Picture of the Month – June 2011

My favorite wild flower patch is on Route 1, which runs across the ridge of the South Fork Mountains, from Titlow Hill on Hwy. 299 to Mad River on Hwy. 36.

I first discovered this patch in 2004, and have made a point of returning each spring to see it in bloom. In 2005 I took one of my favorite models, Maria, to the patch.

Because this patch of wild flowers is at its prime for only a couple of weeks, I usually start heading up there the first weekend in June to check their progress. Usually by this time the road has been cleared of any remaining snow. Depending on the winter we had, the patch is usually at its best the 2nd or 3rd week in June.

This year I went up at the beginning of June on my Triumph Sprint ST. I started from the north side and only got about 10 miles up the road when I started having to pick my way through the tracks in the snow. When I got to this blockage, I decided to turn around, since the Triumph isn’t the kind of bike I wanted to be on at the moment.

I tried again a couple of weeks later, this time taking my KLR650 and tried it from the south side. Same story. Still too much snow. I figured by the time the road would be opened this year the flowers were going to be long gone. I really wasn’t expecting to be featuring snow in June’s Picture of the Month, but that’s what Mother Nature dealt.

The last few weeks I’ve been shooting the latest jewelry collections for Baroni Designs. These are all product shots to be used in their catalog and on their web site. Like most catalog shots, these are all shot on a white background. In the case of the products that hang, like earrings and necklaces, the background is a translucent piece of plastic that gets lit from behind with a soft box.

Most of the items are straight forward but every so often, as with any group of products, there’s one that throws you for a loop. In this case it was literally the loop that threw me.

For most of Baroni’s earrings I simply insert the ear hoop through a small hole in the plastic, just as if you were inserting it into your ear to wear it. The earring hangs as it naturally would. But for this one earring set, the loop itself is a large part of the earring’s design and it needed to be shown from the side. That ruled out the normal method I use.

I thought about laying it on a table, but the pearl, being much thicker than the wire would cause it to bend and not look like it was hanging.

I also thought about rigging it from some fishing line or a small hook and then Photoshopping it to remove the suspension device.

But by thinking upside down, I solved the problem in a way that looked natural and didn’t require any Photoshop work. I used a small piece of earthquake putty on the back side of the pearl and then stuck it to my piece of translucent plastic so it was hanging upside down. To get better separation of the white pearl from the white background, I surrounded the pearl with bits of black gaffer’s tape. Then I shot it as usual, with one soft box behind the plastic, and one soft box in front. I also used a small reflector card to control the specular reflections.

Picture of the Month – May 2011

This month’s POTM isn’t that special of a picture. It’s really just a snapshot, but I’m pretty proud of what’s in the picture.

Back in 2006 the foundation was poured for this fence in our front yard. Five years later I finally finished it. Budget, time and medical issues all conspired to make this a very long project. But now that it’s done I can sit back and watch the roses grow. (if I can ignore the other 101 items on my honey-do list)

Well the folks that brought you the most easily infected PC operating system, and the buggiest and most non-compliant web browser, have done it again. Their latest invention is a crawler robot that may end up costing you money.

All of the major search engines have robot computers that are known as crawlers, bots, and spyders. Their job is to go to web sites and follow all the links and then index those pages, follow the links on those pages, and go on and on and on. That’s how the internet is indexed these days. All well and good. Until Microsoft designed their bot.

The search engine bots are supposed to have a minimal impact on your web site, coming by for a taste now and then. If they try to devour the whole meal at once it can impact your server, slowing it down for your visitors.

This month after receiving the bill from my hosting provider, I noticed that I was charged extra for going over my bandwidth limit. That was the first time I ever experienced this so I did a bit of investigation.

One account on my server was way above normal usage and after looking at the logs, I noticed that search engine bots were way over represented in the stats than they should have been. Drilling down into those stats I found that bingbot, Microsoft’s bot for their Bing search site accounted for 19% of the site’s traffic. It was hitting my site so often that it totally skewed the Webalizer stats for the month.

The problem seems to have resulted in a voting script that I recently added and bingbot was trying every voting link which seems to have put it in an endless loop. For a long time bots ignored URL’s with question marks in them because only dynamically served pages would have them and the bots could quite often be caught up in endless loops when trying to follow them. Apparently the engineers at Microsoft thought they were smart enough to venture into the rough waters of dynamic URL’s, but they forgot to bring their lifeboats with them in case they needed to abandon ship.

