So I started this blog almost a year ago and I haven’t posted anything for for about 3/4 of that year. Not surprising really - another dead blog. Too much to do, too much happening in my life, too little time, too much coffee, too much responsibility - pick one - everyone has an excuse like that. However - I just can’t pull out the old “nothing to write about” and make it stick. There really is loads to write about - perhaps its just that I feel like a lunatic talking to the walls of an empty room here. Whatever.
I updated the photos section to support big images - in fact you need a screen of about 1280 x 960 to avoid scroll-bars there. I just care more for bigger images than I care for smaller screens - not professionally of course, but here, in my little cell. This change is supposed to motivate me to streamline the post-processing and export of a few of the thousands of images I have taken during the last 6-8 months. The gauntlet is down. We’ll see what comes to pass.

The train-ride to Lillehammer for Yggdrasil (which is the name of “The Tree of Life” in Norse mythology) provided some photographic opportunity through the filthiest windows I have ever seen on a means of public transport… and that is saying something. The day was wonderfully foggy, and the state of the windows seems somehow to have enhanced the effect.

The Yggdrasil web-usability conference was held in the small town of Lillehammer (Winter Olympics 1994, Norway) Monday 15th to Tuesday 16th of October this year. Among the speakers was interface-design wizard Luke Wroblewski who currently holds the post of Senior Principal, Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo, Inc. Luke also runs his own company, LukeW Interface Designs and writes articles and books on the subject of interface-design, to great acclaim.

Luke made an excellent presentation highlighting how graphic design and content prioritization can make or break getting your message across to first time site visitors and getting people to use your services online. I am a professionally trained commercial artist with 12 years of experience working with webdesign, and despite the rapidly evolving field of web-centric design, I did not feel that I came away with much in the nature of new insights from the lecture. But I still came away very excited by what Luke had to offer. Why? Because Luke has managed to put into words and examples those very principles that I completely take for granted, but which sometimes seem so hard to get my clients to understand.

As is probably true in most skilled professions, having the principles of ones craft - in this case graphic design - well internalised makes it more difficult to appreciate which aspects of ones work may not be self-evident to other, perfectly intelligent human beings. Having a client pick on perfectly well-justified design details and failing to comprehend the significance of what has been outlined in the design, and, in turn, the ramifications of their own suggestions, is fairly common. Trying to convey why elements in a design have been fashioned the way they are - that there is indeed more to what is presented than personal preference - can be a significant challenge in some cases. So with the promise of getting my point across to my clients more easily, the next time I make a presentation I am going to lift a few salient points from Luke and smile all the way to client approval.

Check out Luke’s website and books.

Putting up a gallery on the subject of thresholds is nothing new, of course, but the subject is undeniably interesting because it can be interpreted so broadly. How we understand and structure our surroundings depends largely on how we categorize and label those things or concepts with which we interact. Thresholds and gateways can be interpreted as any border or connection between discreet spaces or concepts. I have submitted a few images of the very literal variety here. However, taking this to a more abstract level should prove a very interesting future project.

I have added a quick series of images of our daughter to the gallery, most taken during the last half year or so. Like any parent, I find her wonderful to behold and a joy to be with, and sometimes I really wonder what goes on inside that little head of hers.

I have been wondering how to best present images on this blog. Attaching them to each post as images with thumbnails is ok if you’re only showing a couple of images, but with more it gets tedious to navigate to see them all. In addition, a sea of portrait/landscape oriented thumbnails does not do your layout any favours.
A very knowledgeable colleague of mine, Eirik, suggested I look into SlideShowPro. It is an extremely customizable and well-designed Flash component that allows you to present images with any metadata and many optional features based on a single XML-file. It is very easy to set up and use, it works flawlessly, and best of all, it is supremely flexible in how you can configure it.
I am an avid Flash coder, and I really like SlideShowPro because it demonstrates just the sort of thing Flash - when done right - excels at. A case in point is how SlideShowPro allows you to create permalinks to a specific gallery and image within itself - as the link at the end of the previous post Large caliber everything demonstrates.
Check out the new photos page to see it in action. Also, for SlideShowPro coupled with great aesthetical and artistic value, be sure to check out one of Eiriks collaborative photography projects Hopscotch. Thanks for the tip, Eirik!

I spent a few Sunday hours at the local railway freight-terminal with a friend and fellow photography enthusiast. The area is vast and includes more than fifty parallell railwaytracks and a large maintenance area. What strikes you when walking about the place - apart from the need to watch your back so you don’t get run over - is that everything is larger than you might expect. The smallest useful tool on the site would probably be a wrench the size of your forearm. Yet there is a balance here between sheer scale and beautiful detail.

Used here were the EF 50 f/1.4 and EF 20 f/2.8.

See the images here.

A quiet falls on the surface of the ocean at the onset of evening. Rain is beginning to fall. Following its customary rise into gusts and buffs just preceding the sunset, the wind abates. If the wind can be described in terms of human spirits, it usually experiences a fit of pique before the evening, and then becomes depressed and withdrawn once the sun curves beneath the arc of the earth. When this coincides with a slow advance of solid rainclouds, the wind becomes positively catatonic instead, and goes away altogether. That is when mosquitoes start to bite. And those bitten by an entirely different bug - nicer perhaps, but more expensive - emerge to make their careful first attempts at nighttime photography. These were taken at Vikane, about an hours drive south of Oslo on the east side of the Oslo fjord. Top: EF50mm f/1.4 USM lens, 15 seconds at f/22, ISO 100, bottom: EF50mm f/1.4 USM lens, 25 seconds at f/22, ISO 200.

My grandmother was born and spent her entire childhood here - though of course, things were rather different then. If these had been pictures from that time they would, at the very least, have featured an aspect of historical interest. But one thing will have been the same all those years ago: Mosquitoes were biting, rain was beginning to fall.