Incredible things are happening with technology as we speak. The internet is growing exponentially. I find it almost impossible to stay up to date. And sure enough, once in a while, I find out that I have indeed fallen behind.

It was the case this evening. Having looked up the French town of Anjou on Google Maps while Skyping with Marie earlier, I was left with an open browser and beautiful France smiling at me. I began to zoom in and traveled south. A little orange icon looking like a person attracted my attention on the interface. It looked like the « Street View » icon, a very cool new feature in Google Maps that shows you street level images of a location. But I thought I remembered Street View only being available in select US cities. I checked further, zooming in on Marseilles.

Surprise. Street level views were everywhere. My heart started beating faster. What if? I scrolled, scrolled and scrolled, disoriented at first. I missed la Bonne Mère, found le vieux port, climbed back up the hill and spotted the name I was looking for. I dragged the little icon and held my breath.

And this, is what I got.

I was blown away - that ruelle, boldly labeled an « avenue », is the smallest street one could ever imagine; the hairpin turns below and to the left (once in street view, click and drag to turn around) are so tight and narrow that most small French cars miss and have to back-up once. And yet, there it was, on my screen and out of a decade of dust collecting, duly photographed and archived by others onto the internet. 69 Avenue David Dellepiane. Google sent me tumbling down the memory lane.

How many times had I written that address on an envelope? The squeaky metal gate would open into a small empty terrace, and then the door, to the right, lead via a long corridor inside one of the smallest (and darkest) apartments I had seen before arriving in Vancouver.

There, lived my father. He spent the end of his tumultuous life smoking and drinking himself to oblivion, and he stayed at 69 D. Dellepiane until the end. The sight of this house is an amazingly sad one, filled with the heavy burden of guilt and regrets. But at the same time, I catch myself smiling at the memory of such a colorful man. I chose, long ago, to remember all the extraordinary moments he filled my youth with, rather than the sadness of an unavoidable end.

Isa, if you ever read this, my love to you and everyone around you.

As it was said somewhere else:

...

For those of you who might have wondered where the pictures of old posts had gone recently, well, they were in server la-la land. I had forgotten to update my database table to replace the string of my old domain with the new one in over 300 entries!

It’s now a done deal.

Oops. I’m an idiot. It shouldn’t have made a difference since the files are still there. Haven’t had enough coffee this morning. It would seem that the old site is down. I’ll investigate...

This is the stuff dreams are made off. A road trip from Cape Town to the Namib Desert. One border and 2000 kilometers on African roads in unknown conditions, in the peak of summertime, with no cell phone reception nor wi-fi hotspots, aiming for the oldest desert on Earth and the most incredible landscapes one can imagine.

Of course, the word dream implies many - still - loose ends, including securing the use of said vehicle, swallowing the cost of fuel, leaving loved ones behind when they thought they had finally been granted the luxury of our company, and finding the guts to actually hit the road.

But as with any dream, anything is possible. The three or four cameras invited on the trip would go nuts and ample material would be collected for later publishing.

And most of all, the limits of a daily reality would be stretched yet a little further and deeper than once thought possible. The envelope would be pushed a step closer to the edge and souls would soar a little higher, stoned by freedom, inebriated by raw beauty and hardened by a tougher commitment.

Wishful thinking? Not quite. A lot remains to be evaluated and probed but it’s feasible. It’s actually quite possible. Heck, it’s almost tangible.

To be continued...

5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - Ignition!

Well, so to speak. The fireworks are inner ones. There’s really nothing to brag about but I hope you’ll enjoy the new look and streamlined interface. I certainly have learned a great deal and for that reason alone, it was worth it!

Please post any comments, typos, feedback, bug reports (are you still seeing the blog in blue, Gitte?), constructive criticism and blown away exclamation marks either in here or even better, in the guestbook accessible directly from the main gallery. I’ll be very curious to hear about loading speed, functionality, interface, etc.

There remain kinks to be ironed, of course and bits and pieces to be glued together. But you shouldn’t notice them too much.

Known issues:

• There is a major glitch with gallery centering in Opera, which I just discovered. If you are using Opera, have patience, or consider Firefox or Chrome...
• At this stage, all prior dates of guestbook comments are stamped 1969. Why then? Why not.
• Most photo captions haven’t been written, nor the final sequence of photo albums decided; however neither should matter much because the captions are only turned on manually and definitively aren’t necessary, and since albums play at random by default, again the sequence isn’t quintessential.
• I am still deciding what to do with the full screen mode; improvements may follow.
• Too many pictures remain in the galleries, and some are not yet scaled to fit the screen. I should be removing at least 30% of what’s currently online and will be adjusting sizes when time allows.

