Custom Wall Calendars, Part Three

We showed the two calendars to various friends. Most seemed to prefer the Ofoto calendar with its professional binding and nice packaging.

On Sunday, Dan and I got around to looking at the color print quality in detail, examining the two calendars with a magnifying glass and comparing them to the original JPEG's as displayed on my color-calibrated powerbook display.

Both calendars overemphasized reds and yellows; I wonder if this is intended to make family snapshots look warmer? Also, both calendars exhibited vertical banding, especially evident in low-contrast backgrounds.

In the end we slightly preferred the Ofoto calendar, but really expected Ofoto to do a better job of color management.

I used each website's support section to write to customer support complaining about the red shift and asking for a copy of their printer's color profile. Cafepress never wrote back at all. Ofoto wrote back to say that my images weren't of sufficiently highly resolution, which is both wrong and irrelevant.

We decided to add a third entrant to the competition, Kinko's. After a bit of wrangling, we managed to get all the images uploaded to the Kinko's site. They have a nice GUI for cropping and laying out the images. I was eventually able to order and pay for the calendar at their website, and arrange to pick it up at my nearest Kinko's store, thus saving on shipping.

Custom Wall Calendars: Part Two

Both the Ofoto and cafepress calendars arrived today via FedEx and UPS, respectively. That's two days after placing the order -- pretty impressive! The Ofoto calendar was wrapped in a plastic envelope containing a silica gel dessicant inside a cardboard box mailer; the cafepress calendar was shrink-wrapped to a corregated cardboard sheet inside a sturdy brown mailer.

First impressions -- the Ofoto calendar with its spiral binding and nice packaging seems much more professional and impressive. The cafepress calendar is larger with large, borderless photos, but its inexact folding and stapling job made it seem much less polished and professional. Also, cafepress put the cover image on upside down.

Both websites did a good job providing order status information, email updates, and links to shipper tracking information.

Custom Wall Calendars: Part One

Inspired by some stuff that my wife Mary found on the web, I decided to try to make a custom wall calendar containing twelve of my photos. Since her original inspiration came from cafepress, and since their website was pretty slick, I definitely wanted to try them. However, some disquieting comments from dissatisfied cafepress customers made me want to try at least two vendors. After looking around, I settled on Ofoto as the second contender.

I downloaded the cafepress template for wall calendars (3,450 by 2,700 at 300dpi), built a set of high-quality JPEG's using Photoshop CS with embedded sRGB color profiles, and uploaded them to both the cafepress and Ofoto websites.

When I started to create the custom calendar at cafepress, I ran into my first problem. Since my first look at cafepress's "Create & Buy (tm)" section several days earlier, the Wall Calendar ($14.99) item had disappeared from the list of Products. Only by fiddling with the URL did I get to the page that allowed me to create the Wall Calendar. An email query to cafepress concerning this oversight produced no reply.

Eventually, I uploaded all the photos to both cafepress and Ofoto. I added captions for the Ofoto calendar; cafepress expects you to format your own captions as part of the image you upload, which is both more flexible and more work.

I ordered both calendars today at midday, November 22nd, to be delivered to my house via second day delivery. Within a few hours I received email acknowledgements from both companies.

Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing" at ACT

We went last night to see Tom Stoppard's play "The Real Thing" done by American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. I should mention up front that I'm a huge Stoppard fan, having been won over by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's production of "Rough Crossing" several years ago.

Like all his work, this play is self-referential and multi-layered. A play-within-a-play in the very first scene fits perfectly with the main theme of trying to work out when a relationship is The Real Thing. His use of symmetrical scenes in which lovers confront each other lends weight and rhythm to the interlocking stories of theatre people trying to make sense of their intertwingled professional and personal lives.

During the second half I was sure he was setting us up for another devastatingly sad ending as in his play "Arcadia", but instead he gives us a quiet, faintly optimistic one, hinting that Stoppard, like his playwright main character, is quite a romantic.

photo: ucsf vanpoo?

ucsf vanpoo?
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

I swear I did not manipulate this photo. That's what the side of the van said. Spotted in Belmont, CA turning from Old County Road onto Ralston Ave.

Photo: Cooper's Hawk Close Encounter

Cooper's Hawk 2
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

Woah. So there I was walking along the sidewalk between the Charleston Slough pond and the windsurfing pond when I hear a rustle like ten feet ahead. I look up and this lovely creature lands just ahead at eye level in a little tree. I just had time to grab like 6 or 8 shots before he got wigged and flew off.

Report: Trip to Malheur NWR

Wow!

We're just back from an amazing weekend at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon with our favorite birding guide, Steve Shunk of Paradise Birding.

Despite unseasonably cold and snowy weather we really enjoyed ourselves and got to see almost all the birds we could reasonably expect at the Refuge. I really recommend a visit to the high desert of eastern Oregon. It has a kind of serenity you don't find anywhere else, due largely to the striking volcanic rock formations and fantastic cloud formations. The sunlight at dawn and dusk is warm and velvety, you could shoot landscape pictures all day and never get tired of it. (note: I'll post some of my landscapes soon, I promise).

