Aaron Barker’s Photoblog

I have been wanting to update the look of my blog forever, but just never got around to it. After posting pictures of the holi festival I got lots of great comments on the photos, but thought they could have been shown of so much better.

I have been a long time fan of the big picture blog over at boston.com. They post a few times a week on various interesting subjects. But the best part are the… BIG PICTURES.  They display their photos at a glorious 990 pixels wide. So different from most other blogs.  You really get to dig into the detail of the amazing photos.  So I decided to take my cue from them and change my layout to show bigger pictures.

I moved all the stuff that was in the side column down to the very bottom as that wasn’t what you are here for anyway. I took that extra space and added a little more and am now proudly showing my photos off at 900px wide.  Sure it’s not the full 990 that Big Picture does, but it’s still pretty dang big and gives me a little room to have some fun with the design.

The web designer (and geek) in me had fun using some fun new features that the good browsers are starting to support.  I say good, because if you are looking at the site in Internet Explorer you are missing out on a few of the niceties. I won’t get on my soapbox about why IE sucks at this time, but do us all a favor and stop using it… m’kay?

I know I don’t post that often, and there are many better photographers out there (see my blogroll at the bottom of the screen for several)… but for the little I do post, I hope you enjoy the new format of seeing the bigger photos.

I have updated the holi festival post to use the larger photos, and may go back to others from the past to update them as well.  The photos in this post are selections from the past in their new bigger format.

To more easily navigate the photos you can press your J and K keys to go down and up respectively, jumping to the next or previous photo.  Kind of weird keys to use, but that is what a number of sites are already using (Google Reader, Big Picture) so thought I would follow suit.

I’m sure I have the occasional bug to fix here and there, but hopefully I’ll get to them… sometime this year.

Canon 40D, EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM, 1/800, f/6.3, 200 mm, ISO 100

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to go out and take some pics (the broken glass situation was naturally a fluke). So it was great to get out and take some pics at the Hill AFB Air Show.

I missed a few cool things while taking my son around to see some stuff, but that is also where I was doing my best work (being a Dad). I did get to see plenty of fun things though, and it was well worth the long drive, sunburns, and traffic to get out.

Hill Air Force Base Air Show 2009 Full set

More favs:

I’ve spent the past few months tinkering with several different designs for my LDS Temple Photography site.  I never really bonded with any of them until this last version.

Decently inspired by Scott Jarvie’s blog (which in turn is a wordpress theme), I have hopefully changed it enough to make it my own.  My site is not based on wordpress so the code is all my own and I rebuilt the layout myself.  So while it’s visually similar, it was rebuilt from the ground up to work with my different columns, widths and desired colors (I read there was a psd avaialable AFTER I was all done *sigh*).

Anyway, I think this new design provides a much more elegant feel to the site then the temporary site that was up previously, and speaks more to the subject matter.  Hopefully others enjoy it as well.

Canon 40D, EFS 28-135 IS, 1/100, f/7.1, 28mm, ISO 640

This was probably my favorites picture from spending three mornings at the Provo Freedom Festival Balloon Fest this year. We had a great time as always and this year was extra awesome  But I will share those details in an upcoming post.  For now here are a few more pics.

All my pics from this year, with a sneak preview of the awesomeness that occured.

Minolta DiMAGE Z1, 1/250, f/5, 26 mm, ISO 50

From the Provo Freedom Festival in 2005.  I love the 4th of July festivities and can’t wait to get out and take thousands of pictures of hot air balloons and fireworks.  That is if we aren’t having a kid