I wasn't really planning on being up early enough to capture today's lunar eclipse. It just so happened that my daughter dragged me out of bed to take her to her 6am swim practice. On a Saturday. Ugh. Anyway, I was surprised I was awake enough to remember that the lunar eclipse was today and fortunate enough that my driving her to the pool would get me back to the deep SE of Calgary sometime before 7. I decided on a whim to grab my camera and put it in the car.
When I got back to my part of the city, I headed for the biking/walking trails that are nearby as I've taken many photos from there facing west. Lesson number one for night photography – bring a flashlight. I had a heckuva time finding the actual pathways since they've been covered in snow. After stumbling around a bit, I did eventually find the paths and settled in to take some shots. Lesson number two – bring a tripod. I ended up taking around a 100 or so shots, all the while experimenting with the camera settings to see what would work. I went through and processed the photos this afternoon and I've found that the vast majority of what I shot has noticeable blur and aren't really useable. Here are the two that I found to be among the better ones from this morning.
Lunar Eclipse IMG_3864
Lunar Eclipse IMG_3904
The fine folks over at Real World Hero have begun their 3rd annual donation campaign! This is a charity drive by players of the MMORPG City of Heroes.
They have put together a number of events to help benefit four charities – Child's Play, Donate Games, Operation Gratitude, and Heifer International.
As a part of this, they're also running an auction until this Friday night with a variety of items, including City of Heroes merchandise, comic books, comic art, and a number of hand-crafted items.
After having been a bidder on a number of items last year (and even winning one), I thought I would donate one of my prints on canvas to their cause. Check out their auction page to see what's available and place your bids!
It's hard to believe sometimes, but we've been operating for three years now! It's been quite the experience so far and we're only continuing to grow and develop. Thanks to everyone who has encouraged and supported us through this journey so far!
To celebrate this milestone, we're offering a coupon code good for 30% off of any of our prints on an order of $30 or more for this week only! (excludes shipping and taxes) It's only a happy coincidence that the date of our anniversary also happens to be on Cyber Monday this year. ;-)
Simply browse the 'Prints' category here on our site to see what's currently available for purchase.. We're offering the photos in a variety of formats, including high quality paper prints, fine art paper prints, and canvas prints!
Click on any of the [Buy a Print] links underneath a photo, and you will be presented with the Fotomoto shopping cart interface for ordering it. (Fotomoto is an online photo printing and fulfillment company through whom we've recently started offering prints of our photos). If you're having any trouble with it, we've put together this quick little help page about it.
When you proceed to the checkout, enter this code into the Discount field: 820A67
Thanks again and enjoy!
As with many photographers, I've been playing around with 500px in recent weeks and have liked what I've seen so far (check out my profile here) . The sheer quality of the photos over there are so amazing that it's been really easy to lose hours just browsing photos.
Then I came across the Firefox extension, Stylish, which allows you to restyle websites in your browser. Basically, this amounts to writing some CSS that overrides what the website is coded with.
I've always been a fan of darker-themed websites because I find them less straining on the eyes, so after installing a few styles and tinkering a bit, I thought about what other websites would be good to restyle. I figured 500px would be a good candidate, since it is mostly white. I didn't find an existing style, so I went ahead and experimented with Stylish myself to see what I could come up with.
Here are a few screenshots…
Main Page
Login Page
Profile Page
Photo Page
If you're interested in using this, you'll need to install Stylish first. Then you can download/install 'Dark 500px' directly from userstyles.org. Feedback welcome and appreciated.. Enjoy!
I've been experimenting with adding a lightbox to the photos you find on our site. For those that don't know, lightboxes are those pseudo pop-up boxes that typically allow you to view a larger version of a given image or thumbnail. Of course, these have been abused in other ways (e.g. ads, surveys, and the like) and so may be a turn-off to some folks.
You can take a look at what I've done by checking out our last two photo posts here and here. Click on the links below the images to see what they do.
To get some feedback, I thought I would put together a quick Facebook Poll using their fancy new Questions feature. Please take a moment and add your thoughts. Here's a direct link to the poll. Thanks!
