it has been a month.

I’ve been pretty busy lately. Between my B/W photography class, work, and finding reasons to escape to take pictures, I’ve hardly had any downtime.

I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a new domain to host my photography portfolio.

I started writting a wordpress plugin the other day. It’s almost functional and ready for alpha release. After developing that plugin, I thought that instead of building my whole site end-to-end from scratch, that I should take some framework and build plugins on top of it to do what I want it to. Not wanting to use wordpress for my photography site led me on a search for php based frameworks that would provide enough flexibility and power to not be encumbered by working within the framework iteslf. I then discovered CakePHP. I’ve been reading the docs and set up a test instance on my Fedora laptop…it seems like just the ticket I need. I’ll probably start serious development this weekend or the next weekend when Laura is out of town.

So, now I’ve got a flexible, powerful, php based framework within which I will be working. My current gallery software is homegrown. I integrated lightbox into it to make it somewhat web 2.0,  but lightbox seems (at least to me) to be so yesterday. I’m not a huge fan of flash apps, but some of the most effective photography porfolios I’ve viewed have been flash based. This lead me to airtightinteractive.com’s lineup of photo viewers. I’m not sure which one I like the best, but I’m currently thinking about just keeping it simple. Whichever one I integrate, I plan on integrating it into the CakePHP framework as a plug-in of sorts and hope that I will be able to release the code to the community at large.

We developed our first roll of film last week. Tonight, we had to make a proof sheet. It was our first time in the dark room. No biggie, right? Wrong. We only had 50 minutes in the dark room. That should have been plenty of time had we all had our own equipment and not had to share with others. I screwed up when developing a test strip of my negatives (I forgot to use a filter, so my test strip ended up being over-exposed), so I was almost down to the wire. For a dark room supporting 31 enlargers, a 2’x3.5′ wash sink simply isn’t enough when you get 20 prints in there.

After all was said and done, my proof sheet was done. I’m not sure there’ s one particular image that I like more than the rest - our assignment only calls for one print. I have a week to make up my mind.

I took a bunch of photos the other night - I escaped for a while and went on a long walk. I took photos at four locations. I think I only got one (maybe two) usable pictures.

I’m going to put my ¹⁰⁄₂₂ back together this week. I had pulled the bolt out with the intention of sending it out to be worked over, but that hasn’t happened and I don’t feel like spending the $60 on it right now. I really need a nice, long, wind-free range session right now. I’m on-call this weekend and we’re planning on visiting Apple Valley, so we’ll see how that works out. The weather looks like it’s going to cool off this weekend, so maybe that will work to my advantage - the colder it is in the desert, the fewer people will be at the range. Maybe this will be a good excuse to go take some pictures of the Barstow train yard. Who knows…it feels like everything is up in the air right now - everything is so fluid.