After a nasty episode which I still haven't figured out, my site is mostly up on its feet again. I had to manually cleanup a bunch of old posts, and reupload a ton of existing content, including nearly every Quicktime VR on my site. I now have a nice daily backup plan in place, so it was a good learning experience (and reminder of what I forgot to re-implement when I moved to my new server last year!).

I'll be back to new content in a few days once I get the last couple fixes in place. I also put into place a new mechanism for preventing people on MySpace from embedding my content directly in their pages from here - a scan through my logs showed me that half my traffic was actually just my images being presented on people's MySpace profiles without any credit or thanks to me, so I've shut them out. This means, though, that they are more likely now to just copy the image to their own server, so I won't even find out now when I'm not getting credit! So I also implemented a less desirable new process whereby all images that might be of interest beyond my little world will be watermarked with a big "Copyright 2006, Roger Howard" notice. I hope it's not too obnoxious.. a sample here:

Watermarked sample

Is that really distracting? Offensive? Feedback appreciated.

Italy pics are finally up! It's taken a lot more time than I hoped, and I've not been without distractions, but I thought I'd post a link to my pictures from Italy since I've already shared the link with some people anyhow. I have a gallery for panoramas from each day in Italy, as well as a gallery of normal photographs for each city.

There are two types of panoramas posted - interactive, which require Quicktime to view, and flat, which require Flash.

Enjoy!

Last weekend we went out to Tehachapi, where Julia's parents have a home, for the annual Tehachapi Mountain Festival and the Tehachapi Rodeo. I've never been to a rodeo before and had only a vague idea of what to expect. It was a fascinating experience, in many ways not at all fitting my preconceptions. For the most part, I think notions of animal abuse are at least overstated - I certainly don't think the majority of the audience was there with a thirst for abuse - by and large it was a macho sporting event, and the animals were treated as well as could be expected. In any case it was an excellent event to shoot with my new Canon 70-200mm f2.8 L lens, and we had a lot of fun and only a little discomfort.

I've posted two galleries - a complete gallery with lots of shots from the weekend, and a gallery of selects.