Exercise 25 Further pages

I decided to make a total of 5 pages, mentioned previously, and had to decide which of my images I would feature on each one.  I thought it was important not to duplicate images on other pages.  One thing I've noticed with Weebly is that WYSIWYG  (what you see is what you get) in that, I imagine, unless you pay for your blog, you get a basic set up with just the pages you see and no parent/child design available so that you can split up your images according to category. For example, I take portraits in colour and black and white and would like to have a Portraits page with sub sections for BW and Colour but can't do it in this basic software.  I'm using Weebly for this exercise as I run this blog in Blogger and a camera club blog in WordPress ( www.lymebayphotographicclub.org) which allows parent/child sections, so I thought I would give Weebly a trial and see how it went.

 

On my Landscape page I created a  2-column picture gallery with 6 images to start with.  One thing you must remember is to click on the word 'Publish' or 'Update' when you have made the slightest change to the page.  Even if you've just added a space or full stop, until you click the orange key on the top right hand corner, your changes would not be made.

 For the Portrait page I used the same layout but kept similar images together, ie, black and white dancers, black and white portraits, then colour work below.  I could have separated the black and white and colour images but at this point decided to go with just one page.  Later I could make the decision to split them into two pages and have a link on the left hand side to show what I've done.

With the digital art page I thought I would do something slightly different, that of having a slideshow which toggled round the images in order.  It's all very simple, just drag the symbol on to the main page area and upload your images.

Here you could see that the main image had moved back to the beginning of the trio of images to show the first image with glowing edges, edited in Photoshop, which gave a different effect.

I've done quite a bit of blogging since I started using it instead of working through the exercises with paper and paste since I started People & Place (my previous module).  It can be very frustrating to create the blog, especially when the images won't go where I want them to go, but there always seems a way round it and if not, I can always refer to the OCA student forum on digital photography for advice.  Someone has always had the same bad experience and can give suggestions on how to overcome the problem.  If all else fails there is always the 'happy engineer' on the blog website ready and willing to offer advice if you have 48 hours to wait for an answer.

I have worked with the Adobe Dreamweaver software when I was working in further education but, whilst it was fairly simple to create the pages, there were always some other aspects that had to be completed before I could upload the pages to the internet.  Blogging is a much simpler way of getting stuff on to the internet, albeit you have to pay for a web address that doesn't include the blog name in the URL.

One thing I feel that you need to do if you run a website, whether it be a properly constructed site or a blog, is to keep it up to date and interesting, unless you have a very static subject.  With my camera club blog, I change the header images weekly, having been out and about scouting around the town and countryside for new images.  I also change the Club News page after every meeting to incorporate the report of the latest meeting and make sure the programme section is kept up to date.  I've had one or two comments that I run a dynamic website which keeps club members well informed about club matters.

The club has quite a large section of old school members who tend to treat it as a Friday night social club so, at present, I have to bow somewhat to their requirements as we build up membership of the  more dedicated photographic type.  Membership, social against technical, is running at 50/50 as against 75/25 for the social side when I first joined. It will take some time but I really feel that we need to attract the more photographically minded type of members to keep the club running.

Exercise 25 Creating the blog

I've created the basic web blog which has five pages - Home, About, Landscapes, Portraits and Digital Art.  

 I changed the Font and colour of my name which I did through the menus above the pages:

You can also see, on the left hand side, the headings/links to the other pages that I set up.  I have also used one of my own pictures as the masthead rather than leave the original one that came with the design template.  Here you can see an introduction by me and a Comment form for subscribers to send comments.

Project 25 A web gallery

I've been running a blog to accompany the work of this module.  I find blogging is a good way of charting my progress as I can type faster than I can write with a pen.  As I'm a trained typist (although sometimes I find it difficult to believe with some of the spelling mistakes I make) I can type almost as fast as my brain can compose stuff.

I've also mentioned in the past that I run a WordPress blog for the photographic club where I'm programme secretary and you can see that at www.lymebayphotographicclub.org .

Whilst I taught IT and communications whilst I worked full time at Guildford College of Further Education I also dabbled in web design but hadn't touched it in the last couple of years.  Over the past few weeks I've read about people asking advice on which blog site to use and as I have blogs in both Blogger and WordPress, I thought I would try a new blog site for my personal work to see how I got on.  To this end I've started up a new blog at Weebly which I am finding fairly simple as there are some template to guide you and page design elements where you can add your own ideas easily.  

My new personal Weebly blog can be found at: http://jenniferhollands.weebly.com/

Weebly register screen

I think before you start creating pages left, right and centre you need to give some thought as to what you want in your personal sales tool.  Most websites have an opening page, something about the website owner/photographer, then some other pages on different types of pictures that the photographer specialised in.  

In my situation I feel that I would like a Home page, an About Me page, then separate pages for my Landscapes, Portraits and Digital Art work.  That makes a total of five pages to start with.  Weebly allows you to have Text only pages, Text with a picture and Picture Galleries just by clicking and dragging into each separate page.  There are choices where you have a film strip at the top and larger images below or just a gallery of 2 or 3 images wide and as many down as you require.  If you've worked with blogs or websites before, Weebly is one of the more simple sites to work with.  I've also decided to add a Comments box to allow people to let me know what they think.

Exercise 24 Sharpening for print

This exercise asked me to take an image that I had processed as a reference standard and make 3 versions each with a different degree of sharpening.

So, here's my start portrait.  I took this on a dull, day with very flat light and if you look very close, you can see just that his eyes, which should always be the main point of focus, are just outside the front point of the depth of field for sharpness.

I thought I would sharpen just the head area so here I've used the Quick Mask to carefully select the boy's head and neck area.

I tried an increase to 50% sharpness to see if that would improve the overall sharpness of his face.

 This had the effect of sharpening slightly but with no greater impact of pixels.  I don't think it's quite enough. so I tried sharpening the image by 100%:

You can just start to see the pixilation of the face area in this shot, it's only slight and could just be an acceptable 'fix'.  I thought that I would take it further and changed the slider to 200% and with this sharpening you could definitely see the pixels which are becoming very unacceptable.

Just for experimentation, I took the slider up to 500% which was completely unacceptable as the whole face area was completely pixilated.  Nobody would find this in any way natural which is what the majority of pictures try to portray.

Through a process of elimination I found that the most acceptable level of sharpness was in the region of 85%.  This gave an element of sharpness but kept pixilation to a minimum.

85% Sharpened

Finished, acceptably sharpened image

Almost there

It's taken a long time and a great deal of determination to get this far in the module as so many things allow me to be distracted, yet this is my favourite subject.  In the middle of completing part 4 I moved away from a PC back to an iMac which I had owned and used several years ago and enjoyed.  It's been a trip down memory lane with the mac and one that I've found challenging but it's all coming back now.  One of the things I really find good is how quickly the mac can be switched on and be ready for use, whilst my old PC used to grind away for about 5-10 minutes before I could start work.