Changing Your Blog Directory in Wordpress 3.5

If you're like me, you probably began your Wordpress blog in either a default directory, or one with a pretty generic title like this: example.com/blog.  That's all fine but recently I found out that it's better to have the blog URL, which is formed from the name of your domain and the folder your blog resides in. Apparently search engines prefer this. If you are running your blog in the root directory and that's where you want it, then fine, leave everything alone.  If you have several blogs, however, you must have them in different directories. The same applies if you're like me, with a static home-page which is not created in Wordpress. So how can you change the directory title?

Early Summer at John Muir Park, Dunbar, 1990

[caption id="attachment_5" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Early Summer at John Muir Country Park, Scotland[/caption]

I began with this picture because it representated a departure for me, and a point when I began a long journey of investigation, which is ongoing. I had become fascinated by the effects of sunlight passing through foliage, and it gave me a completely new direction in terms of landscape photography. Instead of the broad, I began to focus on the intimate, and instead of the general, the particular.

I had walked past this scene many times and was waiting for the foliage to really wake up as it does in early summer, and before it becomes tired-looking. One day I realised that the moment had come and I went back to the car to get my gear. I used an MPP MkVIII folding 5x4 technical camera, which is a very similar beast to the German Linhof Teknica, but made by a company in London. These are really nice machines, and usually pretty cheap to acquire, much less than a Tek, anyway.

Photography: Definitive Art of the Twentieth Century?

[caption id="attachment_511" align="alignleft" width="186"] Photography-definitve art[/caption]

Photography, although shunned by the establishment in its infancy, became the quintessential, defining art of the twentieth century.

 This was not simply because photography’s roots were in the decades immediately preceding the year 1900, nor that it blossomed, came to maturity and ultimately transformed with the aging of the century itself.

 Photography did what any great art must do: it unified the Apollonian and Dionysian understandings of the universe in one statement. These conceptions, and ways of conceiving, are symbiotic while opposed, like the shapes in the yin-yang symbol. The Apollonian is abstract, transcendent, mathematical, logical, while the Dionysian is real, immanent, cannot be understood by maths or physics and utterly passionate. Every facet of the one has a mirror opposite in the other, and the struggle for artists is to reconcile these into something that is not only complete, but greater than the mere sum of its parts.

Photo Technique 5: Brightness and Exposure

We have looked at the ways we can regulate our cameras to get the right exposure, but until now we haven’t discussed exposure itself. Correct exposure is simply setting the camera so that the subject is rendered with an appropriate range of tones in the image.

If the camera allows too much light in, or over-exposes, then the image will be too light, appear washed out, and particularly in digital, highlights will ‘blow out’, that is, be rendered as solid, featureless white. If there is not enough light, or under-exposure, the image will be too dark and the shadows will appear jet black with no detail.

All modern digital and film SLRs have very sophisticated systems of measuring the light coming from the subject and setting the camera automatically and this is exactly what a lot of photographers do. I do it myself, if there are no lighting complications or other factors to worry about. However, as soon as you begin to play with aperture and shutter speed, it really helps to know what you are actually doing.

Photo Technique 4: Film and Sensor Speed

We have already seen how four key factors in photography are linked: aperture, shutter speed, film or sensor sensitivity and subject brightness. These are linked in such a way that if any one is changed, then one or more of the others must also be changed to compensate. The first two, aperture and shutter speed, are easily controlled on camera, and no we will look at the third factor, which is also under the photographer’s control: film or sensor sensitivity.

In pre-digital days this was always referred to as ‘film speed’ and this is convenient, so we will continue to use it. A number of indices or scales were established to measure film speed, but the one that became the most widely used was the American Standards Association, or ASA, scale, which was eventually adopted by the International Standards Organisation or ISO. This is an arithmetical scale, so that a doubling of the ISO value indicates a doubling of sensitivity or speed, and a halving the opposite. (This is as opposed to the more complex DIN scale which was logarithmic.) Because the ISO values are arranged in this way, they conform exactly to the conventions we have already met for aperture and shutter speeds, where each stop or step is a doubling or halving of the one before. So it is easy to apply the same logic to film/sensor speed.

Photo Technique 3: Shutter Speed and Movement

We have already discussed aperture, and seen how the f-stops marked on the aperture ring are calculated and what they are. To recap, the focal length divided by the aperture gives the f-stop, so a 50mm lens with a 25mm aperture is f2, and the they progress f2, f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8 and so on. Each of these allows half as much light to pass as the f-stop before, counting from low to high.

Aperture is one of four interdependent parameters that are central to photography. These are : Aperture, Shutter Speed, subject brightness, and film or sensor sensitivity. IF any ONE of these is changed then AT LEAST one other must also change to maintain the same exposure. The most common example of this is that if aperture is altered, then shutter speed must also be altered, reciprocally. So if aperture admits less light, then shutter speed must admit more.

Photo Technique 2: Stopping down, Depth of Field and Bokeh

In the last article we looked at the optical principles that govern focus and depth of field (DOF). Now let’s explore how these are applied practically in the camera. For the moment we will assume that we are using a single-lens-reflex (slr) or rangefinder type camera, either digital or film.

If you look at the lens barrel you will probably see a ring which controls the aperture diaphragm. This will be numbered in f-stops, which on modern cameras will run f1.4,2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, (32, 45, 64). I put the last three in brackets because you’re pretty unlikely to have them but you might see them on view cameras. Note that the numbers double on every second step—2,4,8 etc and 2.8, 5.6, 11 etc. The f-stops are determined by dividing the effective aperture into the focal length, so a 50mm lens with an aperture of 25mm is f2, and with 12.5mm is f4. Each f-stop, going from low number to high, admits half as much light as the one before, so f2.8 is half of f2 etc. It’s easy to work out why if you’re mathematically inclined, but if not, just remember it.

