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Just to let you all know, there is still time to sign up for either the Slot Canyons/Monument Valley workshop or the Arches/Canyonlands workshop (or both!) coming up next month. Spring is a great time to be in northern Arizona and southern Utah. The temperatures are bearable, the flowers are coming out, and the weather is usually pretty decent. With any luck, by the time we get to Monument Valley and Arches there will be some quick storms brewing to help make for dramatic landscapes. But if not, we'll suffer through the good weather. And if it's clear, maybe we'll be able to get some star trails??
Also coming up quickly is my Columbia Gorge Waterfalls workshop. Everybody loves waterfalls. They love to look at them, listen to them, photograph them, and buy photographs of them. And the waterfalls of the Columbia Gorge are classics. Plus we'll be visiting fields of wildflowers overlooking the Columbia River. There's lots to photograph on this trip, so don't miss out!
The two-part Palouse workshop that I'm leading with Victoria Dye is already over half full. This was a great workshop last year. We got to photograph some great stuff (old barns, old towns, rolling hills, a fence made of wheels, more old barns, old junk, a huge waterfall, some old barns, some vintage cars and trucks and gas station, and more). Plus the second part of this workshop is Lightroom and digital workflow. Victoria takes us through the meat of Lightroom so that you'll get comfortable using this amazing program. And I may even be talked into doing a demonstration of the Lightroom plug-ins I use to create my website. |
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I'm excited to announce that The Turning Gate is launching its CE3 line of Lightroom Web Module plug-ins on March 3. Many of you know that I built my website using the TTG plug-ins. The main reasons I love these plug-ins are that they allow me to manage my entire website from the same application I manage my images: Lightroom; they make beautiful, well-designed web pages and galleries; they're very customizable; and they make me look like I know a whole lot more about web design than I actually do. (But I'm learning more every day).
I've been beta testing these plug-ins from the start, and I think Matthew Campagna at TTG has really outdone himself with these plug-ins. But instead of spouting off about the wonders of the new CE3 plug-ins here, I'll just refer you to my blog, where I recently posted about some of the new features. And be sure to take a tour of the test site I've been working on, it shows off some of my favorite features of the CE3 plug-ins. |
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You may or may not know this, but when you visit a website, the fonts used for the text you're reading usually come from your own computer. So what you're seeing may not actually be what the web designer intended. Or, to put the shoe on the other foot, that cool looking font you found and want to use on your website probably isn't going to show up in your intended viewers' browsers on their computer.
I use a font on my site called Enviro, I use it in my masthead and at the top of this email. Chances are you don't have it on your computer, so if I created the header of this email with simple text, then you probably wouldn't see that font. For this reason, I've created graphics in Photoshop using this font and saved them as image files like jpg or png. Now they're no longer fonts, but pictures. More and more, web designers are starting to use web fonts such as Google Web Fonts, so the font you choose will actually show up on your viewer's computer. You can download the fonts to your computer for your design purposes, but they're still on your computer, not your viewer's. The great thing about using Google Fonts is that you can get the code from the Google Font site that will call the font and display it in any modern browser. What you have to do at your end, as the website creator, is just add that little bit of code in your pages so that the fonts will be summoned.
Matt at The Turning Gate has created a tutorial for the new CE3 engines that's all about how to do that. The same technique can be applied if you're using the older CE2 versions as well. It's really very easy and I'll most likely be implementing it myself once I go out and find the fonts I like. |
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Now I'm sure you all know that Iceland has been my new best friend since I met it last August. I really want to go back. But I need your help. I need enough people to sign up for this summer's trip so I can go back. It's all about me, you know. Me me me.
Seriously though, this is a great trip to a wonderful country. I'm sure you'll fall in love with Iceland too. So if Iceland has been calling your name (it has, you may not be able to hear it yet, but it's calling you), take a look at my Iceland Photo Tour page and think about joining me this summer. |
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Well that's about all I've got this month. I told you it was going to be short.
So if anyone is wondering why I love living out here on the "remote" Olympic peninsula, one of the reasons is the relative lack of traffic jams. Seriously, if the traffic is backed up it's usually due to an opening of the Hood Canal Bridge for marine traffic, which is often one of these big boys heading out to sea or bringing our sailors home.
And Tracy and I have started in on the annual spring rearranging of the yard. So that's keeping me busy too. As you might guess, my back is sore. Bailey had a wonderful time "helping" us dig stuff up. |
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