank">Blog Project: "your Best Photos from 2008"</a> - Jim's Photography by Jim Wheeler
My Best Photos from 2008 - TrevorCarpenter.com by Trevor Carpenter
Best Photos of 2008 - by Dave Reichert
2008 Favorites - by Beth Madison
01/01/2009 Best of 2008 - Brad Barton Photography
2008: My Favorite Photos - My Digital Life by Jeremy Brooks
2008: The year in photographs - Katie the Scrapbook Lady by Katie
Gotham. Or maybe London - SFT Photography by Steve Thomas I love the dark and moody feel, combined with the futuristic look of the building. I really enjoyed shooting it!
My Best Photos of 2008 - Malphoto.com by Andre Maltais I'm particularly proud of these submissions this year, as it seems I've made some great strides in my photography from the beginning of the year.
Best of 2008 Project - Photos From The Top Floor by Carsten Fischer
La Arcada seating on a rare rainy October morning - gZphotoGraph
Jaguar - by Jarrod Erbe Photography This jaguar image was taken at the Milwaukee County Zoo. The background was generated using a combination of Aperture, Photoshop Elements, and DFT Light.
Best of 2008? - Suzy Walker, Underwater Photoblog My top ten fav travel, underwater and macro photos taken in 2008
My best shots of 2008 - TemujinPhoto Blog by João Almeida
Best of 2008 - by Rick Goldwasser
My Top 10 Images of 2008 - The Jim Stamates Collection by Jim Stamates
#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6 - Mannedspace: Photographs by MT Fanders
Best 10 of 2008 - by Duffy Knox
Future Christmas Card - by Massimo Belloni
Best Photos of 2008 - MIZSPONTANEITY: A Girl With A Camera by Elaine I got a Nikon D40X for Christmas 2007, and although some of these photos were with my trusty Sony W70 point-and-shoot, these are my favorite 10 results of my first year with a digital SLR.
Best of 2008 - Changing Perspectives by Jenni Brehm
My Best of 2008 - by Eliya Selhub In 2008, I have found myself increasingly drawn to animals as subjects, and a slight cartoonish absurdity always appeals to me.
My Best Photos From 2008 - Lilahpops - Plunging into Photography by Anthea Brown Looking back over my photos for the past year shows my increasing interest in post-processing experimentation alongside my favourite macro format.
My top 10 favorite photos of 2008 - The Taeleman's Blog by Kris Taeleman
My Favorite Photos of 2008 - Coulter Photos by Scott Coulter
Favorites of 2008 - XGray Vision by Stephen Gray
My Top 10 Favorite Images of 2008 - Cornforth Images by Jon Cornforth Spectacular nature and wildlife photography, photos, and pictures by award winning professional photographer Jon Cornforth.
Sitting Backwards on My Horse - latoga photography By Greg Lato
Top ten images of 2008 - Enlightened Images by Gary Crabbe These are some of the image I took in 2008, and which rose toward the top of the - I Like - pile.
Best 10 photos of 2008 - Have Camera Will Travel by Paul Dymond Images from professional Australian travel photographer Paul Dymond which ironically were all taken pretty close to home.
Best of 2008 - Heidi Donat
Best Photos of 2008 - by Luca Filigheddu Photography
Favourites of 2008 - by Chris Brown
Best of 2008 - by William Kahn
Pics of the pops 2008 - fotoVoyager by William Fawcett
My Top 10 Photos of 2008 - Always Breaking by Gary Hegenbart
Best of 2008 - by Trevin Chow This is a set of my best photos that I took during 2008 which is a combination of Flickr's "interestingness" meter and my own selection.
Best of 2008 - Hotel Yankee Foxtrot by Alex McGeagh A collection of the better images captured in a progressive and productive year for me.
Top 10 Photos of 2008 - Digital Kloc Photography Blog by Brian Kloc
Burrard-Lucas Top Ten Photographs of 2008 - Burrard-Lucas Photography by William Burrard-Lucas We are brothers from the UK with a shared passion for wildlife photography – in 2008 we followed Meerkats in the Kalahari, stalked Jaguars in the wetlands of Brazil and waded through swamps at night to photograph Caimans...
My best 10+3 pictures of 2008 - All Day I Dream About Photography by Antoine Khater
Best of 2008 on Highway 89 - Ann Torrence Photography Transecting the west from Mexico to Canada on US89.
Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance - by Dave Fitch A railway bridge in Leith [Edinburgh] that was restored and then left to rot. It's not perfectly symmetrical, but then neither is the bridge
My Top 10 Photographys of 2008 - Nuwomb Bits by Scott Webb
Best of 2008 - Matt Sallee Photography
My 10 best photos of 2008 - Stephen Trainor Photography Mostly landscapes, mostly of the Southwest, but with a hint of other anglophone countries.
10 in 2008 - k|d loftis photography My favorite images from 2008 which include weddings, maternity and newborns, families and babies and a few personal images from the year.
My 10 Favorite Images of 2008 - Della Huff Photography My ten favorites from 2008 include California landscapes and cityscapes, with a couple of extra goodies thrown in for fun!
Best Photos of 2008 - by Dave Schumaker
Best of 2008 - by Jay Goodrich Photography
My best photos from 2008 - All Narfed Up by Bryan Villarin Choosing my best photos from 2008 was really hard to narrow down, especially since it was my first year with a SLR camera.
Mein Flickr Photostream 2008 - Best of - by Stefan Neuweger
My Best Photos from 2008 - Why Yet Another Photo Place by Rafa
Best Photos from 2008 - by Daria Sukhanovska Only until i created this set of 13 photos, i realized how much progress i have done this year: I have traveled a lot, got one photo printed in the magazine and had my first own personal exhibition in the university library and simply had fun with my photos
My Best of 2008 - by Phil Price Photography

