The end of a very busy year!

Okay, so the entries toward the end of the year were not as regular as intended. Let us blame it on the all the tasks that needed to be finished before jumping into 2009! 2009 will have its own set of fast paced challenges! We (our local photographic society) decided to host a photographic course during 2009 and quite a chunk of my time is currently going towards preparing for this course.

The aim of the course is to help our new members to understand the basics of digital photography. It will start with typical camera / photo techniques (with special emphasis on understanding your digital camera) , through very important topics such as photo composition and will end with a good basis of digital darkroom techniques. We plan to present the course over a nine month period with ample practical exercises and "tests". The final task will be the preparation of a panel of photos to be entered as an application for licentiate honours holder of the PSSA (Photographic Society of South Africa (see http://www.pssa.co.za).

In preparation for the course I took the following series of photos to show the influence of shutter speed on a typical nature scene when trying to capture the flow of water (I made a mistake to use auto white balance during the capture of this series, hence the difference in colour – maybe I need to attend the course myself!).

Showcase

The past month I had the opportunity to get business cards printed for my photography endeavors. The template made provision for a website URL. I thought of using this blog URL but then decided that such a URL must actually be a showcase of my work, and not necessarily an interactive/informal blog! The problem is, I do not have a formal website!

Solution: design, develop and publish a web site! It all happened over a weekend. For most of the site I used the Simpleviewer free flash viewer from airtightinteractive. It is really a great product and very easy to use: All you have to do, is to crop your photos to a desired size, create a thumbnail for each photo, create an XML document which describes the display order and format, and upload it to your website! This is really all there is to it!

The only extra I added was a front page with a menu to navigate to the different photo themes. I ended up with the following themes:

• Anaglyph (yes I am mad about 3D photography!)
• Portraits
• Travel
• Landscapes
• Creative

I will probably add more themes later, but this is all I could fit in on one weekend!

I used one of my creative photos called "The Masks" for the front page. I used the same photo on the back of my business cards. (Visit my new site here)