It’s been a while since there was a photo entry.
We are slowly making progress. I’ve got the existing photo albums, which were originally generated by jAlbum, looking sort of like the Thingamablog pages. The menu at the top now points to the correct sections (yea!). Now I need to roll my sleeves up and get my Thingamablog and jAlbum templates working in concert. Lots of HTML and CSS. It’s getting clearer, but it will probably take me a while.
I’ve been struggling a bit with the Nikon D200 I got in the summer. It’s a much more sophisticated camera than the D70 was, and it’s taking me a while to get my brain around it. My RAW conversion tool is now Nikon Capture NX as I purchased an upgrade from Nikon Capture 4.4 (which I rarely used) in August. Capture NX has gotten a lot of press, both negative and positive, since it’s introduction in the fall. Amateur photographers seem to take to it, but professionals seem less impressed. In any event, I’ve been learning how to use it, and generally I’m impressed. I really never came to grips with Photoshop, so the different philosophy offered by CapNX has been welcome. Post-processing isn’t any less time-consuming, but at least I don’t feel like I’m starting from scratch every time I fire it up. These two things combined have meant a lot of studying has been going on in the off hours. I’m just getting the D200 set up like I like to take photos. Websites like NikonGear, NikonCafe, d1scussion, Nikonians and dpReview have been big helps in the acquisition of knowledge. To augment those, I have purchased Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 which I’m slowly making my way through. Additionally, I bought Jason Odell’s “The Photographer’s Guide to Capture NX” which has been a really big help in understanding the capabilities of Capture NX. Both e-books are highly recommended.
I’m in the process of getting all my photographic workflow processes set up. Currently, I use iMatch for my Digital Asset Management (DAM). Digital Asset Management is a long term for photo organization. iMatch and I have had a love/hate relationship going since our introduction a couple of years ago. Its taken me a REALLY long time to get a grip on iMatch because the User Interface (UI) is truly user hostile. Things are scattered all over the place and the titles are not particularly intuitive. In any event, iMatch is an extremely powerful tool and there is very little that it won’t do either directly or via scripting. The author is currently updating iMatch to use the latest Nikon SDK (software developer’s kit) which supports Nikon RAW files post processed in Capture NX. This is really cool, because I can do my edits in Capture NX and then use iMatch for organizing the NEF files. I can use the tools in iMatch to generate appropriate web albums and such from my Nikon RAW files. Cool. Can’t wait until the next update of iMatch.
In combination with all this, is the integration with jAlbum and Thingamablog. My goal is to have a unified system where I can apply labels, ratings and appropriate information in iMatch, choose which photos I want to publish on my site, create suitable information to bring into jAlbum which then creates photo albums I can include nicely in Thingamablog ramblings. Wheh!
The way that pictures will be integrated here is becoming clearer thanks to Jo Hendricks-Jansen. She uses Thingamablog to do her blogging, and brilliantly suggested to use Thingamablog’s “Favorite Links” functionality to list pages with photo albums. Absolutely Brilliant. Now, I have to get the JAlbum templates looking more like Thingamablog (there is that CSS thing again) and I’m homefree!
Take care