It’s a new year, and a new decade. I know 2010 will be a great year for me, and I’m going to do my best to make sure of that by setting a few new years resolutions for myself.
Take 1 photo a day and blog it to force myself to get more creative - I’m keeping it in a tumblr blog you can follow here: http://2010photos.tumblr.com
Lose 10 pounds
Make a short film about my trip to Togo, Africa in July
Try to get a photo published somewhere or in a local gallery
So most of these are photography related, but I think these all revolve around my trip to Africa later this year. This is more than likely a once in a lifetime trip, and I really want to make sure that I take some amazing photos and videos to remember it by.
My church asked me to make a quick video intro for a new 5 week sermon series titled "Five Words That Will Rock Your World." The graphics were already made, I just had to animate it somehow. It's been a while since I last touched Adobe After Effects, but I think I came up with something pretty decent.
I originally made this as a standard 4:3 video at 720x480 to fit on the projector screens at church, but I decided to re-render this in 16:9 720p HD so I can have a good archival copy for my portfolio and just so it looks great online. The original 4:3 video took roughly 5 hours to render out on my MacBook Pro (which I had to do 3 times due to various mistakes and errors!) and the larger 720p version took 10 hours!
The music is "Life Inside You" by Matthew West from his album Something To Say (Amazon MP3 download page)
So, I wrote a game! It's something I've been wanting to do and had the idea for a while now. The premise of the game is that a random word is selected, a search of Flickr.com is performed with that word and you see the images from that search. Now you have 30 seconds to guess what that word is!
The game is entirely written in javascript/jQuery and is completely themable with jQuery UI. I wrote the majority of it in one afternoon, and made some updates the following week based on some great feedback from friends on Twitter and just some better usability ideas I had.
Take a shot at it and let me know what you think. I hope to find the time soon to make even more improvements to the game.
Once a year my company, AppRiver, allows me to attend one work related conference and my for first year working here I’ll be attending MIX ‘09 in Las Vegas! Until recently, this wasn’t even a conference I’ve heard of, so don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it before either. Mix is an annual conference for web designers and developers with a heavy focus on Microsoft technologies (also sponsored by Microsoft).
So, I’m headed out to Vegas on Monday the 16th and expect to learn a lot and have a blast doing so for about a week. I’m scheduled for a few different sessions that I’m excited about attending, and there’s tons and tons of sessions to attend. Need I even mention this all takes place in Las Vegas? I took a trip out there about 3 years ago with my dad and had a blast, so I fully expect to have a great time when I’m not doing web related stuff. I know the grand canyon and the Hoover Dam are fairly close, and it would just be a dream come true to see either one of these (or both!).
I’ll hopefully be fully armed with my laptop and camera where ever I go, and a goal I’m going to try and set for myself is to do a daily photo-blog of what’s going on at the conference and anything else I can take pictures of. It’s my first conference and I’m usually pretty trigger happy, so expect lots of photos.
Recently I needed a way to click a button and add a new row to a table with an animation using jQuery for people to add new data for a section. Simple right? Well I set up my table with a blank row at the bottom that I hid with CSS, and then when I press a button it clones that row it and puts it at the top with a .slideDown() animation. Here's the code I used:
Looks pretty straightforward right? Well it works, but it doesn't seem to render correctly. Here's a demo of this in action to see what I mean.
Turns out that for most jQuery animations when they complete, the display CSS property is set to display:block;. Normally that's all fine and good, but a table row has to be set to display:table-row;. I can't edit how that animation finishes since it's part of jQuery, so now what?
Well someone on the jQuery Google Group had the great idea to just fill each table cell with a <div>, put all the contents I needed in there, and simply apply the .slideDown() animations to that <div> since by default they are set to display:block; anyway. Brilliant! Basically we never animate the table row itself, only the elements inside it.
I put together a pretty full featured demo with some other cool jQuery tricks I've been learning recently, so take a look and I hope this will help someone else out.
Something I've been wanting for a while was a way to integrate a contact form in Expression Engine with some nice AJAX effects from my favorite Javascript library, Mootools. I've not been able to find anything out there that does exactly what I want, so I've made my own. This does require the FreeForm Module for Expression Engine from Solspace as well as Mootools 1.11.
This past week web work was a bit slow, so I decided to make some stuff for my church‘s new contemporary service called Seven30Seven. I spent a lot of time in Adobe After Effects, which I haven’t been in for a few years, and it took some time to get re-aquatinted with.
I made two videos for Seven30Seven, one is just a simple background to put on the screens that will animate in and stop, and the other one is a 5:00 countdown video so people will know when the service is starting. I also created a Youtube account finally, so I put the videos up on there. So either head over there and check them out, or just click the jump below to see them here.
I needed to update the software on my Garmin Nuvi 660, so while I had it connected to my computer I decided that I was bored with the white logo on a black screen while it starts up. Gamin makes it easy enough to change, you just put an image in there and select the one you want to use.
I decided to give it an over the top "Web 2.0" look. The designed are way overused everywhere online, so I thought it might be funny to bring that here. I've uploaded the PSD file, so feel free to download and edit for your specific needs.
In case you didn’t know, there was a total lunar eclipse last night, and we won’t be able to see another one until 2010.
I stayed outside for several hours last night to capture every stage of the eclipse, and I got about 150 pictures of it, but I had to narrow it down to just a few for the image below. Feel free to click and download this thing at any size you want. The largest size fits Apple’s 30 inch display, so hopefully it will fit yours.
I learned a lot about astral/moon photography doing this also. A small 2 second exposure actually gives the moon enough time to move and blur the photo slightly. Two seconds!
This past weekend I had the opportunity to take some photos of a golf tournament help by my church. I got to ride around with my friend Kristen in a gold cart and just take pictures of each team. I had my Nikon D80, and she had her D40x, and we both got some really great shots. Here’s a few of the highlights, click each photo to view it larger on Flickr.
Yesterday Derek and I went over to Studio 812, which is the recording studio primarily used by Paradigm Music Group to take some photos of the studio. If you clicked on that link, then you know they need a new website, and luckily that’s the reason we were taking photos. So I’ve got a few photos from the shoot.
(Amazon MP3 download page)