And now, I’m going to.... bed!

P.S. Oh yes, how do you get there? With the link above or here. And don’t forget to update your bookmarks!

Updates:

• Blue text and background issues in Safari fixed, thanks to Gitte. CSS was the culprit, I hadn’t linked to a couple of files. I’ll have to centralize all that CSS.
• Centering fixed in Opera, and while I was at it, I reverted to a much more simple CSS centring code; God only knows how I’d ended up using negative margins when I just had to use 2 margin:auto’s and 100% width... Again, CSS issue.

Saturday morning, 1:30 am. 

I wish I had a big black cat here to distract me from the computer and beg for pellets. Or its owner, to distract me from the computer and beg. But writing this post should do the trick and put me to sleep. The redesign is about complete and I should be going live tomorrow, hence today.

I’ve finished transferring files from one domain to the other, and thank god there will be less crap on the new site. The old one had become like a dark basement in which no one dares enter. I’ve gotten rid of my Viper Guestbook after reading that the project had been abandoned due to major security issues, and have installed a new, lighter script; adapting the database was a bit tricky and my old dates still aren’t sorted out but I’m working on it. The blog now resides at the new domain and if you are reading this, you have been redirected silently (look at the URL.) Time to update your bookmarks. All the photo galleries are online and duly managed via the SlideShowPro Director CMS. They still need tweaking and the most time-consuming task of writing captions has yet to be tackled.

But all and all, I’m just about there. I’ll finish adjusting everything once the site is up and running. There will be a lot of SEO left, and some cleaning up, and 301’s, and Google Analytics and Sitemaps, and Woopra. And then there will be time to think about a desert...

We are now in the final stages of a multiple countdown, the three main features of which being a trip (ours) to the antipodes, an interview (hers) with the foreign powers that be, and the launch of the (read « thee ») new-born web site (mine). The former is due in a few weeks, the latter might conclude as soon as this week-end, depending on how little sleep I get and how many bugs I manage to squash on my way there. And the middle one, more formidable still than its peers, will happen in between.

For the web site, a new domain has been registered, files are flying back and forth, settings are duplicated, the database soon will be transferred. Well no, in fact I hope to leave it as is, since I haven’t changed hosts. As soon as I can configure my silly ftp program to stop changing the capital letters in file names, I’ll be on my way to success.

As far as the trip goes, more about it later. Incredible generosity, much luck, hard work and sacrifices were involved into making it happen. Some extraordinary ideas are emerging and will be worth looking into.To be continued.

Of the third feature, I shall not say much, not wanting to jinx it. Let’s just admit fingers are crossed very hard, the odds are in our favor and it’s looking pretty good!

I once hated maths. I was so bad at it that I had to see a tutor outside of my school time. But time passed and I improved, having been given the lucky privilege of an extra school year while transiting from a country to another. College came and I juggled happily with the basics of trigonometry, differential and integral calculus, and other wonderful buggers. And then I forgot it all. Such is the usefulness of our school years. (Don’t get me started on that...)

However, maths is all around us and once in a while, as adults, we run into it and suddenly remember an old friend. It’s happened to me quite a few times recently and I’ve decided to write about it because, not so surprisingly, it was photography that yielded the happy encounter. As both a technical and artistic field, photography is a good breeding ground for numbers and rules.

The number 3 has always begged for rules. Maths has its Rule of Three. That much I have remembered and I use it all the time in high stress situations. « If one black cat eats 76.4 pellets in 55 seconds, how long would it take him to eat the standard 50 pellet ration? » Scuba divers too have a Rule of Thirds. One third of your air supply to go, one third to come back, one third as a reserve. Granted, that’s a worse-case scenario, for penetrations and deep dives.

So sure enough, photographers and artists came up with their own Rule of Thirds. It’s the mother of all composition rules. To be broken with moderation but enthusiasm. After all, as the crew of the Black Pearl would say of the « Code of Parlez », it’s a more of a guideline... Still. The Rule of Thirds... rules. If one divides a typical canvas or photographic composition in 9 rectangles formed by the intersection of two pairs of equally spaced vertical and horizontal lines, four focal points are obtained at the intersections, dividing the scene in three equal vertical segments and three horizontal ones.

