Added 2009-06-25
“Desperately need to reach some kind of Nerf detente with @jonty before one of us loses a testicle.”Thursday, 11th March 2010
“I would go as far as to describe it as magnificent.”Thursday, 11th March 2010
“Discussing llama waxing over pasta and salad.”Wednesday, 10th March 2010
“Spent too much time in vim today. I just tried to use ":w[enter]" to send a line in IRC.”Wednesday, 10th March 2010
“Further dispatches from the world of human cheese.”Shared on Facebook Wednesday, 10th March 2010
“Seriously, Amazon, why the Hell is your "sort by price" feature so adamantly opposed to sorting by price?”Wednesday, 10th March 2010
“I need new in-ear/earbud headphones, around £20, with good sound that doesn't shut out the whole world. Recommendations?”Tuesday, 09th March 2010
“Plugged my ipod in at work to charge. I think Rhythmbox took the liberty of scrobbling it without asking me first. Useful but unexpected.”Tuesday, 09th March 2010
“Most photocopiers will refuse to copy things that contain a certain pattern of 5 circles as an anti-counterfeiting measure.”Shared on Facebook Monday, 08th March 2010
“Felt hungry. Started making dinner despite the hour. Stopped feeling hungry while cooking. Going to eat anyway. Make your mind up, body.”Sunday, 07th March 2010
“I can't explain it. Individually, goths look awesome. In a group (coven?), they look ridiculous.”Sunday, 07th March 2010
“Slow-buffering Flash videos are the 21st century Chinese water torture.”Saturday, 06th March 2010
When the NERF shotgun and machine gun joined the pistols already in the office, I knew I wanted to create an image that looked like a film poster. We went out into the car park to take this, along with 3 colleagues who held the lights.
Strobist info: Three lights, not including the sun. I underexposed the ambient light by about 1.5 stops, and had two lights at camera left and right, slightly behind the subjects, with gobos on the sides facing the camera and the backdrop (to create a strip of light on the edges of the subjects). My main light had a ¼ CTO gel on it to warm it up a little; it was held by a colleague on a light stand above them all. I'd meant to use an umbrella on it but left it upstairs, so we just went with a bare head. It had the same gobos as the other two, to avoid spilling light on the backdrop and avoiding lens flare.
“I am such a sucker for a free lunch.”Thursday, 04th March 2010
“Another day, another fire alarm. Rolled up on my bike and took the yellow vest off before someone expected me to take the initiative.”Thursday, 04th March 2010
“I like photographing colleagues. It's much easier to harrass them into posing/assisting with stuff like this. http://bit.ly/bfN05X”Wednesday, 03rd March 2010
“Bad omens for a website user experience, part #1: the word "interstitial".”Wednesday, 03rd March 2010
The Nerf Portraits photoset is now available on Ethicsgirls.
Wednesday, 03rd March 2010
This is my entry for the Digital Photography School's fourth week of their "Life" competition¹. Water is essential for life; sea life evolved first, and mankind evolved from it. Without water you will die in 3 days. Without water plants cannot grow, and we would have no food. Water is life.
My entry for the first week is here, and the second week here.
¹ What happened with the third week, you ask? Flaky models, deadline mix-ups, and a hectic schedule. Don't worry; the series will be completed.
“Canadians are a friendly bunch.”Friday, 26th February 2010
“I am 100% in agreement with you here. As I said, I'm concerned with comprehensibility. Something like "parentNodeIndex" helps you understand what you're doing – presumably something more complicating than walking a list. Returning to the original example, something like "loopControlVariable" doesn't give you any extra information, and just clouds your view. I'd rather trust programmers to recognise idiomatic code when they see it (using "i" to walk a list, in this case).”Monday, 22nd February 2010
“Not really. I'm not concerned with saving keystrokes; I'm concerned about comprehensibility.”Monday, 22nd February 2010
“Argh! I've had to maintain code written by people like you, and it made me *angry*. If you're counting something, use **i** or **num** or something like that. If it's a temporary variable, call it **tmp**. Please don't make me read 44-character variable names, and have to remember the capitalisation of them to differentiate the three throwaway variables from the one that actually matters. Oh, and don't use the word 'variable' in your variable names, please. We know it's a variable. Tell me what it's for.”Monday, 22nd February 2010
“What I did last night (as well as ping-pong and getting schooled in pizza-making): http://ethicsgirls.com/201”Shared on Facebook Tuesday, 16th February 2010
The Wind photoset is now available on Ethicsgirls.
Tuesday, 16th February 2010The Water photoset is now available on Ethicsgirls.
Tuesday, 16th February 2010
This is my entry for the Digital Photography School's second week of their "Life" competition. Air is life, of course: animals breathe oxygen, plants breathe carbon dioxide. The wind blows and drives the weather. Without air we would have no sound – no music – no speech. Air is life.
Strobist info: I was working with a really boring sunset, so I used the tungsten-colour-shift trick to get something more interesting. I had a shoot-through umbrella with 1½ CTO gels on an LP120.
My entry for the first week is here.
This is my entry for the Digital Photography School's first week of their "Life" competition. Fire is life, of course – without cooking, and heat, we wouldn't have made it out of the caves. Hell, we wouldn't have made it in to the caves. Fire disinfects and purifies. Fire is life.
Posted on Flickr :: Taken on Thursday, 04th February 2010 Thursday, 04th February 2010The Fire photoset is now available on Ethicsgirls.
Thursday, 04th February 2010
Jonty rescued a projector-clock from a skip and brought it back to the office. It took me a while, but eventually it percolated through that I could use it as a neat background. The "Now ←→ The Future" label on the wall left over from our roadmap was just gravy. (I think this photo's the spiritual cousin of this one.)
Strobist info: I killed the overheard lights, projected the clock, and got that exposure where I wanted it. (I had to use a tripod, as it was quite long). I was using a kind of adapted butterfly lighting for this; main light above and to camera left, with a fill light below and to left. Looking back, I'd have liked a little separation light on the right from the rear.
“Including some programmes that were cancelled before the first episode finished being transmitted.”Shared on Facebook Saturday, 30th January 2010
“Remember that moonlight is reflected sunlight, so it's *bright*. The "sunny 16" rule applies (or close enough). Crank up your shutter speed (or close down your aperture, but that won't help you hand-hold the shot) and you should start to get closer.”Friday, 29th January 2010
“OH GOD WE ARE SO TINY”Shared on Facebook Thursday, 28th January 2010
“You're right, it's not literally useless. But the answer to "How can I make the snapshots of my kids' birthday party look good?" should not be "Well, first you must learn *exposure*."”Wednesday, 27th January 2010
“What are you going to use it for? If you're just going to slap it on the hot shoe and use it for fill flash & bouncing off the ceiling, get yourself a Sigma 530 DG Super. It does all the auto-metering stuff and is about half the price of the Canon equivalent. It'll also do most of the wizz-bang things that the Canon flashes provide. If money is no object and you're going to push your flash to the limit, get the 580EX II. It'll cost you almost as much as a camera body and about half the price of a nice lens, but it's well put together and is a joy to use. Personally, I'd skip it. If you're about to start getting in to the Strobist stuff, get yourself the LP120 or Vivitar 285HV. They're basic, manual flashes – which is awesome if you want to set up your own light just the way you want it, but useless if you just want something to take decent pics of the kids indoors. But don't forget you can get three or four 285s for the cost of one 580EX.”Wednesday, 27th January 2010
“Vaginas in science.”Shared on Facebook Saturday, 23rd January 2010
