Jul
This little info page is still a work in progress, but here are some of the answers to questions that I occasionally get asked.
I bought it in February 2007 and I’m still learning what all the knobs and buttons do. Quite a few people have asked about my equipment, so I thought I’d put some info here.
The main camera I use is a Nikon D80 SLR, and where possible I try to avoid using a flash. The lens it came with was the 18-135mm zoom, but I also bought a 50mm f/1.8D lens which has a much wider aperture and lets me shoot in lower light. You can read about my excitement when I got the lens here. It’s the wide aperture that makes it possible to get really blurry backgrounds too but you don’t have to have a flashy camera to do that though- you can use telephoto on a normal handheld camera and change how far away you’re standing, or do some fancy layer and masking tricks in photoshop if you have the time, patience and money. I also have a Nikkor 18-55mm and a Nikkor 55-200mm VR zoom. All my lenses have UV filters on the front. I also have a graduated neutral density filter which is good for stopping bright, overcast skies from blowing out. The other camera I use is a really basic 3.1 mega-pixel Casio EX-Z3 that I bought about 4 years ago. I’ve learned through trial and error that for taking a nice photo it’s more about composition than having an expensive camera. This photo remains one of my favourites that I’ve taken and that was with my cheapy Casio. I still love my Nikon though. Hopefully I’ll be getting some other booty for it soon, but we have to save some money for the time being- we want to move into our own house within the next 12 months.
I’m not really into the whole post-pic processing thing, I’d rather learn how to get my camera to do the work. The most I will ever do to a picture is adjust the white balance and contrast. Occasionally I will straighten it too if I held the camera wonkily, or maybe heal a blemish, but that’s about it; I don’t really crop things either. I have A TON of stuff to learn from the instruction manual and books obviously, but hopefully I’m improving.
I’ve been learning how to use my camera from Ken Rockwell’s website, and I get a lot of inspiration for what makes a nice-looking picture from looking at other people’s photos too. Photo people I love include:
- Jennifer Skog who shot our amazing engagement photos
- Erin Julian, who also has a great flickrstream and is behind the very, very excellent lylium blog too (it’s insane that a 20 year old can have so much talent)
- Jeff Ascough, a ‘master of available light’ and one of the world’s best wedding photographers and who we were so lucky to have shooting our wedding this past summer
- and various flickr members including:
- mmarsupilami who shoots some beautiful scenes of rural France
- chris of alaska whose Alaska pics are stunning
- Buck Forester (and see this one especially)
- MsBooshay (gosh, just check out this pic of her daughter, it’s so precious!)
- Junku who takes FABULOUS photos of his cats
- Peter from Wellington with his amazing NZ pictures
- cc49
- Sean Marc Lee of which this photo is a favourite
- You can see more of my favourite flickr pictures here, and keep checking as I add to them all the time
This site first started out as a Movable Type blog on another site of mine, but after an unfortunate incident whist attempting to de-install a problematic plugin, coupled with a string of other mysterious events, I defected from Movable Type and settled into a new home here, which uses WordPress which I host on my own server space at Dreamhost (this is not to be confused with wordpress.com which is already set up and hosted for you, but the trade off for this is that there’s less functionality). I chose Dreamhost as I noticed that The Bloggess’ site loaded super fast so I emailed her to find out who she used. And I also used special offer promo code to get a $50 discount which you can get by signing up using this link. I’ve been pleased with their service so far. They are also carbon neutral.
The version of WordPress that I use is WordPress 2.6. It’s a little buggy, but I’m slowly figuring out how to get it to work properly. I’m sure they’ll correct things with updates.
To help me publish this blog, I use the following plugins:
- Google Sitemaps - This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog (just remember to create your own sitemap.xml file in your root directory so that it has somewhere to write to).
- Lighter Admin Drop Menus - Creates Drop Down Menus for WordPress Admin Panels, just like Andy Staines’ original plugin, but without background pictures and special fonts. This makes it faster to load and more adaptable to customizations.
- Clean Archives Reloaded - This plugin is designed to display your archive listings in a clean, uniform, single-query fashion that’s Search Engine friendly on a dedicated page or in your sidebar. This is what creates the Archives page.
- Lightbox 2 - This is the Javascript plugin I use to dim the background and overlay photos onto a page.
- Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
- Simple Recent Comments Widget - Shows a list of recent comments in my footer.
- Google AJAX Libraries - Replaces the most common JavaScript libraries in WordPress with the corresponding files from the Google AJAX Libraries API. (It’s supposed to make everything run a bit faster).
I designed the look and layout of this site myself. Using the default WordPress Kubrick 1.6 theme as a template and guide, I played around with the PHP and re-wrote the CSS to get things coloured and arranged like I wanted them to look. I created the ‘dynamic footer’ out of three additional dynamic sidebars (specified in the ‘functions.php’ file) which I placed in the ‘footer.php’ file and positioned using CSS. You can find out how to do that here. Another very good resource is Lorelle on Wordpress. I created the flickr collage thingy in the footer by modifying the code from a flickr badge and styling it with CSS (i.e. deleting the portion of code in the flickr badge that styles is, and putting in <div> codes to style it myself. So far I’ve been able to check that it all looks right and works on Firefox and Netscape, but I haven’t checked other browsers, so if you notice any problems please let me know….I’d be willing to bet that it probably doesn’t work in IE, but I don’t know of anyone who uses that browser any more anyway, except for maybe one friend, but I keep yelling at him to switch 
And it’s probably got weird things going on in Safari too, because it uses different language or something. Ho well.
Anyway, thanks for coming, and enjoy the rest of the site!
Born to wear pretty dresses and Barbour jackets and skip through muddy English fields in a pair of Hunter wellies, Nin is now a 30-something British Ex-Pat living in the urban wilds of the San Francisco Bay Area. She likes cake and chocolate and is on a quest to find the perfect Stateside cream tea. 
