The Impossible Cool

Ran out of creative energy this afternoon and turned to one of my favorite antidotes, the minimalist website fffound!, an amazing and varied firehose of images gathered from around the web. At the top of the page was a shot linked from another great site, The Impossible Cool - this quirky shot of Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn. Not a bad transfusion of visual energy for two mouse clicks. Reminded me I've got to finish watching the documentary footage from Kubrick's The Shining extras dvd – fascinating footage of Nicholson warming up and going over his lines while Kubrick blocks the shots and decides on camera position. The documentary then follows up with the actual scene as it ran in the film – and you appreciate how truly brilliant Nicholson is.

Back to work...

Day Three - New Gallery

New gallery! Today I wanted to see how long it would take to set up a new gallery now that I basicly know how the system works. I selected a set of location shots that are varied (in other words, kind of random) and set up the gallery to show square cropped thumbnails.

The square thumbs look really neat in the grid, but they can occasionally crop off a face in a vertical shot. The good thing about them is they make accomodate horizontal shots without any special trouble in terms of the arrangement of thumbnails on the page. Quick and easy!

I'm using Aperture 3 to manage and export images for my galleries. I am really more of a Lightroom guy, and I am much quicker and more knowledgeable with Lightroom, but Aperture has really gotten much better in version 3 and the full screen view rocks. It allows viewing your grid thumbs as well as full or zoomed in images against a pure black background with no UI unless you call it up. Very elegant for previewing and editing.

The new gallery is "Location Fashion" and it's the fourth one down in the Images drop-down menu. And this gallery was really fast and easy to upload and populate. I spent a little time reordering the sequence of images, but that was about all I had to do. Putting the page link into the the drop menu was a quick drag and drop. Sweet!

Day One! - Round Two

• Figured out how to create a drop-down menu for my page links at the top of each page, so now there's a menu item titled "Images" that contains the two galleries and the "Links" page that I mention in the post above.
• Also I decided to make this blog page the landing page so it's now the first thing you see when entering the site.

Day One!

Here's the deal:

• Several years ago I figured out barely enough about an Adobe website building program called GoLive to wire together a photographer's site that wasn't like anything else out there. It was different, fun to look at and it had a cool gimmick. That was the up-side.
• On the down-side, it took FOREVER to get the site done. Every link was connected by hand, and there were a LOT of links because there were a lot of photographs, and it had that clever gimmick. I decided it would be cool to give the effect of zooming in on each image by rolling the mouse over a small round gray button under the image. It made it possible to appreciate the detail of the large original image without the necessity to load a huge file. Each "zoom-in" view was a separate file cropped out of the original and they pre-loaded so the zoom was really quick to appear. Great idea except that it exactly doubled the number of images I needed to prepare and load and link. There are a lot of pages on the site, and 2 shots on each page, so really there are 4 files including zoom-in views, and lots and lots of connections in the html code. Eventually I got everything done, but I realized that I would never get myself to update the site. Way, way too much work and time.
• It's been years since that site was new and I've put off building another for far too long. I heard about a new web-app/site hosting service called SquareSpace (they sponsor my favorite podcast, Leo Laporte's MacBreak Weekly). While SquareSpace is not aimed at photographers, it's non-flash based which really appeals to me. I decided to try it out and see if I could use their tools to build something simple but cool, and a lot less time-intensive than my previous website.
• I've embarked on building the new website and I think I'm going to leave it in view as I go. It won't be polished and complete at first, but it might be interesting to you to watch me stumble along figuring things out as I go. Please check it out regularly and leave comments or suggestions - email me at timboole@gmail.com or post a comment on this page. Here's some miscellaneous thoughts on what little is here so far...
• The Gallery on the front page is a proof of concept. It took me all of the first two days to work out the kinks and lumps.
• The second Gallery on page two is the same as the front page gallery, only the thumbnails are differing shapes. If you're not careful the result is a big mess with empty holes here and there.
• Page Three (Gallery Links) has several live links which point to a couple of flash galleries and to my original site. The galleries open in new pages when you click the links.
• There will be more pages and more content daily, but I don't know what they will look like yet.
• From time to time I'll screw around to see how something works. These little experiments will appear and disappear regularly.
• Case in point: I'm throwing an image in here. Try clicking it for a jumbo-size version.

Headress from The Desert ShootHeadress from The Desert Shoot