Photo Technique 1: Focus and Depth of Field

If you are used to using a digital compact, then focus may be something you take for granted. Things just are in focus. But if you are thinking of buying a DSLR or a film camera, then focus becomes much more important. In fact it is one of the primary creative tools the photographer has.

Lenses resolve the light emitted from objects in the world into an image that we can use. Sometimes, as in a telescope, this is for direct observation, and the focus is inside the eye; in photography, resolution is always on a plane behind the lens.

Let’s begin with a point of light in front of the lens. Now strictly, a point has no diameter, so think of something like a star which appears to be a point (but isn’t really.) If we want to make a photograph of this we must create a sharp image of it, and to do this we first need a lens. The lens will take the very narrow cone of light it receives from the star and reverse this into a steeper cone behind it. The plane on which this sharp image is created is called the focal plane of the lens. The distance between this and the lens is called the focal length of the lens.

End of The Line

The ticking clock of the modern world has finally blown the whistle on Scotland’s only cycling railway signallers, as part of a package of improvements to be made to the Inverness to Aberdeen railway line. Railtrack Scotland zone director Janette Anderson announced the proposed changes in a speech on Scottish rail infrastructure at Robert Gordon’s University in Aberdeen on Friday. The £2m investment, which is expected to reduce journey times by 10 ½ minutes by the year 2000, will involve the installation of new signalling on the line, which will put an end to the “Nairn Bike”, and the sight of signallers cycling from one end of Nairn station to the other to operate the points.

Manila: Skinny Cats, Transports of Delight and Beautiful Women

[caption id="attachment_306" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Jeepney and taxi in Manila[/caption]

Manila is huge.

Apart from Manila itself, the conurbation of Metro Manila includes other cities that would themselves be enormous by any other measure: Makati, Pasig, Quezon, Cavite, and others. So transport is a major part of Manila life. But this is Asia, and unlike Europe, there is no organised public transport. There are no service buses, no trams or metro systems oganised by local government. Everything is run privately, and the sheer amount of private transport provision is staggering.

Given that I have not yet see anyone carrying a passenger on his shoulders, and horse-and-cart solutions are reserved for the tourist area of Intramuros, the old part of Manila, the most basic, though not always the cheapest, means of transport is the gloriously named 'pedicab'. This is a bicycle with a side-car.

The main problem with this solution, leaving aside the thorny moral issue of whether it can be right for a 14-stone Scotsman and an admittedly much lighter Filipina to be push-biked around by a sweating 9-stone Pinoy, is the complete lack of suspension on these contraptions. Since the roads in Manila resemble the Somme after a barrage, this means a bone-jarring ride that risks lumbar impaction.

Why Do Americans Go To Church?

Americans go to church on Sundays because American culture is completely amoral. It is, after all, a nation built upon the expropriation of land from its previous occupants by wholesale violence and genocide. Slavery was its foundation and the consequences of that remain in the inequality and obvious racism and ethnicism of American society. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Indians, Native Americans are all routinely demarcated as different, and therefore not to be trusted. Conformity to social norms is an absolute requirement, and conformity to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal is best.

American business is no more than legitimised brigandry. It maintains a Spartan philosophy—do what you like as long as it makes money, just don't get caught. American tobacco companies fought tooth and nail for decades, to prevent the fact that their product was packaged death being publicised. Now, American oil companies spend millions to try to pretend that climate change is not happening, while Monsanto, makers of the deadly Roundup weedkiller and chief promoter of the anti-social technology of genetically modified crop production, carries on as usual.

Thatcher, The Dame is Dead

So, Margaret 'the Bag' Thatcher is dead.

[caption id="attachment_336" align="alignleft" width="640"] Margaret Thatcher at the opening of Torness Power Station in 1989[/caption]

The heroine of the Falklands, the scourge of the miners, the 'most divisive' Prime Minister in recent British history, maybe any British history, has finally kicked the bucket. Legions of trendy-lefty commentators are dancing in the streets, and people far, far too young to have any recollection whatsoever of what Dame

Margaret Hilda Thatcher actually did, are filling their Facebook drivel, er, pages, with claptrap about how much they hated her and are glad to see her gone.

Well, I remember her reign, and indeed it was not pleasant. But what is forgotten, perhaps wilfully, by those celebrating her death, is what it was like before Thatcher. They forget too, that without her, a great part of what the 'British' now accept as normal, simply would not exist.

Site-Map Scam Sites

I don't consider myself any great shakes in the Web Design field. I don't think 'code is poetry', I think it is an inconvenient pain in the ass that I have to wrestle with in order to get what I want.

The thing is, that puts me in exactly the same basket as the vast majority of you. People like me, working away on our sites, feeling our way forward. So I am going to begin a series of articles about web design for people like us, where I will explain things simply in language that I understand, and avoid talking about the brain-frazzling nightmare that is code whenever I can.

There are so many pitfalls waiting to trip up people like us, and frankly the web is chock-full of unscrupulous companies and scam-sites that are just waiting to take advantage of us. Look at this example: I found out that I needed a site-map that would be search-engine friendly, in order for my site to be more highly rated. OK, so, I am a supporter of free, so I went looking for a free site-map generator.