Just took this in the kitchen with a sigma 50mm f1.4 EX prime. Love the combo. Really feeling the need to get out and shoot stuff!

Have a nice contract in at the moment that’s allowing me to do some pretty cool clean-up work on some old B&W images. This one wasn’t so bad as the B&W image source was very clean to begin with. The file was enormous and was obviously worked on quite a bit already. Still, it was nice to see it even cleaner and in colour. The funny part is the rust! What i forgot to think about was at what stage of the ship building the photo was taken. You might think, well, it looks finished….. but it wasn’t! Hence the reason it was all rusty in places.

When the ship was finally launched it was painted and cleaned up to look perfect. I thought the rust may have come while it was at sea (yea, we know that didn’t last long) so I kept it in the final.

Off I go now to give her a new paint job

I recently completed my latest web project for The Wright Venue. Following on form the brand, The website was the next installment of this project. The idea here was to try to encapsulate the essence of the night club. A purpose built 3 story multi-level ‘super club’ at Airside in Dublin.

There were basically 5 specific requirements for the site. Video, imagery, a functioning events system, a web store and a blog. As the site grows and we gather proper interior photographs I’ll be adding a flash based walk-though of the various areas and features. For now though, all I had to work with image-wise was the graphic elements I created for the interior and brand.

I initially built the site using straight html, css and php. As the site developed it became apparent to me that using wordpress as a back end was going to be more efficient and provide a more scalable delivery. I did consider the possibility of developing a completely flash based site but I kept coming up with reasons why it wasn’t going to be a good idea. There are, of course, several flash element in the site. I wanted to animate the logo and flourishes to give the site movement and I think these work well.

The menu system was probably the trickiest part. I initially developed a JavaScript based pop-out drawer type system. It worked fine in all platforms bar, of-course Internet Explorer. The problem there? Performance. IE seems to fall over at the thought of handling 2 flash animations and a relatively large JS file added to the several JS files WordPress initiates also. I tried several ways to alleviate the issue including different types of js based menus using jQuery along with streamlining and compressing all the javascript. It still had issues for some people so I reverted back to a straight CSS based solution and I’m happy with its performance.

Over the course of the next few weeks I’ll be adding the merchandise web store, an image and video gallery with footage from some of the nights so people can really get a feel for the size and scale of the club. A truly remarkable achievement!

Just launched latest website for a pub chain called Gilbert & Wright. Overall I’m happy with the result. I wanted the site to achieve an overall feel for the actual venues themselves and judging by the client’s reaction it seems to achieve this. Thankfully!

On the face of it there doesn’t seem to be much to this design. It’s clean and simple but hopefully has that initial wow factor when first launched. The client originally wanted a splash screen that more-or-less did nothing but display the brand. As I normally hate splash screens I decided to try and encorporate a functional one instead. The Chain initially has 2 branches but they plan of several more over the coming months. I thought I’d use the spash screen to convey this. Each new addition gets a new box…if you will.

Technically it’s a different story. There are a couple of ‘holy grails’ of web design used here.

The first is the use of transparent PNGs. While they work fine in modern browesers like Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 7+, they don’t work in IE6…..what’s new! So, I used the excellent iepngfix solution from Twin Helix .

I had to disable the rollovers in the menu for IE6 as it still has problems rendering transparent background PNGs that have a href applied. I simply used a conditional style sheet to cover this. However, it wasn’t all plain sailing!

The second ‘holy grail’ and one that I’ve been trying to find a decent solution to for a while, is the use of background images that both scale AND keep their aspect ratio (i.e. don’t distort). I also wanted to use different background images on each section of the site. After long hours of trolling various solutions the only one I found to work was to use the img#background css technique. Basically, you add an img tag like so:

<img id=”background” src=”yourimage.jpg” alt=”Background-image” />

right after your body tag, then you use css to give it its attributes using some of the following:

img#background {
height: auto;
width: 100%;
z-index: -1;
position:absolute;
color: black;
}

you also need to apply the following to the body tag:

body {
background-color: #000;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
height: 100%;
border-top: 1px transparent solid;
margin-top: -1px;
}

and finally set your html to allow scrolling:

html {
height: 100%;
overflow:auto;
}

Why not apply overflow to the body you may ask? There is some tweaking to do in relation to the scrolling and using ‘position’ in the css for IE6 with overflow set on the body tag only on or two DIVs on the page would actually scroll! This is primarily because of the use of iepngfix.js. These two ‘effects’ don’t get on! The site went live today but there are still some tweaks to be made. Like fixing the background do it doesn’t scroll

Anyway, if you have any comment or suggestions please use comments below or email me.

