Blog Note

 Just thought you might like to know that someone just posted a comment on one of my 2015 posts. Check it out at Cotton Belt / UP 1068.

Scrub Oak, Fence

 

Scrub Oak (San Geronimo Valley) - Marin County  2021

Fence Posts, Wire (San Geronimo Valley) - Marin County  2021

The Nikon Z7II used for these photos has way more megapixels than my Z5. Unfortunately, the difference can't be seen on photos necessarily downsized for the blog.

Blog Note (Banner Images)

 

Something has gone haywire as to how Blogger is showing the banner image. We'll have to wait and see if they ever get around to fixing it. (The banner looks OK on phones, but not on tablets or desktops.)

Above images are the ones I'm trying to use. We'll see. (Note: photos resized in Blogger to "Large.")

Monday Cat Blogging / 10th Anniversary

Cat (Yokohama) - Japan  2017

Evening cat.

BTW, tenth anniversary of the mikereport. The first mikereport blog post: 50 Years. (January 15, 2008.)

Blog Note

mikereport, UK

How this blog appears in Europe, with cookie warning.

[Insert chocolate chip cookie joke here.]

Reds Meadows Sightems

Bear Boxes, Reds Meadows - Sierra Nevada  2014

Red Boxes - Sierra Nevada  2014

Photos taken as Mike wandered around the stable area at Reds Meadows.

- Blog note: this is the 2500th mikereport post! Yikes!

Red Bluff

Elmore Pharmacy - Red Bluff  2007

Etta's Place - Red Bluff  2007

In 2007 Mike took a photo trip into the "Narrow Roads of the Far North," as a kind of homage to Basho's Oku no Hosomichi. In Mike's case, the narrow roads were in Northern California, unfortunately still a kind of terra incognita to the urbanites of the California coast. Since this happened before the start date of Mike's exquisite blog none of the photos have been posted here. So some of the photos from that trip will be appearing on the blog, along with some 2014 pix as well as some earlier scanned black and white photos.

Traveling to the north means going up highway 5, not a narrow road by any stretch of the definition. But once in Red Bluff, you can travel to the east towards Lassen National Park and into the mountains.

And as you can see, Etta's Place is certainly Open.

Blog Comments

Hm. Some comments have been hidden in the "Waiting Moderation" section of the blog. And they are hidden. Finally found one today.

Also, Google has buried some comments in the "Spam" section. And they are spam. But still:

"What a material of un-ambiguity and preserveness of precious knowledge regarding unpredicted feelings," posted as a comment to a Pike Place post.

I almost agree. 

Alas, a Google search reveals that this message has been posted to a great many other blogs, blogs that apparently have not enabled a spam filter.

Interesting Blog Factoid

If one does a Google search on "What are the three main food groups?" and then keeps going to about the 15th or 16th results page one can find this helpful mikereport entry.

You're welcome!

Official Record of the Working Pictures/Mikereport Blog Design Correspondence

Mike has been fussing with his blog’s design for quite some time, as is evident from the number of querulous queries he posted to Carl Weese’s idiosyncratic Working Pictures blog over the last few months.

***

12/5/10

Mike Mundy said...

Carl:

So how did you get your photos to suddenly appear bigger? Fiddle with the innards of Blogger?

Looks cool.

Carl said...

Mike,

Don't need to get to the innards. The larger front page picture is enabled by the latest version of the Blogger software. Just upgrade and rummage around in the Design tab. Possible size depends partly on which template you choose.

12/21/10

Martina said...

Today it's Dec 21st - days will be getting longer from now on. :-)

Dennis Allshouse said...

not necessarily warmer.

Mike Mundy said...

. . . and not to be totally off-topic, but it seems like I'd have to switch to a new template in Blogger in order to get bigger pix.

Yikes! I thought that my template would be for Forever!

Carl said...

Martina, yes, looking forward to that.

Dennis, 20°F this morning, colder than yesterday.

Mike, the template switch is quite painless, shouldn't take more than an hour or so to do it on a practice blog, find settings you like, then apply them to your main blog.

 5/13/11

Mike Mundy said...

I continue to be impressed by the quality of your photos on the front page. Do you have to resize them in any particular way? My photos (using a Blogger old-style template) , before enlarging, are decidedly fuzzy.

Carl said...