Their foolhardy venture cost me a small amount this month, and I’ve put some modifications into my robot.txt file to keep them out of that part of the site. Hopefully they will grab the updated robot.txt file soon and pay attention to it.

Just for the record, here are all the IP addresses I found in the logs during a one hour period that can be traced to bingbot. At some points there were up to 4 different bingbots hitting my site at the same time! In all, in just this random 1 hour time frame that I picked, 34 different bingbots hit my site 94 times. Mostly indexing the same 15 pages over and over again.

65.52.108.12
65.52.110.17
65.52.110.18
65.52.110.28
65.52.110.29
65.52.110.34
65.52.110.35
65.52.110.41
65.52.110.44
65.52.110.52
65.52.110.69
65.52.110.72
65.52.110.78
65.52.110.81
65.52.110.87
65.52.110.92
207.46.13.100
207.46.13.147
207.46.13.148
207.46.13.45
207.46.13.84
207.46.13.87
207.46.13.89
207.46.13.96
207.46.195.226
207.46.199.40
207.46.204.182
207.46.204.182
207.46.204.188
207.46.204.192
207.46.204.232
207.46.204.234
207.46.204.236
207.46.204.240

Apparently, I’m not the first to experience a bingbot binge.

Picture of the Month – April 2011

March 3-4 was the big FRAY slot car race in Ferndale. My landlord at the studio, Rick Phillis, got me back into slot cars a couple of years ago and it was a great pastime to be involved with while I was recovering from the kidney donation surgery.

This year I used my own car to compete, one that Rick helped me build. It went pretty fast for a first time effort, although I have to admit my driving skills need to improve, especially on some of the more technical tracks. But I placed 46th out of 75, which I was quite happy with, given that most of the people there had multiple cars, pits filled with all kinds of specialty tools and hundreds of dollars if not thousands invested in their racing program.

After two full days of racing the rear tires were pretty shot, but I didn’t even have spares. I didn’t realize you could wear them out that fast.

After the racing was over we all took a break and then this month I started going through the car, cleaning it and replacing worn parts. But before I did that, I wanted a picture of the car in the post race condition.

Photographing real cars takes a large studio and huge light banks, but getting the same lighting effect on an HO scale t-jet is pretty simple. One softbox directly above, and a small reflector to highlight the front of the car was it.

Back in February of 2007, Humboldt County experienced a rare snowstorm that in some areas made it down to sea level. That day I had a meeting up in Crescent City and while driving up 101 through Arcata I noticed patches of snow right down to the beach.

I finished up my meeting and made it back to Ferndale around 6, and by then the sky had cleared. I thought it would be a great opportunity to take some shots at night up on Bear River Ridge.

Since at the time only digital camera I had was my Kodak SLR which produces very noisy images from long exposures, I decided to shoot a roll of 120 film I still had. It happened to be 400 asa Portra, a film usually used for portraits as it doesn’t produce the saturated colors that something like Velvia would. Still it’s what I had on hand so I loaded it into the Pentax 645.

Lori and I then began the drive on up to Bear River Ridge. I was planning on taking several pictures in different locations, and so I didn’t immediately head to my favorite spot up there, Kinman Pond. I probably should have.

I calculated (ok, guessed) that I would need a 15 minute exposure. With the clear sky I was hoping to get some star trails in the sky. I set up for the first shot, opened up the shutter, and then climbed back in the truck to get warm. About 8 minutes into the exposure, I was dismayed to see clouds rolling in. Then about 13 minutes into the exposure it started snowing again. Not wanting to be one of these people who get stuck in the snow out in the boonies, we decided it was best to cut it short and head back down.

For four years that roll of 120 has sat in my Pentax 645. Every once in awhile I would think about getting it out to finish the roll of film, only to find the batteries had died. So I would put it on my list to get new batteries and a few weeks later I would actually remember to put them in. Then I would wait for another opportunity, at which point I would pull it out, only to find the batteries had gone dead again.

Finally, last weekend, I got new batteries and immediately took it down to the Avenue of the Giants and finished the roll. Then yesterday, I drove up to Eureka to drop the film off, and today drove back up again to pick up the developed roll. No wonder I switched to digital early on. Who wants to spend 2 hours driving just to see your pictures?