For you birders out there, I've posted my trip lists for days one, two, three, and four, and you can also take a look at the weekend total species count.

I had a few good bird pictures over the weekend, especially this American Dipper.

Riders

Great America
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

While looking for a Plumbeous Vireo and a Clay-colored Robin in the parking lots around Great America, I had several chances to photograph folks riding the roller coasters; this is one of the best ones

About this whole accordion thing...

So, my wife and my guitarist have been hassling me for years to take up the accordion. Although I might grudgingly admit that certain applications of that instrument (for example, in Zydeco music) are pretty cool, I'll certainly never tell them that. The more they talk about it, the more I dig in my heels.

Until now.

RSS is actually Simple?!

Conventional wisdom around our office is that any specification or standard that begins with Simple or Lightwight is definitely neither (anyone care to make the case that LDAP is truly lightweight?). Imagine my surprise this morning when I managed to add an RSS feed to my birdWalker site in about 10 minutes. If only WSDL, XML Schema, and SOAP were this easy.

birding website now "bloggier"

On Saturday, I updated the look of my birding field notes website to make it less cluttered and more blog-like. I especially wanted the front page to show details of the most recent trips at the top, with as many photos as possible. Feedback appreciated.

Dowitchers and Plovers

Dowitchers and Plovers
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

Dan and I combined his lovely new Canon 20D body with my 300mm f4/L lens at coffee break. I wanted to see how the AI Servo focus mode on the 20D, combined with its large shooting buffer, helps with taking shots of flying birds, a task which is very difficult even with all these amenities. I filled up 2GB (!) of Compact Flash in like 20 minutes. This is one of the better shots, slightly cropped. Here we see a flock of Dowitchers (smaller) with one Snowy Plover (larger) leading the flock. Note the black wing pits.

What's on the iPod: "COWBOYbebel"

The playlist-of-the-week on my iPod is the one I titled "COWBOYbebel". It's two parts "Cowboy Bebop" anime soundtrack per one part Bebel Gilberto's latest album.

Just in terms of story and visuals, Cowboy Bebop stands apart from every other piece of Anime I've watched. What really makes it special is its pairing of techno/film noir visuals with retro big band music. It's a combination that really seperates Cowboy Bebop from the rest of the pack, just as Vince Guaraldi's soundtrack lifted the Charlie Brown animated specials into the realm of classics.

Bebel Gilberto's latest (self-titled) album is more mainstream, less techno than her previous offering ("Tanto Tempo", also excellent). She mixes up singing in English and Portuguese this time, and the results are infectious, light, airy.

I couldn't say why these two seem to fit together; I guess it says something about my appetite for eclectic juxtaposition. Anyway, give 'em a listen and lemme know what you think.

Where's that confounded bridge?

Natural Bridges State Beach, Santa Cruz
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

Here's a look at half the bridge from the beach in Santa Cruz. Pelicans really dig it, as you can see. (hint: those rocks aren't naturally white and streaky like that)

Another friendly bird

Red-necked Phalarope
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

I noticed someone digiscoping with their Swarovski spotting scope, and headed over to see if he had found something interesting. He had evidently been looking at some Phalaropes. Although they flew off as I first approached, they later returned to a much sunnier spot.

Black Turnstone

Black Turnstone
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

We got to Natural Bridges toward sunset, and the Turnstones and Sanderlings were feeding in the surf, seemingly oblivious to nearby people and pets. I've never gotten so close to a Turnstone before, it was really magical. I shot nearly 80 pictures in about 20 minutes

Willow Flycatcher

Willow Flycatcher
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

Here I am testing Blogger's integration with flickr. This photo is allegedly of a Willow Flycatcher we saw with the Audubons at Point Reyes National Seashore. I'm not sure there are enough field marks here to really be sure of the diagnosis. Any opinions?

Gear lust

I wonder if I can explain to you with a straight face why I really, really need a Canon EOS 20d camera body. My buddy Dan just got one, I played with it at lunch today, and WOW it's nice.

Compared to the Canon EOS 300D I already have, what has this new camera got? Glad you asked. Mostly, it's just faster -- it starts up faster, writes pictures to the memory card faster, lets you change your settings faster. It does that really cool AI Servo autofocus mode whenever you want, the one that lets you track flying birds (the 300D only does it in dorky Sports mode). And it's a lot less likely to tell me BUSY while I'm trying to capture that hawk flying right overhead.

And, it's black. Need I say more?

We ROCKED the CFC

We did the SFBBO CFC and WE ROCKED. More news later, very sleep now.

SFBBO CFC Madness

Every year the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory sponsors a Big Day competition called the California Fall Challenge, in which teams attempt to raise the most money while seeing the highest possible percentage of the known birds in a particular California county during a single 24 period. We did San Mateo county last year, and had a great time. We've only today signed up to do San Benito county with R. J. Adams tomorrow! And when I say tomorrow, I mean starting about 12 hours from now. Wahoo!