Binary Bonsai

Je Ne Sais Quoi

Sunday, August 17, 2008 @ 09:08 · ego and photography 0 Comments

Even as an experienced photography-enthusiast, people remain the hardest subject for me to capture. Not only do I rarely find myself in a situation where I’ve brought my DSLR¹, the social conditions have to be right as well, for me not to be considered borderline rude. And when the stars align, I pop out the camera and…

Well, we’re all a ‘cheese’‐conditioned lot, who look into the camera, smile and wait for the ‘I release you from this spell’‐click. Sure, you get people drunk, it’s another story — rabbit-ear-fingers, cheek licking and funny hats — but the basic premise remains the same; namely ‘acting’ for the camera. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it yields nice in-focus photos of happy people who’re willing to hold still long enough for me to adjust the focal length and take it up an f-stop or two to get the shot right.

But the ones I really want and the ones that stay with me, are the stolen ones. And I don’t mean paparazzi-style 1500mm gyro-mounted zoom objectives from a hilltop 2 clicks away and down into your garden where you frolic around in your birthday suit. Just friends and family being themselves, unaware of the CCD ready to reach out and snatch away their soul.

Those shots are elusive. Real life doesn’t stop while I switch from auto to manual focus; which in turn means that when they once in a blue moon do happen, they’re that much better. In fact, out-of-focus snapshots are often even better than cheese-shots by pure virtue of the intimacy of the subject(s).

When people know they’re being photographed they stiffen up somehow, suck in what can be sucked in, squint, go from ‘listening’ to ‘listening, intellectually’² and lose that spark of the unexpected, the serendipitous. You could go so far as to say that they lose their ‘soul’. But that’s just silly, so I won’t do that.

Then again, maybe it’s really the other way around. By virtue of my understanding of the construction of ‘cheese-shots’; that little else is happening between the portrayed than what meets the eye, which is what makes even the most pedestrian stolen shot unexplored and unexplained territory.

What I’m driving at, is that in the end, when all else fails, a chimp will never give you the cheese-look and that’s why chimps always work.

Let’s face it, it isn’t really photography if it isn’t an SLR. In my case, it’s a Sony α100, usually with my favorite Sony 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens or the all-around Sigma 17-70mm ƒ/2.8-4.5. And every once in a while, when I can be bothered lugging it around, my Konica Minolta 75-300mm ƒ/4.5-5.6 ‘you can run, but you can’t hide’-lens. ↩

I do all of the above. I have checklists for it. And procedures. ↩

In the Cracks of Copenhagen

Thursday, August 14, 2008 @ 22:44 · art, graffiti and photography 0 Comments

Copenhagen is a treasure trove of street art, with its hip and healthy anti-everything sub-cultures. A living mosaic created in unison by hundreds of more or less talented people, some of whom take great pride in their work and then of course a large following who are satisfied leaving their mark across the city, in much the same manner as a dog would. We’re lucky, in that living in the heart of Copenhagen, we often come across some pretty interesting pieces, some of which I’ve documented. And amongst them, the above, rather obscure and easily overlooked one, is a favorite of mine.

Also check out the Little Brother project.

Summer Nights

Thursday, August 14, 2008 @ 10:05 · denmark, photography and sæby 0 Comments

The OS & Fluid Designs

Wednesday, August 13, 2008 @ 07:15 · Firefox, interface design, kalamari, os x, safari, web design and windows 0 Comments

In laying down this new design — Kalamari — I decided to try and go with a fluid-width layout for once. Traditionally I haven’t held it in particularly high regard; but I experiemented with it for a few hours, and ended up somehow finding it a natural fit alongside the ‘book-like’ typography.

What’s interesting about fluid-width designs, is that for me, they actually only make sense under OS X. After all, under OS X, no window can be maximized and locked to the screen. Quite the contrary in fact. Not only are windows rarely sized to fit the full size of the screen¹, but all windows are movable at any time. And the ace in the hole, is that you cannot move the upper edge of a window above the lower edge of the menu bar, and you cannot resize a window to be bigger than the size of your screen.

Combined, these factors are very significant, as they directly influence the way you work your windows.

Contrary, on Windows, un-maximized windows most often differ in size and vertical position from window to window. And without the menu bar blocking vertical movement and the screen-size dictating the size of windows, it isn’t quite that easy to quickly move and resize a window, while retaining a tidy workspace; and so I most often simply maximize all windows.

Hang on, I’m approaching the point.

Because of this, I work much better with OS X’s windows paradigm. Much better. My work environment simply remains more fluid than when I’m working on Windows, and I often find myself resizing windows to fit whatever content they contain.

In turn, because I do that², Kalamari felt more natural on OS X, since I find myself resizing the width of the window to where it feels ‘right’. But at work, on Windows, the window was maximized, and… well, it looked almost grotesque actually, because of the vast wasteland of whitespace on either side of the column in a maximized window.

So I have to come up with some way of countering that I suppose.

Yay.

The lack of a maximize button in OS X has been known to drive some people to the brink of madness. ↩

Well, and because Baskerville looks amazing in Safari on OS X, and Georgia looks like shit in Firefox on Windows ↩

Habari & Kalamari

Monday, August 11, 2008 @ 13:08 · binary bonsai, blogging, ego, habari, kalamari and wordpress 1 Comment

Alright, listen up. Binary Bonsai has been powered by WordPress literally since its very first release. And as a consequence, I’ve been pretty involved with the WordPress community over time, especially these last few years with K2 (which is still in production I might add). But, while it has served me well for all of that time, to kick the carcase of the dead horse that is the girlfriend metaphor; we’ve grown apart. And today, I’m moving out of the apartment. So it’s goodbye WordPress and…

Hello Habari.

Mmm. Sweet, sensual, built Habari. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a pitch for you to do the same (though, please, take it for a spin; you never know). It’s simply me celebrating that I’ve finally gotten on with my online life, and getting even more involved with a project that has so far been both incredibly rewarding and ditto challenging.

And it wasn’t that WordPress and I were in a painful relationship; at least not in last year or so. It was more one of those courteous ones where we had both made peace with the fact that we weren’t meant for each other. That over time, we had grown apart. And… Alright, alright; enough of this blasted girlfriend metaphor; it’s creeping me out!

Seriously though, I’m really happy to finally move in with Habari. I’ve long had a keen interest in interface design and blogging tools, and my involvement with Habari has allowed me to follow up on both of those, and hopefully in the process creating a blogging tool that others will find exciting as well.

As a writer, if anyone would stoop so low as to call me that (thank you), what happens behind the scenes doesn’t really interest me. I do most of my writing in Textmate and then copy/paste it anyway. And after I’ve turned off comments, I don’t even see the whole admin section that often. But just because you only use the car to go down to the supermarket, why shouldn’t you be driving a black Countach?

I thought so too.

But please, have some patience with the design (which is new, and very much in progress), the archives and the feed (new permanent address, I’ll try and do some clever rewriting to get the old links to work). I’m working on getting all my ducks in a neat little row, and hopefully everything will settle down within a few days.

Well, except for the design.

I’m calling it Kalamari.

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