JonathanBourke.Com

Flickrs New Look

After the “War and Peace” like length of my last post on “Editing Canon EOS 7D Video with Premiere Pro“, I have taken a bit of a break. Here are some quick photography related links to distract while I craft my next masterpiece

• Lifehacker – How to record great video with your hd dslr camera. Some great tips on shooting video, including knowing which way your focus ring moves. Sounds simple, but you don’t have time to mess around with this when shooting video.
• ImpulseAdventure – Comparison of Digital Photo Catalog Software. After my brief reviews of DAM software such as Adobe Lightroom, I found this excellent (and massive) comparison table of pretty much every software product for digital asset management known to man.
• Finally, Flickr will shortly be introducing an exciting new look, as seen in the image at the head of this post. It also features a great “Dark” mode, seen below, something which many third party services had provided in the past. I use Flickr to showcase my images, it’s a great community, and I enjoy the feedback that an image or gallery on my website doesn’t necessarily receive.

The new Flickr "Dark" mode

The sun emerging from a storm in the Maldives

So I am finally relaunching the website. It has taken some time, but I believe that I now have the bits and pieces in place to meet my needs for the future. For those who are interested in these things, I will update my previous post on this topic at a later date. In particular I wanted my website to:

• showcase my photography – check out the new “Gallery” section which will grow over time to include images from my Travel, Concert, Sport, and Landscape collections
• facilitate sales of my images – you can now do this by clicking the “Buy Print” links over each image in the “Gallery”
• provide a forum to discuss photography, camera gear, techniques, and my struggles with all of these – see my “Blog”
• let people find out about me, and get in touch – my “About Me” and “Contact” page

And I wanted this all to look in some way professional!

For those who have called around before, you will notice that I have migrated my domain to a “.Com”. The main reason for this is that I now live in Australia, and rather than get an Australian domain to augment my existing “.ie”, it would be simpler to just use the one truly global domain name, despite the fact that “.Com” was never intended to fulfill this role.

I have migrated most of the old content, and implemented a redirect from my old site, but please get in touch if you find anything which needs correcting.

Building foundations - the hard way!

When I started this blog, the web was alight with talk of Wordpress, Blogger, and other “blogging platforms”. I eventually chose Wordpress as I was blown away by all the varied and artistic themes that were available for it. Also Wordpress is extremely extendable through plugins for embedding Youtube movies, photo’s from Flickr and a host of other things. Before you even start blogging, it is important to build a solid foundation for your Wordpress Blog. Here are 11 plugins to help with that…

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Last time out, I outlined some considerations around domain names. In the end I went with a “.ie” and a “.com” address, but while choosing a good domain name is somewhat important, the real work only starts then – registrating, hosting, email, etc. My next decision was where to register as there are many, many domain registrars out there, and at least with the “.com” some can be had for free (with a huge dose of advertising on the side of course).

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I have long pondered setting up a “Home on the Web”. Obviously, if you are reading this, I must of actually got around to it, but what does it take to make it happen?

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