Blog

SPLASH

Tim Boole — Thu, 20 May 2010 19:39:33 +0000

A few years ago I did a lot of work for the groundbreaking magazine PaperCity, working with their legendary creative director, Chris Promecene. Chris gave me an assignment to shoot some club fashion and we cooked up a plan to make the opening image pop. There's a lot of nifty technique in this shot, ringlight, ultra-brief flash duration, and high-contrast black and white filtered for bright skin tones, but in my opinion, it's the reaction of the couple in the background that makes the shot. Notice the difference between the guy's reaction and the girl's...

The Dream of Perpetual Motion

Tim Boole — Fri, 14 May 2010 00:34:32 +0000

I just finished Dexter Palmer's The Dream of Perpetual Motion about a world where mechanical men can fly, but computers are non-existent. The book references Shakespeare's The Tempest, and I paused partway through to read up on the characters from the play (Prospero, Miranda, Caliban) who have counterparts in Palmer's book. The cover art is extraordinary, and equally as interesting to me as the book. The designer, Ervin Serrano, a senior designer at St. Martin's Press has done some really nice covers, but this is his finest work yet. I couldn't help wondering if the artwork was a photograph of a metal sculpture fabricated by hand, or if there might have been a little digital construction involved. It turns out Photoshop was indispensable. I tracked down an interview with Serrano on the book cover design site Faceout Books where he says, "It took a while for me to find the right images to use until I finally bumped into detail photos of locomotives. They had all the right parts to make the type work. It was also the photoshop work. I think this was the most that I've done in my entire career." The photoshop craftsmanship is superb, but it's the design of the overall cover combined with his Photoshop skill that makes the final result so compelling. Serrano's final words from the interview: "What’s something unique you learned while working on this project?
That photoshop is my best friend."

"Like WALL-E connecting to EVE"

Tim Boole — Thu, 13 May 2010 18:33:25 +0000

I look at Jon Gruber's Daring Fireball with my first cup of coffee every morning, both for his pithy observations of the Mac and tech community and for his briefly commented but unerringly chosen links to pieces from around the web. A post near the top of DF scored a double with me today - a link to a video on the Panic blog depicting an iPad (no cassette tape deck on hand) pouring source code into an Apple //e (see quote from Andy Baio in the post title above). On the Apple //e's screen you see a music video ingeniously programmed to run on an Apple//e by Stewart Smith for the song Beautiful Ground by a band called Grandaddy. The music video was the 2nd hit geeky but low-tech and really nice. (also, go to Stewdio.org and check out "Browser Pong" - at the bottom of the page)

Photoshop CS5 Tools

Tim Boole — Mon, 10 May 2010 04:51:08 +0000

The new Photoshop (CS5) has shipped, and I'm very impressed with how solid and fast the Mac version is. I wonder if much of that is due to the entire code base having been re-written in Cocoa, the only way Adobe could bump Photoshop on the Mac platform up to 64 bit. It stands to reason that if the Adobe team was in there re-writing that massive code base from the ground up they would streamline and clean up everything they could while they were at it. The interface is very similar to the previous version which makes it easy to get around in compared to the big splashy changes in the UI moving from CS3 to CS4. However, I really noticed the reworked tool icons in the tool palette - the CS5 tools are less contrasty and 3D in appearance, but more subtle and illustrative, more like little animated creatures that might get up and start moving about all on their own...

Google Map

Tim Boole — Fri, 07 May 2010 16:24:06 +0000

This morning kicked off with tech trepidation followed by a second cup of coffee and a careful reading of the manual. Challenge of the day was to add a Google Map to the site, and there's a small amount of back and forth between Google and Squarespace to set it up. I just followed the directions and there it is!Google Map Snap Now if I could just get the map to center on the page without causing everything else on my site to shift off-center in the opposite direction...

The Impossible Cool

Tim Boole — Thu, 06 May 2010 23:29:53 +0000

Ran out of creative energy this afternoon and turned to one of my favorite antidotes, the minimalist website fffound!, an amazing and varied firehose of images gathered from around the web. At the top of the page was a shot linked from another great site, The Impossible Cool - this quirky shot of Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn. Not a bad transfusion of visual energy for two mouse clicks. Reminded me I've got to finish watching the documentary footage from Kubrick's The Shining extras dvd – fascinating footage of Nicholson warming up and going over his lines while Kubrick blocks the shots and decides on camera position. The documentary then follows up with the actual scene as it ran in the film – and you appreciate how truly brilliant Nicholson is.

