Chinese White Jade Carving

By RP Birt | Published: March 11, 2010

Another of my ‘monitor stand buddies’. Probably carved in the mid 1800’s from nephrite jade…

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Matchbox Toys in lightbox-comparing image sizes

By RP Birt | Published: February 24, 2010

Rather than using the ‘link to source picture/original’ setting which posts at around 1 meg (from a 2.5 mg original file), the images have all been set to link to a ‘large’ 1200px format … the difference in the formats can really not be seen in the lightbox and it serves out at 245kb which is less than 10% of the original file… quite a bit of savings without a sacrifice in quality.

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Why 1200px as a new standard? Well, it seems that I have added a 24" monitor to my 19" monitor … and 1200px seems to be the best setting.

Hmm… I wonder if I should be renaming my site; My 43" Universe? Can’t imagine what life was like before dual monitors… :)

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Formatting for Lightbox and WordPress

By RP Birt | Published: February 19, 2010

We are getting close to going live with the new WordPress platform for the PrivateCollection PhotoBlog. One of the last steps is to make sure that the formatting of posts … especially those that are not using tables anymore … is consistent between different browsers.

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This is another grouping of three images using the new format with a neck form shot and two table shots.

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Left: no custom margins,  0px 0px 0px 25px; display: inline, 5px 0px 0px 19px; display: inline;

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Eliminating Tables in WordPress

By RP Birt | Published: February 18, 2010

Now that we have lightbox working… using a new format with a major shot and then a grouping of smaller sized images will still give the reader full images for all of them…

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In the past I would have used a table to drop the photos into… but this seems to causing a lot of inconsistency between different browsers … especially with Chrome which renders the same way as Safari….

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This layout uses the alignment settings in the advanced photo settings in Live Writer… with custom margins…

In a long post, another grouping of images might possibly be required…

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This creates a group of 6 images for lightbox….

This would be a good format for the bead necklaces with a neck form and then 2 table shots.

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Image Resizing with Live Writer

By admin | Published: February 14, 2010

These images range from 2-3 mgs… definitely too large for the web… one can use XnView to do batch resizing but often it is nice to be able to just drag and drop an image file into the publisher… I think this is where Live Writer is really great.

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A 4416×3312px image published at 500px with an enlargement of 1200px

and

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A 2734×1951px image  published at 250px with an enlargement of 1024px with very little degradation.

Both original images are published to the server between 14-15 thousand bytes. Quite a time saver! Great quality.

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Chinese 19th century Carved Jade Lock Revisited

By RP Birt | Published: February 13, 2010

Photographing jade is always a challenge. It is difficult to capture the ‘life’ that is there. Normally, I wouldn’t include my fingers in a shoot… but with this piece it was easier to tilt the object than the camera. I had originally photographed this 19th century Nephrite Chinese lock for PrivateCollection’s 07-04-11 blog but I was never happy with the photos… I am glad I had a second chance.

Now that lightbox is installed on the site, I can use a mixture of different sizes of images in the layout but when lightbox is launched, all of the images are grouped together by lightbox into one enlarged presentation …. give it a try … click on any image!

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It really adds flexibility for layouts and impact to the photos.

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On Becoming a Google-Blogger Refugee

By admin | Published: February 11, 2010

I am feeling pretty naked out here with this new ‘minimalism’ template… the image below is what I am used to seeing this on site…. published by FTP using Live Writer through the Blogger API. I was originally with BlogSpot before the Google takeover … advised folks that this was the way to go for content management … no data base to maintain and comment spam to contend with… and since Live Writer plays so nice with Blogger… hey, life was good! Had a lots of plans for the winter!

My 19 Universe- China Straits Silver Dragon Bracelets

Until I received an email on February 2nd from Google telling me that I was one of the .5% user base for Blogger that uses FTP publishing and that I had until March 29th to migrate all of my sites to their server. I really hadn’t planned on spending days and days of setting up MySQL data bases …migrating sites OR having to spend unbudgeted funds for a senior developer create new templates and themes for  an established site …. PrivateCollection  (in both English and Chinese) that has many links to other sites and is highly indexed by search engines… no that was not in the plan…

Not that they didn’t offer any options… but at the end of the day there was really no choice… Blogger.com like YouTube or Picasa just happens to be blocked in China and other places in the world… and a high percentage of our readership resides there… BUT and it is a big …BUT  it was the really outrageous spin Google put on it and the total  lack of consideration… that made the whole affair distasteful. In essence,  they were saying to users… you have less than 60 days … our way or the highway!!!

There is no such thing as a free service when one deals with Google… they are in the information business and whenever someone uses their service, Google gains more information… that is an exchange of value… but what was even more highlighted was the risk that someone takes when they enter into that relationship with Google (or other potential cloud-providers) … what if we did migrate to Blogger’s server and one day they said; "sorry… good-bye!"

The loss is not the content… that is backed up locally… it is the search rankings and the indexing and the URL’s … years spent in establishing a presence… it seems the ‘Non-Evil-Empire’ wants to own (control) your domain too!

