fine whine

Back before April I began working on the first major redesign of the non-fine-whine portions of my website since August of 2004. I'd meant it to be an April Fool's joke of sorts, as the new look and feel resembled the so-called Web 2.0 design ethos, but it would've been a pretty weak attempt at a prank.

I made some major progress on it in the weeks leading up to the first (see my contact page for a mostly-functional example) but got stalled working on a photo gallery, particularly one that would show my flickr photos in some decent way. I'm not entirely happy with the ways photos end up being shown here, and as such, have decided to write a simple script to do exactly what I want.

I haven't coded much of it lately, and probably won't for a while, except that I've got some new neat photos to show off, and unfortunately I end up linking to the flickr page instead of something that looks nicer. Anyway, take a look at this:

That looks neat, doesn't it? Check out these two:

Here are the rest* of the fish photos.

So how did I do it?

Well, we went to the zoo today (see more of my Zoo photos from today's visit and others), and I took my camera, as usual.

This time, though, I wanted to try something new. I'd never been able to get good photos of the fish because of the poor lighting, but this time around I decided that a longer exposure could compensate for the dimness, since more time with the shutter open = more light.

Which is fine and dandy if the photo's subject isn't anything moving. Fish, though, swim. This tends to make taking still snapshots of them a tad bit more difficult.

Thinking however of the way some photographers capture moving cars (for example) - moving the camera to match the car - I tried to focus on the fish, as it were.

Fish don't move the same way cars do, however, but they're much smaller. My attempts at panning were met with the occasional success, and I look forward to going back soon to try again. I bet I looked somewhat silly, waving around my camera, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for neat photos.

* The rest of the ones that weren't too blurry or incoherent, that is. I took nearly thirty pictures in the Aquarium, and was happy to even have seven or eight that look good to me.