12 Witnesses

Last week I took some pictures in a near full moon. If you like these, you can find more on my photoblog.

[Show as slideshow]

Click on the thumbnail for a larger picture.

Be on the lookout for a massive Link Load coming today and if you like these fotos, you can see more on my Photoblog.

Today I am combining several things into one mighty Phriday foto: My tech series on blogging and Wordpress, my pictures, my trip to Vietnam and a tribute to Joe Kennedy, whose photography I love - especially the pictures of food. No. Not because its food and I’m fat. Because of the texture, perspectives and colors.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

So, I am uploading these pictures, after compressing them with Faststone freeware image viewer as mentioned in Better Blogging: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), with Wordpress 2.5 media uploader. The media uploader was giving me some problems, but David Phillips helped me to to install the Flexible Upload plugin and that has settled it down. It only works on pictures though, but if I were uploading video or audio (the other options) I would use Podpress, so I don’t need it for anything else. *Note to David, who is very busy - I’m not tinkering. I promise.

One of the options of the Media Uploader is that you can insert several images and it will create thumbnails and an intermediate picture. The other option, on display here today, is the insert gallery function, which will create a gallery of thumbnails through which you can navigate, like a mini-photoblog on your post.

Rather than give you the rundown myself on how to do it, I’ll link to Matt Mullenweg, a fellow Houstonian living elsewhere in the world (California, where there is no decent BBQ), telling you all about Wordpress 2.5 media upload at WordPress.org. PS - Matt is one of the first ever bloggers and is (one of) the creator(s) of Wordpress, which is to say, he’s had some help, but he is the primary cause of its existence. He might know what he’s talking about.

So here it is a picture gallery of food from Vietnam, created in Wordpress 2.5: (click on a thumbnail for the full size picture)

[Show as slideshow]

Since I gave you a Phriday foto a day early and it wasn’t even really my pic, I’ll give you one that is.

This is a Hmong Girl tending the fire at a restaurant in Sapa, Lao Cai, Vietnam. I took it on our last night in Sapa when we dined with another church who was there working with the Red Dao People at Ta Phin.

You can find more of my pictures at my photoblog.

You can check out more pictures on my photoblog.

Steeples

Of course, the “Christian Scientists” have their non-steepled effort…

Just so you know, I’m not the “every church must have a steeple” guy. Ours has a peaked roof with stained glass in the peak. It’s pretty and it’s unique.

Before I post the pictures, allow me to explain the comment section. Apparently, I need to upgrade my Wordpress software because there is a format conflict that is causing all of my comments to disappear. They are still there, but the software can’t seem to read them. Thanks to Bluehost Tech Support for figuring that out, and thanks in advance to David Phillips for the help in getting everything up to snuff. As of the moment, the comments are registering their presence, even on the post, but you can’t see them and neither can I, even behind the scenes. We’ll try to get them up soon.

These pictures and more at my photoblog.

The Circle Cinema near downtown Tulsa.

Whittier Square - you can see the Cinema above through the arch…

These and more pics at my photoblog.

Legendary Cain’s Ballroom.

Hard to find parking downtown.

Just for my own amusement and my family’s ability to get to my pictures online (some are of my family), I have created a photoblog as a subdomain. If you would like to access my photoblog, you can do so here:

photoblog.twelvewitnesses.com

With the help (as always) of David Phillips, this blog is a direct connect to a flickr account set up for just this purpose. It siphons off the photos, sets and recent uploads, as well as any I mark as favorites, which I have not done. The home page is a full sized picture of whatever I uploaded last, which you can cycle through backward at full size. An easier way is to look at the sets of pictures, which will launch thumbnail pages. If you click on a thumbnail, a larger size will appear and you can scroll through the set, forward or backward, if you like.

I’ve enjoyed taking pictures since I was a kid. My Mom was a professional photographer, so I grew up around it.

I use a Canon Rebel xti DSLR to take the pictures and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to process the RAW data, which is the way I record the digital data.

Flickr now also receives photos through email. This will allow me to post pictures I take with my camera immediately to my photoblog, which I look forward to doing. Camera phones have revolutionized culture, it seems. If you have a flickr account, you have a secret email address that will receive your photos. Login to flickr and go to www.flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail/.

Wait, there’s more. The photoblog is photoblog software, but I might also like to upload pictures from my treo to this Wordpress powered blog - the main domain site - and post a short article to go with it. I can do that, too, though it is a different process. It also works with blogger, typepad, moveable type and other blogs styles.

If you would like to post to your blog from your phone, you have to first set up the interface with flickr and your blog. You can do that by going to www.flickr.com/blogs.gne and following the process there.

After you get that set up, then go to www.flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail/blog/ and get the add on to your secret email address that will receive your email picture, post it on your flickr site, and then send it all to your blog as well.

Should be fun for random “out and about” posts, but also could be interesting when live blogging a conference.

Enjoy.

[HT: Mark Ghosh]