During the Centennial Celebration for Fernbridge, Jerry Lema used his antique flat bed truck to ferry a bevy of beautifully dressed women across the historic bridge. One of those women was my wife Lori looking gorgeous as usual in her period garb. Sitting next to Lori was a young woman who I had never met before, but she had the most astounding period look. She had the perfect hair, face and makeup; she looked just like an old photo that had come to life. I instantly knew I wanted the chance to photograph her.

Luckily, Lori had found out a bit about her and knew that her mother Paula worked at the Ferndale Post Office. Lori will strike up a conversation with any woman how has long hair, which mother and daughter both have. So through Paula we found out that Kellyanne would be interested in modeling, but she was only going to be in Humboldt for a bit longer as she was going to Switzerland in a few weeks.

So we scheduled a shoot for just after the holidays, but on the day of the shoot I wasn’t feeling like I should be outside of a 5 second perimeter of a bathroom. So I had to cancel. First time I had to flake on a model after having about a 50% record in the other direction. I felt bad, but really there was nothing I could do.

When I next ran into Paula at the Post Office I found out we still had a small window to shoot before Kellyanne departed for the land of chocolate, fine time keeping machinery and anonymous bank accounts.

On the day of the shoot we first dressed Kellyanne in some vintage lingerie and an Edwardian dress. She looked just perfect in that ensemble, and when I get some time I’ll add those photos to our vintage clothing website.

Next we had her try on an Edwardian costume that Lori made and it looked spectacular on Kellyanne. I’ll post more photos of the dress on Lori’s web site once it’s ready to go.

I’m looking forward to Kellyanne’s return from Switzerland and having her back in our studio again.

Picture of the Month – December 2011

Ferndale’s Main Street is a beautiful sight year round, but at Christmas time it has a special glow about it, dominated by America’s tallest living Christmas Tree. I’ve taken photos of the tree every year we’ve been in Ferndale, and for this year’s photo I wanted to take a panoramic view of Main Street and the tree.

Cruising down Main Street I was lucky to find a parking spot right in front of Valley Grocery. This put me directly across from the Ferndale Emporium, one of the prettiest Victorian buildings on Main St. No sooner than I pulled out the camera, someone came and parked his truck right in front of the Ferndale Emporium. Somewhat disappointed, I figured he had every right to park there. But then he never even got out of his truck. I was tempted to ask him to move but I figured he’d eventually move. He didn’t.

So I started taking the photos and when it was apparent his truck wasn’t deserving to be the center of attention, I moved down the street a bit and started over. Taking a panoramic, especially at night is an extended process as have to take several exposures as you pan the camera around, in this case 180 degrees. I was just finishing up the last exposure when the fire siren went off, so I had to pack up and leave before the last exposure was done.

I figured I could always try again another night this year. But then we left to go out of town for Christmas and when I got back I came down with a flu that kept me a short distance from the bathroom for several days. By the time I was feeling better, the lights were off. So my grand plan for a Main Street Christmas pano never got realized. Which was really a shame because we had some great weather and some beautiful sunsets that would have made great pictures.

Picture of the Month – November 2011

This year for Thanksgiving we were invited by our friends Greg & Penny to spend the weekend with them at Ripple Creek Cabins near the Trinity Alps.

Lori and I both had busy, stressful weeks, so having down time with friends was a great way to spend the holidays. Traveling there was a breeze, the Thanksgiving travel rush in that direction meant us and a couple of other cars.

When we arrived Thursday morning the turkey was still cooking so we took a walk around the area. We came across this lovely old barn with these wonderful hand forged hinges. The color of the aged wood reminded me of the bristlecone pines, so I believe the wood is some type of pine. Great texture and color that speaks to a time when things were built by hand.

Picture of the Month – October 2011

This month’s POTM isn’t so much about the picture, as the camera that took it.

12 years ago I purchased my first digital camera, an Epson 850Z, that cost me just under $1000. What did I get for a grand? I got a 2 megapixel camera, that could take 20 pictures before the card filled up, or the batteries died. It did have a hot shoe though so I could use my studio lights with it.

My latest digital camera cost me $299, and it has four times the resolution as the Epson did. It also shoots 1080p HD video, let’s me check email, surf the web, play anything from my entire music collection, oh, and I can even make phone calls on it.

If I want to play James Kirk, I can even talk to my camera and command it do what I want.

What an amazing amount of progress in just 12 years. My new iPhone 4S is the best camera in the world, because it’s the one that’s with me.

It was with me when I ran out the door responding to the Ferndale Volunteer Fire Department for a traffic collision on Fernbridge. I had just purchased the camera a few days earlier so this is the first time I used the camera function.

Steve, you left us with an amazing piece of technology to play with.

Picture of the Month – September 2011

For the last eight years, I’ve been taking photos of Laura East’s Ferndale Dance Academy productions and each year the production has gotten bigger and better. Now Laura is starting off on a new adventure, the Humboldt Dance Force, which will provide FDA dancers more opportunities to perform.

