Frozen Light at the State Fair

For the 2nd year in a row I tried my hand at taking long-exposure images of the carnival rides at the Kansas State Fair.

Though the rides were mostly the same as last year, I was able to get quite a number of photos that are quite different from the year before.

As last year, these taken using a Canon 40D DSLR, with a Canon 17-55EF lens, mounted on a tripod. I shot at 100, for 1-10 seconds, with an f-stop of 18.

Here’s a link to this year’s Kansas State Fair Frozen Light photos, and also a link to last year’s Fair photos, both on flickr.

A few days into offering All the Pages via the WordPress blogging system things seem to be going pretty well.

The redirects from the old site are working and my modest traffic levels haven’t changed to any degree (though I think it will take 2-3 weeks before that’s a certainty).

Somehow when I imported the entries from MovableType around 100 duplicates were introduced into the system; they’re gone now!

About the only thing that’s lacking compared to the old site is the machine-readable Creative Commons license as well as an indication of the license in the sidebar or footer; I’ll add that soon enough, until then the site is licensed as before, with a Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution, share and share alike license.

I don’t think I mentioned that I’m using a design called Amazing Grace, created and freely distributed by Vladimir Prelovac.

I’ve only made a few minor tweaks to his templates, primarily to make the Atom RSS feed the default feed. I really like how the site looks with this design; thanks Vladimir!

One thing I really like about this new design is the random image that is displayed at the top of the page. Long time visitors to this site will recall that my earlier designs had a simliar feature; sometimes I used to hit reload over and over again just to see what would come up!

Anyway, I’ve got about 30 images prepared for use with the site so far, and will add more over time. The images, besides being scaled down to fit, also have to be processed to add the border. This is done very easily using the ImageMagick program on my linux box.

To process the images I followed the (translated) directions from this site: Le Yet Another Blog, with a couple of changes.

First, I found that the actual image area inside the frame is 285×177, not 283×175 as specified in the article. Not wanting to recreate the images I had already prepared for the site, I simply modified the script used to create the composite images. The result is an additional line of framing, but it looks fine.

I also made a couple of other changes to the script, and have included it below. Caution: you really want to read the full article before trying to process your images.

#! /bin/bash
DESTDIR="out"

# model1.jpg is one of the template images with the inner area
# converted to a white background
SRCPORTRAIT=model1.jpg

# démarrage de l'incrémentation - la dernière image fabriquée
# se nomme br-portrait86.jpg
typeset -i INDEX=0

mkdir -p $DESTDIR

for FICHIER in $(ls src)
do
   composite -compose src-over -geometry 282x177+14+28 -quality 90 src/$FICHIER \
$SRCPORTRAIT $DESTDIR/bg-portrait$INDEX.jpg

# original command for reference. note the geometry args have changed
# composite -compose src-over -geometry 283x175+14+28 -quality 90 $FICHIER \
SRCPORTRAIT $DESTDIR/bg-portrait$INDEX.jpg

   INDEX=$INDEX+1
done

I hope you enjoy the new site look and feel as much as I do. Between the new WordPress software and this great design, I’m pretty happy with the site these days.

Just for grins, here’s a screen shot showing the current 30 images used in the rotating image display in the upper right of this site:

Same address as before, but the site is now primarily powered by WordPress.

After loading a test copy of my content on Sunday, and spending a few hours Monday and Tuesday evening making sure everything was the way I wanted it, I decided it was ready to go.

I still have some odd and ends to clean up, but nothing major.  If you notice anything unusual, please let me know.

RSS readers: I’ve put in redirects from the old Atom and RSS2 feeds to the new Wordpress feeds, so you should be able to keep reading the site without any changes.

I’m strongly considering migrating this site from MovableType to WordPress.

You can see a preview of my WordPress site here:

All the Pages, WordPress Edition!

I’ve been looking at a couple of different themes, and variations on those themes, and am close to making a decision; if you have any thoughts after reviewing the new site, please let me know in the comment section below.

I’m not up to doing a full-blown article on why I may be changing site software, but at this point I feel WordPress has better developer support and therefore a richer set of of core features as well as add-on functionality.

This is my main site for now, though I may post some articles on both sites. When I switch over, it will be transparent for the most part, though there will be obvious visual differences, plus I will announce the change.

I’m considering changing the software that powers this site, and this is the first post using the new software, WordPress.

You can return to the MovableType version of the site via this link.