Tis the season to be shooting
The holiday season is upon us and there is always plenty of family to take pictures of. Take the a moment to play with your family photography in ways you might not have thought of. Family dynamics can be very rewarding to photograph as I have written about here.
All the best in over the holiday season and here is to a wonderful new year. Until then, take care.
Family dynamics
Probably the most fun I can ever have in photography is shooting the relationship between parents and their kids. No matter what age the children are, there is always this dynamic with their parents that spans everything from adoration, resent, love and envy. Kids have to leave a lot of their lives in the capable hands of an adult right through into their teenage years or even into early adulthood. Kids may feel their parents are unjust, over-protective, too lovey-dovy, don’t give enough space… but under it all, there is a true, unconditional love and adoration for their parents that runs so deep it’s undeniable.
What I love best about shooting this parent-child dynamic is making that undeniable love shine through, regardless of how embarrassed the teenager is with their parent, or how annoyed a tween is with their guardian, or despite the child of any age thinking they are too cool to be there, etc… It’s fun to work with that and turn those attitudes around on them or play into them. There is a certain pleasure that kids can derive from the juxtapositions of the stature and indeed their lot in life against that of their parents.
I will often place kids on stools to bring them to the height of their parents or even higher. I will dress kids as their parents would. I will get kids to mimic or mock certain characteristics of their parents. But best of all, I will get the parents to do all of the same but in reverse. The results make for fun, light hearted images that truly show what bonds lie between a parent and their child.
New frontiers
What a busy, trying time! With many projects on the go, logo’s, banners, themes (and more themes), showcase sites, tutorials, photography gigs to wrap up before Christmas… It’s no wonder the holidays never feel restful to me.
So why then would I go and do something as crazy as learning Obective-C programming at such a time? I guess I am just a little crazy that way. That and because Chris has taken up making plugins and wants me to join him in our continual quest to take over the world together.
I have to admit I have wanted to make RapidWeaver plugins for quite some time and this was the fire that needed lighting under my proverbial behind. Will I actually make any plugins and how soon? I can’t/won’t make any promises. It’s a little far beyond any limit I have stretched my self to in the past and I do have a theme store (or two) to support.
So here it to the new year and all that it may (or may not) bring!
RapidWeaver tip: Adding a logo
If I had a dollar for every time I get asked, “How do I add a logo to my banner?” I would quick possibly retire. So to finally break the confusion cycle, I will tell you how it’s done:
- Go to the main menu bar in RapidWeaver
- Select Site then Show Site Setup
- From the resulting panel that pops up, select the “Home” icon (the tool-tip will read “Site Setup”)
- Half way down the panel you will see the “Logo” with a check-box beside it, select that box
- Now select the “Choose…” button and navigate through your files to select the logo you wish to use, appropriately sized of course (png, jpg and gif are supported)
- Select the preview button on the main RapidWeaver window and voila, you have a logo on every page.
Twitterish coming to save the day?
I’m not one for feeding the hype machines and usually find them a bit bloated, pompous and often fall flat on their faces once the actual product that has been the subject of said hype machine is a total dud, or at least doesn’t live up to the hype. But I caught wind of one such quiet little hype seed on Twitter one day when I was checking out to see who my Twitter friends were following. I found one called Twitterish that a few of my friends were keeping tabs on. I followed a few leads and found a Twitterish website and flickr page.
So why am I latching on to this hype machine? The one thing I hate about Twitter is the clients available for it. I am sorry to have to say this but Twitterific is a piece of crap. I mean sure, the Twitter service itself is partly to blame for the apps crapness, but the app itself lacks (or buries) so many features available in the service that it makes it frustrating to use. It’s no secret that I am a Jaiku fan and a fan of the Juhu client. I think that Twitter should work the same. I have tried countless Twitter clients and all of them worked with varying success. One of my favorites for a while was Spaz.air, but with continual changes in the Mac OS and Spaz, and AIR itself, I felt I was in a constant state of “catch-up”.
So now I catch wind of this supposed Twitterish Twitter client and I am thinking that it’s about time someone came along with something new and stable and feature rich. I have no idea if Twitterish is any of these, but I figure Twitter has matured enough and proven itself to be a platform that people are going to stick with for some time that the market must be ripe for the picking. It must be time for someone to come out with a serious client that is stable, functional and accountable for itself. Here’s to hoping for a substantial Twitter client with meat on the bones.