To kick off the first season of Humboldt Dance Force, the dancers, Laura, and I headed over to Fireman’s Park in Ferndale. First we did individual shots of all of the dancers posing on the playground equipment. Then we did one final group shot, that involved a lot of trial and error in poses to get everything to work. Thanks to the dedication and patience of the dancers, it all worked out into a dynamic and exciting group shot.

Because HDF will be known for their use of bright colors (see their web page for an example!) the saturation of this shot is boosted way beyond what I would normally do. But sometimes it’s fun to break out the box you construct for yourself.

Picture of the Month – August 2011

On August 7th, Ferndale celebrated the 100th anniversary of Fernbridge. Rick Phillis, who chaired the celebration committee, went above and beyond the call of duty when he decided to light the bridge for it’s birthday party.

Rick borrowed several generator powered construction lights from Wendt Construction and placed them so each arch was lit.

I owe Greg Rumney for the use of his tripod, since I foolishly walked out of the studio without mine.

I took this shot by wading into the Eel River until I was waist deep in the water. I did remember to bring my waders!

I’ve been using Apple’s Macintosh computers since 1984, yep the year they came out. Since that time I have been a big fan of them, and have owned 11 different models, 8 desktops, and 3 laptops.

I have also been using PC’s since 1981 when they ran on DOS. I have used Windows from it’s inception up to XP.

Having used both over many years, it still surprises me that Windows remains the dominant platform. I often get into debates about which one is better, and often even when the other party grants that Apple makes better products, they claim they are too expensive.

I’m going to leave the whole stability question out of this article and instead concentrate on specific differences between the two platforms that I feel make Macs worth that extra money. (It really is hard to leave that stability issue alone though after seeing so many friends and clients loose work and data to viruses, or have their Windows machines slow down so much because of their virus protection programs hogging resources.)

These are listed in random order, as I think of them.

1. PDFs – Apple’s operating system includes the ability to create PDF files from any application. Windows you need to purchase Adobe’s Acrobat program to get the same functionality which will cost you an additional $300.

If you need to combine two or more PDF files into one, on a Mac you can use the provided program Preview to do this. With Windows, you need to buy Acrobat.

2. Screen Shots – Macs have always had the ability to take a screen shot simply by pressing Command-Shift-F3 and you get a nice shutter sound as confirmation. It leaves the screen shot as a file on your desktop. OS X also includes a program called Grab that provides lots of other options for screen capture. Windows users can press the PrtScn key (which under DOS actually sent the screen to the printer) and find that nothing really happens. Until you open a graphics program, and select paste. Then you have to save the file. 8 steps vs. 1 for the Mac. In my web design work, I often ask clients for a screen shot when trying to solve layout problems (usually caused by Internet Explorer). It amazes me how many Windows users I have to explain the procedure to.

Speaking of Internet Explore, that brings up two related items:

3. Mac OS X includes one of the best browsers out there, Safari. It is known for displaying HTML and CSS code as the standards define them. Windows, on the other hand includes Internet Explorer, the absolute worst browser out there. While each version of IE has gotten better about following standards, the early ones were so buggy that they’ve left a path of destruction all over the Internet. Webmasters regularly pull their hair out and have sleepless nights because they can’t get their web sites to work with all the different buggy versions of IE out there. Every time Microsoft fixes one they create another so many sites end up serving different content to each and every version of IE that hits their site.

4. To test a web site design I’m working on, I need to be able to open it in all of the major browsers out there. On the Mac I can install and run multiple versions of the same program. On Windows you can’t do this because different programs use external library programs that also get updated and prevent backwards compatibility. Not only is this helpful for browser testing but it’s handy for other purposes as well. I have three different versions of Photoshop installed on my Mac, CS, CS3 and CS5. Adobe has a habit of removing features in newer versions so sometimes it’s easier to open the older version to complete some tasks then try to figure out how to do it in the new version.

5. Apple’s OS X supports running Windows (or multiple versions of Windows) either natively through BootCamp, or as emulation through various software programs. The reverse is not true. So Apple’s computers can run more software than Windows computers.

6. Apple support. Even if you don’t sign up for Apple Care, you get support from the company that has consistently been ranked number 1 in the tech business. After experiencing the support with Apple Care, I’ll never buy a computer without it again. But most importantly, because your hardware and software come from the same vendor, there is no blame game played when you call with a problem. With Window’s you problem could be caused by the cpu, the graphics cards, the keyboard, the mouse, the hard drive or Windows, all of which might be different vendors and each can say it’s not their problem until you’re left spinning in circles.

7. Apple includes more hardware than those lower priced machines you see advertised. I remember back in the early 90s when every Apple shipped with Ethernet built in. PCs you had to add and configure a card, and good luck if the Ethernet card didn’t cause a conflict with your modem card because they shared the same Com port. Oh you had to open the PC and move some dip switches and jumpers to get it to work? Isn’t that handy! So yeah, now Windows has caught up and has plug and play. In my experience it sort of works, but not to the level that Apple’s does. On a recent forum someone was mentioning how expensive the new Mac Mini was at $799. Funny thing was that when I compared it to a similar package called the Pandora Mini and configured them the same, the Pandora ended up being several hundred dollars more expensive because the cheap base price only included things like 512 meg of memory, vs. 4 gig for the Mac Mini.

