These Immortals are from a silk and paper screen that was hand painted…. it is one of the most colorful depictions i have seen.There is a good explanation of the the eight immortals here,

These were shot for the PrivateCollection Blog… there is just something special about them…. Fodouda (Buddha’s Head) beads are unique in their shape … completing the circle of the necklace and joining the counter weight ….

Some mornings it just takes me a while to become cute…  but after a couple of tries… I’m good to go!

These 13 huge 22mm ( 28mm with stems) silver beads, each with 2 three claw dragons were not around very long… I would have liked to have had more time to work with them. There was something special in the way that they felt and the sounds they made when they would ‘rattle’ together… perhaps I should have shot a video rather than stills to get the full effect!

These carved jade beads were probably from a Mandarin Court necklace… the large 28mm Head Bead had so much character that it seemed to be looking into the camera.

A lot of my time is spent photographing various types of beads… the Chinese were amazing at creating things out of glass… often combining other elements such as knotting or jade links… the challenge is always to try to present what is really a repetitive element in an interesting way…

I suppose that he would have to show up sometime… there is only so much Chinese jewelry… but an unlimited amount of him…

a beautiful piece to photograph….

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 …It really adds flexibility for layouts and impact to the photos!

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I spent a lot of time with this badger…. he was very elusive and at first did not want to be photographed on a dark background … but he had so much character and like the jade monkey, he had a way of looking into the camera … so I stayed with it and finally he agreed to have his portrait taken.

It seems that My 19" Universe has become my PhotoBlog… a place to share some of the images that are special to me… as I spend more and more of my time with the photography…

just the gang waiting around for their turn… while the boys are mugging the camera….

I am feeling pretty naked out here with this new ‘minimalism’ template… the image above 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!

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!!