Fall

Supersize me - How To - Part 2

For those interested in Supersizing your blog like in my previous post, my buddy Seth has done 2 posts on his blog explaining how to do it also. He's way smarter than me at techy stuff, so he explains it better and has more info. I learned a few things!

-Click here for the post if you host it yourself

-Click here for the post if Blogger hosts your blog on BlogSpot

And if you've ever been curious what Seth's lower legs look like, now you know. ;)
I shot this photo quite a while ago. 2002 I think. It was one of my first assignments at Brooks. The goal was to illustrate the word "isolation" with a photo. What do you think? Does that work?

Supersize me - How To

Ever since I made the Supersize change to my blog... Lots of people have been asking me how to do it to their own blog, understandably, because it makes the photos look much better! So, here goes my best attempt to explain it. You should have at least a tiny bit of HTML knowledge to do this... if you don't, you can probably still figure it out.

1) Download your blog template contents as a backup. That way if you screw something up and need to go back to the original, it's no problem. If you host on BlogSpot, I have no idea how to do this... If you host on your website like I do, just login to your FTP server and download the whole blog folder with the contents inside.

2) Login to your blogger account, and go to Template Tab > Edit HTML.

3) There are 3 numbers that I changed. First one was the "header" pixels. I changed this from 660px to 800px. If you want your header (sometimes called banner) to be wider then make the number even larger, or of course smaller if you want it smaller. If you want your header to stay the same as it already is, leave this number unchanged.
Screenshot to help you locate #1:


The second number I changed was the "content" pixels. I changed this from 660px to 1,000px. I think this number is the width of the entire blog (the content AND the sidebar).

The third number I changed is the "main" pixels. I think this is the width of the main section of the blog, where your type and photos go (not including the sidebar). As you can see, I'm no pro at this, but it worked for me!
Screenshot to help you locate #2 and #3:


4) Once you have these numbers changed, you can click the preview button and see how it looks. If it the width looks good, then save the changes and republish the blog. There should be buttons to click for all those.

5) Now it's time to upload your photos. As far as I know, you *cannot* use bloggers photo uploader to upload your photos, because it limits the size to the default size. If you do use it, your blog will be supersized but the photos will still be small. So, you need to size your photos (photoshop or whatever image editing software you use) to the actual size you want them displayed on the blog. Mine are 700 pixels on the long side. When you get your jpeg file sized and ready to go, you need to put it on the internet somewhere (FTP to your own website, flickr, photobucket, etc) and get the link for your image.

6) This is the code that you will paste into your blog post- Click here to see it (blogger tries to display the image if I paste it here)

Thats it! When you get the code in there for the images, then publish the post just as you would normally, and of course check it out to make sure it looks good.
If you have questions, leave a comment with your question and I'll do my best to help... but I am no pro at this... so beware. And, everyone's blogs are different, so try not to ask questions like "Where is my code for the header?" because it could be called a totally different thing on your blog and located in a totally different place, so I couldn't really help you out with that.

Good luck!

ZoZo

I'm keeping up on my attempt to post once a day... amazing! It's probably not going to last long though. There are two reasons why I've had time to post more than normal- 1) Bethany is out of town visiting her family in Michigan, and 2) My recently purchased dirt bike is broken! Bethany will be back on Thursday, and I'm hoping to have my bike fixed on Tuesday when a part comes in, so this posting may not last long. :)

Anyway, yesterday I headed down to the Columbia River in hopes of photographing kiteboarding with my underwater housing. I got down there, got out in the water and quickly realized that it wasn't really going to work because the river is big and the kiteboarders are really spread out, so I needed to communicate with some of the guys beforehand and tell them where I am, so they could do stuff in front of me. So, luckily I brought our family dog Zoe (I call her ZoZo) with me and got some fun photos of her playing around in the water. ZoZo has tons of personality and she's super happy all the time. She's also OCD about everything, especially anything that she can fetch, it's pretty funny.

These 3 of her shaking off are so funny looking!

SUPERSIZE ME!

No, not at McDonald's! If the blog looks different to you for some reason... it's because with the help of photo extraordinaire Steve Depino I figured out how to SUPERSIZE!
From now on the images will be large on the main page! No more clicking them to enlarge!
If your still back in the stone ages with a 800x600 monitor resolution... sorry dude, it's gonna look bad on your screen! But the majority of people are on at least 1024x768 resolution these days, so it should look great! My new screen is 1920x1200!

Anyway, how does it look on your screen? Too big? Too small? Just right??

Here is the first pic supersized... it seemed appropriate! :)

Ok I couldn't resist- Here are 2 more! I love how the big images look!

Multnomah Falls

Multnomah Falls at night.

