What is used to run the site?

All of Exitwound proper is based on a custom PHP/MySQL Content Management System that I wrote myself. The first version was created sometime around October 2002 and has been updated occasionally as needed (for example, most recently, the comments system was written and implemented on a Saturday in March 2004).

I made my own CMS because, at the time, none of the available packages offered “future publishing” (some might now, I don’t know). I wanted to be able to post in advance as opposed to a new post every night like I had been doing. I also wanted to learn PHP and MySQL, so a custom CMS was a good starter project. In the end, it worked out to a little more than 1,000 lines of PHP code.

For the curious, a screen shot of the CMS’s main page is available.

I have no plans to distribute the code or make the code available to anybody other than myself.

Do you edit the photos?

Sort of. Level adjustments are made to almost all photos. Sometimes white balance is played with. Photos do get cropped, if necessary. That’s about it. I never add anything to a photo that isn’t already there and I never take out anything that I think shouldn’t be there. Oh. All of this sort-of editing is done in Photoshop CS, with my Cinema HD Display calibrated to 2.2 gamma.

Do you shoot JPEG or Camera RAW?

RAW. I shot JPEG when I was still getting the hang of the 10D, but eventually switched to Camera RAW.

As far as my RAW workflow goes, Canon’s File Viewer Utility is incredibly slow, and Adobe Photoshop CS’s RAW plugin, while faster than FVU, has some color and noise issues, so I use David Coffin’s dcraw command line utility to convert selected CRW files to non-linear PSDs, then use Fred Miranda’s 10D Profiler Photoshop actions to get those non-linear files to a workable state.

It’s a too-complicated process, for sure, but high quality files make it worth the trouble. Besides, I wrote some custom PHP scripts to help automate the process. (The scripts are written for the command line version of PHP, which is standard as of Mac OS 10.3.)

I use the expensive but unmatched iView Media Pro for cataloging.

I sent you an email. How come you didn’t write back?

I use KnowSpam to help prevent spam. If requires people to click a link after an email is sent to me. If that link (sent in a follow up email) isn’t clicked, I won’t get the email. Sometimes (especially for people who use Yahoo!’s web mail) that email containing the link will be marked as spam itself and won’t get delivered. If you think that has happened to you, leave a comment (with a valid email address) on one of the photos with your question and I’ll get back to you.

Of course, it’s quite possible that I got your email and haven’t gotten around to writing back yet. If you went through the trouble of emailing me and doing the KnowSpam bullshit but didn’t get a response, I apologize. Odds are you email is still in my inbox, waiting.