I’ve been trying to improve the quality of my photography, and quite apart from doing obvious things like taking more pictures and reading up on techniques, I’m making an effort to look at more photographs. I’ve been to a few exhibitions, and I’ve started getting some books of photographs. I’ll be talking about those as they reach the top of my reading pile, but I thought I’d mention this one now.

Ansel Adams, for those not familiar, was an American photographer best known for his wonderful black and white landscapes of the American West, perhaps most famously of Yosemite. Now there are lots of books of his work, ranging from small samples to enormous coffee-table volumes, but afer some dithering, I bought this one. As the title suggests, it’s a collection of 400 of his images, selected by Andrea G Stillman, who worked as and assistant to Adams for a number of years.

It’s printed on good, heavy paper, and the photographs are clear with plenty of contrast. The page size is on the small side, so some images do suffer from not being seen as large as they truly deserve, but that’s forgivable at the price.

As an introduction to the work of one of the most significant landscape photographers of the twentieth century, this book does very well indeed. One to look at again and again.

Of course, there is a danger with looking at photographs of this quality – if your’re not careful, instead of being inspired to make better images, you could find yourself giving up in despair. I’ll try not to do that.

Quite some time ago, I unleashed my second attempt at a WordPress plugin – List Drafts Widget. It’s a simple thing, and it was stuck together from some code found on the WordPress forums and some tutorials on how to write plugins.

Well, time moves on, and WordPress with it. Version 2.8 of WordPress introduced a new squeaky clean object-oriented  method for writing widgets, and while the widgets written the old way will continue to work, there’s always a chance that old functions will cease to work with some future update, which would make my poor little widget crash, burst into flames, kick the cat (should you have one) or at the very least, stop working, which would be moderately annoying.

So, I did some digging, and read some tutorials, and borrowed some bits from other sites, and turned List Drafts Widget into a shiny new version that uses the new API and doesn’t appear to break anything, or nothing that I’ve noticed, anyway.

I’ll be uploading it to the WordPress Plugins Repository later, and you’ll be able to find it in the same place as the old one:

List Drafts Widget

Comments, suggestions, etc are welcome.

Back down again today, in the usual random oscillatory way.

Today’s bit of stuff is this little screenshot:

This may take some time

This was the result of copying a large folder of images from my MacBook to the iMac. I think it may have been lying about the time estimate, as it seems to have finished already rather than keeping me waiting until some time in the year 10765 or thereabouts. Not sure if this is a peculiarity of Forklift or random weirdness, but it amused me slightly. And I’d rather have an insane over-estimate of time than the Microsoft-style guesswork, which once told me that it would take 20 minutes to move a very large file. And kept telling me that for the two hours or so it actually took…