Photographic Tutorials

Sheila had a good idea, to collect the titles/links of my tutorials on photography, initially written for BarCampLondon2. I'll also be updating the list regularly when I post a new photography tutorial, so you can easily keep tabs on them.

Taking Better Pictures
These were the posts which formed my presentation at BarCampLondon2. They are aimed at anyone who would like to improve their photography, whether they use a fully-automatic compact camera or SLR. The principles apply equally to film and digital photography.

• Composition #1 - The Rule Of Thirds
  
• Composition #2 - Lead-In Lines
  
• Composition #3 - Using Symmetry
  
• Composition #4 - Framing Elements
  
• Composition #5 - Creating Depth
  
• Composition #6 - Using Repetition
  
• Composition #7 - Fill The Frame, Or Not?
  
• Composition #8 - Using Triangles
  
• Texture & Tone in Monochrome
  
• Subdued Or Single-Colour Images
  
• Vibrant Colours

Getting Technical
These are aimed at people with a bit of photographic knowledge, but would like to learn more about the technicalities. They will explain the affects of ISO speed, shutter speed, apertures and more.

• All About ISO
  
• All About Apertures & F-numbers
  
• All About Shutter Speeds
• Putting It All Together - Exposure
  
• More on Depth of Field
• White Balance & Colour Temperature
  
• Lenses And Perspective
• Compression, File Size & Resolution - coming soon

Please get in touch by leaving a comment if you would like any other aspect of photography explained.

BarCamp Day 2 - Morning & Afternoon

Simon Willison on OpenID
Simon talked about systems for single sign-on across multiple sites. You don't give away your user name to the site, but do it via a third party signon, such as Yahoo!. MyOpenID https://www.myopenid.com

Attribute Exchange
Registering personas. You can set up personas which lets you act as different people on each site, with perhaps a different circle of friends or interests..

A bit prone to phishing - an evil site could redirect you to a phishing site which could catch your ID and password (if you are signing into openID via any old site (rather than at the mothership). AOL have turned OpenID on for 68 million accounts now.

idproxy.net is a site which Simon has written, which acts as a middle man for yahoo signin/openID.

[Simon demos openID signon for Magnolia]

What happens if your provider goes away? You can use your own url as a delegation by inserting a couple of lines of HTML in the code of your site.

If you log into a blog to comment, you can populate a white list of trusted friends' openIDs which would then bypass comment spam moderation.

http://jyte.com is a way to enhance your reputation as a distributed profile. Other users vote yes or no to say if they agree with your opinion. Jyte has a group for BarCamp (effectively a white list) which could be exported to another social network, lock, stock and barrell.

Janette Girod on Optimising The Everyday: Finding Flow
Janette's presentation was all about the art of training your attention. You get out what you put in - pay attention and you'll get more benefit. Also need to set up circumstances to allow you to pay full attention to what you're doing. This can be helped by:

• Defining clear goals
  Focus one one small thing to achieve per session.
• Heighten concentration
  Can be increased by practice. Make it easier on yourself by removing apps you're not using, ban im, email, twitter!! Don't sabotage yourself.
• Loss of self-consciousness
  Become absorbed in what you're doing.
• Distorted sense of time
  Specifically allot a period of time to concentrate - it can take 15-20 minutes to zone-in. 48 minutes on, 12 minutes off. Fun to race against the clock. At the end, it gives you break - get up, make tea, check email: this break means your next session of 48 minutes is more productive.
• Direct & immediate feedback
  Test all the time, immediate reward for your work, seeing when something works
• Balance between ability level and challenge
  T oo hard, you freak out, too easy, you switch off. If you have a really hard task, break it down into smaller chunks and get those out of the way one by one
• Sense of personal control of activity
  Master your tools, then you will feel in control of what you are doing
• Intrinsically rewarding action
  If you have a choice, do something you want to do, rather than something you have to
• Focus of awareness narrowed down to concentrate
  Be strict with yourself if you find your attention wandering off track. If you keep practising this, you will need to do it less often.

[Janette, in full FLOW]

As a soon-to-be freelancer, I found her ideas and suggestions most welcome, as self-motivation will be a big factor in my success!

Erin Staniland on Web Sites For Photographers
Erin demonstrated With Associates' Flash-based galleries for photographers, with a cms. The customer gets their own domain name, a unique design on a small budget, they manage pictures themselves. Some examples of the system:

http://justice.withassociates.com/
http://www.jameshatt.com/
http://www.175pairslater.com/

The CMS is Ajax on Rails, which creates an XML file which can be manipulated with Flash.

Minibooks - cheap, quick and dirty website for quickly showing work to potential clients. These have standard templates, slight customisations.

