The company’s called fishrod (soon to be registered) and we will specialize in RIA (Rich Internet Applications), Scalable Web Solutions and Branding and hopefully soon move into Social Applications (those annoying facebook apps), for you techies we’ll be working with some amazing frameworks and JavaScript libraries including the Zend Framework, CakePHP, jQuery and MooTools.

I’d like to introduce you to Alex Waterhouse, our designer and branding expert, he’s done a few years freelance in design and branding and knows what he’s talking about, loves guinness, has a strange temperamental south african accent and is very enthusiastic! Siobhan Bentley, our all rounder, she’ll mainly be dealing with clients, admin work and making sure every one’s doing what they’re supposed to be doing when they’re supposed to and that projects are on schedule and on budget! Lastly me! Gavin Williams, 5 years experience in PHP and MySQL, 2 years JavaScript and 1 year C#.NET. Hoping this will be a great opportunity for us to have a feel of what it’s like running a business, we’ll still be freelancing however, mainly because we love it! and the people we work with. Website coming soon (as soon as Alex comes up with a bloody logo!).

Yeah! I managed to get the useless skill I picked up in my gap year into one of my images! Prap! HDR is the shit. I actually quite liked shooting the subjects in my images my self, found it quite fun, made the whole process a lot more flexible, and because they’re all really high quality images they look fucking awesome scaled down or in their original form.

I do however regret asking Dan (to the left) to spike his hair up, took way too long in Photoshop to mask out using the pen tool.

Any way, the meaning of this image… it’s the last image in a series of images for my BAIMP Images unit to the theme of Nature and Technology. It’s basically the future, it’s supposed to be kinda dreamy, hence the whites, blurs and halo effect on Dan and Mel (thanks for helping my guys, although I have about 50 shots of you f*cking laughing!).

It’s kinda how we use technology in the future to genetically engineer designer babies, eventually we think, look and feel the way the generation before us want us to. Future generations are forced to live and breath the way past generations see the world of tomorrow… be it a bad world, the image depicts a dystopian future.

Yeah I used long words in the sentence, so you’ll need to look them up!

Ah! Finally! I’ve completed my first imp image, well at least I think it’s finished, I’ll no doubt look at it tomorrow and say to my self “well this was a waste of time” and scrap it, but for now, “SWEEEET!” I don’t think I need to explain this image, it speaks for it self. But the square logo’s supposed to represent knowledge, power, integrity, seriousness and trust… but the dark orange… is supposed to represent deceit and distrust.

It’s one of those digital picture frames but for your keys!

Stores 31 pics and lasts for an hour and a half, amazing!

http://www.dabs.com/ProductView.aspx?Quicklinx=4P9F&InMerch=1

Earlier on I mentioned an LG ad I’d seen ages ago. It was one of the first things that popped into my head about nature and technology after hearing about the brief and gave me my initial idea of technology under the microscope and mixing nature with technology. At the moment I’m stuck between the war between nature and technology and my original idea. We can invade other countries, protect our selves from eachother but always seem to find our selves defenseless against the elements… Tsunami’s, Earthquakes, Tornadoes and Hurricanes, Floods, etc. Hmmm tough choice!

“You can build a house brick by brick or you can buy a ready made IKEA home and decorate it how you like with IKEA furniture or make your own bits and bobs to put in it, the framework’s your IKEA home”

Trey’s work is awesome. Some of his images can catch you off guard. What you need to remember is that HDR images aren’t overly airbrushed or manipulated. It’s just taking a photo of the same subject at different exposures and squashing them together. It’s the composition of the image, the amount of exposures you take and the exposure range and how you process them that gives you the impact you want.

Our 1 day project was quite fun. I didn’t get to show mine but it’s all good, would have been embarrassed to get up and talk about my work any way with so many designer likes poking holes into my work :(. I had this crazy idea of encounters, I went from E.T to Johnny 5 to Asimo the Toyota robot. I actually had to look up encounter to justify my work. goggled around for Asimo and found a patent diagram for the robot and based my work around that, and some text I nicked off of wikipedia.

I wasn’t expecting to be surprised by the new beta, as I thought it would just be PDT with a few bits and bobs, but I can say I’m pretty surprised, and would recommend any one and every one using Zend Studio with the Zend Framework at the moment to give it a try.

