This picture titled “The King Has Fallen” was taken a while ago. I was trying out different depths of field (DOF) to use whilst taking the image. In the end I settled for a very narrow DOF so that I could include the white pawn to give a sense of why the black king has fallen, but not give it any real focus in the image.
During the studio session we tried out a number of different concepts. The first idea, which was Olga’s, was to get Akiko to dress up in traditional Japanese clothing. Luckily for us Akiko had some clothing to fit the bill. I’ll post a couple more in a slide show when I’ve a couple of minutes.
One of the issues I have with my current position is what appears to be the lack of interesting in developing both mine and the other technical staff’s skill set. I should clarify this by saying that I’m referring to our technical skills rather than the more “soft” skills like speed reading, managing people, etc. Of course for the majority of projects that come our way we can use our current knowledge to craft a solution. However, I’m always left feeling a little cold knowing that maybe there is something out there that would make life easier, improve what we can offer the rest of the department, or simply make things look more professional.
So I’ve decided to take the old bull by the horns and look into exploring new web technologies. To this I’m trying to weight up two options. The first is J2EE, which I’ve been reading about for the past couple of weeks. However, an email today said that there is currently no supporting server on campus and that one would have to be purchased. That could be a bit of a problem, so my second option is Ruby on Rails. There seems to be a lot of hype about this. So the question I’m faced with is which of these should I continue spending time on, or is there something else I should look at?
I’ve just spotted that there are a couple pictures which aren’t displaying correctly in firefox. When I say not being displayed correctly I mean that the colours are slightly off. I’ve run a number of the image through different browser (safari, IE6, IE7, firefox) and the problem is not just firefox, but also IE6. I’m in the process of finding a solution and will update everyone when I’ve amended all the affected images.
Update: I believe I have corrected all the images that looked slightly off.
In this picture I was experimenting using low level lighting. It was whilst I was taking these pictures that learnt a new trick on my camera to deal with focusing under these circumstances. Having said this, I’m not convinced that you get the full effect of this picture from this reduce version, but I just wanted to show some of the other stuff that we were trying out.