Photography - The rules of composition.

   I have been learning a lot about photography lately since I purchased a nice DLSR camera. Truthfully I have always been into it, I even had a class in photography in high school. But that was back in the days of film and costly development prices and so forth, so I never pursued it. At any rate, here I am now, blogging about the new things I am learning and have learned, such as the rules of composition.
   Today I am going to cover my favorite rule, the rule of high and low angles. This was something shown and demonstrated to me by Mr. Williams on my very first day of graphics class when he sent us out to take pictures with the school camera. Often we tend to point and shoot at eye level, which is fine for parties and general photography that is shot "on the fly". But when we have the time to actually sit and compose a photo of a subject, changing the angle to high or low can often add a depth of character you wouldnt normally see at eye level, and I often find myself on my knees or searching for that magic angle when I am composing pictures.
  There are a lot, and I do mean a lot of rules of composition to follow, or at least pay lip service to, and I am not going to blog about all of them, but high and low angles is definitely on the top of my list.

Search engine optimization

Wikipedia defines SEO as the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

            SEO is important because without it, many people with products and services on the internet would not be successful online. So as a designer its our job when building a site for somebody, to be as thorough as possible with keywords, image tags and anything else that could possibly be browsed over by a search engine to bring up a clients page on the top or near the top of the list. Most people do not browse past the second or third page when they are looking for something online, and if a website is at the bottom of the list, that means no business.

            So how do you make SEO work? The first step is keywords, and being as thorough as possible in your meta tags with them. Secondly, make sure you are concise with any other tags for images and any other elements in your page as possible. That way when the search engine bots are combing the web for information, your page pops up more frequently and gets a higher ranking on the list. After that its a matter of tweaking and working it over a period of time to climb the ladder on the pages, until your website is sitting at or close to number 1. 

Tablets, touch screens and browsers oh my!

In today's emerging markets the big things going are touch screen tablets and gadgets of all kinds. Threes something so "Star Trek" about these items that they have instant appeal to almost any generation. With the ipad and ipod touch and iphone leading the way its becoming increasingly easier to stay organized and do your computing on the go. These miraculous gadgets have their drawbacks however. One thing I definitely would point out is battery life, and I am not talking about how long it lasts before having to charge it, but how long it takes before the battery just can't be charged. Then you have a 500 dollar chunk of aluminum and glass that has no purpose at all, and apple charges a pretty penny to replace these dead cells. I think that this is a marketing tactic designed to keep people tethered to apple and make them come back. However, there are so many mobile touch screen devices, that its big business to be able to design apps for them, because there are apps for everything under the sun. An iphone or an ipad literally has the ability to be a mobile office, and the ipad especially has the potential to be a whole lot more, even in a classroom setting. With that being said, knowing how to write mobile app software and scripting is definitely a strong emerging career choice.

Now anybody who knows me knows that I don't have a love for Mac's or Apple in general, that I am a PC baby born and bred. This isn't because I think they are bad per say, but just because I have an aversion to paying premium prices for something that doesn't do anything any better than what I've already got. And I have to hand it to Microsoft in some situations. Take IE9 for example. Hardware accelerated web browser, light speed baby! Leaving Firefox, Safari, and Chrome in the dirt and scrambling to catch up as IE users experience the fastest browsing capabilities on the planet. Using the directx engine, IE9 blows away the competition. So while you're sitting there and waiting for pages to load despite your 40MBPS bandwidth, I am cruising around on the internet autobahn. I think that's definitely progress, and one technological advance of 2011 that really pays off.         

Copyright Etc.