Back to work...

Day Three - New Gallery

Tim Boole — Thu, 06 May 2010 18:26:48 +0000

New gallery! Today I wanted to see how long it would take to set up a new gallery now that I basicly know how the system works. I selected a set of location shots that are varied (in other words, kind of random) and set up the gallery to show square cropped thumbnails.

The square thumbs look really neat in the grid, but they can occasionally crop off a face in a vertical shot. The good thing about them is they make accomodate horizontal shots without any special trouble in terms of the arrangement of thumbnails on the page. Quick and easy!

I'm using Aperture 3 to manage and export images for my galleries. I am really more of a Lightroom guy, and I am much quicker and more knowledgeable with Lightroom, but Aperture has really gotten much better in version 3 and the full screen view rocks. It allows viewing your grid thumbs as well as full or zoomed in images against a pure black background with no UI unless you call it up. Very elegant for previewing and editing.

The new gallery is "Location Fashion" and it's the fourth one down in the Images drop-down menu. And this gallery was really fast and easy to upload and populate. I spent a little time reordering the sequence of images, but that was about all I had to do. Putting the page link into the the drop menu was a quick drag and drop. Sweet!

Day One! - Round Two

Tim Boole — Wed, 05 May 2010 19:16:10 +0000

Figured out how to create a drop-down menu for my page links at the top of each page, so now there's a menu item titled "Images" that contains the two galleries and the "Links" page that I mention in the post above.
Also I decided to make this blog page the landing page so it's now the first thing you see when entering the site.

Day One!

Tim Boole — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:56:13 +0000

Here's the deal:

Several years ago I figured out barely enough about an Adobe website building program called GoLive to wire together a photographer's site that wasn't like anything else out there. It was different, fun to look at and it had a cool gimmick. That was the up-side.
On the down-side, it took FOREVER to get the site done. Every link was connected by hand, and there were a LOT of links because there were a lot of photographs, and it had that clever gimmick. I decided it would be cool to give the effect of zooming in on each image by rolling the mouse over a small round gray button under the image. It made it possible to appreciate the detail of the large original image without the necessity to load a huge file. Each "zoom-in" view was a separate file cropped out of the original and they pre-loaded so the zoom was really quick to appear. Great idea except that it exactly doubled the number of images I needed to prepare and load and link. There are a lot of pages on the site, and 2 shots on each page, so really there are 4 files including zoom-in views, and lots and lots of connections in the html code. Eventually I got everything done, but I realized that I would never get myself to update the site. Way, way too much work and time.
It's been years since that site was new and I've put off building another for far too long. I heard about a new web-app/site hosting service called SquareSpace (they sponsor my favorite podcast, Leo Laporte's MacBreak Weekly). While SquareSpace is not aimed at photographers, it's non-flash based which really appeals to me. I decided to try it out and see if I could use their tools to build something simple but cool, and a lot less time-intensive than my previous website.
I've embarked on building the new website and I think I'm going to leave it in view as I go. It won't be polished and complete at first, but it might be interesting to you to watch me stumble along figuring things out as I go. Please check it out regularly and leave comments or suggestions - email me at timboole@gmail.com or post a comment on this page. Here's some miscellaneous thoughts on what little is here so far...
The Gallery on the front page is a proof of concept. It took me all of the first two days to work out the kinks and lumps.
The second Gallery on page two is the same as the front page gallery, only the thumbnails are differing shapes. If you're not careful the result is a big mess with empty holes here and there.
Page Three (Gallery Links) has several live links which point to a couple of flash galleries and to my original site. The galleries open in new pages when you click the links.
There will be more pages and more content daily, but I don't know what they will look like yet.
From time to time I'll screw around to see how something works. These little experiments will appear and disappear regularly.
Case in point: I'm throwing an image in here. Try clicking it for a jumbo-size version.

Headress from The Desert Shoot