Mike, I'm using a new-style template, and set the front-page pictures to "x-large". The file I upload is sized 1000 pixels wide (or 800 pixels tall for verticals) and saved as a level 8 JPEG. Since Blogger is resizing for the front page, the initial size of the uploaded file *could* make a difference, but I don't know what Blogger is actually doing under the hood.

Carl said...

Mike, I took a quick look at your blog (will go back for a better look later) and I think you need to update to the current software/templates to fix the issue. It's really not a big deal. A couple days ago I had to update my wife's blog, which we've only used to announce her exhibits and was still on the old software. Updating the software, specifying a template, customizing the "width" settings to accommodate the x-large front page picture presentation all took less than half an hour. I just used the same template as my blogs, so that's cheating a bit, but still I don't think you'll need an hour to cross your blog over starting from scratch.

Blog Redesign

Mike has switched to a wonderful new Blogger template. It has taken him quite a while to find colors and elements that match both the old blog design and his web site.

Reason for the switch: bigger pix can be posted! Wow!

(For example.)

Mystery Canal Solved

Alert commenter Muttley has identified the canal in the foreground of the Lamont-Odett shot to be none other than the famed Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Banner Photo Technical Glitch

Hmmm . . . something's not right. Banner pix are coming out blurry & indistinct. Will have to work on it.

Blog Stats . . .

. . . for last week. I've left out California 'cause I haven't been able to exclude myself from the stats, so results are skewed. For those interested, "The Bailiwick of Jersey is a British Crown Dependency off the coast of Normandy, France," per Wikipedia.

Country / Visits / Pages per visit / Average time on site

United Kingdom / 3 / 1.33 / 00:00:14

Philippines / 2 / 4.50 / 00:02:42

Canada / 1 / 1.00 / 00:00:00

Germany / 1 / 1.00 / 00:00:00

Jersey / 1 / 4.00 / 00:01:20

France / 1 / 1.00 / 00:00:00

Poland / 1 / 1.00 / 00:00:00

India / 1 / 1.00 / 00:00:00

State / Visits / Pages per visit / Average time on site

Oregon / 10 / 1.90 / 00:00:34

Georgia / 3 / 1.00 / 00:00:00

Florida / 3 / 5.67 / 00:02:09

Connecticut / 3 / 1.67 / 00:00:11

Washington / 2 / 1.50 / 00:00:21

Wisconsin / 2 / 4.50 / 00:01:16

North Carolina / 2 / 1.00 / 00:00:00

Missouri / 1 / 1.00 / 00:00:00

Pennsylvania / 1 / 2.00 / 00:03:47

Maryland / 1 / 1.00 / 00:00:00

Missouri / 1 / 1.00 / 00:00:00

Colorado / 1 / 1.00 / 00:00:00

New York 1 2.00 00:00:07

Photo: Landscape Form From Plane—Utah, 2010

Lake Nicasio Banner

Another Photoshop adventure.

First example here.

Photo: Lake Nicasio (banner)—Marin County, 2010

Web Site

OK, so now the wonderful web site is officially up. It can be viewed at http://mikereport.com/

I've added a link on the right.

Quonset Hut Banner

Taken during a overcast and gloomy day in San Rafael, back of Trader Joe's. I was trying out a Nikon D90 from Costco and took several pix, including a three-pix panorama. This shot was a single image, however.

After I had inserted "the mikereport" text into the sky area (using Centaur), I realized that with all the reflections going on, I could also have a reflection of the text by copying, pasting, flipping and blurring in a separate layer.

Photo: Quonset Hut (Banner)—Marin County, 2009

Gull (Banner Experiment)

So, a different banner (posted below for future blog scanners).

Well?

Photos: Gull—San Francisco, 2009; Shiodome Rain Banner—Tokyo, 2008

New Labels

I’ve decided to try to categorize the photos that get posted here.

Most are just blog photos, meant to illustrate some point or other, or are maybe just somehow interesting. Others are pretty good, maybe good enough to be put up for sale. And others might be something that would look nice in an exhibition. (Photographs that one might want to have in an exhibit might be ones that will never have any sales value, alas.) Some of these categories might overlap.

So, two new blog labels will be: Photo: (Sales), Photo: (Exhibition).

No "Photo" label will mean that it's a blog photo. Not that that's a bad thing!

We’ll see how it works.

Blog

I've been thinking that the background color of the blog (light gray) was too bright (too much contrast between the background and the pix). So I've switched it to a darker gray. But then I had to change some text colors because they were dark gray and couldn't be seen.