baldysblog.co.uk

I have web site where I post my photographs. I started it off some time ago with a collection of pictures called “The Months” which are pictures taken from my daily bike rides besides and on the flood plain of the River Brue in Somerset. Although not my original intention, having loads of pictures, I bundled them up into slide shows of 15 pictures a time for each month.

This meant that my initial 12 month posting amounted to 180 separate images many of which, same place each day, would tend to be a bit repetitive although the light and tides do change things. A couple of days back, I decided to add the latest two months – Aug08 and Sept08 along with nine other slide shows on various subjects…

Cock Ups can be Beneficial

I had originally designed the web site using a standard ‘template’ which I modified from Adobe Dreamweaver which is a visual web authoring software package. It all worked fine until I added in these extra slide shows and slightly altered the site navigation which whilst it worked fine on my local machine, had all kinds of inexplicable problems once uploaded onto my web server – Oh Bum

Eventually and after 24 hours I got it all sorted so that it now works and quite apart from over a year of pictures of the River Brue flood plain and estuary – which truth to tell is a very small affair not to be confused with the Nile Delta, there are also on offer presentations on launching and recovering Lifeboats, a sailing dinghy, a favourite fishing boat, the Red Arrows and the Battle of Britain Flight with lots more promised. In total we have ‘ballooned’ from 180 images to 375 and…

What a Load of Tosh !

It was only after I had dealt with the technical problems that I paused to ask myself the basic and most obvious question: “Who on earth wants to look at 375 pictures you have taken and presented in a linear way ?” To a greater or lesser extent, we all suffer from a degree of ‘information overload’ and I know that sometimes when people send me stuff to look at or vet for them, it can take an amount of mental effort to concentrate or, even get round to it so, “Would you like to look at my family album ?” Is probably a Big NO.

Now it is at moments like this that you ask yourself ; “Why didn’t I ask myself that question in the first place because it is not as if I were some great photographic or artistic genius is it ?” There is hardly a big queue of people waiting to see the latest “Baldy Opus” revealed !Time to rewind and think about what I’m doing, why and what do I hope to achieve anyway ? There are times when you just have to laugh at yourself.

Playing With a Redesign

I have already started planning a total redesign of the web site because I want something a little more original than just doing a variation on an existing design and having worked with my current one, realised that it was not very slick when doing updates and loading new material.

Also, I have started working with video and 3D animation which although in the early stages and in the “proof of technology” rather than ‘content’ stage so, won’t be ready for “prime time” until sometime next year, I also want to accommodate on the site. Well I guess now, I have another factor to add to the mix – less but higher quality content.

Less Is More…

When I stood back and looked my pictures displayed on the web currently, I realised that I need to turn the concept on its head, what I need to aim for is a strictly limited number of images or ‘image units’ – a concept I’ve just made up. I’m not attempting “NASA Speak” here, by describing something as an ‘image unit’, I want to encapsulate the idea of a short video or interactive animation as well as single still images.

So one of the things I am currently playing with and learning is a piece of software called Corel PainterX which is a computer based fine art painting tool so that whilst you may start with a photograph, you can take the image into any number of directions using all kinds of artistic media whether oil paint, water colours and the list is extensive.

The basic proposition therefore is few but of high quality, less a ‘theme’ more just an individual image so, how many ?

For absolutely no scientific reason what-so-ever, I’ve decided on the number 12 and I’m setting myself a target of the next 6 weeks to produce 12 stand alone images and the web design to present them in. Thereafter, I will set a target of one new and unique image every 4 weeks with each time, the ‘retired image’ going into an archive which people can still access if they like but, the main site remains at 12 images only.

Conclusion:

Although looking back on the current web site which I will leave there until I replace it, doing it was and is not a bad experience because I learned quite a lot by working on it all and most times, experience trumps theory.

I may not meet my self imposed 6 week target because whilst a “12 page” web site is easy to do, there is another idea that comes to mind on a detail of the presentation that I have no idea how to do technically on a web site so I need to explore and through doing that most likely discover another way to do a similar thing ! But whatever happens, I am still continuing on my personal journey in life and will have some fun in doing so.

Footnote:

Since posting this earlier on today I’ve been doing some web browsing and in case anybody reads this and is interested in such stuff, I thought that I would share what I found. On my present picture galleries, when I build them I have to set a fixed size which is 640 pixels on the longest edge. If I’m restricting myself to just 12 images, I don’t really want to do that, the feature I really want is for someone to be able to zoom in and out of the picture so that they can see it at the best size for their screen or, look at parts of the picture in greater detail by zooming in.

I wrote earlier that I didn’t know how to do this but after looking at a tutorial for Photoshop CS3 which I use, I’ve got all the tools in my hand already to do it using a feature I hadn’t noticed before – “zoomify” – doh !