Photography and websites; sometimes they mix well, but so many of the photography web sites I have seen out there just don’t work. They look ugly, or flat, or are just somehow lacking. As both a photographer and sometimes web developer, this is something I have had running about in my head for ages now. The basic problem seems to be, to my mind at least, that the “goals” of creating a good web site are somewhat contradictory to the “goals” of presenting photographs as works of art.

A good website should be usable and accessible. A good work of art should be presented in a way that reinforces the piece. These are not fundamentally conflicting, but it seems that people either care about one, or the other, rarely both.

A friend of mine from Imperial has written Gallery as a general put-some-photos-on-the-web type thing. He is very keen on AAA web accessibility, and making things work for all people in all situations. The site is very good: it works in different sizes; different browsers and even has meaningful behaviour. From a purely computing point of view, its one of the best sites available for photos. But just look at it, I hate to say it about something a friend of mine wrote, but it’s ugly :(! Who wants to go to the effort of taking a photograph they are proud of when it’s going to appear surrounded by so much visual noise, all distracting from the photo?

Flickr is much cleaner in terms of its view, and it’s a very nicely written site (even if it does have long strings of numbers in most of its URLs). But it still doesn’t give any control over the context that your image is placed in. It’s always on a white background, always with the Flickr menu, and so on.

The photographic course I’m attending has, along with reading on the subject, really got me thinking about presentation. A large part of the impact of any piece of art is the surroundings you see it in. A reproduction of a famous oil painting on my wall has different associations to the same work of art elsewhere. It now shows that I have chosen to place it on *my* wall. That says something about me, something that clearly wasn’t included in the original painting. The colour of the wall has an effect, as do the other things on display in the room. If they look like the something depicted in the painting that can change what you see when you look at it. In short, presentation is vital, a photo where the presentation is not decided on is like a piece of writing that hasn’t been spell-checked.

So let’s look at some websites that are designed by photographers rather than computer scientists:

Harriet Logan has a beautiful web site. I think it could do with a bit more text setting a context for the photos, but its beautiful, simple to navigate, and the photos are stunning. It’s also written using Flash. In this case, the Flash is totally unnecessary. The only thing it adds over basic HTML is the nice way that the panes animate when you change from one part of the site to another. You loose the ability to link to a specific photo, and I don’t think an animated bar is worth it, even from a design point of view. Flash makes too many assumptions about the viewer’s environment. This is a debate I often have with my dad. I think I have finally got an argument that will convince even him. I have two monitors connected to my computer – as I imagine do many professional art directors. When I look at this web site, it automatically maximises across both of the screens. The effect of this is that the left half of each photo appears on my left monitor, and the right half on the right monitor. This really is not good. I can imagine a few pissed off magazine editors being so too!

Next we have Lesley Aggar. Lesley is a friend of my dads and an absolutely amazing darkroom printer. Her web site has some very strong point, but ultimately I think it’s a failure. The strong points first. The design is stunning. It’s so elegant that its breath taking. The bad points are that it is in Flash when it doesn’t need to be (see above), but the biggest failure is that a computer monitor simply cannot come close to a fine art print. When I look at one of Lesley’s prints I am speechless, but the computer version just can’t compare. A web site simply cannot work here.

Finally we look at Nick Briggs. Having complained about the last two sites use of Flash, this site doesn’t, it is pure HTML. The site is very simple, but effective. It’s easy to get to the photos, though I do have a few bugbears with it. I don’t like the font, nor do I like the names “portfolio 1″, “portfolio 2″. However there is no denying the fact it doesn’t look as slick, or as smooth as either of the two previous sites. I said before that the Flash doesn’t add much that you can’t do in HTML, and that’s true, but it’s not easy to do the HTML for a site that looks that slick. It’s certainly not a skill that many photographers are going to have.

So I’m left with a conclusion that I don’t really like. It’s possible to make a website that is both good from a computing, usability, and accessibility point of view, and from an artistic point of view. But it’s very hard. It requires both a combination of skills that is rare, and a caring about detail in two very different disciplines, ones that don’t often go together.

The photo course that I am doing is turning out to be exactly what I needed. Last week we were working on concept, the theme behind series of photos, and it turned out (unsurprisingly) that I find it hard not to be too literal. This week we were given the task of shooting to a piece of music: “Choose a piece of music that describes or inspires you, and then use that as the theme for a series of snapshots”. On Saturday we will present the photos first without, and then with the accompanying soundtrack.

