The time has come. This is my final post here at https://edrosack.com. My WP Pro Web Hosting plan at InMotion expires on 20 September 2025 and I don’t plan to renew it. So this Central Florida Photo Ops website will go offline next month.
But I want to preserve the content (posts, pages, comments, …). I’ve made a complete offline backup. I’ve also created a new free WordPress.com blog and imported everything from here to there. The new archive site is online now. You can check it out at https://edro1237.wordpress.com.
I probably won’t be adding much (if anything) new there. But feel free to browse there and enjoy the existing content. Time permitting, I’ll go through and clean up obvious import errors.
I’ll still welcome questions / comments at the new site. You can also see what I’m up to on Flickr at https://flickr.com/edrosack, where I’ll keep posting photos. And you can send me messages via Flickr too (use the … link next to my name in the header).
Note that your reader subscriptions will NOT transfer over. You can re-subscribe at the archive site if you’d like, but remember there probably won’t be much new info.
I appreciate each and every one of you. Thank you for your gracious support and encouragement over the years!
Take care of yourselves and each other. And if you can, make some photos!
I’ve been thinking about this blog and what it should be like going forward. I haven’t reached any conclusions about revising the purpose or content, but I am going to revise the schedule.
What’s around the bend?
Over 15+ years, I’ve written 758 posts: an average of over fifty a year. In recent years, I’ve been publishing every Sunday and I’m finding that pace harder to sustain. Coming up with something worthwhile each week is a challenge, especially since I’ve been photographing less than I used to. I guess I’m suffering a bit from writer’s / photographer’s block.
So I’m going to shift to an irregular schedule and publish when inspired. Instead of searching for something every week that I hope will interest all of you and me too, I’m going to update the blog when I have something to share. My goal will be once per month, but I’m not going to force it.
I’m very grateful for all of you that subscribe and for everyone’s visits, views, comments, and likes – thanks! Remember to stay positive, be kind, take care of yourselves and each other. And if / when you can, make some photos!
in·cred·i·ble, adjective: Very difficult or impossible to believe; extraordinary
There’s been a lot of buzz on the web recently about sky replacement – a genre of compositing. You take the sky from one photo and substitute it into a second photo. I first tried this way back in April of 2007. I wanted to make the Great Egret family in this nest at the St. Augustine Alligator farm stand out against the sky. You can compare the before and after in this slider:
Before on the left, after on the right – Use the slider to compare
The latest version of Skylum’s Luminar photo editor comes with a capability called “AI Sky Replacement. This “automagically” replaces the sky in your photos with a single click and will even adjust the rest of the lighting in the scene to better match the new sky. You can read more about it on their site: https://skylum.com/luminar.
Here’s another before / after slider showing my recent effort with their software. The original photo was made on Black Point Wildlife Drive in Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. It was a very pretty morning, but the sky was a bit plain.
Before on the left, after on the right – Use the slider to compare
Here’s the whole completed image (click to see it in much higher resolution on Flickr).
Good Morning
I like how this one turned out too – the sun in the new sky is in the right place and the light direction, intensity, and color match the foreground nicely. It adds interest to the image. And it was easy – Luminar worked well in this case.
But it makes me a little uncomfortable. I guess because in this blog I want to tell you about what, where, and how to photograph. So I think you should expect to see things here that you can also see when you go to these places. This image is a composite, not a photo – you wouldn’t have seen this on that morning. I won’t say that I’ll never do compositing, but I do promise that I’ll disclose it if I do.
Now, am I going to criticize you if you replace skies in your photos? No, you can do whatever you want with your images. They’re your art. But in general, I do see folks on Flickr doing this a little too much. And if you do it you should disclose or tag it. And you should do it right – the results should look natural, not artificial. The light direction and color should match. The lens used in both photos should also match so scene elements are at the proper relative distance from each other. Go for the second definition of incredible (extraordinary), not the first (Very difficult or impossible to believe).
Thank you for stopping by and reading my blog. And if you can – make some photos!
As for everything that’s going on in the USA and the world right now … I’ll try to keep politics and non-photo opinions out of this blog. But if you’re interested in what I think about things, feel free to take a look at my Twitter feed (link on the right). Peace out.
I try to maintain a regular schedule here and normally blog once a week – almost always on Sunday morning. I get up early and write (or finish writing) so I can hit the “publish” button before breakfast. My system’s worked pretty well for me and I hope for readers too. It’s gotten me up to almost 600 articles so far.
I enjoy it, but it’s a challenge at times. I want to include photography info worth reading or at least an image worth viewing. And I want each post to be something that I’ll enjoy re-visiting myself.
This morning I sat here with a blank page and a photographically blank mind. Making and processing images is a passion for me and has been for a long time. I’m pretty sure I’ll continue to enjoy it as long as I can. But it is just a hobby and there can be (and this week are) more important things to think about and deal with.
I won’t burden you with any personal issues – the blog is about image making. Instead I’ll simply leave you with another recent Caladium composition that I hope you’ll enjoy. Processing it to preserve as much detail as possible took my mind off of other things for just a little while.
Morning Dew. We’ve had some bumble bees flying around our flowers lately and I’ve tried to photograph them. I made this image after giving up on the bees one morning.
You can click on this image to view a larger version on Flickr. Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog. Your visits and comments mean a lot to me.
This post is about blogging, not photography. So feel free to move on if this doesn’t interest you. But before you do, here’s an unrelated photo to try to make your visit here worthwhile:
Sunrise Surfer – An early morning image, from October 2018, near the Cocoa Beach Pier (click for a larger version).
My blog has been up since May of 2007 and I’ve written almost 600 posts through the years. A few weeks ago, I read an article about broken links and how Google crawls the web and downgrades a site’s search ranking if it finds broken / dead links on web pages.
