Virginia Breeze

I spend a lot of time looking up at the sky and following the circle of life.  Trying to figure out whether we will be seeing a nice sunset in the evening or a great sunrise. It’s pretty tricky business.

And I also do the same thing early in the morning but there’s not a whole lot you can see. I usually just lie in bed and try to have some sort of psychic experience that will tell me whether or not to go out.

But that doesn’t work very well as you can imagine. So as we often do I decided to go to the search engines and try to find an answer. This is an interesting discussion in a forum for photographers about sunsets. They talk about cloud formations.

Mid level clouds come up several times as promising for this sort of thing. And as I think back there may be something to this. The sun goes down and then it shoots rays up at an angle. If there are heavy clouds sitting on or near the horizon these rays don’t have a chance. But if there are thinner clouds further up the sun’s rays can penetrate whatever is near the horizon and reflect off of them. And then the light can bounce back down to earth and the happy photographer. I guess. Here’s the link for those who follow these things.

Once the sun goes down the rays start shooting up instead of down and interesting things begin to happen.

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I have tried a lot of different themes on my three Wordpress.org blogs. And I always seem to return to Sadish and his fine themes. They don’t cause me problems and they do some pretty cool things. Virginia Breeze uses his Nigarila theme and as you can see it allows me to show a slideshow in the all important upper right area of the front page. I can also put 1-4 posts up there and give them great visibility. There is also a page of options with this theme and a great deal of versatility in the admin/design area.

I am not sure exactly what you would call the photo presentation. Maybe it is an overlay? I went looking for some clues about this and found this article. The title is The Lightbox Clones Matrix and as you can see there are a lot of different options and descriptions in this area.

http://planetozh.com/projects/lightbox-clones/

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I was very happy to see his Wordpress.com theme Misty Look come to the Wordpress.org side of the street. I am not sure when that happened but I can remember asking Sadish to do something like this when I purchased Nigarila. I was using Sky Blue at the time for my third theme on the news/politics/humor blog NewsLink Briefs. And really wanted the “light box” for PhotoLink Love. The photos there clearly benefit from this presentation.

And so now he has done it. And Misty Look is free! Sky Blue is also free although it was around twenty dollars when I bought it. Nigarila was also about that much. He is always giving great themes away or charging very nominal prices for his work.

And he has many more themes. But these stand out in my mind as the best of his work.

One more thing I should not forget to mention is the ability to import a photo into the header of all these blogs. When I get restless and start thinking about making a change I find this is a very good way to avoid making too much of a change and getting into trouble. My recent experience with the photoblog plugin is a good example of what can happen in that regard. I have many 404 messages now because of it and have learned a valuable lesson.

There is only one wish left on my list of things I would like to see Sadish create. And it is something that I have not ever seen out there in the land of themes. He does not like to repeat himself so maybe he will do it sometime.

Take something like the striking header and font from Sky Blue. Add the author’s box from Nigarila. Use something a little like the side bar in Misty Look. Allow photos up to 650 pixels wide like those in the Sky Blue theme. And add the photo treatment found in Misty Look and Nigarila.

I can imagine one of those large photos overlaying a beautiful page and it would be stunning. It would be unique! It would be so fabulous he might even want to charge twenty five dollars for it!

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http://wprocks.com/free-themes/

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http://wprocks.com/

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http://wpthemeshop.com/

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Update:  I am trying out a new theme by Sadish at NewsLink Briefs in case you go looking there for Sky Blue.

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