Brian’s Blog - Mostly Harmless... » Photography

Adding Images to Posts

Brian — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:36:38 +0000

The single thing which causes most problems for the WordPress users I know is uploading and positioning images in their posts. Hopefully I have found a solution which will make things quite a bit easier – it’s called “Freebie Images” and is a WP plugin – you can get it here.

I just installed it and it shows up nicely as a panel in the WP “Add New Post” dashboard. From there it’s just a case of:

Searching for a suitable picture from the included stock library
Dragging its thumbnail from the panel into the post
Finetuning the result

Up at the top of this post is a pic chosen after searching for “F1″ and dragging my choice into position.

So far it looks a very useful tool – I’ll report back after a few more tests….

IOW Star Party – I promised pictures…

Brian — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:59:57 +0000

These three fantastic pictures were taken from Brighstone during the recent Isle of Wight Star Party – they show what can be acheived if we can manage to keep our beautifully dark skies.
Click a pic (and keep clicking for the Hi-Res versions)
Details of the equipment used and the various exposure information is included with each picture
All three pictures are © Richie Jarvis – http://www.deepsky.org.uk, please visit Richie’s site for many more incredible images.
Many thanks for allowing me to use these Richie, and I hope you, dear reader, are as amazed by them as I am.

IOW Star Party – the aftermath…

Brian — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:28:19 +0000

Had a great long weekend out at Brighstone at the IOW Star Party. Loads of good friends, brilliantly (?) dark skies and wonderful viewing – I even won a prize in the raffle – now it’s time to sleep!
Got to bed at about 2am Fri, 4am Saturday and 3am this morning (still on GMT) I’m knackered but still buzzing.
I hope to add a few pictures of events and some of the images captured over the 4 days but that’ll have to wait for a while – stay tuned…. ZZZZzzzzzz…

Webcam moved

Brian — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:47:16 +0000

I have now moved the webcam stream to its own page.

The whole thing is a little resource hungry and slows the PC down a fair bit even when it isn’t actually serving the stream – the next step is to move the application to another machine and stream from that. I may even up the resolution and size a bit….

Webcam

Brian — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:56:28 +0000

Over on the right of my homepage you can hopefully see the output from a streaming webcam.

For now, I am experimenting with it connected to a telescope to get in close to a bird feeder in the garden. Eventually I hope to use the thing for astronomy but before making any permanent mods to the camera I thought I’d lash something up with “gaffer” tape.

Please bear with me if the camera goes off line, the tape has probably broken! – one day it’ll have its own page I think.

Island Eyesores?

Brian — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:02:09 +0000

There is a lot of noise being made about the proposed windfarm at Cheverton Down. The main complaint seems to be about the visual impact on the area, but to my engineering eye, wind turbines look rather pleasing.

They certainly appeal rather more than this:

In all its glory this is the latest Red Funnel paint job as seen in Cowes and Southampton.

A quick play with an image editor gave me this:

Which is still ugly but, IMO, not half as bad as the real thing!

Geograph

Brian — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:34:03 +0000

Have you heard about the Geograph British Isles project? it’s a great site which set out to accumulate photos from every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland – buildings, landscapes etc.

So far, about 70% of the squares are complete with at least 1 picture with the remaining blanks in some pretty wild places and mostly well off the beaten track – of course you may be lucky enough to find your area needs a little help. Multiple pics are allowed for each square so even if your area isn’t blank, you can still add photos.

See the site FAQ for details of copyright conditions. For those with an interest in such things all the source code that powers the Geograph site is Open Source.