I’m finally launching a project I’ve been working with off and on for the past year: a photographer’s guide to Point Reyes National Seashore. I’ve been taking photos at Point Reyes for several years now and it is one of my favorite places for landscape photography in the Bay Area. Since I couldn’t find any resources that talk about taking photos there, I decided to start one. I have 3 goals with this project:
- Help people take better pictures at Point Reyes.
- Give myself an excuse to go there more often to do research for the website.
- Improve my writing through practice.
Now, for some technical details about the site. It is built using WordPress. Although primarily blogging software, WordPress also has a limited ability to write static pages. This is intended for things like an “About” page, but also can be pressed into service to make an entire static (i.e. non-blog) site. The blog features of WordPress, which are perfect for a “News/Announcements” page, can be bumped off the front page of the site to a dedicated news section. Since I’m already using WordPress for zovirl.com, it is convenient to be using the same software for pointreyesphotoguide.com.
WordPress has some good image upload features, and it generates thumbnails for you too. However, I want more control over both the image resizing and the final URLs of the images, so I’m using a Makefile and ImageMagick to automate the image generation. The original images are organized in a directory structure which mirrors the final URL structure I want. These are much larger than practical for a web page, so ImageMagick is used to shrink them down to the full size & thumbnail images. I apply a slight sharpen after the resize to avoid post-resize blurriness. Having automated this process, it was easy to try different images sizes because I just had to tweak a parameter in the Makefile and run ‘make’ again.
Photographer’s Guide to Point Reyes
It’s springtime and flowers are coming out! To celebrate, we went hiking at Henry Coe last weekend. The park is at its most beautiful this time of year, with green hills and lots of flowers. The weather was cool (bordering on cold) and a little damp. There was dew on the grass & flowers and it lasted all day in the shade.
We went in from the main entrance and hiked to Frog Lake, along the Monument trail. I really like the top of the Monument trail. There’s a spot where the hill opens up and has some tall pine & oak trees. It was very quiet except for the wind blowing in the trees. From the top, the trail descends down to Frog Lake. Anywhere else, this would count as a steep descent, but compared to some of the other trails at Henry Coe, this one is only a moderate descent. We forgot about the park’s tendency for steep trails and didn’t bring our hiking poles; we’ll want to remember them next time.
Frog Lake is a little reservoir with a few dead trees sticking out of it. I think this was the smallest lake we’ve been to at the park (not counting the small water ponds that are so valuable in the summer). From here, we hiked up to Middle Ridge and headed east. This trail alternates between open oaks forest and cutting through thick brush . The Manzanita trees are truly impressive. Normally a small bush, the specimens here are full-blown trees.
After hiking along the ridge we took a right turn and crossed the creek to start climbing back to the park headquarters. By this point, our knees were definitely starting to feel all the climbing and descending we had done, and we were ready to be back at the car. To cap off this nice springtime hike, we had the most beautiful clouds over Gilroy on the drive home. The sunbeams shooting through the clouds were beautiful, and lasted for quite a long time.
More Pictures
I finally signed up for a Flickr account (http://flickr.com/photos/zovirl), and I was impressed with their interface. It is very clean and simple, so it is really easy to get started. The people running Flickr seem genuinely cool. As a quick example, the 3rd link on their help page is to an offsite list of tips for beginners. Offsite links on an “official” page are a good sign of a company that really wants to work with their user community, in my opinion.