Cheers!

Not a great day weather wise yesterday but I decided to scout a couple of locations I had wanted to shoot up in Glencree Co. Wicklow, plus i knew Mina would enjoy the trip and the walk. Took these as prelim shots as I didn’t have tripod or decent lens with me. These were quite flat but a bit of photoshop managed to bring them up nicely.

The B&W pic here was taken at an amazing location, right at the top of the valley in Glencree. Walk down a dirt lane where there are two houses. One of these houses in particular is interesting. I remember going for a walk years ago with a friend of mine, Shane, in the same place. The house on the right at the end of this lane looked uninhabited as all windows were blocked with drawn curtains and the surrounding area was quite overgrown. We had a look around as it is in a stunning location and found a note in the window with simply a number on it. It was obvious it wasn’t a phone number.

Upon a return a few weeks later we noticed that the number had changed…..ah! It was an ESB meter reading. So, Someone did visit the house regularly….. Anyway, we both pondered who owned it and would they sell it!

Anyway, I was quite interesed to see what had become of this place and low and behold, it hasn’t changed one bit. Hmm….

While I’m not mad on typical sunset photos I though there was an interesting perspective on this shot. The sun picked up and illuminated the haze behind Liscannor village outlining the buildings nicely. Then to add to this it also manages to pick out O’Briens Tower on the Cliffs of Moher which lies directly behind the village from this angle.

I had actually 2 filters on the lens at the time. A UV filter and a circular polariser. This created some lens flare, basically a couple of rings, which i removed in photoshop.

While you might notice that 99% of my pics are b&w I felt that colour gave more dynamics to this photo which were lost in the b&w version.

If I were to change anything in this photo I really would have liked more clarity and resolution, possibly using a 200mm low stop lens and tried for more detail around the village. I might have been able to capture the sun rays shining through the village more clearly.

Next Time!

Managed to get a few minutes today to take a couple of pics along Bray Prominade. The sky was nicely wild (as I like them) and so it added a slightly different aspect to an otherwise normal shot. I also got lucky with the lack of any human or canine interruption!

I also removed the horrible modern street lamps that dorn the prom. There was one just to the left of the kiosk. It would be really great to get a shot like this but of the kiosk open with its wares hanging from the open shutters. Might be possible some evening during the summer. Pic could have been taken anytime within the last 30 years really

Finally got myself a new Camera, well, new to me that is. A beautiful Canon 400D. I managed to take a few pics with it over the weekend and am delighted with the results. The camera is 10.1 Mega pixel and i’m thankful for the extra resolution as previous camera was 6 mega pixels. Don’t need to step up the images any more in photoshop

So far, I’m delighted with the results. The camera has a host of better features than the old 300D it replaces and definitely gives me a bit more freedom. I contemplated a 40D, desired a 450D and lusted after a 50D. The cost for the this 400D with only 1200 shots on it was too good to pass up so I’ll stick with it for the rest of the year anyway.

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Unfortunately I had to watermark all of my images. Well, all in the photography section anyway. 2 of my images turned up on another site without my permission. Apologies if it messes up the viewing for users.

Thankfully all’s well on the work front. My current work load is, quite frankly, fantastic – especially in the current climate.

[SinglePic not found]After spending almost 10 years working for a publishing company it feels great to be able to spend time on projects that require a much higher creative input. It’s also great to be working on different types of projects once again.

The last 4 weeks has brought a slew of interesting stuff my way including 4 more websites, couple of restaurant branding projects, 2 corporate identities and a brochure that will present everything from nightclubs and bars to engineering products. Back to my comfort zone, learning about different types of businesses and services and providing creative and accurate solutions! (more…)

Any web dev knows the biggest pain in the ass is getting your site cross platform / cross browser complient. As I’m currently working on rolling out 4 websites I once again find myself using a ridiculous amount of time getting the site to look perfect in IE6. So. I’m faced with troubleshooting for 3 browsers!!

A lot of us will begin a site on a Mac. It’s a great dev platform for many reason, none I’m going to launch into here. I generally will get the site looking perfect in Firefox first. Mainly because Firefox, on both Mac and PC, will have almost identical results. So, tick 1st box.

The next stage is to see what IE6 is displaying. (more…)

I’ll be regularly uploading comments and idea on all aspects of design in here. I’ll also be available to answer any questions anyone might have on any design or web related issues.

Over the course of the next few weeks I’ll be expanding areas on the site and using it as a basic test bed. (more…)