Sadly the end of the macro course, but lots to practice at home.
And next term back for another course. More about that in due time. Also to keep my busy there is the Lighting 102 on the Strobist blog starting in June, and preparation for the Swallowfield Show in August.
There is a lot of excitement/noise/fud/heat about Web 2.0 and RIA these days.
Life on the web used to be simple. (Order of events that follows is probably incorrect).
There was HTML. HTML was good. Web browsers on may different platforms (Un*x, Windows, Mac, VMS, etc) could display the information.
Then (a long time ago) someone added forms capability to HTML - this meant that you could interact with a web site and send it data. HTML became standardised - it wasn’t owned by any particular profit making organisation. Anyone could use it.
Then someone added Applets - little applications that could run inside your web browser. These were slow and required proprietary software (now open source), but the software was free and could run on lots of different platforms.
Then someone added security - your communication with the web server could be encrypted. E-commerce was born.
Then someone re-invented Applets and called them ActiveX. These required propriety software and only really worked on the Windows platform.
Then someone added Javascript allowing simple programs to be embedded in web pages. This because a standard and was called ECMAscript. It could run on lots of platforms.
Then someone invented style sheets. HTML got more complicated, but could do more and looked prettier and still could run on lots of platforms.
Then someone invented XML and XSLT - allowing data to be represented as structured text and viewed in different ways. Things started to get more complicated, but sill was free to run on lots of platforms.
Then someone allowed Javascript to make asynchronous calls back to the web server. AJAX was born, and so was Web 2.0 and RIA (Rich Internet Applications).
Then people saw dollar signs and threw away standards that run on lots of platforms, and now we have three competing technologies to take Web 2.0 on to the next level:
It looks like the web is no longer going to be based on standards, but on competing proprietary technologies.
Time will tell where we end up. I expect eventually someone will see how complex things have got and re-invent the wheel HTML claiming it to be a great new idea.
This week playing with a light box and also doing some experiments with a studio flash and a softbox.
The light box was “daylight” balanced, however there were fluorescent and tungsten lights around the room that may have interfered now and then. I generally used an exposure that was 2 stops overexposed judging by the camera’s light meter.
-
This picture I did hand-held without a flash:
These used the studio flash and softbox:
-
 |
Yesterday I got a suprise parcel at work. I’ve won an iPod nano! I don’t often (i.e. ever) win anything. I got this pod by dropping off my business card at the Citrix stand at Infosec last week. So the day at the trade show was worth it, although I’m now expecting hundreds of calls from sales people trying to get me to buy products that I’m not interested in. |
I also entered a competition to win a Nintendo Wii. Still haven’t heard about that one. Must be stuck in the post.
More playing with liquids and food colouring this week. This one was a bit hit-and-miss.
The set up was a camera on a tripod with a Speedlite flash set on “multi” or “strobe” setting. Camera was ISO 100, 125th second, and f/16. Shutter was set to continuous shoot. My camera only manages 3 frames per second, and doesn’t have a very big buffer before it has to write to the memory card.
The liquid was milk with food colouring in it. Drips were allowed to fall by turning a tap on some glass equipment that looked liked it came out of a school’s chemistry lab.
I took nearly 300 photos but still not satisfied with the results.
Later on a played around with a studio light and softbox to take some pictures of shells. I’ll try and get a bit more arty next week.
What fun you can have with some water, food colouring, glue, a light and a camera!
A useful technique that I have recently discovered for improving my portrait photos (and others) is the use of “levels” to adjust the blackness or whiteness of the background.
The software that I use to manipulate my photos is Corel Paint Shop Pro XI. This technique can also be used in Photoshop (which I’d love to have but is too expensive - any donations welcome), and I guess (although I don’t know) Photoshop Elements.
Here is an example. This shot was taken in my home studio (a black cloth draped over a door):
It may be difficult to see, depending on your monitor contrast/brightness, but the black background is not completely black. You can see that the cloth is not completely flat. Sometimes I find that it is easier to see flaws in a photograph if you look at the negative:
(In Paint Shop Pro go to “Image -> Negative image” to see the negative image).
Back on the positive image, select “Adjust -> Brightness and contrast -> Levels…” and the following box will appear:
At the bottom you will see a histogram showing the distribution of the dark and light tones in the image. The peak at the left hand end is where most of dark parts of the image are. For the background to be truly black you would expect that peak to be as far left as it could be. But it isn’t in this case.
Drag the black diamond under the histogram to the right until it is in the peak. This will darken the who image and make everything to the left of the diamond black. So that the rest of the image is not also too dark, drag the middle diamond until its value is about 128. This will lighten other parts of the image. click OK when done.
The final image looks like this:
As you can see, the background is now a nice even black.
This same techinique can be used for white backgrounds - just work from the other end of the histogram.
I’ve recently been using Google’s ability to produce your own custom homepage.
This has been wonderful. I’ve been able to add my calendar, my email, my subscribed RSS feeds with Google reader, and lots of other useful tools such as notes, to-do lists, etc. I have a common home page that I can use from both work and home that contains the up-to-date information that I want.
Or so I thought….
Somewhere around lunchtime today it all went pear shaped. The homepage reverted back to some version that I had played with a few months ago. Gone was all the useful information.
Thinking that I had done something stupid, or that there was a bug in our web filtering proxy (that the company I work for makes), I spent ages trying different things: checking with IE and Firefox, clearing out old cookies, do network traces.
Luckily I stumbled across a post in Google groups suggesting that I was not alone. It seems that a lot of people have experienced the same problem today. The sad thing is that Google (who generally are thought of as “good guys”) have not said a word - no explanation, apology, warning or help on the homepage as far as I can see.
Are we becoming too reliant on these “free” services? How much damage does an insident like this do to our confidence or Google’s reputation? What are the alternatives?
In my hunt for a solution I’ve come across Netvibes. But can I rely on this any more (or less) than Google?
Update: 27th April 2007: It seems Google is now fixed with no explanation of what went wrong.
 |
I’ve not blogged recently. This is not because I don’t have anything to say, but I have been busy (work and life) and very tired. |
There are a few things in the pipeline that I want to blog about, so keep watching:
Subscribe in a reader