I set aside today to do the photos, but first I had to choose some music. This was really hard. I think so literally minded (which I hope in changing) that on glancing though my collection of music I would see “Homeward Bound” and think that it was perfect. I could photograph the route home from the tube station. These thoughts would last about three seconds before I was bashing myself over the head metaphorically (mostly), about being too literal.

I thought about “Le Tango De Roxanne” from Moulin Rouge. I love the song, and I can’t hear it without feeling inspiration. Listening to it over and over I started to feel the grandeur, passion, and even a delicate softness. But no matter what I ideas I came up with for how to portray these in photos, I found myself being drawn back to the scene from the film where it is played. Maybe I just can’t pull myself away from it, but I think I just agree with it so much. I like to think given a free reign I would have shot that scene identically. So in the interests of not just copying Baz Lurhmann I tried to go for something different.

Like I said before, I found this hard. I sat here, at my computer going though my collection rejecting song after song. I pissed off several online contacts trying to get their advice. I started to feel frustrated, and torn in several different directions because I needed to get this done, and had a long list of other things that also needed to get done. I felt like I was being overwhelmed with conflicting requirements, and needs. Then the random play list on my computer started to play “Because You Can Can Can”, also from Moulin Rouge, and one of the few songs I really don’t like from the soundtrack. Its too noisy, too many things going on at once, too much of an auditory overload. In short, exactly how I was feeling. So it seemed an obvious song to pick.

Having done that, the ideas for how to portray it came easily. I wanted to show lots of people, rushing round all with conflicting aims, and directions. Where better than a crowded public hub, like Kings Cross station in rush hour?

The decision made, I allowed myself some down time before leaving in time to reach Kings Cross at the height of rush hour. I spent a merry three quarters of an hour wondering round the underground station, the main station foyer and so on photographing the crowds. Which actually, when you look at it with an eye that wants crowds, are not that dense. Before too long the camera started to die, with a flat battery. So I moved to a corner ready to change the battery.

That is when the police arrived.

I was approached by two community support officers, who wanted to know if I had a photography permit. I did not. They very politely explained to me that it was illegal to photograph in Kings Cross, and that I would have to stop at once, and delete all my photos. They would have to take down my name, description, and carry out a name check with the police central computers. Now I know they are not allowed to demand that I delete any photos, questions on the law are a common feature in the photographic magazines, but I wasn’t about to argue with a police officer in a crowded train station. I wasn’t sure about the rights to photograph in Kings Cross. On public property you are allowed to photograph anything, on private property I am sure you are allowed to photography anything, but that might be US law?

They took my name, and wrote out my description, giving me a nice pink receipt, and didn’t do a name check because their radio was jammed or something. The receipt they gave me does not contain their badge numbers, in theory I have no way of identifying the incident to the police if the paperwork goes missing, as it did once before when a friend was involved in a road traffic accident, so I made a note of their numbers myself.

Most oddly though, they didn’t actually ask to delete all my photos, despite earlier saying they would. So I still have the full set of photos.

After they left I went home, and with the help of my friend Alex, and his friend, and his friend’s friend, and maybe even his friend’s friend’s friend (I got a bit confused) did some research:

• The TFL Conditions of Carriage specifically ban flash and tripod photography. This is their only mention of photography, so they do allow it.
• The TFL FAQ says that photography is banned without a £300/hour permit. They admitted that this was nonsense and contradictory to their Conditions of Carriage when asked on the phone.
• TFL then rang back, and informed us that photography on the underground is totally illegal, though they were unable to say under which law, and admit that no-one at TFL knows.
• The British Transport Police when asked (again by phone) said they do not know if it is legal or not.

That’s about it so far. I am going to contact the police tomorrow and see if they can tell me under what law I was stopped. I am also going to research photographer resources, and see if someone has summarised the law on deletion of photos, where I can take photos and so on. I will let you know what I find out…

As for the photos, I haven’t looked at them yet…

Technorati Tags : photography, music, mourlin, rouge, police, law

More and more I am feeling the urge to sit down and write something. Today for example, I want to write something, anything. Well not quite anything, I have to write the last bit of my PhD corrections, and I don’t want to do that, so I’m writing here instead.