It looks like Zend are really trying to push the Zend Framework with this one, You can either create a new Zend Framework project or a normal PHP project. If you make a new Zend Framework project everything is there for you to start working with. You can right click to create new models/views or controllers. I’ve literally just started playing around with it. I’ll do a more comprehensive feature review a little later. That’s how sad I am!

My initial idea was to do something silly like take a picture of a blossoming flower with a mobile phone inside it, great idea, but I can’t produce 5 of those. Unless I do it.. in 5 different ways… hmmm maybe not. This idea kind of got me thinking about an advert I saw quite a while ago… it was an LG advert. They basically made an LG mobile phone out of cells, which looked AWESOME! All of a sudden about a million ideas started flowing into my head, a quote from the brief kept pounding into my head.

Human life will depend less and less on working with natural kinds (feldspar, turkeys, cellulose, or carbon) and more and more on artifacted kinds (vinyl, transgenic turkeys, fiberglass, or Teflon).

Holmes Rolston III ‘Technology Versus Nature: What is Natural?’, Ends and Means,
Journal of The University of Aberdeen, Vol 2, No.2, Spring 1998: lines 149-153.

Re-reading that, it doesn’t actually relate to what I’m about to say, but hey… humour me for a bit. It got me thinking about how small technology is becoming, and a bit about a few things I’ve randomly seen in the past… the whole idea about my project I think, will be based around natural and technological evolution, things like iRobot, nanotechnology, bionics, that crazy thing in Battlestar Galactica where they have a fetish for making robot babies. It sounded like an interesting idea in my head… let’s see if it slides… and whether I actually have the Photoshop skills to pull this off!

I actually saw this video early this year and thought it was fucking amazing! I was reminded of it in my first ever lecture on IMP. It’s pretty much the history of the web, and… the scary future, kinda makes films like Terminator seem not so far fetched!

PRESS PLAY BEFORE READING!

Just had a lecture about how the world of media’s changing, with web 2.0, consumers are changing and their demands are changing, and the fact that technology’s moving so so fast. Got me thinking about what I’ve been doing for the past year, and how I’ve had non-consumers pounded into my head by Alex Wright. Suddenly the passive influence of the people around me for the past year have started to come into play on this course, and the respect I have for them has just gone through the roof.

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Started settling in in Bournemouth and asked to take some photos at my flat mates football match, in case you didn’t notice, it was a womens football match! It was actually surprisingly fun, and they do lay into each other which is a big bonus for photo ops.

Check out some of the pics, they’re not half bad.

http://flickr.com/photos/gwillister/sets/72157602322031887/

Ok, so I’ve been looking every where for a difussion filter and it seems no where on the high street sell them, today I thought I’d try out my new lens hood for my 17 - 85mm on my canon, it had a bit of dust on it, so as any normal person would do, I blew on it and looked through the viewfinder, I was dumbfounded, by doing that, the image was really difussed, if you wait for the right moment you can get some interesting photos as the condensation from the lens starts to dissapear, I wouldn’t advise blowing directly on the lens, use a cheap filter instead!

I HATE spiders! With a passion, I broke out in sweats taking this! But I had to! This spider had an egg sack at the back of it before I went to Ibiza… I got back and guess what! The fucker hatched! That’s right! All of those little dots in the top left, they’re little baby spiders just waiting to take free reign around the house!

I actually thought about comparing the 40D and 400D side by side, but soon realized how much of a stupid idea this was. You can’t compare the two, in fact no one ever should! Moving up from a 400D to a 40D for me was a pretty nice experience, allot of the features on the 40D tempted me more to wait for it once I heard the specs instead of moving to the 30D.

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(I’ll steal this guy’s photo until I get my own on Monday!)

Can you honestly remember more that 2 or 3 mobile phone numbers if you own a mobile phone, I mean why should you, it’s all there in your little device, easily accessible, a push of a button gives you your mum or sister’s mobile phone number, easy isn’t it. But what do you do when you forget your mobile phone some where or you loose it, the first thing most people do is panic, the second thing people do is to create a facebook group about it… WHY!?, it’s like some sort of comfort blanket that we all have, an extension of our memory. What would we possibly do with out it? We’d all be fucked.

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