Posted at 08:44 +1100
I get a lot of joy from using Flickr, both as a contributor and browser. One of my favourite streams of photos to watch comes from Flickr username Seb Przd (he a blog, too). I've never met this gentleman, but his photos are amazing. As his profile mentions, he specialises "in all kinds of images that cannot be taken with physical cameras."
Topics: art, photography/flickr, software/open source
Posted at 22:55 +1100
No, I'm not going to tell you a story. Instead, I want to try and write down some of my thoughts about effective storytelling in various mediums. Each piece is going to be based around a particularly effective (or ineffective) example I've seen recently.
Generally, I'll try to write in a spoiler-free fashion, as far as plot points are concerned. Obviously, by talking about style and presentation, some of the mystery will be revealed, but hopefully only enough to pique your interest if you aren't familiar with the work in question.
First up, my impressions of the storytelling in Heroes...
Topics: art/design, entertainment/storytelling
Posted at 05:28 +1000
I'm staying in New Jersey for a couple of weeks (still a week to go), doing some work with a long-time client. Not an amazing amount to do around here in the evenings, though, so last night I went into Manhattan to catch up with Luis and Krissa for dinner.
For those keeping score at home, we ate at the small and very crowded Caracas Arepa Bar. Very good food for a nice price. Recommended (particularly, the Quesillo for dessert).
However, none of that is the point. The point of this entry is my random comment on the way back about some pretty cool sculptures — like this and this — in the metro station at 8th avenue and 14th street. Luis mentioned there was a book on subway art and it occurred to me today that there might also be a website. Everything has a website, after all.
Sure enough, paydirt! I love what people do in this area of creativity. Some of these pictures look familiar and I've no doubt seen them in trips around the NYC metro. Others are making me think I may need to visit particular stations just to check out the art.
Topics: art, travel/New York
Posted at 22:03 +1000
Many words have been written about what makes a good photo and how to compose and frame a shot. For the rank amateurs, such as myself, though, there's a huge difference between knowing these guidelines intellectually and being able to put them into practice. Even when sorting through photos and trying to decide which ones to publish, it's sometimes hard to work out if a photo is going to be interesting for other people to look at or not.
Recently, more or less by accident, it occurred to me that Flickr's badge of photos that are in many sidebars (including on this blog), provides a quick check as to whether the composition in a photo is working easily or not. The smaller size concentrates the eye on the overall features of the photo and not the detail. This is neither a new discovery nor a hard and fast rule (see below for some obvious exceptions), but I thought it was interesting and this is my writing space. Following are some examples of what I've noticed in my own photos.
Topics: art, photography/flickr
Posted at 17:52 +1100
(I should be finishing off a prototype for a client meeting tomorrow. So naturally, I'm browsing the web and thinking about other stuff instead.)
Dave Shea has rolled out a redesign for his Mezzoblue website. Naturally, being a blog, there is a post about the changes and choices. I am not a designer, but I like reading about how other people work and I know what I like to look at, so Dave's thoughts make interesting reading (he was the guy who started CSS Zen Garden for those recently returned from a three year stay on Mars).
One of the interesting ideas on the site is hist idea of grouping posts into collections for archival purposes. Go read the above post for details and links, but there is some interesting thinking going on at the moment about how to present archives outside of just a list of dates. I particularly liked his idea of tying the colour scheme for each page in a collection to the photo at the top.
Dave attributes this idea to (amongst others), the Absenter photo journal. Go and have a look at this site. Click "back" a few times and notice how well the navigation colours match the image. Beautiful. I deeply wish I had the skills to create something like that, instead of just being able to be amazed by the result. Not all of the photographs appeal to me, but the ability to take a shot with mostly a single standout colour time and again is pretty impressive, too.
Topics: art/design, photography, technology/web
Posted at 20:54 +1000
I do not intend to become a "link blogger". Nothing drives me off the edge faster in the morning than scanning my RSS feeds only to find a bunch of posts that are 50% hyperlinks and 100% information free. Once in a while is OK, doing it regularly just makes me want to look up some GPS coordinates and hunt out the launch codes.
That being said (I feel so much better now!), a couple of random items I thought were worth sharing...
I'm not a huge football/soccer fan, although I do kind of follow the English Premier League results throughout the year (more so than the Australian A League, strangely). With Australia having qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 30+ years (and their previous attempt resulted in 3 losses from 3 games with zero goals scored), it's a bit hard to avoid the media coverage around here at the moment. Most of the coverage is not that entertaining. One notable exception is Der Blog, written by an ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the US version) reporter who is following the Australian team. It took me a while to put my finger on why I was enjoying reading it, but his enthusiasm really comes through in most posts. Here's a guy having a lot of fun doing his job and writing articles you don't normally get to see as the event unfolds for a professional journalist.
Secondly, to see how an intelligent, enthusiastic fan might be spending these few weeks, go read Dave Mason's daily predictions (although you do have to actually know the results, since he seems to have slacked off a bit on post-match commentary).
Often when you read about personalised newspapers in a science-fiction novel, they have a requirement or feature that you always get a little bit of random news you didn't ask for or that you might disagree with. I like the idea. I have a few random feeds in my aggregator and sites in my links collection that serve no real purpose other than to provide ideas.
One of the these is The Illustration Blog. Via this site, I have discovered the Photoshop Experiment, containing detailed play-by-play overviews of how some amazing illustrations are created in Photoshop. I'm no artist, but I like to play in the Gimp a lot. Seeing this website brings home (yet again!) just how fiddly really good art is to do. It's not just talent or luck; it's hard work. The main blog of Cory Godbey (the person behind The Photoshop Experiment) is worth a browse, too, if you like illustration.
Topics: art, sport/football, software/graphics