Heres a good topic I think to round out my blog posts.Copyright and intellectual property. Sensitive material to be sure, but what is going too far to avoid infringement? There is a lot of inventions and so forth out there that people have taken and improved upon, so where does it begin to cross the line into infringement when someone is trying to improve on something. Now take Bill Gates, Arial and Helvetica fonts, and look at it closely. Supposedly Bill didn't want to pay licensing rights for Helvetica and had some graphic artists create a font that was close, but far enough off to avoid infringement. Some call this theft, I call it innovation. He saw a way to maximize his profits, while avoiding infringement, which I think is very innovative. Now the fonts look very close to each other, but they aren't exact, and therefor unique, so I think its a good deal for Bill. Is it right or wrong? Sure you could cite ethics and what not, but me, I just see a guy who found a way to build a mousetrap cheaper than the other guy. Its not necessarily a better one, but it does the same job for less money, so I think that its a good thing. Without innovation, creativity, and a spark of inspiration, then the world may as well quit turning, because there will be no more advancement or progress...might as well go back to stone tools and wearing furs instead of clothes.
Now, if that were all true it would make for a hell of a story, but I think some Bill Gates bashers owe him a great big huge mammoth apology for believing he paid someone to clone Helvetica for his own selfish reasons.
Ariel wasn't even invented for Microsoft! Firstly let me link you this website that I have known about and been saving for this one special moment here. Arial vs Helvetica
Now let me quote the author of the site.

Arial
"Designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders for Monotype (not Microsoft), it’s classified as Neo Grotesque, was originally called Sonoran San Serif, and was designed for IBM’s bitmap font laser printers. It was first supplied with Windows 3.1 (1992) and was one of the core fonts in all subsequent versions of Windows until Vista, when to all intents and purposes, it was replaced with Calibri."

and....
"What it’s wrong to do is criticize Arial as a clone or rip-off of Helvetica. If Arial is a rip-off of Helvetica, then Helvetica is a rip-off of Akzidenz Grotesk; or we could simply say that they are both rip-offs of earlier Grotesque faces. The whole rip-off debate is a rather pointless one, I feel. Every face should be considered on its own merit. (We don’t criticize a daughter for looking like her mother). And, if you want to criticize Arial (it certainly has its faults), then do so, not because everyone else does, but do so with your own critical eye."

So, as we can all see, the Arial/Helvetica debate is a moot point and not worth debating. At least for me at any rate....

So you wanna write code?

    Well I have been thinking about this next blog post, which is a miracle because I usually fly by the seat of my pants. But I was looking over my pretty new book for my next class, and getting excited about whats in it, and I thought to myself, it probably wouldn't hurt to post some links to some popular online guides to writing code for anybody who is actually following this blog. To me, when I look at the code on the screen I am reminded of the movie "The Matrix" and how they were looking at the screens of code and seeing "blonde" "brunette" "redhead", while we the viewers only saw the scrolling zero's and one's. That's how I feel when I look at html code now, its becoming easier to visualize whats going on when I am writing it or looking at a page source. Anyways, here are those links.
HTML Dog
W3Schools
HTML Code Tutorials

These sites should be able to cover anything you need to know, and I have used them all to help me with things I needed to know when I wasn't in class to bother Mr. Williams with questions. I hope you find them as informative as I did.

Another one bites the dust

    So here I am again, another project finished and I am happy with the way it turned out. Now need to tackle the final and its all over with for this class, which means I will be blogging more too. This last project was on copyright which falls under intellectual properties. Theres a lot of good reading about the topic, and stories too, so be sure to stay tuned for the live link to the site when I post it. Coding it was fun, I got off to a slow start, but once I was on a roll the creativity started happening and I was enjoying myself as usual. I showed my friend the site and he liked it, then I showed him the code and he couldnt believe that all the "gibberish" as he put it was what actually made up a web page. I also showed him the topless guy on Mr Williams Facebook page and he thought "she" was hot until I told him it was a guy. That was funny seeing the look on his face...

The project, technology, and a farewell to Duke

                Hey its finally done. Check it out here at www.tampabaycreative.com/technology.  Learned a lot of neat things on this project about technology and games in the classroom. A lot of the answers and research surprised me, and I had a lot of fun doing it. Way to go Mr. Williams.

                Its also cool to know that there are entire families out there who are embracing technology instead of fighting against it. I read a story about a husband and wife who, along with their children, publish around nine blogs a day between them. They also encourage social networking and a lot of in betweens with their kids. Kudos to them for that. And once more showing the internet isn't evil! Take that Mr. Church magician.

                On other notes, Duke Nukem forever was finally released, and it's a total flop! I watch some videos of the game play, and to tell the truth, its one game I won't be purchasing, so as of now, my image of good ole Duke is coming down off this site.  R.I.P Duke, you were one bad mutha in your day.