TextMate HTML and CSS bundles for power users
In case you didn’t already know this, I love TextMate! There is no other text editor for the Mac the comes remotely close. Don’t try to refute me on this or I’ll strike you down with my hand coded php saber… er.. I mean… never mind.
Well today I love TextMate even more. Yes that is possible. Today I found two ridiculously cool bundles to enhance the built in HTML and CSS bundles (if you don’t know what a TextMate bundle is then go away and never come back, you are no friend of mine). These bundles take all the repetition out tagging your markup or building you css. Seriously! All the repetition… GONE!
Let me put it to you this way. In web design, coding a nav list can be tedious work; you have your ul, your li’s, your id’s, your classes, your anchors, and all the attributes and values to go along with this… then you have to close it all. I’ve learned a few TextMate shortcuts to make this a bit quicker, but with the HTML bundle from Minimal Design it’s as simple as typing your page names, selecting them and performing a shortcut key binding and you’re done. Imagine this type of workflow all throughout everything you do in you web development. Having intelligent ways to get every common routine done is my kind of thinking.
And what about the CSS plugin? Oh please don’t even get me started on how brilliant that one is. I am already a big CSSEdit fan but there are times in a in a project, particularly in a RapidWeaver theme, where I want to have full access and control of all the files that I am working on in one window, more or less. That said, mind you, I have always found editing CSS in TextMate doable, but not lightning quick like CSSEdit. However, the brilliant mind behind this CSS bundle for TextMate made CSS editing a pure joy. Type one character of a property, press tab, then select from a list of likely choices. It not only finishes the property for you, but completes the whole line including the value. Tweek the value numbers a bit and you’ve written a whole line of CSS in two to three key strokes. CSSEdit can’t touch that kind of speed (but TextMate can’t touch CSSEdit’s grouping architecture so tit for tat).
I know in RapidWeaver theme development I am forever creating and perfecting markup pages that coincide nicely with template css files and vice-versa. These two bundles are going to rock my workflow like nothing else before it. If you spend any time in web design at all, you owe it to yourself to check these bundles out or at least watch the movie.
For a list of other useful TextMate links, try my del.icio.us links.
WakeOnLan; fun for the purely lazy.
One of my favorite features of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is the screen sharing built right into the Finder (the only thing I’ve come to find the Finder useful for). What used to require an expensive seat of Remote Desktop For Mac, or a slightly hackish Chicken-of-the-VNC setup, is now accomplished with the built in screen-sharing goodness of Leopard.
At the home office this is great; it adds an additional level of sophistication to my complete and total laziness that only cool technology can afford. My wife and I share a common space in our home where our computers exist no more than 6 feet apart from each other. We tend to share a lot of files and tend to want to show each other things on the others computer. As you can imagine, before Leopard came along, we used to physically get up and down from our office chairs, walk the 6 long feet and peer over each others shoulder to have our common viewing experience. It was a dizzying, trying time, but we somehow managed.
Now we simply share each others screen with the click of a button. But what if my wife’s computer is asleep? Then what? Do you really expect me to get out of my chair, walk 3 paces of wake it? Hell no. That’s what God created WakeOnLan.app for. Simply put, WakeOnLan is the greatest lazy mans invention. I can wake and sleep my wifes computer at will, even while she’s in the middle of doing something, making for hours of completely impractical, totally irrational, yet entirely enjoyable fun… until she discovered the same app herself.
RapidWeaved is now live
The once popular RapidWeaved.com is back and fully functional! Slated as the RapidWeaver showcase site for the users by the users, RapidWeaved.com is promising to be the fair to all RapidWeaver users. It is the hope of seyDoggy, RapidWeaved.com’s new caretakers, that the new version of the site be packed full of useful news and reviews in addition to the open site showcase.
If you have a site made with RapidWeaver then head over to RapidWeaved.com and submit your site today.
Adobe Premier Pro CS3 is Leopard ready!
Adobe was a bit quicker to get Premier Pro Leopard OS X 10.5 compatibility sorted out than the time it took for them to switch to intel in the first place (understandably). This is great news for me since I have a client just itching to switch their office over to Leopard but I wouldn’t let them. I might still hold them off for a week or so just so I can test the waters but this update is a very good first step.
A RapidWeaver showcase for the users, by the users
It’s been a long time coming but RapidWeaved.com is finally making it’s comeback. This is the RapidWeaver showcase site that was started by Gary Byrd a while back and was recently adopted by seyDoggy when Gary decided he could no longer feed and clothe this ever growing showcase beast.
RapidWeaved.com is looking for site submissions for sites built with RapidWeaver. Head on over and submit yours today.