General "Blooming Today" Information

I thought you might get a kick out of a technology discovery I made.

As some of you may know, I was a photography major in college. Some of the things that I NEVER photographed were flowers or beautiful landscapes or other things like that because the photograph never did justice to the real thing. Because I also like to garden, I sometimes want to share pictures of my flowers with friends and relatives, but as mentioned previously, I never really like the images so I rarely share them. Last year I bought a digital camcorder as part of my family history project. The camcorder also has still digital image capability but it’s not very good and I don’t like the quality so I rarely use it as a digital camera.

A friend of mine (Mary Groft) gave me a Garden Journal as a gift so I decided to use it this summer. One of the recommendations is to document the garden as it changes with photographs. Well, I didn’t want to spend money on film and processing so I figured the digital camcorder would be OK for this. The camera does not allow you to manually focus or set the exposure so basically I am at the mercy of the camera. By playing around with it I discovered what it is really good at: doing extreme close-ups. Pictures of people or scenes or anything further away look funky, but for some reason, a macro shot looks pretty damn good. Another advantage of this type of camera is that some of the shots I have been taking would be next to impossible to take cause the plants are really low to the ground or whatever, so I use the LCD panel to compose the shot and never have to be near the camera.

Though my yard is really small and doesn’t really have a lot growing in it, the pictures I have been taking makes it look like I have some really incredible exotic plants, when in actual fact, if you came into my yard you might not even notice that they’re even there.

So I created a really simple web site (as suggested by my brother-in-law, Don) that I share with family and friends. For the first time ever, I am pleased with my flower pictures and now I have a use for the digital camera in my camcorder.

Funny, huh?

The camcorder/digital camera is a JVC GR-DVL9800U.
There are no specs regarding the megapixels since it is a camcorder.
I take the pictures at 640 x 480 yielding an average file size of 160 KB. The camera can also take pictures at 1024 x 768.
I recently discovered that it does have manual focus capability which I rarely use.

I realize that there is some confusion about the relationship between the email notifications and the web site, so here's an explanation of how the web site works:

Let me compare it to, let's say, a bulletin board in a school cafeteria. Every day, I take a picture of a flower that's blooming in my garden and tack it to the bulletin board. I send friends a message informing them that, for example, Today, June 13, I have posted a picture on the bulletin board and to go to the cafeteria if you want to see it. The next day, June 14, I take down the picture that I posted on June 13, tack up a new picture on the bulletin board, and send everyone a message that I have posted a new picture. If you didn't make it down to the cafeteria on June 13 but go to check on June 14, the picture from June 13 won't be there anymore, only the picture for June 14.

I realize that not everyone can make it down to the cafeteria every single day to see the picture that is tacked up that day. That is why I created the Archives. When I take down yesterday's picture, I put a small copy of it in monthly photo albums that sit on a shelf below the bulletin board. So let's say you were on vacation for a whole week, you can go down to the cafeteria, see the picture tacked on the bulletin board for that day, but then you can pick up the photo album and see all of the pictures you missed the past week.

That's how my web site works. I hope it all makes sense.

1. All flowers posted on this site MUST be growing in my garden.

2. All photos MUST be used straight out of the camera - no manipulation or editing.