The Rule of Thirds claims that a well balanced composition will place its main subject on one of the four focal points. In addition to making the image aesthetically pleasing, this method creates a virtual dynamic path by making our eyes travel from the opposite edge to the subject, and back. The Rule of Thirds is at the Composition 101 level. To the point that I think every digital camera should have an option to superimpose the lines on its LCD screen.

Then there is the much thicker Golden Ratio topic, referred to by the Greek letter phi (φ). Two numbers are said to be in the Golden Ratio if the sum of the two is to the larger what the larger is to the smaller. Got it? Come up, you gotta keep up, here!

(a + b) / a = a / b = φ = 1.618...

Ok, it’s harder to visualize and it involves maths more directly. But it’s an appealing ratio that suppresses one of the lines in the Rule of Thirds and brings the focal point of a photo slightly closer to the center, working well for scenes that lack an abandance of secondary subjects and/or depth of field. And more interestingly, it’s also closely associated with the Fibonacci Sequence. Ah-ah, now I can almost hear the crowd going « Oh » and « Ah » and « Of course, Fibonacci! ». Indeed. Hollywood has a curious manner of pulling obscure themes out of a geeky hat and throwing them out into the spotlight and popular knowledge overnight; so just as Lara Croft brought Leo Délibes’ Lakmé to the masses while dancing on a high wire, Robert Langdon introduced the world to the Fibonacci Sequence and hence, I just awoke you by finally mentioning a concept you’d heard before.

I very much doubt, however, that walking out of the theater you rushed to the public library to open an encyclopedia. So Fibonacci probably ended up in your mind alongside many Italian pasta names. Let me clarify, then. The Fibonacci Sequence isn’t a complicated notion - it’s the implications that are endless. The sequence in itself is a series of numbers, beginning with an arbitrary 0 and 1, and each following number being the sum of both previous numbers in the list. It goes like this, to infinity: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89, etc. That’s it.

Now let’s turn this into an image. Imagine that we draw an invisible square (it’s the 0, duh.) Then a visible one, one unit in side length. We draw another, same size, adjacent. Then we draw another with a side length equal to the 2 previous added, and we keep going, like this:

Above, the Fibonacci Sequence is represented graphically. So how are the Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci Sequence related? They both yield an approximately identical spiral. If we were to draw an arc in each square, corner to corner, starting with the second 1, we’d get a spiral such as this one:

This is called a Fibonacci Spiral and it is virtually identical to a Golden Spiral (obtained by a logarithmic spiral whose growth factor b is related to φ, the golden ratio - Wikipedia dixit, blah-blah-blah.) This is also where things become interesting from an artistic point of view. Let’s superimpose the Rule of Thirds and the Fibonacci Spiral. First of all, one of the focal points of the Rule of Thirds coincides almost exactly with the origin of the spiral:

Then we notice that the curve of our spiral manages to lead the eye through each of the Rule of Thirds’ 9 rectangles except the central one, which once again, doesn’t need the extra attention. There is a smooth transition from the outside edge, a quick exploration of the image and a final tightening of the focus into the main subject. Perfect. And the path can be followed back out, too.

Now the trick is to actually build a photographic composition according to these rules. It so happens that the shot below works pretty well, but it was a pure coincidence. Entering the scene from top right corner, the eye travels down taking in the tree and pond, finds the goose, leaves it attracted by the boots, starts inspecting the girl and finally centers onto her adorably focused expression.

Or at least, that’s my take on it. One is allowed to theorize, right?

Because I am neglecting this blog so badly and because hearing myself talk about it will encourage me to keep pushing forward, here’s a brief update on the site redesign process. I have just about completed the skeleton and will soon be addressing all galleries themselves (as in choosing which pictures make it to the limelight and which don’t.) The site still runs on a basic HTML structure in order for it to remain search-friendly, but the main gallery is ran by Flash and the main HTML text content is accessible through javascript.

Adapting Slideshowpro to suit my needs has proven to be quite an interesting task but I’ve finally got it to do what I want when I want where I want. Flash provides by far the most elegant, dynamic and interactive solution for photo slide shows. There are downsides, of course, and the next challenge will be SEO. But as it is, the gallery is fast, slick and I think it really serves its purpose as a showcase.

As I mentionned above, to retain some searchability, I’ve built the few text-based extra pages like  Bio, About, Contact and the like in classic HTML. But they are served via Shadowbox in an overlay window that avoids a full gallery reload on exit and features a very dark and minimalistic style intended to not steal the show away from the main gallery. Again, this has drawbacks, like for the user not to be able to bookmark one of those pages directly. But they are merely support pages and I really wanted the focus to be on the photography.

