Photos Accepted Into PPA's International Print Exhibition

In our first submission to the annual competition, two of our photo prints were accepted into the 115th International Exhibition of Professional Photography, held by the PPA (Professional Photographers Association). One of the prints - "The Carolina at Pinehurst - Panorama" was accepted into the General Collection, and the other - "Downtown Manhattan - Panorama" was accepted into the Loan Collection.

Approximately 5,000 entries were submitted to PPA’s International Print Competition, and less than 10% of the submissions made it into the Loan Collection, so the award for "Downtown Manhattan - Panorama" is especially exciting. The collections will be on display in San Antonio on January 14-16, 2006 during Imaging USA, the PPA's annual convention.

Both prints were submitted into the Electronic Imaging category, where both the photographic merits of the prints and the creation techniques of the images were judged. Our two accepted prints were both panoramas -- made from stiching together a series of images. "The Carolina at Pinehurst" is also an example of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, where each section of the panorama was created from several exposures, allowing the full range of shadows and highlights to come through.

"The Carolina at Pinehurst" is an iconic image, currently used by Pinehurst Resort in marketing and press media. Pinehurst was the site of the 1999 and 2005 US Opens in golf.

"Downtown Manhattan" is a special image. It was taken from the observation deck on the Empire State Building on September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the WTC attacks. President Bush is speaking on Ellis Island, which is why the Island and the Statue of Liberty have extra spotlights shining on them. The view looks down Broadway, past the Flatiron Building, and you can see Ground Zero near the tip of Manhattan. Past the Harbor, you can see Jersey City, and in the far distance, past the Verazanno Bridge, are the lights of Sandy Hook, New Jersey.

Export XML from Bridge for Spry Gallery II

I updated the script so it exports an XML file from Bridge with full compatibility with the Spry Demo Photo Gallery, to use as photos.xml. See this post to learn more about the script.

It's at the same address, download here.

To Use:

The script goes in the folder "StartupScripts" in Program Files/Common Files/Adobe.

Launch Bridge and browse to a folder that contains the files you want in your gallery -- the "source" folder, as it were.

Choose the menu command "Tools > Export XML for Spry Gallery".

Type a name for your XML file in the Save dialog box, choose a location, and hit "Save".

In the dialog box that pops up, enter a max length/width for your thumbnails, in pixels. Some common sizes are "75" , "100" or "125".

Hit "OK". You should see an alert pop up telling you "XML file successfully created!"

Note: The same caveats about not using CDATA in your "Title"/caption field still holds -- haven't expanded the script to take care of that yet.

Generate Photo Gallery XML for Spry with Adobe Bridge

I've discovered/worked out a way to generate a very useful photos.xml from Adobe Bridge. If you use Bridge, it's very easy to add titles, keywords, ratings -- all kinds of metadata that one might use in a photo gallery.

The script is based on one I found at the Adobe User to User Bridge Scripting Forum for exporting a CSV file. Link to forum thread (this also shows most of the other metadata you can grab and how to get it into JS).

Note 1: this particular script doesn't take into account CDATA that might exist in your metadata, like ampersands in your title. Thus far, I've just avoided using those, but one could also have the script write out a CDATA node for that info instead.

Note 2: this script does not write out a thumbpath, thumbwidth or thumbheight attribute. But usually the thumbpath is the exact same as the regular "path" attribute, and the thumbwidth and thumbheight are just a ratio of the regular "width" and "height" attributes. I added a bit of JS to the gallery.js file to calculate those before growing the thumbnail on rollover.

if (lgWidth > lgHeight)
{ width = gThumbLargestSide;
  height = (gThumbLargestSide * lgHeight)/lgWidth;}
else
{ height = gThumbLargestSide;
 width = (gThumbLargestSide * lgWidth)/lgHeight;};

Right now I'm using keywords as categories and titles as captions and sorting by rating (stars in Bridge), so here's the .jsx file I created. The script should be saved to the folder "StartupScripts" in Program Files/Common Files/Adobe. It's then run by launching Bridge, browsing to the folder that holds your photo gallery large image files, and choosing Tools>Export XML File from the top menu.

Download a zip with the .jsx file.

I made some changes to the script so it now generates thumbnail info, and other clean-ups. See the related post, here.

Golf Anaglyph 3D Website

ClubMax3D.com is finally live -- the first golf-centric anaglyph website (At least, we think it's the first. ) The northeast golf and business 3D website. marketing press is getting special hand-delivered releases/packages today announcing it. We'll see what kind of a buzz it creates.

One issue is: will this be dismissed as just a gimmick? It's actually not a gimmick. 3D is perfect for viewing golf courses. We're experts in golf course photography, and even so, our 2D photos do not tell the story of a golf course. Golf is all about the layout and the land -- elevation changes, contours, little dips and valleys and hills, and trees in the way, and deep bunkers -- all things that don't stand out in a regular photo. Sure the photo can be pretty, but it will never tell the whole story.

People often turn to video to show off a course layout (for example, when we met renowned golf architect Rees Jones at Pinehurst on a photo shoot, he immediately asked if we did golf video, instead). But video cannot be printed, and is much more difficult to retouch. 3D anaglyph really does bring a whole new dimension to viewing golf courses.

The other issue is: how will the website work? The site is built using a mix of ColdFusion, Flash and Spry -- Adobe's new AJAX framework, and the layout is CSS based. Getting all of these languages and syntaxes to mesh was a fun challenge, and hopefully will work across most browsers.

There are also some relatively large images to download, and video. The target market is pretty high-end, comprised of the media and people who can afford a New York area golf membership, so I'm assuming their systems will be able to handle all the site throws at them. You never know, though. Also haven't yet tested the site on a Mac.

So "Get Your Glasses" and check it out! If you don't have 3D glasses (what?!) just let me know. We've got plenty, including some sunglass-style ones with black plastic frames. They're very fashionable.