[tags]Best of 2008, Photography, Blog Project, Photographers[/tags]

Photography Favorites of 2008, Goals for 2009

2009-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Photography has really become my new passion in 2008. Looking back at the photographs I took this past year, I can tell I learned a good bit. The year started slow, photography speaking, but picked up as I had much more time to shot during a two week family vacation, then months later while taking a workshop with Bryan Peterson. Here are a collection of my favorite shots this past year, including several that allowed me to work on my Lightroom and Photoshop skills.

<div class="setThumbs-indv" align="center"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" align="center"></div> <p></p> <div></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv2581148718_div"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv2637619810_div"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv2729608579_div"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv2748269938_div"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv2854312638_div"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv2877129086_div"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv3139107030_div"> </div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv2876394986_div"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv3161682360_div"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv2867242866_div"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv3069852244_div"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv3157224958_div"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv3054124506_div"></div> <div class="setThumbs-indv" id="setThumbs-indv3161679200_div"></div> <p></p> <p></p> <p></p> <h3>Goals for 2009 </h3> <p></p> <p></p> <p>My goals for 2009, are to keep shooting, if anything shoot way more often. I have started PhotoChallenge.org’s 2009 photo per day challenge, hopefully I will be able to keep up. I also want to work on macro and flash photography this year. I would like to sell one of my photographs this year, not really for the money, but to see what people like. </p> <p>If 2009 continues as 2008 finished, it is looking to be a good year.

Winter Haze

2008-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

Sunflower

2008-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

Morning Calm

2008-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

25 Urban Portraits in 25 Days

2008-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

One of my favorite photographers, Steve Paxton, started a series of urban portraits on December 1st, going for 25 days ending on Christmas. He is highlighting people in need in Seattle, particularly the homeless. Steve has a amazing ability to capture incredible portraits and more importantly the stories behind the people he photographs.

Steve has been working on a project he calls “The Least of These” for sometime, check it out.

Storing Lightroom Presets with your Catalog

2008-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

If you are like me, and rebuild your computer every few months. Then reconfiguring all your Lightroom Presets can become a pain. I have done this several times now, and each time before I rebuild my machine I always forget to backup my preset folders. By default Lightroom stores all your presets under the AppData folder on Vista, specifically C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\AdobeLightroom. On the Mac I believe they are stored at ~/Library/Application Support/Lightroom, but someone with Mac experience will need to correct me. ###Moving Presets to your Lightroom Catalog### There is this nice little feature in Lightroom that changes where your presets are stored to the location where your LR Catalog is stored. This will work out much better for how I work, since I have yet to forget to backup my catalog when I setout to rebuild my machine. My catalog is stored under my documents directory, specifically at: C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\LR. Which is a pretty easy location to find and backup. ####Changing the default location####

Open Lightroom
From the Menu select Edit > Preferences
Select the Presets Tab
Within the Location area, select “Store presets with catalog”
Select OK to exit the Preferences dialog

If you check the folders where you catalog is stored, you will now have a new folder called Lightroom Settings.

####Move Existing Presets#### There are a couple of additional steps if you already have Presets configured within Lightroom. Since it seems that selecting “Store presents with catalog” does not move your existing presets to the new location. So the quickest way I found to move my existing presets is to open the old present location (remember the nasty AppData path) and copy the contents of the Lightroom folder to your new Lightroom Settings location.

From this point on you can easily add new presets to Lightroom using your catalog location.

Canon 5D Mark II now supported with Adobe Camera Raw 5.2

2008-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

I am starting to hear reports that the new Canon 5D Mark II is starting to ship, and just in time, Adobe has released Camera Raw 5.2 and DNG Converter 5.2 is now available on Adobe.com. This release includes additional features and new camera support. It looks like Lightroom will be updated to version 2.2 in December to provide the equivalent camera support.