Ben Ward on ASP.NET Active Standards Pages
Ben concurred that ASP1.1 not designed with standards in mind. Therefore it was crap at it, at times. Visual studio tends to insert nastyinline JavaScript in certain circumstances, eg Image Buttons, form validation, hyper link pagination on datagrids.

Some controls need to be nested inside forms. Gridview (.NET2) MUST be inside a form. <label> is a pain. The code will generate unique codes for each element - it can screw up css id selections. Page doesn't validate under some circumstances - viewstate can cause problems.

.NET2.0 Master Page templates are better now to set header, nav, footer and define content area into which we can drop the form controls etc. Easy to pass unique page ID for body class switching. Other useful stuff in the header - such as setting the RSS feed link for auto discovery of feeds.

Wrapping Up
After such an action-packed couple of days, there were a few dropouts by the end, but the vast majority made it to the final session. Thanks were given all round, especially to everyone who helped out or organised. There was a discussion about the format of the whole event, and it was general concensus that sleepover was an integral part of the event, and a one-day format wouldn't be the same (besides, when would we play Werewolf?!).

As a first-time BarCamper, would I go again? Most definitely! It was fantastic to meet such great people - going to PubStandards with some of them regularly is one thing, but this is a chance to "jam" in a completely different way. There was laughter in the air virtually all the while during social times, and you could almost see the ideas sparking off each other during the speaking sessions.

So, we departed until next time, full of inspiration and in need of some sleep!

[All wrapped up, and the photos are posted on Flickr already.

BarCamp Day 1 - Evening Sessions

Mark Norman Francis on Don't Be Scared of Code Reviews

Norm explained that the purpose of a code review is not to criticise other people's code. The findings are not escalated, there is no formal output - just for folks involved. Except Security problems, which are tracked in Bugzilla. So why bother?

• Verification - adhere to internal standards.
• Training - informal education of expectations of new hires
• Collective wisdom - [you will be assimilated!] Experts pass on their knowledge.

They are looking for, in HTML - valid, semantic, accessible.
CSS - valid (hacks separated out), modular (hung off ONE id - means you can reuse code on another part of site without relying on cascade), cross-browser (graded browser support)
Javascript - unobtrusive (pull it out into separate files, still get to the content with JS off), optimised, cross-browser.

Don't care too much about programmed page weight - ads multiply page weight hugely anyway. Page weight is not very relevent to each user but is to Yahoo!, since so many hits could mean server overload.

Perl/PHP must be documented (in the code, externally), understandable, standardised

[Olé Norm!]

How do they work? Time taken doing them is minimised. Quiet time is set aside beforehand for people doing the reviewing, away from email, IM etc.
During review, items are explained by reviewer, while the coder keeps quiet. A mooderator takes notes for them both, which are tabled for later. Then follow-up - the lead developer confirms that the problems identified have been rectified before code goes live.

Me on Taking Better Pictures
I'll post the main contents of my presentation in later posts, but it seemed to be fairly well received, with about a dozen folks coming to listen.

Andy Mitchell & James McCarthy on "Free Schmee"
Andy and James were talking about APIs and using them in a modular fashion - why invent the wheel again when you could reuse another API to do certain tasks, such as user verification. They freely admitted they'd been penning their presentation hastily when they'd rather have been attending mine. But never mind, it was still an interesting few minutes!

[James and Andy argue about who's going to work the slides...]

Next was dinner: geeks + pizza + beer = culinary carnage. At least there was no washing up!

[Colin Schlüter surveys the carnage]

I stayed chat with Andy Mitchell and John Wilson for quite a while after dinner, but made it to the main auditorium , back end of Ask Us Anything panel. Someone rashly asked to see the panel dance!

[Norm! shakes his booty, watched by Simon, Steve, James and Aral]

Of course, it wasn't long before someone asked "when can we play Werewolf!" So, most reconvened to the restaurant area and three groups started. Not sure how many games were played altogether, but I think it was at least nine, with various permutations of people flitting from one circle to anther.

[a wolf in gnome's clothing, perhaps? Tom Coates ponders who he's going to bite next; James Wheare (Wolf??) and Cristiano Betta don't seem worried by his proximity!]

And so to bed, perchance to sleep, at 4am... fat chance - wished the floor wasn't so hard. Got up again 4 hours later to find most still comatose:

[geek dorm, aka conference room]

BarCamp Day 1 - Afternoon Sessions

Tom Scott on Open Source Incremental Backups For Windows
Tom's presentation was useful for those who want to manage incremental backups for Windows in a sensible way. His full presentation is available here: http://www.thomasscott.net/barcamp2/

I backup my system less often than I probably should (photographs aside, which get saved in at least 3 places regularly - I'm paranoid!). So perhaps I should take the time to have a go at this myself.

