multifarious mushrooms

When I first got my digital camera, after having used an SLR for years, I couldn’t work out why people were holding theirs way out in front of them. I soon worked it out.
The LCD lens on a digital camera is pretty useless on a bright day. All you can see is black and you take photos blind.
My camera does have a viewfinder but it isn’t any use when I’m taking a zoomed image. What I see is not what I get.

There are cameras you can get which overcome the problem. The Sony W and the Canon G9 are just two of them. They have viewfinders which act like the ones on SLRs.

Or you can buy a Delkin Pop-up Shade which sticks to the back of the camera, protecting the LCD and which folds out to shade the screen.

My source here is Terry Lane in the Green Guide, The Age, 27 March, 2008

I can get the plugin to work for the posts which contain photos, but it takes an age to load if it ever does. I didn’t wait to find out. So I deleted that and relied on the widget alone. No luck there either.

I think the problem is that my server is not using PHP 5+ to support my blog. I have also emailed PicLens.

If you too cannot add this to your blog, what you can do is download the piclens Firefox add-on. Then on other sites you can click on any image where an arrow appears and that will open up your browser so you can see the slideshow of any one else’s pictures.

The PicLens Plugin for WordPress makes it easy for you to provide your readers with an immersive slideshow experience. Visitors simply click a “start slideshow” link to activate PicLens Lite, a slick filmstrip-style presentation console. From there, they can play or pause your slideshow, or better yet dive into a full-screen mode. Optionally, you can also enable our sidebar widget to display a mini slideshow of images from throughout your blog.

I am about to download it myself. My next post should contain some photo slideshows.

Photosynth is Microsoft’s new image viewer which is still in beta stage and can’t be used for your own photos yet, but it’s quality and facilities look very exciting. You need to download it and install it. Then you will see images already there. You can zoom in and out retaining great clarity, move along, create a 3D image of it, pick anywhere to view what has been taken.

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.

I personally can’t wait to be able to use it myself, although it means taking a lot of photos in the same area.

The header you see above is my own photo, taken when I was in NY at the Guggenheim Museum. I cropped the photo so that only a section of it appears here.

Now you too can customize your blog with your own header at least.  For word press, I copied the graphic which was there and in a graphic editor I worked out its size.

I then cropped my own image to the exact same size.

Then you simply upload via FTP to header.jpg or gif. In my case I substituted 4 headings with the same graphic, but you can override that later with other graphics you like.

By the way, I’m happy for anyone to copy my header and if you want me to make another type from more of my photos, just contact me with the dimensions you need.