Lentic - photography

I am happy to admit being a bit geeky from time to time, and I’m sure my wife agrees as well. Today, just as a mean to run Windoze XP so I could view my web page in IE, I installed a free virtual machine called VirtualBox 2 from Sun. It is open source and free, and it works on all Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris. So I downloaded and within 5 minutes I was installing Windows XP SP1 from my old CD. This one is useless with bootcamp which requires SP2, and I don’t want to reboot the computer anyway. I also made a virtual machine for Ubuntu Linux as well, just for fun, and it all worked so smooth. 

I haven’t used any other VM, so I can’t compare, but the way this worked was awesome. By installing a couple of drivers that came with the installation, I could put the VM into something they called “Seamless mode”. Instead of running Windows in its own window, it looks like it runs directly in OSX, much the same as Wine runs the applications on Linux. The Internet Explorer windows can by resized and moved freely around the OSX desktop, but the window frame is Windows XP style. Also, the windows taskbar is just placed down at the bottom of the screen.

And what did I discover about my web page? Well, IE did not render the galleries right (no surprise). I changed them to some java based greybox gallery template instead and the problem was solved. Unless you hate java scripts, but then I would suggest therapy. Java scripts are here to stay whether you like it or not.

First I made this shot last weekend.

I posted it on Pictures, and some of the feedback convinced me to go out and reshoot the next day. I came home woth this, which is …. slightly different. Maybe better, maybe worse. Haven’t decided yet.

Every once in a while I run across a web site trying to promote some sort of fine art photography. nothing wrong with that, some may say I do that to some extent myself. But here’s the thing that I find amusing. I won’t mention any specific site, but you wont have to look for long before you find one.

For some reason many people selling their fine art photographs (with meager success I presume), fail to use their own name on the web page. Just now I found a web page where the author is bragging about doing fine art landscapes for 25 years, teaching photography at different universitys, adn so on, but I can’t find his name anywhere on the web site.For heavens sake, tell me your name. I want to know who I’m dealing with.

Another amusing thing is how these sites is how they want to create the impression that there is a small enterprise behind this. The text and headlines are always saying “About us“, “Contact us“, and an extensive use of “we”, even though it is obvious for everyone that it is only one persons hobby. Maybe they are counting in their dog. Combine this with not telling their name, and you got a web page trying to sell photographs by one or more unknown, anonymous artists. Not likely to sell anything if you ask me.

Haven’t been much posting lately. One of the reasons is that it is still pretty intense at work. If things were according to plans, everything should have been calm now, but those plans slipped a little, and since I am one of the few remaining when most have their vacation, things get quite busy. The second reason is the summer heat. The past days have been very hot. So, it haven’t been much tempting to sit down with my computer after work.

I am working on setting up a page for the print swapping group, but for the same reasons it has slowed down. If anyone else is interested in participating, please send me a message. There is still room for one more (maybe two)