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Took a day of vacation yesterday to spend some time outdoors, so my brother-in-law and I went canoeing. Since we've had quite a rainy seasons this spring the water level of the river was great. One of the coolest places to stop along this particular river trip is Pattison Forge, otherwise known as the Montgomery Bell Tunnel...

Click on the image below to see a larger view. The larger view may take some time to download as the files are about 2MB each.

Tunnel Panorama

Tunnel Top View Panorama

The "Holy Grail" of wireless flash triggers are the Pocket Wizards - they are fast, reliable, and have an amazing range. This of course comes a quite a heafty price and many new photographers simply can't afford them. For this reason many people use the Cactus V2's from Gadget Infinity, otherwise known as the "Ebay" triggers.

There are many features that the PW have that the V2's don't have, but as far as cheap wireless triggers go, the V2's are quite good. The main problem of the V2's is in their range, but with a small modification this can be remedied fairly easily. Basically, by adding an external antenna the signal is "louder and clearer" for the receivers to pick up.

Continue reading ‘GI Cactus V2s Wireless (Ebay) Triggers Modification’ »

At my office I have three monitors on my desk. Two are for my pc and one is for my backup server. I was thinking about how convenient it would be to simply move the mouse over to the backup server like an extended desktop. I started searching around and found Maxivista.com. One can always use remote desktop, but this is good if you want to control multiple computers with one keyboard and mouse, and it also gives you more screen real estate since you are using the added monitor of the other computer.

The company's main thing is that you can use old notebooks as extended monitors, which is cool and a good marketing angle, but what I like is the ability to remote control as in a KVM setup. I can move the mouse over to the right of the screen on my desktop and it seamlessly moves into the other computer's desktop. The mouse on the remote screen isn’t as smooth as far as the refresh rate, probably because the mouse movement information is going through the network, but it is still very good.

Check out their page for more information!

When I search the internet I very often get results from the popular site www.experts-exchange.com. This is a forum type site where you have to be a paying member to participate. While there is nothing wrong with this, the site is setup to allow anyone to read member questions, so that their site comes up in your search results in the hopes that if you visit their site you will pay to see the answer. I, for one, am not willing to pay, therefor search results that take me to their site are completely useless.

I've created a search provider for your browser that omits results that would take you to their site.

Click the link to install:
Search Without Experts-Exchange

BojanM gave me a good idea for a photo I could use for my company's new website. In order to fit in the site's theme I needed the black and white image, so here is the original. Since the trees have not fully bloomed the color version is not very good, but the B&W version is more effective as it emphasizes the structure. I will have to go back and shoot this one again later this year.

Natchez Trace Arch Bridge in Color

Natchez Trace Arch Bridge

My good friend BojanM showed me this very cool hack for Firefox that makes the vertical scrollbar always visible in Firefox. I find it annoying when I'm surfing pages and the page shifts left to right when it goes from extending beyond the bottom of the screen to fitting in the screen or the other way around. This little hack makes the vertical scroll bar always present at the right of screen. If the page extends beyond the bottom, then the scrollbar is activated, otherwise it's not. Thanks BojanM!

Sometimes when sending files through email, you want to be able to simply right-click on the file and select “Send to mail recipient” form the context menu. If you are an Outlook 2003 or 2007 user, you might have noticed that when you do this Outlook generates a plain text email with your files conveniently attached. While a plain text email is nice, and probably the way all email should be, most of us have been spoiled with html email that allows fancy formatting and we want to keep this functionality when we right-click to send attachments. Not only do we want this formatting ability, but we also want our signatures to be automatically appended to the end of the mail.Below are a few steps to create a new “Send To Mail Recipient” context menu shortcut that address these issues:

1. Right-Click the START button and select Explore
2. From the windows that comes up, make sure to select the Send To folder from the folder list on the left. Vista Users: The Send To folder is located under: %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo . Everything else should work the same.
3. Right-Click anywhere in the white space to the right and select New, then Shortcut
4. In the Type the location of the item: box type in the following lines based on the version of Outlook you are using:
   Outlook 2003: “C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOFFICE11OUTLOOK.EXE” /c ipm.note
   Outlook 2007: “C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOFFICE12OUTLOOK.EXE” /a
5. In the Type a name for this shortcut: box type in: Outlook Mail Recipient
6. Now when you right click on items to send as attachments you will have a new option. By selecting Outlook Mail Recipient you will get your new email in the default email format you have selected in Outlook and, if you have configured your signature for a new email, you will have it as well.

UPDATE: 02/10/2009
It look like this method won’t work when selecting multiple files. For a possible workaround try the following:

1. Create a file sendto.js with the following code and save it somewhere on your system. For this example the file is saved to c:\sendto.js. You can download my copy here: sendtojs

   try
   {
   	var args = WScript.Arguments;
   	var outlookApp = new ActiveXObject("Outlook.Application");
   	var nameSpace = outlookApp.getNameSpace("MAPI");
   	var mailFolder = nameSpace.getDefaultFolder(6);
   	var mailItem = mailFolder.Items.add('IPM.Note.FormA');
   
   	with(mailItem)
   	{
   		Subject="Sending Files";
   
   		for (var i = 0; i < args.length; i++)
   		{
   			Attachments.Add(args(i));
   		}
   
   		Display(0);
   	}
   }
   catch(err){
   
   }
   finally
   {
   	outlookApp = null;
   }

2. Follow the steps in the tutorial above, but in step 4 type this in the box instead:
   %windir%\system32\wscript.exe “C:\sendto.js”

   Note: Use the “Change Icon” button on the same screen to manually change the icon and use the icons in the Outlook.exe file, otherwise you will get the wscript.exe icon.

   Note: This is very crude code and hasn’t been tested much.

   Vista: To get to the Send To folder, you’ll need to open up an Explorer window, and then paste the following into the address bar: %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

This is a cannon that is on the Carter House grounds. I like the image because it appears the cannon is popping out of the screen. I wish I had put part of the left wheel in the frame to balance it out a little more.

Canon At The Carter House

The other day after much procrastination, I finally got myself to go out and take some photos. I started out wanting to get some shots of old barns, but I got an old, yellow railway station instead. The sign on the side door stated it was the private property of the Walters's.

Walter's Railway Station

I've been doing some indoor, still-life photography lately to try and learn some better lighting techniques. This was done with an off-camera, diffused flash at camera right. The back(left side) of the apple was lit by light bouncing off a white surface. I cannot remember the power of the flash, but I think it was set at 1/4 power.

Apple