Broughton Fire - White Salmon, Washington

These are some photos I shot yesterday evening of a fire that has been named "Broughton Fire" in White Salmon, Washington, just below Underwood Mountain.

I noticed the smoke around noon and knew it was a fire, but didn't realize it was a big one until I saw that there was 5 helicopters buzzing around dropping water all over it. I drove down to Ruthton Park in Hood River to take some photos. There were a lot of people down there because it was a great view to see all that was happening.

They suspect it was started by a spark from a passing train! I don't think anyone was injured or killed, but it did burn down 5 houses. Hope those people had insurance... because those are expensive houses up there!
KATU newschannel has an article up about it here and there is a video here.

Helicopters dropping water-


The sun setting to the west was beautiful!




The fire at night-



Zoe kept me company-

ghetto

Trying to keep up with this 1 post a day for the next week thing...

I wanted to share a photo today that had a little story behind it. This one sure does! I shot this at 3AM June 22, 2004 during my college years at Brooks. It wasn't for an assignment, just for fun really. I knew what I wanted the shot to look like... but wasn't quite sure how to get it.
Most legit car photographers have suction cup rigging systems for getting cool angles on cars, but I sure didn't. So I had the idea to tape the camera to the car. Like I said... ghetto! And to make it even more ghetto, I was the one driving (not many people are patient enough to shoot with me) and I didn't have a remote release for the camera... so yes... for every frame I had to stop the car, get out, push the shutter button (10 second self timer), jump back in the car and drive for 30 seconds. Must have been a sight to see. Luckily there aren't a lot of people out at 3AM. I ended up doing 20 shots, which took about an hour.
30 sec exposure @ f/6.3 ISO 200

This shot required a lot of color correcting too because the mercury vapor streetlights really pollute the image with an ugly orange cast. Here is the untouched original:
(crazy huh!)

I've always loved behind the scenes shots, so here are a few that I snapped of the camera taped to the hood. :)

camping in wisconsin

These two shots were from our road trip to Michigan in June. I think this was somewhere in Wisconsin. When Bethany and I road trip we rarely stay in hotels because camping is fun and hotels are expensive to stay in night after night! Plus, these two shots were taken from right beside our tent... when is the last time the Holiday Inn offered a view like that!?
The orange glow was our neighbors campfire... they were up partying all night, haha.

somewhere in northern california...

I thought this was kind of an interesting composition with the hills and clouds, so I stopped the car and snapped off a shot.

just a sunset

Sorry I've been seriously slacking on updating my blog recently... i'm making a goal to update once a day with at least one recent photo, for the remainder of this week! I'll probably fail miserably... but hold me to it! I haven't been shooting a lot recently, but I am super behind on stuff that I've shot in the past couple months, so I'll try and share some of that.
Anyway, to start it off, these are some photos from July when Bethany and I were driving back to Oregon from Michigan. This sunset was pretty incredible so we stopped off at a viewpoint and had fun shooting for a half hour or so. This was somewhere in Eastern Oregon.



A crazy looking weed thing-



Jumping and shooting your shadow at the same time isn't that easy-

Gotta love this double chimping action. Bethany is blurry in the foreground while another interesting photo dude is in the background checking out his shots of the sunset!

And a 100% cropped view for your viewing pleasure. :)

summer is disappearing...

I had the opportunity to go fishing with my dad and my bro a couple days ago. My brother got a nice 14.5 pound Chinook salmon. Tasty. I brought along my camera with one lens and didn't take any photos except for this one of the Columbia River Gorge. So that's all I have for now. I'll add some snaps to the other blog sometime soon...

Seth is on a billboard in Australia

I was just looking over my stock royalty statement from August, and noticed that one of the sales was the photo above of my buddy Seth (shot in Whistler Blackcomb), and it's on a billboard in Australia right now. It will be up until 9/29/07.

I know I have at least one blog follower in Australia- David Kleinert. Are there anymore Aussies? I'm not sure where in AU this billboard is and I know Australia is quite a large place... but if anyone happens to see this billboard, please snap a pic and send it to me! I'd love to see my first ever billboard!

Hood River lightning storm

Here are a few of the shots I took last week of the lightning storm in Hood River. I was excited to go out and shoot this because lightning storms are pretty rare up here, they usually only happen a couple times a year. I started shooting at around 3AM from our house, but the storm quickly moved east and went behind the hills, so I knew the perfect place to drive to and get a good view. Turned out it was the perfect place, and I shot up there until 6:30 in the morning, it was fun.
A little info on what your seeing in the photos- the water is the mighty Columbia River, the hills on the right are Oregon and hills on the left are Washington. The small amount of city lights you see on the right are a really cool little town called Mosier, population 410! And lastly the highway lights on the Oregon side is Interstate 84.