Page 1 of 8612...510...Last »

Optimize image sharpness when printing pictures, making books, developing photos

Posted on by
Reply

girls in smokeroom 520px

 

Girls in the Smoke room

 

Introduction

If you are serious about photography, a lot of your time are spent trying to get the exposure and lighting right and choosing the right lens. And if you are like me, you use RAW as the primary way of saving the pictures in the camera. Memory cards are cheap and the RAW processing applications today are very advanced, helping you to get the best possible image quality. Many sports photographers would likely disagree with me, because they need a quick turnaround. But for most photography, RAW is the way to go. The picture above was taken with Canon EOS 5D Mark II at ISO 6400 in a bar with just one dim yellow light and a candle inside a room for smokers (smoking in a bar or restaurant is illegal in Sweden) and still makes a pretty good print on paper. This would be virtually impossible to do just a couple of years ago.

But after taking the photograph, tweaked it in Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture you probably want to output the image on paper or onto the web. This is my workflow and it may not fit the way you work. But you might find a nugget or two.

Continue reading →

WordPress – Adding fast social network buttons

Posted on by
Reply

Add Sharing buttons to WordPress without slow plugins

After trying out a couple of plugins for WordPress and realizing that they are slow (mostly because of updating the counters for number of clicks with javascript), I found this article describing how to add buttons directly with PHP. But the code doesn’t pass W3C Validator because all spaces has to be %20 encoded in the parameters of the URL. So I modified the ones I needed. So if you follow the instructions in the link above and use this code instead, your buttons should validate.

For Twitter

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=<?php echo urlencode(get_the_title()); ?>%20-%20<?php echo the_permalink() ?>%20@your_twittername"><img src="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/twitter.png" alt="Tweet this!" /></a>

For Facebook

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<?php the_permalink(); ?>?t=<?php echo urlencode(get_the_title()); ?>" title="Share on Facebook."><img src="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/facebook.png" alt="Facebook" /></a>

Hope this helps getting your social network buttons working without the slowness…

Hosting server at blueHost vs. self hosted

Posted on by
Reply

Bluehost

When setting up my old blog again that’s been down for about six months, I decided to host it, instead of having my linux machine here at home. So I started looking for hosting company. And what better place than to check out the WordPress page. I’ve tried a while with another hosting company, and that was a disaster, but it seemed BlueHost had a good reputation. With WordPress themselves recommending it, I signed up for a year. I did the normal optimizations to it, like installing W3 Total Cache, installed APC and got an Amazon Cloud account for pictures and other larger stuff. I did a lot of testing to get the maximum speed out of the server slot I had. The server was located in the US, But every time I did a check from the States, the initial byte took like 1 second. That doesn’t sound very long, but that’s waiting time before the page even start rendering. I tried everything, but couldn’t lower that. So back to hosting it myself.

Continue reading →

W3 Total Cache refuse to cache pages in WordPress

Posted on by
Reply

wordpress logoW3 Total Cache for WordPress – No caching for you!

One stupid mistake by me, and the W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress stopped working. I’ve done some performance tests the last couple of days since I moved my web server to my own machine at home, instead of using BlueHost, and everything looked ok. But when I started to test other pages, they refused to cache. So instead of 210 req/sec I got 4 req/sec! Not so good! I tried all the settings, changing W3 Total Cache settings, looked in the HTML output to find something that was different between the pages. Disabled WordPress plugins, but I could not get some of the pages to cache.

Then I looked in the /wp-content/w3tc/pgcache folder, where all the pages are cached. And lo and behold, all the quick pages was there, with a creation date from a couple of days ago. I had managed to change the owner of the folder w3tc to the wrong user instead of www-data. So W3 Total Cache had no way of writing to the directory! A quick

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /wp-content/w3tc

fixed the problem. Hurrah!

Sometimes the problems are easy, but you get caught up and forget to check the basic stuff. Hopefully no more faux pas like this in a while.

Installing my new Ubuntu Server

Posted on by
Reply

Installing my new Ubuntu Server

2433102356 4d4ce9234b

I was spending all day setting up my own web server using Ubuntu Server as a platform. I got tired of sharing a server at BlueHost, with slow response times and CPU throttling. But there was a lot of steps to get it to work with compression, wordpress and other stuff. All the things that would be a great writeup for others (and me if I have to do it again), but guess what. I didn’t take notes! The good news is that the speed has increased 300%. That’s the great part of living in Sweden. Cheap fast 100mbit internet. They now actually have 1gigabit for home use, but it’s around $80 so I’ll wait a couple of months.

Thinking of redoing the whole installation in a virtual disk in VMWare and write down a how-to. I had to dig pretty deep in Google to get the info I needed. The information was everywhere. I’ll try to do it this weekend. Could be useful.

 

iPhone Filming – Tools to make better movies

Posted on by
Reply

Tools for filming on iPhone

It’s pretty amazing the kind of video quality you can get from a simple iPhone. With the iPhone 4 you can film in 720P and with the iPhone 4S you get up to 1080P! But to get the optimal quality, you are going to need some tools to help you. The first example I found was when the iPhone 4 was released some guys made this film, all made with the iPhone, including the editing. Soon after the release of the iPhone 4S, this example showed up on Vimeo. But to be able to get good quality out of your phone, you need some tools to help you.

Continue reading →

Page 1 of 8612...510...Last »