SITE CONSTRUCTION

Photography:

The majority of the pictures on here at this point were taken with a Canon Digital Rebel, a digital SLR. I've been happy with it, though at this point it's starting to show its age (2 years old is ancient, these days). I've used a number of different lenses, including:

* The Digital Rebel's kit lens, a 18-55mm f5.6 or so zoom lens. For its price (cheap) this is a pretty capable lens. However, it's a slow lens that gives poor resolution towards the corners under many circumstances and will sometimes give color fringing.
* Sigma 105mm f2.8 EF macro lens. This is the lens I use the most, and I've been very happy with it. The finish on mine is flaking off, but that doesn't really matter. It takes good pictures and is cheaper (though possibly slightly better optically) than the Canon equivalent. I had a Sigma 50mm f2.8 EF macro lens earlier, but the shorter focal length made it much less useful.
* Canon 28mm f2.8 lens. I used this on a lot of landscape stuff until I dropped it down a lava crack at the Grants Malpais. Oops. It was a good lens and I might end up getting another.
* Canon 24mm f2.8 lens. I got this as a replacement for the Canon 28mm, figuring the slightly wider field of view was worth a little more money. I've been quite happy with it.
* Canon 50mm f1.8 lens. I got this because I figured I ought to have a good 50mm lens. I haven't had it long, but it seems like an excellent lens for the price and I've been happy with pictures from it so far.

Some other things I use include:

* Canon 420EX Speedlite. A good all-purpose flash. It doesn't do some of the fancier things for using multiple flashes and so forth that more expensive flashes can do, but I haven't found this to be a limitation. I usually use it with a hotshoe cord so I can move it around. I've thought about getting some sort of nifty bracket to hold it where I want it, but so far the weight and expense haven't seemed worth it.
* Slik Sprint tripod. A small, lightweight tripod. I got this model because it seemed to be the only one that would allow very low pictures (the head resting practically on the ground) as well as moderately high pictures, without being prohibitively expensive or complicated. It could use a stronger ball head and it lost one of its feet (lava and camera equipment don't really get along), but other than that I've been happy with it.
* Adobe Photoshop CS2. I've also used several other versions. This is the program I use for all of my digital photo editing. It took a while to learn how to use it to its full potential (I learned by the "let's try buttons and see what happens" approach), but it does pretty much everything I'd want.

Web Hosting:

This site has always been hosted on Macintosh computers running OS X, using the Apache web hosting software that comes with OS X.

The primary stable domain for the site is polyploid.net. The site was originally hosted from two servers at Indiana University (bee.bio.indiana.edu and lucerne.bio.indiana.edu), since moved or defunct. The current computer was previously reachable at boechera.nmsu.edu, but due to various technical problems ended up moving to boechera2.nmsu.edu. I also own the domain names hexaploid.com, newmexicoflora.com, indianaflora.com, and organmountainsflora.com. The first takes you to the main site, the next two take you to the plant pages indicated, and the last is the future home of an interactive online flora for the Organ Mountains to be created at some indefinite point in the future.
Site Construction:

Most portions of this web site were constructed by hand using pico or emacs under Mac OS X. I mostly use pico, but sometimes emacs is more convenient. Web galleries are constructed in Adobe Photoshop and then modified by hand and with batch modifications.
HTML by hand:

Basic html tags for images, links, etc., are easy to memorize. If I want to do something more complicated I'll look for a web page that does what I want to do and then figure out what html it's using to accomplish this, or look for useful html information through Indiana University's Knowledge Base, a compendium of technical support documents. For instance, the Knowledge Base is how I know how to create client-side image maps for the scenery maps (e.g., this one for Lincoln Co., New Mexico) on the site.
Adobe Photoshop:

Photoshop was used to create all of the galleries on this site. For this, I use Photoshop's "simple" gallery style and have it insert an image file's title or caption to provide information about the individual images. After construction in Photoshop I modify the galleries by hand (e.g., to insert the links to other pages of the gallery and to higher levels of the website that you can see at the top of each gallery page) and with batch modification using this method (for instance, in order to modify the color-based southwestern plant galleries so that the links direct you to the species' page rather than to the page Photoshop created for that image).

Errors:

As some of you may have noticed, there are a number of broken links, missing images, or other errors scattered throughout the site. If you notice any of these, please email me (paalexan@nmsu.edu) and let me know. Obviously I want the site to be in good shape, but I also don't generally have time to sit around clicking on things to make sure everything works