There are lots of things I feel like writing about today, my recent phone interview with Google, though as the interview was only four minutes, it wouldn’t be a very long piece, so I will wait till I have had the next interview with them for that. I could write about the absolutely amazing hand of bridge I played last night (my partner and I bid game with only 9 points between us, and it would have made if the opponents hadn’t bid higher) but that will no doubt bore all of you. Instead, I think I will write about the photo course I started on Saturday.

As some of you know, and those who don’t might have guessed by looking at the site, I’m into photography. I love it, but while I have always found the technical aspects of it, like shutter speed, and ISO settings easy (they are just applied physics) I have always felt pretty incompetent at the artistic side of it. I have taken some stunning photos, but always by playing to my strengths – technicalities. The dance photos are good because I have trained myself to photograph the moments when the dancers do something impressive. The people photos are good because I have learnt to use the same “capture the moment the subject does something” technique when looking at people interacting. I’m very proud of the technique I have in my photography, but I have always felt a bit of a cheat when it comes to being artistic. Hence the photo course – The Art of the Snapshot at Central St. Martins, taught by Karl Grupe.

I have to admit, I was a bit worried about what the course would be. Carina, who has some other courses at CSM told me she had heard the snapshot course was quite basic. It is, but in the way I want it to be. It’s basic in technique. We have already covered the entirety of the technique we are going to do for the course: “If you don’t know how your camera works, just set it onto automatic”. The course really does focus on art. We spent the first session talking about how all the things that you put into the photo: style, concept, content, symbols and experience all combine to create a reaction, which is then interpreted by association in the audience. That ties in exactly with the MindHacks book which claims “The human brain is an association engine”. The style, or voice of the photographer is very important, and we spent the rest of the day on exercises about personal voice. We did a number of exercises, mostly drawing, where we had to express various concepts, including ourselves graphically. Karl then shows how for most people their voice is consistent, or at least has some consistencies throughout their work, including photos they had brought in. I am very clear and bold in my voice. If I’m depicting a tree, in any medium, I will show a tree, and it will be in the centre of the frame. Where else would it be? It’s a depiction of a tree! But of course there are other approaches, you could just hint at a collection of leaves in one of the corners. That is a very different way of doing it, but just as valid.

I tried hard to stretch myself for the last part, a visual presentation of “me” on A0 paper. I resisted the temptation to put an icon or depiction of me in the middle, but it ended up there anyway. Each of the four parts of my personality (work, home, sports/dance, and photography) ended up having a clear area on the page that didn’t really overlap. But I did manage to have quite a chaotic (messy?) selection of colours, and I even went so far as to try and signify the feeling of not being artistic by ripping off the part of the paper that was going to represent the artistic side of photography. Despite ending up with something I didn’t like, I think I made progress. Some of the other people on the course seemed to not like their work either, despite everyone loving everyone else’s work (at least I really liked all the other ones). Maybe it’s just common for people to not like what they have done?

There was a really good cross section of people on the course, lots of different ages and professions. I’m looking forward to getting to know them better in the weeks that come.

Technorati Tags : snapshot, art, photography, voice

I am having a trial to see if I can make selling photos feasible through my website. Photobox allow me to upload photos to their site, and then to let me set the prices. I then don’t have to deal with printing or postage at all. They obviously take a cut, but the important thing is that it allows me to put photos up for sale without me spending long periods of time printing photos, stuffing evelopes etc etc….

For now I am doing it manually. If people want to buy the photos they need to e-mail me and tell me what photos they want, and then I will upload it to the photobox web site, and they can buy from there. I might be able to automate the process a bit more, as i can upload photos by e-mail, so i can configure a scrpit to do that, and then sort out the URLs, but that is going to take some testing. I can also get them to do most of the automation, but that requires a �250 set up fee, and I have no idea if I will make anywhere near that much so I can’t justify it.

I now have the photos for IVDA 2005 online here.

If anyone finds any photos which are listed in the wrong round, could they please e-mail me, and tell me what photos (send me the address of the page showing the offending picture on its own) and what event it should be listed under.

All of the photos have been sorted into rounds and events, based on the time the photo was taken. Each photo has a timestamp embedded into it, and we recorded all the start and end times for each round (see this post for details).

However, there were two problems with this:

1. We (I) did not synchronise all the clocks.
   • The software ran on two PCs during the day, i have no idea how close their clocks were.
   • The camera was 3-4 minutes slow compared to the main PC used.
2. There were several rounds were no-one was near the computer to mark the start time. As a result the round is listed as lasting only a few seconds, with the previous round lasting twice its real length.