I still need to scan the entire roll of 15 pictures, but here is the first image from the roll, taken on that snowy night on February 27, 2007.

Picture of the Month – March 2011

March was a wet month in Ferndale, I think it rained every day. So I didn’t get out much to take photographs.

But true to form, although it came in like a lion, it had signs it was going to go out like a lamb. On the last day of the month it finally stopped raining long enough that Lori and I took a walk up Williams Creek Rd. On the way back I noticed this draft horse sticking his nose through an old window in his barn.

By the time I got my camera out and turned on, he had lost interest in the view out the window, so it took some coaxing to get his attention again. Captured with the Pentax point and shoot that I keep in my pocket, it was a good reminder that the best camera is the one the one that’s with you.

Picture of the Month – February 2011

Ever since I moved to Ferndale, I’ve wanted to have the chance to photograph the Victorian Village covered in snow. This month was the closest I’ve come, for the first time we actually had snow stick at our house, which sits at about 40 ft. above sea level.

I knew there’d be lots of snow up in the hills so Lori, her sister, and myself got up early and drove up the Wildcat and across Bear River Ridge. We watched the sun rise on the drive up and the dawn broke with a clear blue sky. Quite a contrast to the trip up there the day before when it was snowing sideways so hard that I couldn’t even take pictures.

The only other people stirring that early was a few ranchers distributing hay to their cattle who no longer had a plentiful supply of grass to feed on. We came across this group of cattle and I thought it was funny how the cow on the left just didn’t fit in with the rest of the crowd.

I’ve used Seth Knorr’s Novice Form PHP script (nvform.php) on a few web sites to do the HTML form to email processing because it is an easy way to implement that common task. I’ve made a few changes to the script for my own use, such as adding a section to combat form spam. Recently a client asked me if I could have the email only list the fields that were filled in. On his web site we are using the script to process a form with a lot of fields, and the email ended up being 4 pages long when printed.

I figured this would be an easy change but when I looked at the code, it wasn’t obvious to me where to make the change. So I went to Google for an answer, and while I found others asking the same question in various forums, no one had answered the question.

So back to the code I went, studying it for where it was writing the email text. One thing about PHP is that you aren’t forced to write the code following any rules for line breaks, indents and such, so following someone else’s writing style can sometimes throw you. In this case I found an ELSE clause at the end of a line that I missed the first few times while reading the code.

Once I noticed that, the change I needed to make was very simple, and here is the answer. Find this line of code:

if ( $NVPOST_name == "subject" || $NVPOST_name == "sort" || $NVPOST_name == "required" || $NVPOST_name == "success_page"){}else{

and change it to this:

if ($NVPOST_value == "" || $NVPOST_name == "subject" || $NVPOST_name == "sort" || $NVPOST_name == "required" || $NVPOST_name == "success_page"){}else{

That’s all there is to it!

Personally I would have written the statement like this, which is easier for me to see the logic.

if ($NVPOST_value == "" || $NVPOST_name == "subject" || $NVPOST_name == "sort" || $NVPOST_name == "required" || $NVPOST_name == "success_page"){
    /* don't print anything */
} else {
    $SEND_prnt .= "$NVPOST_name; $NVPOST_value \n";
}

About the same time I was finishing up the last redesign of my web site, I was also preparing for donating a kidney to my wife Lori. So that left a bit of the site in limbo, mainly the Picture of the Month.

One of the goals of the redesign was to move the Picture of the Month (POTM) into the blog to make it easier for me to add entries, and for visitors to subscribe to it or search for past entries. I finally got some time to work on this and just recently imported all of the previous POTM entries from 1999 on into the blog. There were also a lot of entries missing from the 2009-2010 period where I was just to busy to update the POTM and so I went back through my photos and picked entries for the missing months.

One change I decided to make is the POTM is now being decided at the end of the month instead of the beginning of the next month. It makes more sense to have Christmas pictures as the December selection rather than posting them as the January selection. All of the other annual events make more sense too, such as wildflowers blooming in the right month.

I hope you enjoy the latest additions to the POTM. If you like my work, you can subscribe to the Picture of the Month RSS Feed.

View the latest Picture of the Month.