Meri Williams on Project Management For Busy Geeks
Meri's talk started with the Basic lifecycle of a project. Few projects go through the whole lifecycle properly. The Big Secret is that, for smaller projects, PM is all about Initiating, Planning & Closing (and not worrying too much about execution and control). Planning should NOT be about planning a step by step guide - but something that helps you understand what you're doing. And communicating this to stakeholders. She also mentioned that lots of projects are not closed properly - haven't we all been plagued by customers that just won't go away but pester by saying "can you just do this bit extra?".

[Meri's running order]

Leisa Reichelt on Design Consequences
Leisa's was a hands-on session where she demonstrated her techniques for initial brainstorming of site layouts and designs. We all had to break out the pen and paper (and post-its!), and "mock up" a screen to show the BarCamp Schedule (the real thing was done the low-tech way as you can see):

[Day 1 Schedule - done the low-tech way - but it works very well]

Then we talked about what we'd done and why. It was nice to get away from the computers for a bit, and everyone had fun explaining how they had implemented their solution to their neighbour.

[Andy and Nat listen intently to one BarCamper's version of the schedule solution]

Robert Lee-Cann on Over-Engineering Is Fun!
Leeky's presentation was a light-hearted and thoroughly enjoyable look at solutions to problems which have been hugely over-engineered, and he wondered if this was a typical trait of geeks in general?

[right, Leeky having a geeky- brained moment]

Problem: Is the coffee machine full?
Easy Solution: get off your butt and go and look
Geek Solution: we all know where a bit of over-thinking can get us: webcam trained on the coffee maker

[below: The man needs coffee!]

Problem: Who's going to make the tea round?
Easy Solution: Press-gang someone into doing it
Geek Solution: Web-based ordering of drinks, LED display in the kitchen showing the round required, online voting afterwards to see how well it was made!

Confessions:
Having described the above solution which is in use at his work (!), he asked us all if we would like to confess our most ludicrous over-engineered solutions. Some of the best were as follows:

• Meri - private IRC channel to decide the flavour of your pizza before ordering it - used by people living in the same house
• John - set up a telly, Freeview box and video transmitter in one room and a reciever in the other room - when they could have run a cable through the wall!
• Brave Geek: had written 112K JavaScript file to write a whole web page on the fly, built in the days of Netscape 3 and IE3! He got a round of applause for that one!

Pitch An Idea
The final part was for the audience to come up with a solution to the perennial problem of putting the loo seat up or down in the bathroom. Many outrageous examples were put forward, which ranged from having a finger-print recognition pad on the loo door, so the loo "knew" who was about to sit down, to weight/position sensitive pads just in front of the loo, so it knew if gents were standing or sitting down! All great fun.

Andy Budd on The User Experience
Andy started by talking about the early desktop interface, when abstracting the interface made it easier for "non-tech" users. At the time, it was revolutionary. Similarly, Joe Bloggs doesn't want to learn Unix to use their iPods. People DON'T read the manual. No wonder we say RTFM so often.

We learn by experience - programming DVD recorder is very similar to programming the video. So the building blocks are there and users learn the metaphores. It makes it important not to break common interaction habits.

Users learn new technology by exploring - you switch it on and start clicking buttons to see what happens! So make buttons look like buttons. And make sure it's not fragile so that inexperienced users can't break the system with one click.

Modern life constantly demands our attention. How easy is it to send a text while crossing the road? Rarely do people give your application 100% of their attention. Design it to make things easy, as people are adept at multitasking.

Make error reports blindingly obvious. It's a great place to make the user experience a good one - as soon as something breaks, you want immediate service or fix, or at very least, a human-readable error message. Don't make users feel stupid when they do something wrong.

[I'm no dunce]

Usability is all about making technology easier to use. Plan user experiences carefully. Create wireframe storyboards - think how filming is never done without paper mockups. Then test it on REAL users. Can be as simple as chatting to coffee shop customers - feed them donuts and buy them a coffee and get their feedback on your site - one day user testing, low budget - anything is better than nothing.

UCD is sometimes confused with Business Centred Design or Marketing Centred Design. You should not have to deal with politics. But we all know how hard that can be. Designing with a focus on business unit function is also horribly bad. Technology Centred Design - designing around our own technical ability - we do it that way because we can - is also a no-no.

Get out and talk to the users - find out what they're trying to do with your site. Users don't just want to know what the weather is going to do for the sake of interest, they are more likely to need to know if whether to take an umbrella with them today!

Build up Personas for each broad type of user. Design with these in mind. Very easy isn't always best - maintain a balance. Sites or games companies know about flow - you lose time when you are interested in something.

Starbucks are masters of the "coffee experience" - which is why we are willing to shell out 3 quid for a cup coffee!

