"photography" in Weblog

I’ve had a bit of time on my hands recently so I’ve taken the opportunity to finish up my China photos… FINALLY. The complete collection is up on Flickr titled Shaanxi and Shanxi Provinces, China 2005… I’ve gone a bit over the top, to be honest, but I can’t bear to take any more out than I already have. I guess it’ll come down to something more succinct over time.

I’ve also been writing up the trip but so far it’s pushing 2,000 words and I really don’t think anyone will be that interested in it. Instead of an epic, but ultimately tedious, account, I’ll just pop down a summary of the itinerary and leave the photos to flesh out the story.

We started in Xian with a trip to the Terracotta Warriors, the Wild Goose Pagoda and the Muslim Quarter. Then we jumped an 18 hour train up to Datong for a quick look at the Yungong Caves, the magnificent Hanging Temple and the Wood Pagoda. An overnight train later and we were in sleepy Pingyao. Pingyao was China’s financial heart before Beijing’s ascendancy and has been left largely unchanged for the last 150 years. The place is one big museum. One final over-nighter later and we were on our way back to Xian for the flight back to Shenzhen. It was a week of heavy travelling, all told, and well worth the effort.

In case anyone’s intrested, I am posting my Hong Kong photos to Flickr as I go. I’m loving how easy Flickr is to use and how quickly I can get my images up… My site’s photo gallery’s days are numbered.

To celebrate a move of offices, from Fleet Street down to Canary Wharf, Reuters has put on on open air exhibition of some of their best recent photos. They’ve also kindly put the gallery online for those of us who don’t head for the Docklands very often.

I meant to post about this when Holler launched their new site but I completely forgot… The site’s super-slick but more importantly, it’s the first attempt I’ve seen to make Flash liquid. Resize your browser longer and shorter and you’ll see the nav bar scoot up and down and the content reshuffle. Well done Elmer! I’d like to see that done for width as well… There was some talk of making it bookmarkable too.

Holler were responsible for the concepts behind SlashMusic, a new Channel 4 venture that makes available all music scoring for all shows for the last 2 years, among other things. This means that you can look up any show and find out what music they used - bloody brilliant.

Back to other Holler work, go check out their Eurostar Ski site. It’s not the most usable interface I’ve come across, but the whole thing looks gorgeous and the default chalet photo is one of mine so I wanted to mention it anyway!

I meant to post this last week but I forgot… I’ve added another set of photos to my photos section: Tignes 2005. I was out there for a 8 days skiing, week before last, and it’s the first outing for my shiny new EOS 20D. I’m late to the party but it’s my first digital camera… And I love it! The 20D is an amazing piece of kit with all the features I could want and fantastic quality. I shot quite a lot RAW and now I’ve had a play I really wish I’d shot everything that way. The control you get from the images and the quality… It’s the only way to fly.

It started out with a little bit of idle curiosity on my part: why do I give a monkey’s about sync speed? And turned into a bit of a mission. Apparently sync speed is very important! I recently started using fill-in flash but I hadn’t thought through exactly what I was doing. Christ it’s complicated!

Richard Rutter over at Clagnut has spotted a fantastic little bit of javascript on the Couloir site. I’d seen the site before but I’d just assumed that it was another Flash photo switcher… Turns out that it’s a pure HTML/JS thing! It’s done so well that it didn’t even occur to me to see how it worked.

The ‘loading’ message is in a div masking out the photo underneath. That’s nothing new, but it’s very well done. The clever bit is the dynamic opacity fading done onload, giving that proper macromedia look without the plug-in. Slick. Very slick.

The launch of JPG Magazine has been announced by Heather Powazek Champ and Derek Powazek. As the site says: “JPG Magazine is for people who love imagemaking without attitude. It’s about the kind of photography you get when you love the moment more than the camera. It’s for photographers who, like us, have found themselves online, sharing their work, and would like to see that work in print.”

The first issue is on the theme or ORIGIN. It’s logical but pretty tough… Submissions launch on the 4th October with the first magazien due on November. I look forward to it!

Thanks to Kottke for this one… It’s what it says on the tin, really - the best still photojournalistic photographs of 2004. There are hundreds of them here and they’re all great!

This is a pretty mad idea… Basically, someone found a manequin head in a thrift store and took some photos of it. Then it was sent to another photographer friend and the Traveling Head project was born. The head gets sent around the world and photographed by various people. That’s it. Despite the constraint of the head, the photos are surprisingly different, reflecting heavily the photographers’ personal styles. Check out Bruko’s contribution for something a bit special.