It’s the first time that I am designing a web site for a targeted audience and with very specific goals in mind. I find it refreshing and quite a relief to be voluntarily breaking the sacred rules of compatibility and accessibility. I wouldn’t go as far as claiming out loud « If you don’t have the tools to view my site, you’re unfit to do so. » I’d deserve a slap on the wrist and a wake up call. I will, however, offer my simple apologies and strongly suggest an upgrade. And I might even shrug my shoulders or sigh.

There seems to be a latent tendency in the web community to consider the web surfer as a king and the web designer as his slave; the slave must break his back to ensure the king’s enjoyment and safeguard his royal laziness. Everything must be done in order for the king to be able to access a site with the least effort possible, and while using as few brain cells as necessary. Content and design quality are sacrificed for this, and in the end, the king gets a more primitive product that is a brilliant compromise but does not necessarily yield a great experience. The king is unwilling to take his responsibilities and acknowledge the slave’s work by at least keeping his browser up-to-date and his plugins current.

I don’t think it has to be that way. I believe the public should be educated and shown that better browsers and a smarter understanding of the web will allow them a much better user experience and let them enjoy much more engaging web sites. The slaves spend hundreds of hours designing a site, the least we can do as web surfers is respect their work and accept to view it like it was meant to be seen, and used.

Just like one puts on reading glasses to enjoy a great book rather than complain that the font is too small or put the book down, one should address the web with interest and a willingness to learn and adjust. The web is an ever-changing medium with incredible capabilities that, according to Moore’s Law, are doubling every two years. Every web surfer is presented with a great challenge. A lot of people fall behind, or never even catch up in the first place. But that is not always the fault of web designers. They are the ones keeping up the pace. The public should, too.

If Picasso had publicly declared that his paintings were meant to be viewed upside down, wouldn’t people have stood on their heads? Granted, my web site won’t be a Picasso. Not even a Van Gogh. Surely nowhere near a Cezanne. But I’m not asking you to stand in precarious inverted balance with your feet trashing through the air and blood rushing to your head either. All you’ll need is a recent browser, Flash Player version 9 or above, javascript enabled and a screen with min. 1024x768 resolution. I believe that’s about 95% of people out there. Are you one of them?

If not, are you willing to change? I believe it will be worth it. No, not just to visit my amazing work of art. But to live here today and benefit from today’s wonders. As they unfold. It’s like magic. Except it’s not.

Update your browser. Get a new monitor. Enjoy the web. A lot of people are spending a lot of time designing it for you. Make their work easier. That’s my two cents anyway. Amen.

8:30 pm. People are cheering in the street! This is not even a US city, it’s Vancouver, Canada!

As per all major US networks, Mr. Obama has already won the race, and set many records. When the hang-over subsides, reality is going to kick in harder than ever. The man will have very small shoes to fill, but an immense load to carry. He is going to need a serious set of muscles, and a mind of steel.

But for the first time in a long time, it seems he, at least, can actually pull it off.

’nough said.

For now, I’ll just join the world and smile.

Update: And a very smart, impressive acceptance speech to top it all off. I love the way he brought the whole world into the equation. The man has such charisma he could be an actor. Damn I wish I hadn’t said that.

I don’t mean to jinx things down south and on the eve of one of the most critical US elections I can remember, I am, along with most of the world and a good part of the States, crossing my fingers and holding my breath, hoping for the Blues to win. So much can still go wrong. Polls are like politicians: they cheat and they lie and they deceive. But then again, we are cheering for one politician who, we hope, won’t do much of the above.

My biggest fear, considering who is running the country right now - and what they have to lose if Obama gets in - is for the elections to be rigged. My biggest worry, because I remain and always will be a skeptic when it comes to politics, is that Obama might be a better impersonator than we are keen to perceive. And my biggest hope, along with everybody else’s, is that my biggest fear and my biggest worry will soon be put behind, dismantled as if unnecessary weaponry, disarmed like antiquated nuclear weapons and forgotten among the many nightmares of the past.

Today’s post, however, will be red. It’s not my fault. The Republicans probably manipulated election dates to make them happen during the fall season, sending subliminal messages to all who live in forested States. But then again, maybe they didn’t. When Palin gets pranked on the phone by a fake Sarkozy, one can doubt anybody down there is actually using what’s called a brain.

In any case Vancouver’s Stanley Park is at its peak right now and after watching my ducks for a while on Saturday, I headed into the trees and was blown away by the reds.

With luck, the world tomorrow will be a slightly better place.