David Ajnered

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Our running

I had the idea of taking photo of myself after a run. I wanted to get that really high contrast, almost over saturated sweaty look that you sometimes see in commercials. I set up all my gear ready for when I got back and when out.

About 5km and 25 minutes later I shot the first photo, and I didn’t look sweaty at all. I adjusted the lighting and shot a few more photos but it didn’t turn out as expected. I ended up splashing water in my face to get a decent result.

I wish I had a third bare flash. I reckon that could help enhancing the sweat, but I’m not sure since I haven’t tried. A new flash is on the list of things to buy. When I have it, I might try this again.

Sorry for the bad modeling…

Life Cycles

I would like to share the trailer for the coolest mountain bike movie I’ve ever seen so far. It beautiful and awesome and it makes me want to buy a bike this instant!

Star People

I was asked to shoot some portrait photos of some of my colleagues, the ones that actually meet people and not just hide behind a monitor. They needed some photos for an upcoming folder, and for general use in different marketing campaigns.

The setup was simple. A softbox as a main light from the left and I got the fill light from a window to the right. When editing I by accident increased green in the highlights, and I thought it looked awesome so I kept it. I balanced it up with some red and blue to increase contrast and get a nicer skin tone. What do you think?

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Channel Court Shopping Centre

A new shopping centre is being built in Hobart, and a shopping centre needs nice website. It’s built on wordpress and I used the magic fields plugin for all custom fields for the stores. I love that plugin, it makes wordpress feel like drupal and CCK. I won’t bore you with the details. Happy shopping

Link: Channel Court Shopping Centre

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On a spaceship to the web of stars

Hmm, weird title. Oh well. About 6 weeks ago I got an offer from a company that I couldn’t refuse, and last week was the first one at this new job. I now work for Starweb as a web developer, improving their e-commerce platform.

Why switch from a well known company with high end clients to a smaller one with only six employees, one product and mostly small clients? Because working in a smaller team is a lot more fun, and in combination of having just one product you really feel that everyone is working towards the same goal. As a developer I never really had a lot of contact with clients, so who cares if they’re high end or not.

My first project is to improve the image uploading feature in the administration section. The old one is built on a custom framework but as a process of improving the code base we’re migrating everything to Zend. The feature will also get a much nicer and better UI.

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First roll

I’ve developed my first roll of film and this is one of the photos. I underexposed the film and developed it +2 steps as a experiment which resulted in the graininess. Look good sometime but the majority of the photos look crap so I won’t do that again.

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Analogue

I’ve been inspired to start shooting film lately so I bought myself a Nikon F100 earlier today. The reasons are many but the main one is because I think it will help me to slow down and think things through (composition, light, subject and more) before I take the photo.
Books like The Art Of Photography by Bruce Barnbaum and photographers like Jonathan Canlas and his FIND project are sources of knowledge and inspiration that makes me confident that this will turn out great.

SEO yields result

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how I was trying to get I Own A Camera high up in the SERP. This turned out well. My photo blog is now number one when searching on “I own a camera” and number seven when searching for “david ajnered”. My new goal is to make that seven a two instead, and off course improve the position for “photography”. Not sure how to do that though.

Except the SERP I see some difference in the number of visits, but because I didn’t isolate the change I can’t be sure it’s only because of SEO. The site is only about a month old so it to early to actually be able to analyse the result. As long as I’m getting more and more visitors I’m happy. For now.

I’ve found two realtime analytic tools that are a lot of fun to use. gaug.es is really sleek but costs $6/month after the seven day trial period. woopra seams to give you more data and it’s free as long as you can live with some ads.

Responsive Web Design

I guess I’m slightly behind with a post like this but I haven’t really had a good project to try responsive design on. A few days ago I decided to make iownacamera.com more iphone friendly. The theme is, as you may have noticed, really basic, so was perfect as the first project and it didn’t take long to add some responsive design with media queries. Try make the browser window smaller if you’re on a computer, or visit the site from your iphone (or android, but no guarantees).

If you’re interested in learning more about responsive I recommend that you read this article on A List Apart.

Wedding No.1

I shot my first wedding portraits ever this weekend. The client had this park right outside where they lived and we were supposed to have an hour for the shoot, but with delays we ended up having about 40 minutes. I got some good ones and I will post them as soon as I’ve finished editing them.