New in this release:

Targeted Adjustment Tool for on image adjustments
Output sharpening for print or screen output
Snapshots for saving all settings in a single reference
Camera Profiles for enhanced raw file interpretation now available in the Calibration panel

Newly supported camera models:

Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Canon PowerShot G10
Panasonic DMC-G1**
Panasonic DMC-FX150**
Panasonic DMC-FZ28**
Panasonic DMC-LX3**
Leica D-LUX 4**

Renting Camera Lenses Online

2008-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

For my recent photography workshop with Bryan Peterson, I needed a few extra pieces of equipment. Renting photography equipment is something that professional photographers are pretty used to based on the little research I have done. Many professional sports photographers and wedding photographers rent extra gear when they have a big event. Chris Hurtt and I were discussing this, and he mentioned that during the Beijing Olympics every rental place was out of stock of just about everything.

credit: joeltelling ##How it works## Each site works slightly differently, but basically you have several choices for how long you want to rent the lens (this applies to camera bodies also). You usually have the option to rent the equipment for 3 days, 1-3 weeks or a month. For most amateur photographers I think would fall more into the one week category. Most sites provide the ability to add insurance for each item you rent. Be sure to read the clauses before you decide to rent from a specific site. From the agreements I have read, they usually cover the cost of repairing the lens due to damage. They do not cover in the event of a complete loss, either due to theft, or because the items is damage beyond repair.

I do suggest getting the insurance specifically for some of the more expensive pieces of equipment, but you should talk to your credit card company, some have the coverage automatically if you rent the lens using their credit card. The additional cost, may be worth if for the piece of mind. ##What to Rent## This is your chance to rent the lenses that you have been drooling over for years. Just to pick an example, the Canon 300mm IS 2.8L, a $3700 lens, is $191 for a week on one rental site. That may be an extreme lens for most applications, but just imagine the shots you will be able to get at your kids sporting event.

More reasonably, the Canon 70-200mm f2/8L IS, a great lens is ~$1600 lens and costs $64 for a 7 day rental. This is an example of a lens I rented. I had always heard good things about this lens, but before I was going to drop $1600 on a lens, being able to try it for a week was really worth it. For example, one thing I learned was that my first reaction to this lens was that is was very heavy, but after using it for several days I got used to it and think it would be a fine lens for me to own.

credit: delta407 ##Renting Online vs. Local Camera Shop## If you have a local camera shop, it is likely that they also rent lenses. Many good shops such as my local shop, Glazer’s in Seattle publish their supply on their web site. It is always good to support your local camera store, so if you have a good shop this might also be an option for you. A benefit to using a local shop is that you don’t have to pay for shipping charges.

If you have can plan ahead I found that it is cheaper to rent online. The reason I decided using LensRentals.com it was one of the only online stores that allowed you to reserve a piece of equipment for specific dates. Most other sites allow you to reserve a lens only if it is currently available in their stock. ##My Experience## After I placed my order on LensRentals.com for the dates I requested. I received an email confirming my order, and alerting me that I would be receiving my order via 2 day Fed-Ex, and that it would show up a day or two early but this would not change my rental dates. I received my order on the day they provided, in a well packaged box, with plenty of foam packing. Each lens was packed in their own lens case, along with bubble wrap. The included directions reminded me to keep all the packing, since when I was done with my rental I would repack everything and use the provided prepaid FedEx label to return the lenses.

It was pretty nice, I was able to use some great lenses for several days for very little outlay. It gave me a chance to try before I buy. So if you have a outing and feel that you are lacking a piece of equipment, or if you want to try a piece of gear before you buy, consider renting, it was a very painless experience.

Additional Resources

PHOTODOTO: 8 Online Lens Rental Stores Compared

DPS: Where To Rent A Lens Online

Bryan Peterson Oregon Workshop

2008-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

About a month ago I was able to take a three day photography workshop with Bryan Peterson of Understanding Exposure, Learning to See Creatively, etc, along the Oregon coast. This was an early birthday present, that came up pretty much last minute. I had never been on anything like this previously so I really did not know what to expect. I had a couple of goals for the workshop. First just get out and concentrate on my photography for a few days. Second, push photography out of my normal comfort zone.

Since this was my first photography workshop, I really did not know what to expect. As Bryan mentioned in his email to me about the class, the Oregon workshop is know as the vagabond workshop, since we go where ever the light is good.

The group all met at the Portland Airport, since most people taking the workshop including Bryan and Chris Hurtt (the other instructor) were coming in from out of town. It was a great group, we have a total of 11 people. We all piled into two minivans, and headed to Lincoln City, OR, since the weather was going to great at the coast. We were truly lucky on the weather front, Brian mentioned that in the last 8 Oregon workshops, they never made it to the coast due to rain. ##Getting out of my comfort zone## One of my main goals of this workshop was to learn new techniques. Not only within the types of photographs I normally take, but push myself to try forms that I had not spent much time at. There were several things that Brian and Chris had us work that were pretty new to me.

###Shooting Macro###

I had never spent much time shooting macro photography at all. Sure I would take my normal lens out and photograph some flowers in the yard while the kids were playing, with varying results. Since during this workshop you spend at least 6-7 hours per day out shooting, there is only so many landscape angles you can get.

I rented the Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens, from LensRentails.com (more on renting lens online in another post). Shooting Macro definitely took me out of my comfort zone. First off, seeing a shot in macro is much more difficult for me, it is something that Chris helped me work on over the weekend. Additional there is more technical challenges to getting a great macro shot. Most of the time I found myself laying on the ground trying to get a specific angle on a blade of dew covered grass as a light breeze is moving the blade as if it is in a hurricane. Since your depth of field is so shallow in macro photography it helps to blast off several shots to ensure you have one that is in focus. I have a good bit of work to do in this area, but I now have a much higher respect for good macro shots, and am interested in continuing shooting macro.

