It’s this pretty cool photo hosting site. For $25/year, you get 1GB of storage per year (e.g., you can upload 1GB per year), or for $40/year, you get unlimited storage. At the $40 level, I could have folio.benpeoples.com go to zenfolio, and do things like make a list of folks who are permitted to see a gallery (e.g., clients of a photoshoot). Oh, and you can upload just about anything but RAW files, and download the originals again. So for $40 a year it also becomes the dumping ground for every tiff I’ve processed out.

My Flickr Pro account (thanks Katy!) is up in February, so I’m thinking maybe I’ll switch to this. You can enable direct print ordering through the site, so if I’m not planning on making money selling prints to people (unless you price your whole model around selling prints, it’s hard to pull off) — I’d rather just be paid for the shoot, and let the people print their own images. But that’s mainly because I’m typically selling portfolio-shooting services, not commercial works.

Anyway, check it out, let me know what you think.

Also, they have a referral thing, if you buy yourself an account, make sure to use referral cose N6S-VTB-QXY.

I’m making progress on my avr-based KAP controller.

This one should include most of what I’ve planned– I’ll be using my garmin foretrex 201 for the GPS system, which will connect via the serial cable to the unit. There will be data logging onboard that’ll track altitude (from the pressure sensor) and GPS position throughout the flight. You can then plug the unit into a computer and download that data.

Thursday, all the rest of the parts should show up. I’ve realized that I can offload a lot of the controls (dip switches, trimpots) off this controller, but I like Tom Benedict’s idea of being able to switch all radio off if working in radio sensitive environments, so I’m leaving a trimpot to set tilt onboard, but only if the power switch is set to radio-off.

If these controllers work well, I may consider selling them (either as a solder-your-self kit with pre-programmed chips) or complete devices. I’m leaning towards the former since the soldering isn’t hard, and it would avoid the need for a really nice case– I’m having trouble finding ones the right size. Any thoughts?

(Click for larger)

I don’t photograph a lot of people, but I did headshots for my office — Jason, here, had a couple of days before been mauled by one of his children. (They’ll do that, apparently). So I decided to try my hand at removing the offending scabs. I don’t like my images to look super photoshopped, so I didn’t do any crazy retouching, just removed the blemishes. My tip if you’re trying something like this– use a big fuzzy brush (I used a 20px dia fuzzy) and set the transparency to 50% This lets you just sort of smooth over anything offending, and lets you dress texture across without making it look cloned.

(Headshots for the office… this one is more of an outtake, but you get the idea)

I took the above shot on the ferry a few days ago.

I would like to take this opportunity, at 7:45am on a Sunday morning to point out that my landlady, who lives upstairs, is listening to David Bowie’s Let’s Dance over and over again. She just got back from Europe, so I suspect she is seriously jetlagged and has no idea that it’s quite early in the morning. Her son often listens to music early in the morning, but it often starts at 8am or so, and not so much on the weekends.

Ah well, at least our rent is still below market.