Today was another Maine Photography Meetup (or at Facebook). Like the last one I attended, the conditions were ideal: the temperatures climbed into the 60 °F range. Remember, it’s November in Maine!

As is usual, the girls and I got to spend time with old friends and make some new ones. We hiked down Scarborough Beach and then along the cliffs of Prout’s Neck Bird Sanctuary. And back.

After our long hike we enjoyed brunch at The Good Table in Cape Elizabeth. It was incredible. My $6 mug of hot apple cider with rum was worth every penny! Hayley’s $2.25 bottle of “real” maple syrup…not so much.

Dune grass preservation at Scarborough Beach, Maine

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This morning the Maine Photography Meetup Group met at Evergreen Cemetery in Portland. The weather couldn’t have been better: clear sunny skies, falling colorful leaves and lots of dew. It was great to see old friends and meet new people.

Second Coming of Christ

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From xkcd. This is great!

xkcd: Fall Foliage

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This is one of the most popular photos in my Flickr photostream, so I thought I’d share it with you, too. It made it all the way to the #1 spot in Flickr’s Explore (March 22, 2008), an index of interestingness.

Please leave a comment.

My SB600 speedlight was next to the puzzle at lower left.

The photo from which the puzzle was made

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Today I went on a cruise in Casco Bay to Long Island with the girls and a few friends I met on Flickr. It was a great time! I can’t wait to do it again in the summer.

A Cruise To Long Island
Brent Danley, Danler.org, February 16, 2009

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Doug Mills / The New York Times

Doug Mills / The New York Times

I’d love to have all that gear and be part of the White House Press Corps. Every moment must be captured for a frenzied twenty-four hour cut-throat news cycle.

This is the pen and executive order Obama would sign on his first full day as President.

I’d be the guy with the jacket and jeans. Doesn’t the guy on the left look like a younger Bill Gates?

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Jason Gendron and I went to Cape Cod, Massachusetts yesterday to photograph lighthouses. It was an awesome day!

I met Jason at five o’clock for breakfast at Station House Grill in Hollis, Maine, where he works weekend mornings. He cooked our breakfast, which was delicious.

After breakfast we drove to East Boston Piers Park where we photographed the early morning Boston skyline. The temperatures were frigid and wind brisk. We wasted no time getting our shots so we could return to the warm car. Next we drove to the north side of the Charles River to photograph the city. Unfortunately the sun was too high and directly in front of us. Not wanting to miss any daylight photography opportunities we immediately headed south to Cape Cod.

Boston skyline from East Boston Piers Park

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Yesterday was a slow day at work. So I took a few pictures of myself.

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Brent Danley Photography has been ajaxified!

**The new url is photography.brentdanley.com.**

The “pages” in the gallery have previously been generated by a single PHP file. This was done by passing to itself a page parameter using the get method. This worked well except that the entire page, including images and linked scripts, had to be reloaded every time the user clicked to go to a “new” page. It was certainly better than creating a separate document for each set of thumbnails, though, even if the header and footer were reused. It made little difference to the user who doesn’t know, and probably doesn’t care, how the page is created. An asynchronous transfer would be an improvement the user would notice.

What I did today was eliminate the necessity of the page reload.

Now, using Prototype’s Ajax.Updater method, a PHP script is passed a page value corresponding the the link on which the user clicked. The PHP script retrieves the thumbnail and image information from the Flickr API using phpFlickr and returns an XHTML string to the calling method on the client. The return string from the PHP script is automatically inserted into the client element specified in the Updater’s url parameter.

function updateGallery(page){	
	new Ajax.Updater('gallery', 'ajax_gallery.php', 
		{method: 'get', 
		parameters: 'page=' + page});
}

I also performed some CSS jujitsu to animate the thumbnails when the user passes the mouse pointer over them. It was as simple as increasing the size of the images and reducing (to -1px) the size of the margins.

#gallery  a:hover .thumb{
	background-color:#888;
	width:85px;
	height:85px;
	border:6px double #003e7c;
	margin:-1px;
	padding:0;
}

Go have a look.

It still takes some time to load each new set of thumbnails. Besides caching, I’m not sure what could be done to remedy that. I’d also like for the navigation links to be better looking buttons or tabs or an accordion. And the return from the Updater call should probably return an XML document. Another day, perhaps.

Let me know what you think.

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Yesterday I went on a photo shoot with Jason Pooler down to Cape Neddick Light and Route One. It was fun to hang out with Jason and see some of my favorite places again. He brought two of his kids and I had the girls.

Thanks, Jason. I had a great time!

Donation lighthouse at Marginal Way

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