###Motion Photography### Each morning, we would usually end up on the side of the road with Bryan showing us a technique. One area that I had never spent much time on was various ways of introducing motion into my shots. I can’t say I took any shots I really like, but it did open my mind to ways to handle motion.

##Taking time in one spot## Another thing I learned over the weekend was that if you focus on getting shots in one location you will find thing to photograph that you never would have. I think many amateur photographers go out to a location, take the shots that are obvious then move on to another location. I know I have done this in the past. Several times over the weekend we would show up a at location and shoot there until the light changed. That could be 2-3 hours. It is amazing what you can find to photograph if you spend 3 hours in the same location. So I learned not to rush from one location to the next, take time and look for thing that you never thought of, chances are you are going to find a new angle on something that no other photographer has ever seen. ##Learning from others## Doing a workshop with Bryan Peterson and Chris Hurtt was amazing, it was great to be able to pick their brain on how to see creatively and get the correct exposure in various conditions. But the other benefit of having 10 other students at the workshop was that we all had various levels of experience and were able to learn from each other.

I am still working on processing shots from that weekend, I took over 1600 shots. Between working on this new version of my site, work and family, I am way behind. But the workshop was a great experience and I am hoping to publish several shots from my trip soon in the new Gallery I am setting up on my blog.

Lightroom 2.1 Released

2008-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Yesterday Adobe released Lightroom 2.1 (Mac, Win) and are available on Adobe.com. Beyond several bug fixes there is also support for several new cameras:

Canon EOS 1000D (Digital Rebel XS/EOS Kiss F)      
Canon EOS 50D       
Fuji FinePix IS Pro
Kodak EasyShare Z1015 IS      
Leaf AFi II 6       
Leaf AFi II 7       
Leaf Aptus II 6       
Leaf Aptus II 7       
Nikon D700       
Nikon D90       
Nikon Coolpix P6000       
Olympus SP-565 UZ       
Pentax K2000 (K-m)    
Sigma DP1   
Sony A900

You can get more details at the Lightroom Journal Blog.

Installing Adobe Lightroom 2.0 64bit

2008-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Over the weekend I finally got around to installing the 64bit version of Vista on my home desktop. It was something that was on my backlog for quite sometime. For one thing I get the ability to access memory over ~3.5 gigabits of RAM. Also the other key driver is that Adobe Lightroom 2.0 support 64 bit, so it can access more of that RAM while processing photographs. I understand that the same underlying architecture is part of Photoshop CS4 now, but for know I am still running CS3, so I won’t be able to take advantage of that yet.

One issue that I ran into when installing the 64 bit version of Lightroom on my machine was that every time I launched the program it asked me for the license key. I was not able to fid this specific issue on the Adobe support site, but I figured out that if you launch Lightroom, once, with Administrator privileges, put in your license key all works from that point forward. And does not require you to open Lightroom as admin in the future. I am guessing there is some registry key that is inaccessible as a normal user. This definitely is a bug, hopefully Adobe can provided a fix in the future, but for know it is a pretty easy work around.

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Lightroom,Lightroom 2.0,64bit,Vista,Photoshop,CS3,CS4

Photo Backup - My process

2008-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Brian Auer of Epic Edits has a series of articles on this blog discussing the options for ensuring that you don’t lose your photographs due to the various things that can go wrong with a computer hard drive. I thought I would post how I handle this since, as Brian outlines, there are several approaches.

First off, I’m a PC guy, always have been, and don’t see a reason to change now. For catalog management I use Adobe Lightroom 2.0. I have been a big fan of Lightroom and have been using it since the 1.0 betas. Another critical part of my photo backup process is my Windows Home Server. I have a HP MediaSmart Server filled with hard drives.

I do not store any of my photographs on my desktop, all photographs go directly on the Home Server as soon as I transfer them from the Compact Flash cards. Since I don’t have any redundant hard drives on my desktop, its safer in my mind to store everything on the server. Within the Home Server I have a file share called Photos, this share is set to be duplicated within the Home Server so I don’t have to worry about a drive failing and wiping out those files. To make it simple, and to ensure that I don’t accidentally store photographs on my desktop, I map the default pictures user directory in Vista to the photo share on the home server.

To do this find your user directory, within Vista it is usually C:UsersUSERPictures. Right click on the folder, select properties. From the properties dialog, select location, type in the location of your network share, \MACHINENAMEPhotos, then hit the move button. This will now set the default picture folder within Vista to the server share, the server does not need to be a Windows Home Server, it just is in my case. Now every program that wants to store or retrieve pictures will by default look in this directory.

Currently I have Lightroom configured to copy into date based folders within the Photos share. This seems to work best for me, since I frequently take shots of various subjects, and trying to come up with folders based on the subject of the photograph was just to difficult, plus that is what keywords are for anyways.