Picture of the Month – July 2011

In July we travelled back down to the Bay Area for Lori’s 2 year checkup for her cochlear implants (which went very well by the way). I wanted to use the opportunity to return to a location I used in our last visit, a culvert that runs under a road in the Santa Cruz hills.

The model of choice for this session goes by the name of Sakura Blossom. It was interesting working with her because she likes to keep her identity hidden in photos so each photo had to hide her face either in cropping, pose or lighting. Normally that restriction might make me choose another model, but Sakura Blossom had one advantage that was appealing. She is tiny. That comes in very handy for modeling Victorian clothes.

The camisole and drawers she is wearing have only been worn by one very tiny 16 year old girl so far, and the corset, well she was the first model tiny enough to wear it. The corset measures 18″ around the waist, and Sakura Blossom’s natural waist measurement was 21″ so it fit her pretty good. I had pretty much given up hope of getting this corset photographed on a model, and I am glad to finally ditch the photo of the pillow we had been using up to this point.

It was a pleasure working with Sakura Blossom, and she was the first model I’ve worked with that brought chocolate (and good chocolate at that!) to the shoot to share. Now that’s the way to make this photographer happy!

Every once in awhile for some reason I take a look at the log files for either one of my web sites or one of my customers. The log files are a technical record of all of the requests for files that come in on the server. The requests can be from valid users going to one of my web pages, or they can also be from search engine spiders that visit from Google, Yahoo, etc. Occasionally I’ll also see visits that are the pattern of hackers testing the sites for known or unknown vulnerabilities.

Here’s the first log record from today’s log file:

119.63.196.39 - - [17/Jul/2011:00:28:39 -0700] "GET /cgi-bin/color.cgi?backcolor=CCCC33 HTTP/1.1" 200 67156 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)" 255 67465

This happens to be from the largest search engine site in China. The visit came from a computer called a spyder or bot. Baiduspider is not only a bad bot, but since it’s from China, I don’t need or desire it to be crawling my site. So it gets banned.

How do I know it’s a bad bot? Well back in the mid 90s some guy decided to make a standard for defining a set of rules that spiders are supposed to follow. Like a lot of Internet standards, the robots.txt file was written by a computer geek, and therefore makes no sense. There’s also no good documentation for how it’s supposed to work, and you’ll find many conflicting opinions on how it is supposed to work.

Google and other search engines have also added to the syntax, so you’re never sure if the search engine you’re targeting is going to follow the rules as you write them.

There are even online syntax checkers that attempt to help you make sure your syntax is correct, but no matter which way you write the rules they will tell you you’ve written them backwards. I guess I need the secret decoder ring.

The reason I was trying to make sense of all this again today is because while reading through the log files for aestheticdesign.com this morning, I noticed that Yahoo’s Slurp bot was accessing the same files over and over, from different IP addresses. It’s only half way through the day and already Yahoo has downloaded the same image from my web site 39 times!

Now that image doesn’t ever change so there’s no need to keep downloading every few minutes. It’s just another example of why Yahoo is such a non player in the search engine business these days. In researching the issue I came across many articles going back as far as 2007, of web masters having problems with Slurp. My favorite was this one “Yahoo! Slurp too Stupid to be a Robot” written back in 2009 on Jeff Starr’s blog. He decided to block Yahoo, not only because of their incompetence, but also because Yahoo wasn’t even sending any traffic to his site.

So I looked at my site’s stats, and sure enough, Yahoo referred 150 out of 43,525 hits to my web site, or in other words .2% of my traffic came from Yahoo. Yet the Yahoo Slurp spider itself accounted for 5.67% of the hits on my site. Something’s seriously out of whack when the search engine itself accounts for 28 times the amount of hits as it sends you.

Since I already hate Yahoo for their incompetence, I’m pretty close to just banning their bot completely. I’m giving them one more chance and if the recent change I made to the robots.txt file doesn’t slow them down, then I’ll start banning them completely.

Once again, looking at the raw data in the log file has taught me that ignorance truly is bliss. I’m pretty sure that’s how the programmers at Yahoo must feel too.

A photograph created by Matt Knowles of Aesthetic Design & Photography in Ferndale has recently been accepted into the General Collection of Professional Photographers of America’s 2011 International Photographic Competition. Knowles’ work will be on display at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, January 15-17, 2012, in New Orleans, La. This exhibition is held in conjunction with Imaging USA, an annual convention of professional photographers and several photographic associations.

A panel of eminent jurors from across the United States selected the top photographs from more than 4,000 total submitted entries. Judged against a standard of excellence, over 1,500 images were selected for the General Collection and Knowles’ image was one of only 200 that were also selected to be published in the 2011 Showcase book.

The image that Knowles submitted is from a senior portrait session he did for Ferndale High School student Kayla Ghidinelli. In the image Ghidinelli is riding her horse Lady, while her dog Bandit runs along side in the surf. The South Spit beach in Loleta provided the lovely location.

About Professional Photographers of America (PPA)

Established in 1869, PPA is an international non-profit association for professional
photographers. PPA exists to assist its 22,000 members with unparalleled protection, education
and resources to ensure their continued success in the photographic industry.