The Midnight Isle is where I post articles on visual artistry - primarily photography and image manipulation, but you can also expect to see more on 2d and 3d graphics in the future.
For other avenues of my creativity, please visit Sorcerer's Isle, where you will find writings on a variety of other subjects.
Tonight, prepare yourself for the beginning of a new era, as one man - and his keyboard - begins his journey in an epic quest to save the world.
The team behind the StackOverflow Q&A programming site have created a place for people to propose new Q&A sites to be created - once enough people have voted in favour of a proposal, the site gets created.
Although it has plenty of flaws (which I'm happy to point out), the Stack Exchange platform is still a good way of getting quick and comprehensive answers to questions, and it's much better than many of the forums out there.
So, there are two of these proposals which I am following, and if you are into either photography or 3d graphics you should definitely consider checking out these links, and following the proposals too:
These sites will only be created when enough people have followed/committed to them, so please spread these links to anyone else who might be interested.
I've recently been working on a gallery website for my brother, a brilliant artist and illustrator. The site is still under construction, but he's already got some great examples of his drawings and sculptures on there, and it is definitely worth checking out.
Head over to eldavo.co.uk to take a look, and if you like the work take a look at his blog where he has more of his art.
On the technical side, the main site is pretty simple, so far, with extra complexity coming later on. It runs on Railo and uses jQuery. The (private) admin part of the site was my first opportunity to use cfimage functionality, allowing thumbnails to be generated from uploaded images. I used jCrop for the client-side crop selection.
It's been far too long since I last posted anything, so I'll kick-off what I hope will be the start of more frequent posting with a couple of photos taken down on the UK's south east coast last month, immediately after some incredibly stormy weather.
The winds were still very strong and the evening sky nice and atmospheric, allowing me to create these two images:
In the comments for a recent Stack Overflow blog article, Chris asked:
Can somebody photoshop the top 7 SO users by reputation (Jon Skeet's face onto Superman) onto that comic, just to make me chuckle!
Which sounded like fun, so I went ahead and did it.
Was a fairly quick job, so there's some rough bits, but I hope you like it, Chris.
This is my new and improved weblog, where I will be posting on a large assortment of topics which I hope you will find interesting. All of the old blog messages have been ported across, and re-catalogued into more useful groupings.
For anyone wishing to read posts only on particular areas, there are three sub-blogs available, which filter the messages from this main blog according to their respective focus. Combined with the ability to subscribe to feeds for individual or multiple tags, it should be easy to get at only the content you wish to read. And to follow all the messages, you can simply read just the main blog.
Currently, everything is still rather basic, but over the next few months I will be adding to, extending and improving the various features that are available, and I welcome any feedback you might have.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy your stay, and please feel free to ask if you have any questions.
The exhibition ended last night, and it was a good show this year, with a lot of excellent photos on display.
I did reasonably well - whilst I didn't win any of the trophies, two of my images received certificates of merit, plus I received a panel certificate for my "Elemental Views" panel.
This was a set of extra-wide landscapes with ratios between 4:1 and 8:1 - showing that it is not necessary to stick to the 4:3 or 3:2 standard that comes out of the camera, and photographers should instead consider what shape suits the image best.
Both my print panel and digital set of images are now available to view online:
Please feel free to leave any comments you might have.
This coming Monday 9th March, I will be exhibiting a panel of photographs at my Camera Club's annual exhibition, Photo 2009, to be held at the Fairfield Hall in Croydon.
In total there will be more than 150 mounted prints, plus over a hundred slides and digital projected images. These latter two will be displayed when the Exhibition is officially opened by Damian Demolder (Editor of Amateur Photographer), at 20:00 on Monday the 9th.
The prints will be available to look at all week long, at any time that Fairfield Hall is open - starting on the morning of Monday 9th and running until the evening of Saturday 14th.
The exhibition and opening event are both free to attend, and with Croydon Camera Club regarded as one of the best clubs in the region, there are sure to be some excellent pictures on display.
Anyone remotely interested is strongly encouraged to visit.
A taster of just two of my fifteen images is available if you view the full version of this blog entry...
There's been a little bit of snow in England for the past few days, and whilst I haven't had a chance properly go out and take photos, I have grabbed a few random shots.
(each image links to a larger version)
For the next week, I'll be staying in York, wandering around and taking photographs of whatever I find up here.
Each evening I intend to update this post with what happened that day, and show a quick selection of the photos I've taken.
Updated: 9th November