I currently have all four drive bays filled within the HP MediaSmart Server, 2 500GB drives, and 2 750GB drives. I also have a 500GB external USB drive integrated into the storage configuration. One of the nice features of WHS, is the ability to have various drive sizes within the case, and still enable redundancy between drives. I at one point had a server setup with a RAID-5 configuration, it was good for redundancy, but all the drives needed to be the same size, and with hard drive prices dropping all the time I like the ability to upgrade my 500GB for a 1 TB drive when the price drops.

The configuration I outlined above works great for making sure I don’t lose any files within my home network. The one risk is that if something happens at my home, fire, theft, etc. That is why the next point of protection is offsite storage. I currently use KeepValue as my backup provider. KeepVault has a add-in for WHS that automatically backs up any new or changed files to their servers. The KeepVault interface is very simple, you just pick which shares on your home server you would like to be backed up, and it takes care of the rest. KeepVault for WHS is $100 per year for unlimited 100GB of storage. I could not find a better deal, since I backup all my photos, my extensive music collection (re-ripping all those CD’s does not sound fun), and my family videos.

Well I hope this help anyone that are looking for ways to protect their photography. As photographers we like to get the coolest and latest gear, but don’t forget to invest in the backend of your process, and poor backup strategy will be costly.

Technorati Tags: Photography,Backup,Windows Home Server,HP MediaSmart Server,WHS,KeepVault,Epic Edits,Brian Auer,Lightroom

It's Good to Be One

2008-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

</p> <div class="flickr-frame"> <p>It’s Good to Be One, originally uploaded by mgroves.
</p> </div> <p class="flickr-yourcomment">
Happy Birthday Evelyn!

Can't have enough Lightroom Presets

2008-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Check out a girl in love presets

SmugMug introduces SmugVault

2008-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

I know this was feature I was very interested in about a year ago. SmugMug has added a new feature to enable you to upload your RAW photos as a backup to their servers. There is an additional cost it looks like, but since they allow you to upload any file type I guess I understand.

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/06/23/smugvault-store-everything-for-next-to-nothing/

I don’t really need this any longer since I am using KeepVault to backup my Windows Home Server, where I store all my photos, music, etc.

Technorati Tags: SmugMug,Windows Home Server,KeepVault,SmugVault

Welcome Home

2008-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

Welcome Home, originally uploaded by mgroves.

I was digging thought a bunch of pictures I have, and I found this one of the day Hayden came home from the hospital after being born 8 weeks early. We had been taking home things that Hayden was wearing in the hospital to the dogs so they were familiar with him when he go home. It did seem to work, Niki, was very happy to have Hayden home.

Technorati Tags: Hayden,Niki,Welcome Home,Dog,Photography,Pre-Mature Baby

Lightroom 1.4.1 Release

2008-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Ok, I know I am very late on this, I have been pretty busy lately and have been forgetting to blog.

Pretty much this release has everything that 1.4 had before Adobe had to pull it due to a bug.

Lightroom 1.4.1 comes with fixes to the following issues that were introduced in 1.4:

Import performance has been improved.
Files from DNG conversion on Windows are now readable by Lightroom and Camera Raw. You can correct DNG files created with Lightroom 1.4 on Windows by converting them again using the DNG Converter.
EXIF date fields in metadata had been incorrectly modified been fixed. If an improper date had been written to the metadata of a file, it will be fixed on the next metadata update. You can make sure that all your files have the correct metadata by selecting your images in Lightroom and doing a quick File > Save.
Olympus JPEG files now display correctly.

Download for :Mac, Windows.

And again, if you are using Jeffrey Friedl’s Plug-ins to upload to Flickr, Smugmug, Etc. you will need to upload those plug-ins after you update Lightroom.

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Lightroom,Camera Raw,Jeffrey Friedl,Flickr,Smugmug,Plug-in

Adobe Lightroom Update 1.4 and Camera Raw 4.4

2008-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Update: Lightroom 1.4 update for Mac and Windows has been temporarily removed from the Adobe web site. If you have already installed the update, Adobe recommends uninstalling it due to these three issues:

EXIF Time Stamp Error: There is an error in the EXIF time stamp update technology that causes Lightroom to believe that the files are out of sync with the correct time stamp as displayed in Lightroom. Any ensuing metadata update will attempt to incorrectly modify the EXIF time stamp in the original raw file itself. This is the only metadata field that Lightroom will write to an original proprietary raw file. This error will not impact the integrity of your image data. The Camera Raw plug-in also will incorrectly change the EXIF time stamp in files converted by the plug-in. The information written to the XMP sidecar files or XMP metadata in the converted files will remain correct.
DNG Conversion Error(Windows Only): With the latest version of the Lightroom 1.4 and Camera Raw 4.4 applications, Adobe has included technology to verify that the image data in a DNG file is unchanged from when it was originally converted to DNG. Unfortunately, when converting to DNG using Lightroom 1.4 on Windows, the application will write an incorrect verification tag to describe the image data. When Lightroom attempts to work with those files in the Develop module, the application reads that incorrect tag, believes that there is something wrong with the raw data and will present an error. Rest assured, there is nothing wrong with the integrity of your image data or metadata. For those that have already converted their files to DNG using Lightroom 1.4(Windows only) we recommend using the DNG 4.3.1 converter to convert the DNG files you’ve created with Lightroom 1.4.
Olympus Conversion Error: There is an error in converting Olympus JPEG files to other formats in Lightroom 1.4 and the Camera Raw 4.4 plug-in.

