It’s a new year, and a new decade. I know 2010 will be a great year for me, and I’m going to do my best to make sure of that by setting a few new years resolutions for myself.
Take 1 photo a day and blog it to force myself to get more creative - I’m keeping it in a tumblr blog you can follow here: http://2010photos.tumblr.com
Lose 10 pounds
Make a short film about my trip to Togo, Africa in July
Try to get a photo published somewhere or in a local gallery
So most of these are photography related, but I think these all revolve around my trip to Africa later this year. This is more than likely a once in a lifetime trip, and I really want to make sure that I take some amazing photos and videos to remember it by.
I wanted to show off some amazing album art from my music library, so I've picked 24 of my absolute favorites (arranged alphabetically). My rules for selecting these was to purely judge them based on the artwork, not on the actual music itself.
Some just have amazing photography, others just focus on great use of typography. All in all, I love each piece of album art (and the music.)
Adding shadows or rounded corners to any element is way more trouble than it should be, especially if you're tried out some of the newer CSS3 properties. A simple two lines of CSS can get you these amazingly gorgeous effects, but as expected they aren't supported in every browser (I'm looking at you Internet Explorer!)
Some older versions of browsers that do support these features don't use the official W3C method and you have you use a vendor specific CSS property,like so:
So, that of course won't work in IE, and if you want to have rounded corners or shadows on IE you have to make some custom PNG images and align everything properly. It's a lot of work, but it must be done if you want it to look consistent across all browsers. I realized today that ideally I want to do both, meaning that I want to use the pure CSS method when it's available in the browser, and the old clunky way otherwise.
Sure I could just see what works in each browser and only allow certain versions of browsers, but I'd always have to come back and update that list as future browsers add support for these things. Instead, why not test and see if the browser supports these features first, and then decide what to do.
function supportsBoxShadow(){
var s=document.body.style;
return s.WebkitBoxShadow!== undefined||s.MozBoxShadow!==undefined||s.BoxShadow!==undefined;
}
function supportsBoderRadius(){
var s=document.body.style;
return s.WebkitBorderRadius!== undefined||s.MozBorderRadius!==undefined||s.BorderRadius!==undefined;
}
Those functions will return true if the CSS property is supported in the browser, and not just the W3C property, but the vendor specific property as well. If there's some other property you want to test, follow the same pattern and just use CamelCase and remove the hyphens.
So putting this into practice is pretty simple, assuming we use the CSS property defined above.
if(supportsBoxShadow()){
//Woo! We don't have to do anything! CSS does all the work!
}else{
//Write your complex code here to position your PNG shadows.... :(
}
Just wanted to post a quick blog update with a cool jQuery trick I’ve been using recently. Every now and then I need to compare one jQuery object to another but a simple $(this) == someObject doesn’t do anything. As it turns out jQuery objects are actually stored internally as an array and you can’t just directly compare arrays.
So with that in mind, the easiest and quickest solution is to just access the items in the array and compare those instead. Luckily the very first item in the jQuery array is all we need here, so to access it you simply need to put in square brackets the array item number you want like so: $(this)[0]. So check out the code example below.
<div id="nav">
<a href="#">link 1</a>
<a href="#">link 2</a>
<a href="#">link 3</a>
<a href="#">link 4</a>
</div>
<script type="text'javascript">
$(
allItems = $("#nav a");
secondItem = $("#nav a:nth-child(2)");
//loop through each item in this jQuery collection
allItems.each(function(){
//Compare the current jQuery object with the saved jQuery object
//by accessing the first item in the array of each object.
if($(this)[0] == secondItem[0]){
//we are on the second item! Give it a red background
$(this).css("background-color","red");
}
});
});
</script>
My church asked me to make a quick video intro for a new 5 week sermon series titled "Five Words That Will Rock Your World." The graphics were already made, I just had to animate it somehow. It's been a while since I last touched Adobe After Effects, but I think I came up with something pretty decent.
I originally made this as a standard 4:3 video at 720x480 to fit on the projector screens at church, but I decided to re-render this in 16:9 720p HD so I can have a good archival copy for my portfolio and just so it looks great online. The original 4:3 video took roughly 5 hours to render out on my MacBook Pro (which I had to do 3 times due to various mistakes and errors!) and the larger 720p version took 10 hours!
The music is "Life Inside You" by Matthew West from his album Something To Say (Amazon MP3 download page)
Here's some great videos I've found recently. This first one is a short documentary by Northern Lights about a still working 8,000 pound analog letterpress called the Kludge. Beautifully filmed!
This is a great music video by McBess - I'm overly impressed that they not only made the animations, but also the music! Everything here was made by them (or this one guy, I can't tell how many people...)
Another great music video for Death Cab for Cutie's song "Little Bribes", but this one's made by Ross Ching. Really catchy song, which is really enhanced by this awesome stop motion/time lapse video.
One of my favorite bands of all time, The Mountain Goats has written a short but sweet song about the original Mario game, but from the perspective of Toad. Really a great song, and the video below is worth a watch.
My dad came into town to visit me and we were looking for something to do other than watch movies or try new restaurants (although we did find some great ones.) With my dad being a big fan of lighthouses and myself always looking for a cool new location for photos we decided to visit the Pensacola Lighthouse on the Naval base. As a bonus, we also got to visit Fort Barrancas, although it was closed when we got to it.
Upon entering the lighthouse we had to wait for the previous tour group to get down from the top since there's only so many allowed up there at a time. We wondered around looking at hundred year old artifacts found on site from the lighthouse keepers. There was a great little area in the basement with some old equipment from the 50's, like scales and microscopes, to study the artifacts closer. It was mostly just old bullet casings and coins, but I was more interested in the classic equipment used to study them.
It was finally time for my dad and I to take the trip up to the top of the lighthouse, and we were the only two in our "group". 191 feet up on a 177 step rot-iron spiral staircase that you can clearly see through all the way to the bottom! It was very nerve racking climbing this staircase, but it was worth it. Upon reaching the top we were greeted by a friendly tour guide and a gigantic lamp towering over us.
The guide told us the lamp contains two 1000 watt bulbs (one is a backup) and the worlds largest fresnel lenses. At night the list is visible for up to 27 miles at sea, it would be even further if it wasn't for the curvature of the earth! Stepping ut on the balcony provided an amazing view of the Pensacola Bay and everything around it - I was able to get some great panoramic photos here.
The guide was asking about my camera, and we struck up a little conversation about photography. I guess he liked us because he decided since we were the last group and a fellow photographer he took down the "no trespassing" sign and allowed us to go up one more level to be face to face with the giant fresnel lenses. A truly unique experience that everyone doesn't get to do, and I got some pretty interesting photos because of it.
After the lighthouse, we stopped briefly at the fort and then at the cemetery - graves as far as you can see is a very sobering sight. You can view the Entire photo set on Flickr.
(Amazon MP3 download page)
