Photos from one of my favorite places on the planet:
Redesign
21 December 2011
I recently redesigned this site with the primary goal of improving my photography portfolio. If you don’t care about web dev you can stop reading now and just go take a look at the photos. Let me know what you think.
Ok, so here are some tech notes on the implementation, though this is all pretty standard these days.
For the photos page I wanted to make use of the HTML5 History APIs. But rather than make the photo page standalone I decided to “Ajaxify” the whole site. The site dynamically loads content, avoiding full page loads, using similar patterns to the ones we employed in Gmail and Google+.
If you navigate directly to a certain page it will be rendered on the server. Once the page has loaded, the JavaScript will listen for clicks, intercept any links that can be handled client side, request the page contents via an XMLHttpRequest, update the UI, and change the browser location using history.pushState. For all pages except the photos page, the XHR simply requests the page with ?mode=body which tells the sever not to render the chrome.
This was made simpler by the fact that I’d already written a small library (Surface) that does all the heavy lifting and simplifies the management of single-page applications. The trickiest part was getting WordPress to work properly and unfortunately meant changes that will need to be reintegrated after every WordPress update.
The photos page is all rendered client-side and simply requests the photo data from the server. The photos are stored on Flickr and I actually use the Flickr API to get the list of photos for each album rather than hard coding them.
The top navigation uses Raleway from the Google Web Fonts archive.
The site works best in the latest Chrome and Firefox builds, but IE degrades to using full page navigations, though the photos page only works in IE9+.
S.W.A.T.
25 August 2010
No, I haven’t quit google to work for a Mexican drug cartel.
This is an outtake from a photo shoot.
Mike invited me along to help him photograph the Mountain View S.W.A.T. team. We were to attend a live-fire exercise to get shots of the guys in their full tactical gear; the deliverables would be used for trading cards that they hand out to kids and as promotional material.
The conditions were pretty tough. We were in the open air, in the blazing sun. Going natural light alone would have meant high contrast and dark shadows. It took a lot of faffing around we settled on something we were happy with:
We clamped a 4ft diffusion panel to some 7ft stands, to act as a sun shade. We then had my ABR800 camera right as the main light and a bare 430exII off left for fill. To get a good exposure we were at about f/16 with the strobes providing 50% of the light. To get a nice bit of background blur, we stuck on my 3-stop ND filter to give us f/5.6. Not too shabby.
The guys were all really nice (I admit to being a little surprised…) and in good spirits (amazing, considering they were wearing heavy gear and the temperature was around 95F). Unfortunately, due to range rules, we were not allowed to take any photos of their actual exercises; it’d have been fun to photograph them shooting from moving vehicles.
I’ll hopefully upload some of the actual photos soon, I’m just waiting for permission.
20 portraits
17 July 2010
Last week I volunteered to help out the gym at work and take some headshots for the intranet. They wanted something a bit better than you’d get with a point-and-shoot, and I wanted some practice taking pictures of people other than myself and Tessa.
Since the shots may need to be used in a variety of situations, including small thumbnails on the website, I opted for low-contrast lighting, using a ring flash to kill the shadows and side-lights to add highlights. I had the ABR800 ring-flash on camera without a tripod, so after the hour-and-a-half session my right-arm was pretty tired.
In the end 22 people flowed through, which only gave me a few minutes per person. Some of them were only on a quick break in between training sessions, others uncomfortable and not wanting to be there.
Overall, I think the results came out pretty well, considering. Hopefully they like them.
Photofolio
22 February 2010
This site was home to my photographs for many years, beginning while I was still shooting film cameras and scanning negatives, and going through my first Digital Ixus and onto the Canon 10D.
Coming relatively late to the party, I joined Flickr at the start of 2008 and haven’t looked back since. The thing that is most compelling for me is the social aspect, something that a personal photo site could never achieve. It pushes me to take more photos and to try to be more creative.
With this in mind I felt the photos left on this site were getting dated and unrepresentative; photos from university ski trips and my early travelings in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Instead I’ve put together a portfolio of sorts.
So Flickr is my photostream, Picasa gets random albums for sharing with family and friends, and while I don’t feel I’ve found a particular style yet, this site gets my best attempt at a photographic portfolio.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