To uninstall Lightroom 1.4 please see the instructions per your platform:
Mac: Delete the Lightroom application in the Application folder(Mac) and Delete the following file: Library/Receipts/Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.pkg
Windows: Choose the Uninstall Lightroom 1.4 menu item from the Windows start menu. The Add/Remove Program utility on Windows will also achieve the same result.

~~The Lightroom 1.4 and Camera Raw 4.4 updates have been posted to the following locations: Lightroom(Mac~~, ~~Win), Camera Raw(Mac~~, ~~Win). The updates include support for the following new camera models:~~

~~Canon EOS 450D (Digital Rebel XSi/EOS Kiss X2)~~

~~Fujifilm S100FS~~

~~Nikon D60~~

~~Olympus SP-570 UZ~~

~~Pentax K20D, K200D~~

~~Sony A200, A300 A350~~

~~Lightroom Journal: Lightroom 1.4 and Camera Raw 4.4~~

If you are using Jeffrey Friedl's Plug-ins to upload to Flickr, Smugmug, Etc. you will need to upload those plug-ins after you update Lightroom.

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Lightroom,Camera Raw,Jeffrey Friedl,Flickr,Smugmug,Plug-in

Layers: The Complete Guide to Photoshop's Most Powerful Feature

2008-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

I just received my signed copy of "Layers: The Complete Guide to Photoshop's Most Powerful Feature", thanks Matt! I have not had too much time to go through it yet, but the timing is perfect since I just installed my newly purchased copy of Photoshop CS3.

Using Layers to enhance photographs has been only of my favorite things to do within Photoshop Element and way more powerful within CS3. To be honest I have been following the lead from others when it comes to which layers to apply to get specific effects, and I was somewhat doing this blindly. From my quick look through Matt Kloskowski's new book I can tell it is going to be very helpful to get me up to speed on CS3. I am particularly interesting in the chapters on Adjustment Layers and Layer Masks.

Technorati Tags: Layers,Matt Kloskowski,Photoshop Elements,Photoshop CS3,Lightroom Killer Tips

Rest in Peace Bailey

2008-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

Val and I had to make the hard decision yesterday to put down one of our dogs Bailey. Bailey was a 7 year old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, although he fully thought he was a Siberian Husky. About two months ago, Bailey was diagnosed with Diabetes and had to be put on twice daily shots. Then Monday morning is stopped wanting to eat, did not eat for two days actually. And that is the one thing is the world that got that dog up in the morning, so we knew something was very wrong. Val took him over to the vets, and it turned out that he had Pancreatitis and was in a lot of pain. Since the vet really could only stabilize him and since his over all health was declining we decided to put him down. It is always hard to make a decision like this, but I think it was the right choice.

Of course the first thing I thought of was how was I going to tell Hayden. He is almost four and had not really had to deal with the loss of a pet. I decided I was going to fully tell him the truth and could not sugar coat it or tell him some fantasy about Bailey going to heaven or some farm. When I told him that Bailey was sick and was in a lot of pain and had died. He asked a few questions, such as “Could I see him?”, but quickly said, “Bailey is dead, are we getting another dog?” Of course my answer that we still had Milo and Niki was not helpful, since he seems to think it is important that we have three dogs. I am sure he will have more questions has time goes on, but I am glad I told him the truth.

So we will miss you Bailey, you were not the smartest dog, but you were a good sweet dog.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 for $299

2008-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

I have been wanting Photoshop CS3 for quite awhile now, but just could not justify $649. So I had been using Photoshop Elements, trying to replicate the effects that are possible in CS3. I will say that you can do a good bit with Elements, but I kept wanted for the full experience. The good news is that Adobe is running a special now where you can get CS3 for $299 as an upgrade to Elements. You won't find this on their web site, if you go through the normal Adobe site you will see that the upgrade from Elements is $549. You will need to call, 1-800-585-0774 with Offer Code 27105, and you will need your Elements serial number for verification. But hurry this offer is only good till February 29th, 2008.

I have mine on the way, now I won't need to try to figure out my way around Elements when doing all those great tutorials that Steve Paxton and Brian Auer put together.

UPDATE: I found the link to the Adobe page advertising the offer http://direct.adobe.com/v?xJlqHqlEJTqTJvP I believe you will still need to call since when I tried to order online the code did not work. Reminder this deal expires tomorrow the 29th.

