If you have ever had a massive number of images you needed quickly and accurately resized for export, upload to web or any other reason, you may well be familiar with the concept of recording Photoshop Actions. These beautiful little tools allow you to literally record a macro (series of user actions) that can then be applied to the currently active document. Further, when combined with the “bulk” feature of Photoshop, you can apply this action to an entire directory and apply the action to each and every image, exporting the resulting image to a specified location as well. Overall, this is an extremely useful tool and can save minutes — if not hours — of work, but it has one tiny limitation that has been a bane to me for some time. When recording an action, you must specify either a height or a width on resize: there is no way to conditionally apply your length to the height OR width dependent upon ratio. Enter the Photoshop Script.
More »

So, when shooting all the other children, I was very easily able to select a shot out of the set, but with Rachel, there are actually three that turned out well. The first one here is the one I finally chose, but I’m posting the other two candidates as well.

More »

Early this week, I was able to get Sarah’s portrait for our wall. Now, just to re-take Rachel’s, and we’ll be ready to print!

My son is a ham — all the time. Considering this, you can imagine my joy when I saw how this picture turned out. I only had enough time to shoot a couple pictures of him on our way out the door, and it’s not often someone sees him with clean, ironed clothing and his hair in place, so I was quite excited when the stars aligned and this shot was pulled off the camera. This one will definitely be a family favorite for years to come:

My wife and I have finally decided upon a theme for portraits of our kids to hang on the wall. We purchased four very nice black frames with four inch white matting around an 8×8 inch square image area: one for each of our children. I’m going to do a black and white portrait of each of our kids and hang them in a simple grid on the wall. After shooting the first couple (starting from the youngest and working my way up), I’m quite excited at how they’re turning out. My wife is still not sold on the one of our two year old, because “her hair is not done”, but I still love the shot. I wanted to share these two, and I’ll post the others once I have them as well.
More »

Well, I am grateful and somewhat surprised that we are a week past the birth of our fourth child and I am just now writing my first post like this. Our middle two children (Benjamin is 5 and Rachel is 2) were riding quietly in the third row of our vehicle on the way home from the grocery store today, sharing some orange Tic Tacs our eldest had given Benjamin. Everything seemed to be going along swimmingly until we got home and unbuckled. I looked back, and in the shade of the car, it looked like Rachel had a bloody nose, but upon closer inspection, I realized the flow of liquid was orange.
More »

I seem to have discovered something that can be quite relaxing and a very nice change of pace from the rat race in which I find myself running every day. Baking is something I’ve always enjoyed, but recently, I’ve been really trying my hand at doing more than just pancakes and loaves of bread. While I’ve always tried to throw in the variety of a good yeast cinnamon roll from time to time, this past week has really been a fun one in the kitchen.
More »

So, my wife and I decided to go out for a nice lunch to celebrate our anniversary today, and we were quite shocked by the license plate we observed outside our restaurant of choice. Yes, I know we are in Washington state and it sometimes seems as if every other car you pass is a hybrid, but that doesn’t give you the right to go flaunting what it allows you to do while driving, does it? I mean, seriously. I must admit, while this license plate would be enough to make my children chortle if seen on any car, the fact it was positioned on a Prius raised the level of intelligence a tad — well, at least that’s the line I used to try and convince my wife why I was laughing.
More »

In one of the greatest discoveries of my web development career, I stumbled upon the Zen Coding Project the other day. This is an absolutely amazing project that allows for building robust and — more importantly — valid HTML markup with a fraction of the keystrokes. What’s more, this new method of writing the code uses CSS selectors for an extremely small learning curve. Rather than another language to learn, this little shorthand script is available as a plugin or macro for almost all major IDEs and text editors (Eclipse, NetBeans and even Notepad++ to name a few).
More »

So, after much anticipation, my wife finally delivered our new daughter at 1:31 this morning. Ruth Michelle came into the world weighing in at 8lbs 11oz and measuring a moderate 20.5 inches long. The shortest of our 4 children at birth, she boasts the heaviest weight, and she has gotten glowing reviews from all her health tests here in her first 12 hours of life. Thanks to all those of you who have been waiting patiently with us. We will be posting more pictures as time goes on, but here is one of her at 2-3 minutes old to end out this post.
More »