My son doesn’t like to have his picture taken so I’m not sure how I got this one or why he cooperated, but I like the way it turned out.

Mr. B. by Ryan Wentzel

I made a quick trip to Coronado Island tonight to capture the San Diego skyline before it began to rain. I was able to snap a few shots before having to pack up to get out of the rain.

San Diego Skyline Before the Rain by Ryan Wentzel

I discovered a great spot last weekend. It’s buried in inland North County and provides wonderful views of both the coast and the mountains to the east. I didn’t have my camera with me, but thankfully the spot is only 10 minutes from my home so I went back today to see if I could get some good shots.

San Diego Sunset by Ryan Wentzel

In the center of the photo is one of the last major ridge lines you encounter when looking west from this spot. On the other side of the ridge is the City of Carlsbad and then off in the distance is the Pacific Ocean.

Recently I wrote about a problem I had with the Flash-based media uploader that is bundled with WordPress. The fix for the problem wasn’t very obvious, but it was fairly easy to resolve.

Yesterday I noticed that the uploader was again not working. This time, however, I was able to use the browser-based uploader which led me to suspect there was an issue with my Flash player installation. As I thought about the situation I recalled that I upgraded my Flash player to version 10 a few days before. After a quick Google search I learned that there is an issue with the latest version of the Flash player that causes problems with the WordPress media uploader (see this post in the WordPress forums).

So what’s the solution? Well, I could continue to use the browser-based uploader or downgrade to the previous version of Flash. I decided to go with the second option. Adobe provides downloads of older version of Flash on their site (link). Unfortunately, the downloads are geared toward developers who need to test their applications on different platforms so the size of the zip file is quite large.

After installing version 9 of Flash for both Internet Explorer and Firefox I verified that the media uploader was indeed working by uploading the screenshot below.

Screenshot of Ryan Wentzel Photography viewed in Firefox

Here’s a recap of what to do if you’ve upgraded to Flash Player 10 and can no longer use the WordPress media uploader.

1. Uninstall Flash Player 10 and the Active X control if you’re using Windows.
2. Download version 9 here.
3. Adobe recommends that you reboot your computer before re-installing Flash.
4. Reinstall Flash Player 9.

After reinstalling version 9 you should be able to use the media uploader in WordPress once again.

This photo has been on my Flickr photostream for a long time, but I did some more post processing this time around.

San Diego Skyline at Dawn by Ryan Wentzel

I think I prefer this version. The colors are more vibrant whereas the version on Flickr seems a little dull. If you’re interested in more skyline shots of San Diego be sure to check out the photo I took at twilight.

Photoshop Insider featured a guest post today by Dan Steinhardt that discusses how he rediscovered his passion for photography. The post includes some of Dan’s photos as well so be sure to check it out.

Note: Although this is a photoblog and as such the focus is on photos and photography I figured that occasional posts on issues related to creating a photoblog would be helpful to some of my readers.

While creating this photoblog I did some reading on SEO and one of the topics that came up was URL canonicalization. A canonical URL is the official URL for a given web page. For example, the preferred URL for this blog is http://ryanwentzelphotography.com/blog/. Notice there’s no “www” prefix in the URL. There’s also a “/” at the end of the URL. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t get to this blog using something like “http://www.ryanwentzelphotography.com/blog” or “http://ryanwentzelphotography.com/blog”, but for search engine indexing and Google pagerank it’s best to have one URL for each item on your site.

I can control all of the links on my site, but what about external sites? I can’t ensure that others will link to the official URL for the items on Ryan Wentzel Photography. This is where URL rewriting using htaccess comes in to play. I pieced together a few rewrite rules on my own, but after I found a post by Jeff Star entitled Comprehensive URL Canonicalization via htaccess for WordPress-Powered Sites I went with his recommendations and they’ve been working well so far. Jeff’s article is clear, descriptive, and provides a few helpful examples to get you going with URL canonicalization for your WordPress site.

Oktoberfest in Julian, CA means good food, good music, and fun times with the family.

Oktoberfest Band by Ryan Wentzel

Heading to Julian for the annual Oktoberfest celebration has become a bit of a tradition in our family. This time I had my camera with me and was able to capture some of the scenes.

Though it’s only a few miles from where I live, Ramona, California feels like a much different world. There are lots of open spaces and seemingly empty roads.

Roadside by Ryan Wentzel

This is a scene you wouldn’t encounter too often in the urban-suburbia I live in.

Julian, California is a small, historic town located about an hour’s drive northeast of San Diego. It’s famous for its apples and apple pie.

Julian Apples by Ryan Wentzel

Tourists such as myself can pay to walk through an orchard and pick apples. This group of apples had already fallen from the tree. Some had even begun to rot. I thought the subtle differences in shades of red and varying freshness of the apples made for an interesting shot.