Technorati Tags: Photoshop Elements,Photoshop,CS3,Deals,EpicEdits,Paxton Prints

Photophlow: A Social Experience for Flickr Photographers

2008-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Brian Auer of EpicEdits recently did a guest article on Digital Photography School about photophlow. I personally have tried it, and it is really got me excited about moving some of my photos over to Flickr. I have been using SmugMug for some time now, and I don't plan to close my SmugMug account. I feel better about having full size images that I know are being backed up on SmugMug. But Flickr is way more social, and now with photophlow you add a real-time aspect to the social that the normal flickr is missing.

Blurb from the article:

photophlow is a mixture of several concepts and existing services (a mashup of sorts). The basis of photophlow is Flickr: the photo-sharing website that is popular amongst many online photographers. photophlow uses the Flickr API to interface with Flickr users and photos. The interface is somewhat of a skin that allows for added functionality and new features. The main feature photophlow adds to the Flickr experience is the use of chat rooms and real-time interaction with the other photographers.

Brian goes into details about the interface and how he has been using the service as a way to determine which photographs makes the EpicEdits weekly PhotoDump.

As an extension of my weekly PhotoDump blog posts, I’ve been experimenting with photophlow as a means to get people involved with the photo selection process. Prior to photophlow, I had been personally selecting photos from our Flickr pool to display on the blog each week. With photophlow, I invited the people submitting photos to the pool to also select the photos that would be displayed on the blog post.

Maybe there is some value in this Web2.0 stuff after all.

P.S. I still have a few photophlow invites if you are interested. Comment or email me.

Technorati Tags: EpicEdits,Flickr,Photography,Web2.0,photophlow,social,Digital Photography School,SmugMug

photophlow invites

2008-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

If you are looking for a photophlow invite drop me a comment with your Flickr id, I have a few left.

Technorati Tags: photophlow,flickr,photography,photosharing,networking,social

Free Lightroom Presets

2008-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

Heather Green has created a list of free Adobe Lightroom Presets.

I have not tried them all, but they are great examples of how much you can do to modify how your pictures look before needing to use Photoshop. I personally really like presets from Matt Kloskowski's Lightroom Killer Tips.

Great list Heather, thanks for putting it together.

UPDATED: new link from Heather: http://www.heathergreenphoto.com/blog/2008/2/2/adobe-lightroom-free-presets.html

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Lightroom,Presets,Photography,Lightroom Killer Tips

My Time at Home

2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Today is my last day of my six week vacation/parental leave from Microsoft. This has been a great experience, I really feel like I have bonded with my daughter. I have to say that it took me about a week to get used to taking care of her everyday, but I pretty much have it down now, at least as good as I am going to get. I think I am going to miss being home with her everyday.

The last week has be great spending time with Hayden also since he has been off from school for winter brake. I was afraid it was going to be a lot more work taking care of both of them while he was home, but he was so helpful, and really was good that it was not an issue at all. He is such a good kid, but boy he does not stop talking, that is unless Dora is on.

I told Val before I started my leave that I was not sure if I could not work for 6 weeks, but somehow Evelyn filled everyday. I also had a great time while my mom was out visiting for two weeks, I don’t get to spend much time with her any more and being able to spend two weeks without being distracted by work was great.

So back to work tomorrow, I think I am ready :)

I made the Epic Edits PhotoDump this week!

2007-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

Pretty cool, I made this week's photo dump on Epic Edits. Thanks Brian.

THE REGULAR PICKS

PhotoDump 12-30-2007

Technorati Tags: Photography,EpicEdits,PhotoDump,Weekly Review

Update for Lightroom 1.3.1

2007-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Does not look like many fixed for the Windows version but here you go:

Windows: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3815

Mac: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3810

UPDATE FOR LIGHTROOM 1.3.1:
Lightroom 1.3.1 includes additional corrections for the following issues:
(These issues are specific to the 1.3.1 update. Lightroom 1.3.1 also includes all of the previous updates listed for Lightroom 1.3 below)
● The Lightroom 1.3 Print Module could previously cause the application to crash on either OS X 10.5 or 10.5.1 during template usage.
● On Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.5.1, the import process from a card reader or other device into Lightroom could fail to import all or a portion of the selected images.
● A decrease in Develop slider responsiveness introduced in Lightroom 1.3 has been corrected.
● The Lightroom 1.3 Develop module could cause the application to crash if adjustments were made in quick succession.
● Compressed raw files from the Nikon D100 were read incorrectly in Lightroom 1.3.
● A possible artifact in raw file support for the Olympus E-3 has been corrected.
● The Lightroom FTP Plug-in provided as sample code with the Export SDK did not function properly if the password
was not saved with the selected FTP preset.
● Editing or creating a new FTP preset immediately prior to using the FTP plug-in provided as sample code with the Export SDK would cause the FTP process to fail.
● Using the Export as Previous option did not work with the FTP plug-in provided as sample code with the Export SDK.

Technorati Tags: Lightroom,Adobe,Update,Photography

John Butler Trio - Tonight at The Moore

2007-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Tonight is the night for JBT at the Moore Theater in Seattle. This is going to me by third time seeing John Butler, ~~twice~~ this year. I can't wait the show is always amazing. We have grown the following also, Val's brother, Brad and his fianc

Home Gadget Roundup

2007-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

I have recently setup some new gadgets at home and had not had a chance to give a little write-up on my current media/computing setup.

