Virginia Breeze

, originally uploaded by Davidlind.

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Beth and I both enjoyed this sailboat.  Blue is a favorite color for both of us.  Doesn’t this look like a lot of fun?  One person can run things and I bet it goes fast under the right conditions. I will add a few NextGen photos of sailboats here this evening.  They are a cheerful island in a sea of gray photos I took this past weekend.  I’m so sick of looking at most of them.   Everything is gray and white.   I thought maybe the camera was busted after looking at them awhile.  But occasionally a colorful bathing suit or sail will pop up in a photo.

First, the D40 is twice as sensitive to light as the D40x and D80. (The D40’s ISO defaults to ISO 200 instead of the less sensitive ISO 100, making for sharper photos in any light.)

Second, the D40 is far more flexible with flash in daylight. The maximum shutter speed of every Nikon other than the D40 when used with flash is only 1/250 second, while the D40 easily shoots at 1/500 with flash with no loss of performance.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d40.htm

It’s pretty interesting stuff ( I thought my D70 defaulted to ISO 200).  He has without question guided me towards a lens that has been just amazing in terms of taking photos thru a wide range of distances with amazing clarity.

It’s a miracle! I bought mine in November 2005 and love it. It’s replaced an entire bag of lenses. All I bring anywhere is my 18-200mm, and maybe my 12-24mm for 99% of everything I shoot.

It’s small, fun, flexible, sharp and fast. VR, instant auto/manual focus override and macro and zooming all work perfectly. This lens is too much fun!–Ken Rockwell

He is talking about the Nikon 18-200mm  VR

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/18200.htmI

You can save a lot of money reading this guy.  I swear.  Eventually I will get a Nikon D700 most probably.  But right now I still have too much to learn to plunk down 2500 bucks for a camera.   Although I did spend that much for a computer a few years ago (it’s all about conditioning).    And  televisions can easily cost that much these days.   But some of these cameras are heavy.  And this one ( the D40) is supposed to be very light.  I saw a couple of guys at the beach this weekend with some very heavy cameras and lenses sitting on a tripod.  I’m just not ready to go there yet.  i want to travel light and (hopefully) capture more just by being in the right place at the right time.

Here are some photos I took on our vacation that have been given the NextGen treatment.  You can click on them to see an enlargement if you wish.  We had a wonderful time and I saw some really wonderful natural scenes. The people were very friendly and the weather was good.  Still, it’s good to be home and have a chance to sleep in a comfortable bed and treat all the scrapes and dings you get on a trip like this.

For instance if I wanted to get on the dingy I would throw my right leg over the side and then Captain Jack would grab my arm and pull with all his strength in the opposite direction. Several scrapes and bruises later I would be in the bottom of the boat with my snorkel.  It’s a good thing my arm never came off or Captain Jack would have gone backward all the way to Nassau.

And then we would have had to figure out how to sail back there to find him with one less hand on deck.

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We have gone in great detail through the construction of the NextGen Gallery here in order to help some folks like myself who don’t know a lot about FTP transfer do some basic things. Now we are going to add a feature called ImageFlow  which will present photos in a different and some would say interesting manner.

Here is the location of this plugin in the Wordpress. org plugin section.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-imageflow/

I didn’t use Plugin Central for this operation because we need to install a file from the plugin  in the root directory.   The root directory can be called different things but basically it is NewsLinkBriefs in this case since I installed it in one of my other blogs.

So we keep our trusty (and free) Total Commander around for these things and we discussed how to use it in detail when we did the NextGen Installation posts.

But  when did we decide I was the Pope and needed to start talking about “we” instead of “i or me”?  Good question.

So now you locate the reflect.php file by clicking on the ImageFlow file to reveal its parts.  Simply load this file in trusty F5 and blast off with it to the other side of the FTP program.  It’s now part of your blog or in this case NewsLinkBriefs.  You can delete it from its original location and move on to upload the remaining files to the Plugin directory.  Activate the Plugin. When you write a post all you need to do is place this tag in the HTML area with the correct Gallery ID which is probably not going to be 99.

[imageflow=99]

Click on Gallery (probably next to Comments or near it) and Album to find the Gallery ID. All you Galleries are located in there on the right and they should have ID’s. If you look to the right of Album you should see ImageFlow down at the end. There are things in there you can adjust. You can get rid of the reflection if you choose. And there are some other things there you probably should leave along. At least I should leave them alone.

And that’s it. Now some of your images will come flying at you whenever you click on your blog to say “Hello”.  Right now that seems to happen best if you use the scroll wheel on our mouse.

Blogging is certainly an entertaining process, isn’t it?

To check out how this thing looks you can go here. . .

http://newslinkbriefs.com/2008/03/13/imageflow-gallery/

Here are some more photos from my walk last evening through the gardens.  It was pretty hot but many of the flowers didn’t seem to mind too much.  I would say that overall the gardens are not as spectacular as they are at the Christmas season with all the lights or during the spring when everything pops out and the weather is mild.

But there is still much to see.  The Zinneas are particularly lovely now.

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