About... Chris Coolpix of the Day
5/19/2003 (update)
Chris now uses Exifer 1.2 by Jake Olefsky to read Nikon Coolpix tags and PHP getimagesize and iptcparse calls to extract IPTC header tags (example, example, example, and brief discussion of metadata).
4/2/2003 (update)
Chris offers all images and text on this site under a Creative Commons license.
3/31/2003 (update)
Fix display problem across Mozilla/5.0 version 1.2a, Internet Explorer version 5.50 and Opera version 6.0 browsers on Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition. Chris Coolpix of the Day centers one division after milov.
3/18/2003 (update)
If the feedback script does not work then send directly to:
christy[underscore]church[circleA]hotmail[stop]com2/9/2003 (update)
Previous javascript collection was very difficult to maintain, and ISP, bdcsi.net, moved site to instantaccess.net, which offers Linux hosting with PHP and more. Now, information stored in the daily picture itself appears on the web page. New archives are ad-free, and pictures are searchable in static files. There are just a few differences from before, mostly cosmetic, with one notable exception, timezone is PST8PDT, Pacific Standard and Daylight Time. The splash, where the picture is better centered than before, has a "d" link to the description and various links appropriate to the home page appear there as well.
2/18/2002 (update)
Six months ago, I realized that I couldn't take the time to upload daily updates. Therefore, I revised my home page to run on javascript, capable of updating its content by itself according to the date on the user's computer. This software works on a single, dynamic page that resembles the previous separate pages for each day. One major change is the user can no longer click through to the original, full size JPEG of each day's picture. This is because of storage and changing my mind about displaying the original.
There are ongoing minor changes to the look of the page. For example, "Z" asked, "What is all this garbage around the picture?" I have thrown out as much clutter as possible, while retaining most of the information and minimal navigational capability.
The date-sensitive dynamic archive pages are a consequence of the dynamic home page. The javascript software approach is similar, with the exception that instead of using the date as selector, the archive "results" are based on the user's choice from a list of titles, as before. However, the choice now sets a cookie, which has the sole purpose of telling the results script what to look for.
6/30/2001 (original)
This collection of sites is a project of Christopher Robertson Church, born October 30, 1946 in San Francisco, and since 1968, a resident of a town surrounded by the Pacific Ocean south of the city, Montara. The collection largely consists of a one-a-day digital photograph (quotidian, because not every day), archives and the writings of others, especially the poems of Red Dog Pieface. The daily photograph clicks through to the original full 1600 x 1200 pixel image, and although a small number of archival photographs have this feature, most are reduction images only. All of the images are automatically copyright protected and some are watermarked.
The camera is a Nikon Coolpix 800 that I bought for $300 from a now defunct site, the antecedent to mobshop. On the net, I've seen a few excellent scanned color prints, for example on my nephew's web site, but mostly the scans are second-rate, murky affairs, so digital is a good way to go. Get a camera with as much resolution as you can afford. My camera happens to be 1.92 megapixels, and produces approximately 400K files at "normal" compression. This page, for example, with a photograph of Ralph Kirkpatrick's harpsichord case with charcoal and chalk notes by my father, Robert M. Church, around 1950, displays a copy of the original JPEG file, which contains the full-size image, a thumbnail and embedded information such as capture date, which I partially extract with a program I found on the net because I wasn't able to interpret the binary effectively myself. Thus, the alt="04.09.05 Untitled 16 x 32, E800, 2001:03:05 14:27:38, 1/27 sec., f/3.7, Normal, Matrix, 8 mm 1600 x 1200 pixels." I sometimes fail to set the date correctly when I start shooting, but in this case, it looks pretty accurate.
Instead of photofinishing, I download from the camera to the computer. There are commercial sites that print files you send them. The same or other sites also manage on-line digital photo albums, but I've never liked how these sites look or work, so never tried them. Still, I highly recommend them for a start.
Anyway, I get around to building web pages the way I want them to look, more or less, with Perl scripts I wrote. Then later still I update the modification date and archive page and upload one or more versions of the web page to one or two servers. This part gets to be a bit of an effort that has to happen on time, and unfortunately it's very easy for it not to happen. A technophobe I know always gets a kick out of any perceived failing. Sometimes I get a nice response though, as follows (to Hovels on the archive page): "Thanks for the photos, I wish I'd taken more of my ole place. The psychology of a photo is interesting, eh? I notice you're not in any of them. I think you should put one on there so I can see you, you dear boy." —Michael Dee Cookinham