I was/am one of the lucky ones… years spent in putting together Open Source Software Suites with the ZedFiles Project… knowing how to set up XAMPP and a dev bed to test and migrate to WordPress… having an ISP that keeps its data base and PHP up to date … being able to hack a simple template and set up some permalinks…

So, maybe now that the rant is over and some of that anger has been hosed out into cyberspace, I can spend a bit of time helping some of the other refugees by at least giving some tips and sharing how we are making the conversion.

That means that I won’t have the time to port my old template over to WordPress… but hey, I am getting used to this one already!!

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Testing Live Writer

By admin | Published: February 11, 2010

Using the FTP setting for the image and the remote publishing feature setting… this should upload an image to the photo directory in a sub folder and publish the static page to the correct sub directory.

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then I will add another image

 

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China Straits Silver Dragon Bracelets

By admin | Published: February 3, 2010

These dragon bracelets were a lot of fun to photograph…they were made by Chinese artisans probably in either Singapore or Malaya… so they are classified as “Straits” … I am not sure if they will make it to the PrivateCollection Blog but I just couldn’t let them stay on the hard drive… way too much heat!!

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This first one I captioned; “Step on it… they’re gaining on us!”

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“Geez, I love spring break!”

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“Next time let me do the talking… OK?”

Maybe if they can get their act together, they will make it to the blog!
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Chinese Jade Goats

By admin | Published: February 2, 2010

Sitting on my monitor stand keeping me company all day…. wonderful to look at… wonderful to hold!

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Happy 2010

By RP Birt | Published: January 3, 2010

Western New Year…in Canada it is time to start putting a new date on everything… update the copyrights and recover from the ‘holiday’ …

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09-02-10_中国银＂水果拼盘＂式手镯

By admin | Published: December 1, 2009

＂TUTTI FRUTTI＂是意大利语＂所有的水果＂的意思。这个词用于描述一种由切碎的的水果制成的甜点或者混色的果浆。你们中的有些人大概能想起猫王录制了一首同名的歌。他甚至有一个＂女孩名叫苏＂（至少是在歌里）。

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珠宝收藏家用＂Tutti Frutti＂这个词来描述看起来让人眼花撩乱的首饰，比如说这个手镯。打磨光滑的碧玺， 蓝宝，玫瑰色石英，水晶和红宝围绕着中间绿色的翡翠，这些宝石镶嵌在装饰着花朵的由鎏金银丝编织成的三块巨大的镯片上。估计制作于一九零零到一九一零年之间。

这个手镯有很多地方与我在二零零七年六月在相片书中提到过的＂中国多宝出口项链＂相象。 

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许多二十世纪的珠宝设计师设计过＂水果拼盘＂式的首饰，但是公认的这种式样是卡地亚创造的（他们甚至为此申请了专利）。卡地亚的网站上说是一九二五年的东方行中看见的雕刻宝石激发了卡地亚的灵感，从那时起他开始＂将普通宝石制作成惊人美丽的多彩的作品＂。

卡地亚甚至用珍贵宝石来制作这种式样的首饰。二零零八年十一月，一个卡地亚Tutti Frutti手镯在日内瓦卖到十九万美元。不过拍卖记录是二零零五年一个＂超级卡地亚Tutti Frutti 手镯＂创造的，卖到超过一百万美元。

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如果说珠宝是女人灵魂的食物，这个绝对是甜品！

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Somba…

By RP Birt | Published: November 19, 2009
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Just couldn’t resist!

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Chinese Rock Crystal Art Deco Beads

By admin | Published: September 24, 2008

These rock crystal beads are early 20th century. Most of the Chinese beads I have written about were carved in the 18th or 19th century…those beads are carved, pierced and reticulated… spherical… because the necklaces were created with beads from Mandarin Court strings.

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This [length] necklace was made for the Western market…the beads are graduated in size from (x to y) a style that became popular c. 1920-1930…  carved with the Shou symbol and another I am not familiar with… pure elegance.

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Rock crystal is a member of the quartz family…related to rose quartz, smoky quartz and amethyst. It was used for decorative carving in ancient Egypt and Persia…in the 14th to 17th century it became popular among the European Aristocracy …it became popular again in the early 20th century when it was used for beads in famous ‘pools of light’ necklaces.

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The simplicity of the carving has a distinctly art deco feel. In 1925, the Exposition of International Decorative Arts and Modern Industry was held in Paris. It was a turning point in the history of modern design in the western world. The ‘Art Deco’ movement rejected the serpentine lines of Art Noveau and embraced a cleaner more geometric style.

One of the most influential jewelers in Paris at that time was Cartier …Louis Cartier created some of his most famous Art Deco designs using Chinese carved stones and rock crystal collected on trips to the orient.

Photos of the Cartier Oriental pieces can be seen in the book "Cartier" by Hans Nadelhoffer.

The book is amazing…took my breath away… probably the most beautiful jewelry book I have ever seen… and I have seen many. I own 100’s.

Visit PrivateCollection’s PictureBook to see additional photos… many in larger formats.

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King Fisher Dragon

By admin | Published: January 30, 2008

After spending so much time photographing reflective and often colour morphing jade, it is nice to have a new medium to play with. This is an example of a King Fisher finish…done with powder from the birds feathers…

 

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