I just had enough of the horrible Comcast DVR that I finally went out and orders a Tivo HD. I have to say it was a great buy, sure I had to buy the hardware, and there is a monthly service cost, but as the math worked out it was not much more per month than the DVR from Comcast. And it works, I can transfer un-encrypted shows from the Tivo HD to my computer using TivoToGo, I have yet to miss a show, get it cut off, have it reboot, or have the device be unresponsive to remote commands (all features of the Comcast DVR).

It did take a few days to get the CableCards working correctly, but Comcast was great and helped get it fixed pretty quickly. It turns out the Motorola dual-tuner card does not play nice, so we had to go with two single tuner cards. Not a big deal Comcast did not charge me for either card. Btw, I know I have been slamming Comcast’s DVR, but their customer service is great, they just need better hardware solutions, or buy Tivo.

A more recent upgrade was my purchase of a HP MediaSmart - Windows Home Server. I have had NAS for the last couple of years but had been wanting what WHS was offering since I heard about in internal beta at Microsoft. My first NAS was a old white-box computer I purchased for $60 from my last company, I installed Window 2k3 put 3 120 GB hard drives in a RAID-5 configuration and things were good. Of course things were also complicated, I was administrating a server, technically not a big issue for me but still not the thing I want to be dealing with at home. Next I decided to go with a Buffalo Technology LinkStation 500 GB NAS. I attached two additional 500 GB USB drives and life was good, for awhile. The LinkStation solution worked pretty well, the things I did not like about it was that I was maxed out on hard drive space, and I did not feel all that comfortable with the weekly backups between the LinkStation and the USB drives.

I could have built my own Windows Home Server, but decided that based on the price of the HP MediaSmart Server it would be worth it to have someone to call if it fails. I ordered the 500 GB HP server from Buy.com surprisingly they had some in stock. Currently I have two 500 GB drives in the installed within the server and two 500 GB USB drives attached, that gives me 1.82 TB, with 2 internal drive slots, two USB connections and a eSATA connection available. How I configured my server seems better left to another post.

Adobe Lightroom and color spaces

2007-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

Here is an interesting article from CNET on color spaces, I have to admit I did not fully understand the differences between all of the choices within Lightroom. I have been using Lightroom for several months now and really love this application, it is not cheap but then you do get what you pay for.

Adobe Lightroom and color spaces | The Pervasive Datacenter - CNET Blogs

That was my problem. I was exporting to JPEGs with an Adobe RGB color space. Lightroom (like Photoshop and other higher-end imaging programs) understand how to properly display images using that color space on an sRGB monitor. However, neither Firefox nor IrfanView do.

Moral of the story? Although Apple's Safari and the Firefox 3 beta can display non-sRGB color spaces correctly, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Firefox 2.x don't. Nor do most basic file viewers. Therefore, for most purposes--and certainly for Web display--it's best to use JPEGs with an sRGB color space or the results probably won't be what you expect.

On an additional Lightroom note, with version 1.3 and the new SDK, and thanks to Jeffrey Friedl you can now export directly to SmugMug. Jeffrey is still working through some bugs, but recent versions are starting to work pretty well. Thanks Jeffrey!

Technorati Tags: Color Space,Lightroom,Adobe,SmugMug,CNET

Birthday Present

2007-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Anymore Val and I have gotten into the practice of getting our own gifts for Birthday's / Christmas. It seems to work out better, not that we don't talk about what we want, etc. But based on my need to research the hell out of everything I buy it is much better that I make the purchase that I really want.

So for my birthday this year, yes, another year older, I decided to get a real professional lens for my Canon 20D. I read all the reviews and decided to go with the Canon 24-105mm f/4L lens. I was looking for a lens that would be an good "walking around" lens. So far I think this was a great purchase, I still carry my 50mm 1.8 lens when I know I will be indoors, but the 24-105mm has been a great lens. There is a big difference is quality once you get into the Canon professional series lens, and the price shows that.

ZUNE Gen 2

2007-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

Val has been wanting a new flash based music player, and of course me being the gadget guy that I am I had to see if we were going to jump the Zune given it finally has a flash player. So on Friday before I left for my leave I decided to stop by the Microsoft Company store and pickup a couple new 8GB flash Zunes. I have to say I am pretty impressed, the devices is much lighter than I expected and the screen is great to look at. I actually like the new Zune software, the big issue I have right now is no ability to build auto playlists. What I am looking for is the ability to customize what I put on my player based on how much I like the music and how many times I have played a given track. I understand that the Zune team pulled the Auto Playlists in this version since they did research that most normal users just never understood how they worked. Well I hope they bring them back, and better than in WMP.

Technorati Tags: Zune,Music,Gadgets

220, 221 what ever it takes

2007-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

Today is my first day home being Mr. Mom. Yeah, that is right, Val is back to work I am home with Evelyn for the next 6 weeks. So far so good, 9:40 and the baby is still alive. I do have a some help the next two weeks, my Mom is out from Pittsburgh, so there is little chance I will even get to hold my daughter.