I knew this, but hadn’t been actively addressing issues. I’m not a commercial site, and search ranking doesn’t affect any bottom line for me, but – well, we don’t want to be left out of Google do we?
Anyway, I’ve had a plugin loaded on my site called “Broken Link Checker” for a long time. I was having some server performance issues a while back and deactivated it. I decided to turn it back on and see what it found. It was disturbing!
> 5100 links total
186 broken or dead links
> 900 redirects
And a few warnings
I’ve been going through and fixing these. Here’s what I’ve done:
If the site I referenced changed and I can find the new page, I updated it.
If I can’t find a new page, in some cases I substituted a different source such as Wikipedia. (By the way, Wikipedia is amazingly good at keeping their links up – none of my broken links were to them.) If I couldn’t find a new page to link to (seems to be a common issue for newspaper articles) I removed the link and marked it as “no longer available”.
On some problems, I just removed the link if it didn’t really need to be there.
How embarrassing! Some of the broken links were to my own pages! These had to do with re-organizing categories and tags. So I went through and fixed these too.
I looked at redirects and they don’t seem to be real issues, so I left them alone.
As of this morning (finally!) all of my broken links are gone.
In the future, I’m going to modify my link philosophy:
I’m not going to be as eager to insert links. Web search is pretty good these days and you can highlight and right-click to get info on anything I write about. And It’ll be current too!
I’ll favor using Wikipedia when it makes sense. There’s less chance those links will break.
I haven’t noticed any performance issues with the Broken Links Checker this time. So I’ll leave it on
Broken Links Checker will email me when it finds problems and I’ll fix them as they come up, instead of ignoring them for too long.
Onward to search results dominance!
Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog. Now – go make some photos!
You probably missed my post yesterday, where I wrote about both Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and my struggle to get the blog back up and running. That was because the connection between my blog and the Jetpack plugin that manages emailing each post to all my subscribers broke during the move.
I’m happy to report that the awesome Jetpack tech support folks (thanks James!!!) have fixed the issue and all future posts should go out normally. If you’d like to see yesterday’s, please visit the site or click the link above.
Please be aware that we’ll be moving https://edrosack.com (this blog) to a different hosting provider over the next few days. I’ll try to minimize downtime.
I’m sorry for any inconvenience and hopefully everything will be back up and running better than ever before next weekend’s regular post.
Today’s entry is just a few notes about the blog. First: A photo. This is unrelated really to the subject of this post, but we can’t have a post without a photo – can we? This is from Melbourne Beach, Florida on the morning after the Turtle walk.
Smell the sea, sense the sand, and see the sun rise
Second: If you’re reading the blog using Google’s Reader RSS service or an app or web page that uses it to sync, then you should know that Google is stopping Reader as of tomorrow. There are several alternatives. You can subscribe via email (use the button at the top right), visit using your browser once or twice a week, or adopt a new RSS reader. I’m trying out “The Old Reader“. There’s an IOS app called “Feeddler” that can sync with it. Several others are available too and will come up if you Google “Google Reader alternatives”.
Third: I’ve been behind updating the blog’s Table of Contents page, but I’ve caught up now. If you’ve never looked at it, please check it out. I think it’s a great resource on Central Florida (and other) Photo Ops.
Fourth: I’ve also been very behind keeping my Birding life list up to date. I still haven’t caught up on this, but it should be done later this week. It’ll have a few new (for me) birds from earlier this year and will be re-organized and sorted to align with the ABA bird checklist.
I’ve had some requests for an email option to Central Florida Photo Ops. Starting today, I’ve enabled a subscription service. You can sign up by entering your address over in the right sidebar, and I’ll send you an email whenever the site is updated.
Rest assured that your address will never be shared with anyone or used for any purpose other than this blog subscription. As always, Central Florida Photo Ops remains a non-commercial service for my readers.
Please note that you can continue to subscribe to blog updates via RSS. Simply click on the RSS icon in the top right corner to have updates delivered to your RSS reader.
This past week, I noticed a problem with my blog. I was looking at an older post and the photos weren’t showing up. I’ve been working to correct this all week and I almost have it done. What happened? Read on.
In early 2009, I wasn’t happy with the flexibility and customization provided by Google’s Blogger service, so I decided to move my blog to my own web server and use WordPress. I won’t get into a debate here about the relative merits of the two platforms – you can find too much info about that on the web. Suffice it to say that after more than a year of use, I’m very happy with WordPress, it’s useability, flexibility, and how easy it is to customize. I don’t regret my decision to move at all.
However, this particular problem has been a bear to fix. When I switched to WordPress, I used one of its features to import all of the posts from my old blog into my new one. This worked very well and made the switch mostly painless. I guess I should have known that was too good to be true.
The import process of course imported all of the links to photos within the existing posts. But the links point to the original location – on Blogspot. At the time, I realized this and since everything displayed correctly, I just accepted it and moved on. Over a year later, it turns out that the source of my problem with missing photos is that some of those links no longer work. So I only postponed the work – I didn’t avoid it.
What I’ve been doing intermittently over the past week is going back through all of my older posts and changing all of the links that point to Blogspot. For photos, I can point to copies on my server or on Flickr. But sometimes, I don’t have a photo anywhere but on Blogspot and in those cased I have to upload the photo as well as change the link. One thing that’s been really helpful is the search function within WordPress. I can easily search for “blogspot” in all of my posts and know which ones I still have to work on.
This is a fairly straightforward problem and solution. It just takes some time to fix. And it also points out that having control of web content used in your blog posts is important. If you’re switching to WordPress, it’s something to be aware of.
I apologize if this has been a problem for you. I should have everything corrected later today, and if you notice any lingering issues in the future, please let me know.
