It’s tempting to treat photography as a formal thing, but sometimes the most spectacular and spontaneous photos come from every day life. That’s why I offer Day in the Life sessions, where I’m a personal paparazzi and photograph your children just being as they are. Even something as pedestrian as a bath can yield something precious.
A recent Kickstarter project funded a new blogging platform called Ghost. The creator of Ghost, although highly respectful of WordPress, as a former WordPress designer, noticed that WordPress became less about writing and content and more of a large scale website platform. So, he went back to basics to create Ghost. Basically, he felt that using WordPress to blog is like using a bazooka to kill a fly: it’ll work, but maybe it’s a little more than needed.
Although I initially didn’t get it, it seems to me now that Ghost is to blogging as WriteRoom is to word-processing. Distraction-free, basic, functional. The split-screen editor let you type markdown on the left, and lets you see the WYSIWYG preview immediately on the right. You can type most basic editing formatting in manually and let the engine bother with converting that to valid HTML. Complicated syntax is replaced by easy-to-read, more intuitive syntax.
The project will remain not-for-profit the whole time, thus the motivations behind future innovations are to serve the end-user, not to sell to a bigger fish.
If you’re an egghead and any of this is mildly interesting, look also into these plugins which attempt to port some of the best features of Ghost to WordPress:
If you follow my blog, you may remember this beautiful girl here:
Well, she just booked her first acting gig. Here’s a the commercial in action. I’m super proud of her and happy for her mom, too. The girl is a natural and I’ll bet this shoot wasn’t hard at all! I really like the product and think it’s great! If my kids’ grandparents had a smartphone, they’d totally be into it. Actually, seeing that this exists may prompt them to buy one! Here’s the link to the company and product information.
Congrats! Get that work!
Shot of child actress headshot client in action
Screenshot of her first acting gig! More details to come!
Yep, I know that Picasa has a right click context menu option to edit in Photoshop and many other programs. However, you can’t control how that list in populated. Photoshop could be missing from the list, or buried down low. This is a one-click solution. And for those of us who do it often, all the clicks add up.
I’ve seen many of these around the net, specific to version CS3 or CS5, but this guy was nice enough to make a universal button that works for all version of Photoshop. He saved me an hour and a half of trying to learn Google button API and tinkering. Enjoy!
http://www.185vfx.com/2010/12/mac-picasa-to-photoshop-button/
Here are the other two dogs I photographed recently. The dog from an earlier post was already rescued from the pound. This dog, named Candy, is a Berger Picard, a sort of rare French sheep-herding breed. She was quite spry and had a lot of bounce in her. She was initially only interested in running around the yard, but by the end, she was very affectionate and interactive with us. Her information is easy to find by clicking her name Candy, but her official West Valley Shelter id info is (A0860696).
This dog here, Minnie, held a special place in my heart because she shares the name of my recently deceased Yorkie. When we were looking for dogs to take photos of, we picked friendly dogs who’ve been in the pound longer than some of the new recruits, thus need to be adopted sooner. So when I looked at her information card and saw “Minnie”, I told my compatriot that she (Minnie) was my pick. This American Staffordshire Terrier’s id at the West Valley Shelter is (A1419749). She was a really pretty dog. And had lots of energy and was quiet sweet and tame. Not intro treats much, though. LOL. 