All of the round times were saved in an XML file. I have created a database with all the rounds, and their start and end times. All of the photos have an EXIF meta-data section, with the timestamp, which I also copied into a database.

All of the photos are served though a PHP script, which shows either a competition, event, round, or individual photo based on what arguments it has. In order to have nice URLs (which google will index) mod_rewrite sits between the users and the script. However, my server is slow, and even 1-2 database quieries per page is too expensive. so the url above actually points to a static copy of the php output, generated from wget in archive mode :-)

I spent the weekend helping to set-up and run this year’s Inter-Varsity Dancesport Competition (IVDC), in Blackpool. The organisation has been ongoing for months, and I have been involved in trying to write a technological set of for managing the day. After months of hard work developing new scrutineering software, it was not ready. It was unfinished and totally untested. With two weeks to go till the big event, a much more piecemeal solution was decided on.

I wrote a timetable management program, which lists each event and all of the rounds. It predicts (using a simple mathematical model) how long each round will last, and predicts times for each and every round of the day. When a round is started, it records the start time of the round, updating the predictions for the remaining rounds. All of this is written to an XML file.

Bryan and Fab created a series of solutions for obtaining computerised copies of the recall numbers. The scrutineer’s software only prints the results; it cannot do anything except print. They tried to take the printed results, scan them, and use optical character recognition. This was not reliable enough. They tried to type the numbers in by hand. This was too prone to error, and too time consuming. Finally, Fab found a print driver capable of printing to three other print drivers. This allowed us to set one of the print drivers to print to file, and still produce the paper copies the scrutineer needed.

Oliver created a piece of PHP software. It takes digital photos and presents them to the user, who can reject, or accept the photo. Then, by reading the timetable file, and the timestamp embedded in the photo, calculates which heat of which dance the photo was taken in. It then reads the recall numbers, and discovers which couples were dancing in that heat. A list of these couples is placed on screen to allow the user to select which couple the photo is of. Next to each couple number, several photos already known to be of that couple are displayed, if they are available.

Bryan and Fab had written extensions to Bryan’s Company’s software (which does dynamic signage). At the beginning of each round, as the recalls are read out, the numbers, and a photograph of each couple appear on the large screens throughout the venue. Similar things were to happen with the final results at the end of the day.

All in all, a pretty ambitions set of software to write in two weeks!

Did it work? Well, sort of…

I’m pleased to report that my timetable software worked perfectly. We sometimes missed pressing the button to signal a new round, and there were a few cases where the rounds were marked as started at the wrong times, but the software performed brilliantly. All through the day there were predicted times for the next four rounds, and the start times for the next major events.

We had not had a successful test of the triplicate print driver, and it didn’t work on the day. I wasn’t closely involved with it, but I gather it didn’t work on the scrutineer’s software (which is written for DOS). That pretty much killed anything relying on knowing the recall numbers. This was a big loss. Without recall numbers, all we could do in the way of photos was displaying photos that hadn’t been rejected by the user.

Oliver’s photo software was an even bigger disaster. Not due to the software itself, but due to the fact that the computer it had been set up and tested on, was, by mistake, left in Bryan’s office, in London. We really owe a massive debt to Shamrash, one of Bryan’s employees who got into the office at 6am on Saturday morning, to plug the computer in, and send us the software. At this point we didn’t know the recall numbers would not be available, so Oliver got straight to work, configuring the software to the new network, and the new computer. But it just did not work. To this day we don’t know why. It simply would not let us associate the test photos to test couple numbers.

It was however working well enough to allow good photos to be selected, and bad ones to be rejected. We did manage to get some of the good photos on the screens. There were two small problems with this though. Firstly, the template we displayed the photos in, showed them way to small for anyone to see them, and secondly the template we displayed the photos in, showed them way to small for anyone to see them. I realise that technically this is only one problem, but I thought it was such a serious problem it deserved being mentioned twice! Unfortunately it also required photos to be in a strange aspect ratio, which just does not look good on dance photos. We also suffered the problem of not having any spare person to select which photos were good, and which ones were bad. Reluctantly, we abandoned the idea of having photos on the screens during the day

As for the extensions to the signage software, to display recall numbers and photos, we didn’t get a chance to try it. Neither recall numbers, nor associated photos were available.

It almost worked. I am going to continue to develop my timetable program, and we still have the photos, and the timetable data, so watch this space for a nice event and round based selection of photos from the day…