January 2006 Archives
Tomorrow moring: -16 °C! This is pretty unusal for Dresden, so prior going to work I went down to the river and did some shooting. It was quite challenge to go up a bit earlier and go down to the river in this cold!
One picture I did yesterday as well. So here's the version of yesterday afternoon:
And now today in the morning:
There were many gulls on the river banks and I disturbed them:
Sadly some of the gulls seemed to have frozen to the ground or the ice :-(. As it seems it's even too cold for them.
After the session my tripod was quite covered with ice, because I set it up in the river a few times:
On my flickr pages you can even see some more pictures of this morning session…
Now that I updated my homepage I did add two new Cyanotypes as well.
“Stolen” Viewpoint
This images was inspired by konomu and looked quite nice in b/w as well. But from the first sight this was a Cyanotype canidate!
Stallhof
The second one is the image of the Stallhof in Dresden. It's a complete different mood in blue, but very nice as well.
Finally the new version of my main homepage is online!
Changes
The layout is more clean than the last one. I still liked the old one, but as I worked on it anyway, I decided to change almost anything. The colour theme is similar, but fits this blog more closely now. I changed the image selector and there is a main gallery page now. The images are shown in reverse order of time added.
Technically I switched to dynamically created pages using PHP. My old ones were created pseudo-dynamical using a script on my PC, but adding new images got a bit complex. This is much easier now.
The images
All images are available in a larger version now. If you click on the standard view, the bigger image will be shown (up to 1 MP). Regarding the smoothness of the images, the normal sizes seem to fit better with reality… I'll replace all images on flickr with these larger ones as well.
I changed the reproduction of the Cyanotypes as well and didn't use a scanner any longer. With a scanner it was always difficult to get consistent colour and contrast. So now I did use my Canon EOS 20D, metered using a gray-card, and did a fixed white balance using a white-card. I used one constant setting in the camera to create the jpegs (parameter set 2, which I use normally, with contrast +2). For lightning I used halogen lamps (first I did use an external flash, but this way the lightning was more even). I just corrected alignment problems and cropped the images, I didn't change to colour or contrast!
Test it
Please test it and if you see glitches, add a comment or write an email and tell me. I did only test using Firefox 1.5 thoroughly, so please tell me which browser you use, if you experience problems. All old links to the images should still work (redirecting to the new layout), as I still have to update my plugin for this blog to show the random Cyanotype.
Everyone is talking about Web 2.0 (with varying definitions), but we're back to Web 0.0 (sometimes at least). ;-)
Why? Well, last Thursday some of the Dresden flickr people did meet offline. It was fun to meet them. Something was quite different to other “offline meetings” of some online community: it was not dominated by computer geeks (I don't deny being one). That's a development I most like about Web 2.0 applications like flickr. These are starting to be usable by people, who just want to use a computer, the internet, and so on without being able to program and fix it themselves . There's still some way to go, but the intentions are noticable…
I'm looking forward to the next meeting on 2005-02-11. This will be Web 0.1 then with some computer equipment and a usable WLAN hotspot. ;-)
I didn't bring along my camera but Konomu posted some pictures, though.
This is a funny flash video by Hitachi about perpendicular recording which is used on some of the most recent hard disks.
I just wonder how they got this idea… ;-)
