Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

jayphoto.co.uk Launches At Last

Started before Christmas, moth­balled until last week, finally com­pleted. jayphoto.co.uk, my attempt at a “pro­fes­sional” web front for my pho­to­graphy, is finished.

The site show­cases all of the pho­tos avail­able as prints from my devi­antART page, while hope­fully avoid­ing some of the slightly less pro­fes­sional ele­ments of the dA site and help­ing the vis­itor get through the selec­tion check­out pro­cess with the least dif­fi­culty. Hopefully it will help me get some expos­ure and sell some art; my main motiv­a­tion to get it done was the loom­ing on the hori­zon of a couple of higher-profile photo jobs that I’ll be tack­ling in the com­ing weeks — details will be forthcoming.

Techie note: The Flash used on the main land­ing page is a heav­ily modifed ver­sion of the “Gallery Tween” sample applic­a­tion included with Flash 8. It reads in a ran­domly ordered list of image file­names from XML (gen­er­ated by PHP from the site’s image data­base) and then dis­plays them on the Stage, using a one-frame loop with ActionScript to shift them from side to side. If people are inter­ested I’m happy to pub­lish the code.

WSAF Photo Exhibition

For those of you at Warwick, next week sees the arrival of the Warwick Student Arts Festival, which includes an exhib­i­tion put on by PhotoSoc. This will appear in Xanana’s Lounge (oppos­ite Xanana’s) at the begin­ning of the week, and the Cooler on Thursday and will, with any luck, include some of my work.

New Lens

While I was home this week­end I made a trip to my local cam­era shop, and came away with a new lens — the EF 55-200mm USM — and very shiny it is too :-D. My 350D’s kit lens tops out at 55mm, so this was the ideal long lens to com­ple­ment it. I’ll be post­ing some shots from the week­end at some point soon.

devi­ant­PRINTS Update

Earlier in the week I finally got up to date with my Print sub­mis­sions on devi­antART — I’ve now sub­mit­ted Prints for all the major­ity of pho­tos I pos­ted since July, when I got my new cam­era.

Prints are avail­able from 6×4 upwards, at excep­tion­ally good prices. Get ‘em while they’re hot!