CommuterJoy » Logbook

« logbook home

Model Villages & Thoughts on Tinkering

Posted by mattc at Oct 20, 08 10:52 PM ... Comments (0)

I've been playing with TUAW's and Receding Hairline's fake tilt-shift. The illusion of a shallow depth of field makes your photo's look like they were taken above a model village.

A not-to-great example from the French coast ...

It's reminded me of how much I like playing with Photoshop tutorials (I hardly ever open it these days, unless I need to chop or resize a JPG!) and how you can lose and entire evening tinkering with the sliders, filters, channels, gradients to get it just right ... It feels very creative even thought you are essentially just adjusting numbers that are fed in to Adobe's canned CS3 image algorithms.

Some of the work Cisnky and Matt have been doing recently (cinematic tweening and ui widgets, respectively) have reminded me of the importance of tinkering, getting the interface in your hands and poking at it until it feels right.

I've seen (and worked on) so many projects where version 0.1 of the interface was built and everyone moved on to the next project before anyone had time to tinker, it's so easy to keep cramming product requirements to the very last minute that there's no time to let things settle. Good UI developers can intuatively fine-tune their app's if they have the time.

So I'm making an effort to justify the dumping of requirements (or do some extra hiring) and finish projects early to give the developers time to tinker with their interface code.

iPhone camera test

Posted by mattc at Sep 6, 08 04:38 PM ... Comments (0)

Not great ...

Poppystar chairs.

Eversley

Posted by mattc at Aug 3, 08 06:01 PM ... Comments (0)

Phew, another weekend, another dandy time spent watching my friends scorching the enamel from their teeth with burning liqueur.

Spring Garden

Posted by mattc at May 19, 08 06:52 AM ... Comments (0)

Yorkstone

Posted by mattc at Sep 8, 07 10:48 AM ... Comments (0)

We needed a few flagstones to lead across the border to the food composter.

I never really noticed the Woodlands Farm Reclaimation Yard when living in Guildford, but it seemed worth a trip. It's huge, full of 100's of crates of second-hand stones, edging, rockery, lumps of concrete all precariously balanced, waiting for your tremors to gently nudge 1/2 a tonne of granite on to your flip-flop protected foot. We spent a happy couple of hours wandering around, dusting off old stones, inhaling the dust etc.

Having realised our favourite was far to expensive for something that's just going to be stuck in the ground and be mostly covered by foliage for most of the year the guy in the hut pointed us at a small batch of 30cm x 30cm Yorkstone flags.

The sand-coloured streaks look great in direct sunlight and even better when wet, like high-resolution photo's of Saturn's rings.

Embers

Posted by mattc at Sep 8, 07 10:42 AM ... Comments (0)

The remnants of an early August BBQ in Meads Village.

Putrified Squirrel

Posted by mattc at Jul 29, 07 07:08 PM ... Comments (0)

This morning we took down the foul orange fence at the back of the garden, prepared the ground for the wild flower area and approached our neighbour once again to broach the subject of chopping down their unneighbourly leylandii.

Best of all we found a decomposing squirrel carcass. It would make a good mascot for a theatrically villainous sports team, perhaps Sunderland under Roy Keane's stewardship or maybe the Iranian national team. After posing for photo's it went in our vegetable bin.

Isles of Skye & Harris

Posted by mattc at Jul 7, 07 12:30 PM ... Comments (2)

Roughly in chronological order, a few favourite photo's from our plane/road/ferry trip around the Scottish Highlands.

Along the A87 between Loch Ness and Kyle of Lochalsh.

A day trip to the Trotternish area of Skye. The first test of our new walking boots. They performed well until Poppy fell in a bog on the way down.

The sheep littered more or less every road on the island. In general they ignored the passing traffic, though occassionally they would become unnerved, turn and run. Here's two sheep running.

An (unsuccessful) whale watching trip. Saw lots of seals, puffins and rocks though. Generally felt much fitter after spending three hours clenching our stomach muscles each time the boat hopped over the peak of a large wave and landed at an awkward angle. Speedboats don't have suspension, it's like hitting concrete.

The Loch Snizort on which our Hotel sat, taken at about 6am. We were killing time after spending the night sleeping in the hire car having return from a delicious 3 hour feast at Three Chimneys and realising that the hotel didn't have a night porter.

On Harris, after a short ferry trip from Uig to Tarbert, the stunning Sound of Taransay and Luskentyre beach.

And a little down the road, the beach around Buirgh.

Stornoway wasn't picturesque. The guide book said 'lunar landscape', ie. lumpy and ugly, but East of the town there's a few pockets of greenery. Port Mholair is the most Easterly point in the Outer Herbides.

Dorking to Brockham

Posted by mattc at Feb 18, 07 04:44 PM ... Comments (0)

Walked across the fields to Brockham, which took around 45 mins through the mud. Ended up in the Royal Oak overlooking the village green (slightly less pretty in the winter gloom), ate carrot and lentil soup with London Pride. Not that great.

The the trough and the old corn field were about half way between the two towns.

Tivoli w/ Graffiti Cat

Posted by mattc at Feb 11, 07 06:41 PM ... Comments (0)

Winter Malmö

Posted by mattc at Feb 10, 07 10:56 PM ... Comments (0)

Two lit ice rinks and a turreted building. I recommend the Moose burgers.

Nature

Posted by mattc at Jan 26, 07 07:03 PM ... Comments (0)

Snow

Posted by mattc at Jan 24, 07 04:37 PM ... Comments (0)

Looking upstream towards Meadowbank from the Pippbrook Mill in Dorking this morning.

Goal?

Posted by mattc at Jan 21, 07 09:38 PM ... Comments (0)

Reading Dave Winner's Brilliant Orange. He interviews Dutch photographer Hans van der Meer who complains of the modern football photographers obsession with taking close-up pictures of the players, and in doing so fail to communicate the game's subtleties.

A wide-angle photo containing the players, the crowd, the pitch, the officials, taken at the right moment can tell a much better story about a game than a telephoto lens shot of an inconsequential tackle.

Inspired by these comments, here's photo taken at Dorking FC's ground this weekend (they lost 2-1 to Banstead Athletic).