Lastly, he made the point that the iPod would probably fail user testing. People buy into the brand. You might struggle through learning the interface, but you're willing to learn it because your friends tell you it's a cool gagdet. So for the right brand, people are willing to take the time to learn new ways of working.

BarCamp Day 1 - Morning Sessions

Introductions
We met in the plush surroundings of BT's offices in St. Paul's. They have some fantastic facilities and it was great to be able to make use of them for the weekend.

[hi-tech ramp down to the main auditorium]

The Three Musketeers - Ian, Nat and Jason - set the ball rolling with a few words and generally explained what was going on, and how the format of the weekend would run. Then we were all encouraged to say a few brief words about ourselves as an icebreaker, by passing the mic round the auditorium. I thought this was a great idea as you could note down someone's name if you had similar interests, and seek them out later.

[the fun begins with the Three Museketeers introducing themselves]

Ian Forrester on Pipelines
Ian was explaining what Pipelines were about, basically inputting a stream of data (can be rss but also other formats), transforming via XSLT to give an output such as HTML. Several online applications currently let you do these sorts of mashups, eg BlogWaves 1.0 is a GUI application with which you can do transforms. Also, pipes.yahoo.com does a similar thing. Ian was disappointed that none of them seem to allow you to include information from your own desktop in the aggregation, which might also be useful.

http://www.touchstonelive.com - is a "glorified rss reader" plus extras. Allows you to set alerts as popup for desktop, or as an rss feed (via pebbles). Preloadr passes pictures through Flickr and out to Moo. All have APIs and so the pipeline can be automated right through, end to end, without the user having to intervene manually. Here's Ian strutting his stuff:

[Ian talks about pipelines in the main auditorium]

Tom Morris on The Semantic Web
Tom's talk was a tad too technical for a bear of very little brain like me. He started by saying that tagging data isn't a very scaleable thing to do. RDF is a more complex way of tagging stuff. It can have the same design model as relational databases. And gives us a way to represent something like the relationship: Pants = Trousers - users of both terms are now able to understand each other. [It's helped now I've looked up the definition of ontology!]

eRDF is embeddable - ids, titles, attributes etc. It can be parsed with XSLT if your page is XHTML. RDFa is the next thing coming along with XHTML2.0

GRDDL (griddle), Protégé, SparQL are tools to help you do this stuff easily. SparQL lets you bypass APIs which would otherwise require all methods to have been published as an API.

[Tom talks triples]

After all that brain-bending stuff, it was lunchtime! Thank goodness.

Previews

BarCamp Presentation
I'm happy to have finished writing my presentation for BarCampLondon2. I've decided to do a spot on Better Picture Taking as there seem to be plenty of folks with digital cameras who want to know more about getting the most out of their gear. It won't be technical, and it won't be biased towards any particular type or brand of camera. Instead, I'll be covering the basics of good composition and lighting, plus editing your pictures for showing to friends. After BarCamp, I hope to blog most of the content for those who couldn't attend.

I've gone for a non web-related topic as I figure I'll be teaching many of the attendees how to suck eggs if I talk about web standards or css. Others have said that some of the most interesting topics last time round were those which were a bit off the beaten track. So here's hoping it will go down well.

Geek/Girlgeek Dinners
I notice there are a couple of geeky dinners coming up soon. They seem to have shot themselves in the foot slightly in that they're both on the same day! So, clone yourself or toss a coin to decided which of the following you'd rather attend on 21st February:

• London Girl Geek Dinner 10 Sponsored by Amazon!
  The speaker for the evening is Jeff Barr from Amazon and he will be speaking on web services.
• Geekdinner with Tara Hunt & Chris Messina of Citizen Agency
  Both Tara and Chris are best described as Upstanding Citizens of the Internet world. They are well known for looking at the longer term view and talk with words like vision, attention to detail, community, sustainable, open, higher purpose, etc.
  

Unfortunately, I'm unable to attend either event as I'm already busy, but I will be keen to read any blogs about them afterwards. Please let me know if you write a review.

WSG London #3 - Accessibility
Stuart has put together another great programme for the forthcoming WSG meeting on 28th February. Now that's one I will be able to attend, and am looking forward to what Anne McMeekin, Niqui Merret and Mike Davies have to say on the subject.

Misc Bits

Pubstandards Logo
First off, a quick update on the Pubstandards logo comp - Kapowaz has set up a group on Flickr for the challenge, and there's now quite a few entries.

BarCamp Worries
I've got my ticket for next weekend's BarCampLondon2 - but I've still got little idea what I'm going to present. There will be plenty of folks there who are better able to say something new about CSS, Microformats or whatever. So I think I might go a bit lateral and perhaps do something biased towards the photography. We'll see.