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Goodwood Festival of Speed 2011 video

At this year's Goodwood Festival of Speed I took my photography a bit more seriously, lugging around not one but two SLRs (Canon 5D Mark II and Canon 40D).

The main reason for two cameras was to use the higher burst rate of the 40D to get action shots of the cars going up the hill or round the rally stage, while using the 5D for wider shots and cars in the paddocks, but I also used the 5D to get some video when I stopped long enough to set up the tripod.

Check out the video below. It's best viewd full screen and loud. You can also download the full 2.3GB 1080p version from the video page on Vimeo.

Griddle.it - generate your grid background helper images

Griddle.it is a cool web service to generate grid backgrounds, which are useful when developing a site to make sure everything lines up correctly.

Found via Cameron Moll.

A website is born

For a while now, I've wanted a place to show off my photography in a better way than the odd article on this blog coupled with my flickr account. Today I launched just such a place: my new site, adamperfect.com.

Some background

A month or so ago, some ideas I'd been mulling over combined into inspiration and I started planning out a whole new website that would act as a kind of personal hub: showcasing my photography and design work as well as some more 'life stream' stuff like tweets, bookmarks and Dribbble shots.

During the course of building the site, I remembered my original idea to simply have somewhere nice to display my photographs. Even without having explicitly focussed on that, the site was already heavily weighted towards photography and so I decided to pare down and remove the other stuff.

This was definitely a good decision, as it's left me with a site that focuses on a single thing: my photography. The other stuff is still interesting to me, but I'll end up putting it elsewhere, possibly some of it on this site.

The site

So what does the new site do? At its root, the site is a hopefully more nicely-presented copy of all the photographs I upload to flickr, indeed the photos on adamperfect.com are imported from flickr. This also means the site acts as a nice backup of my photographs (or flickr does, depending on how you look at it).

I'll be writing a journal of my photography-related exploits and thoughts. I've added a couple of journal posts already, based on a couple of recent photography sessions and linked to their related photo sets.

There's a featured photos section where my favourite photos get the 'view big' treatment and go full-screen. Every photo on the site also has its own page with Exif data listed alongside and the key data like shuter speed, aperture, exposure bias and ISO listed under the photo.

Under the hood

As I want to shift Supersonic Feet back to focus on design and web dev, I should mention a little bit about the build of the new site…

The site uses some funky CSS3 stuff like text/box-shadows and the odd rounded corner or gradient, but I also created a nifty photo stack effect using just CSS. I came up with the effect a couple of months ago based on Matt Hamm's CSS page curl demo and posted a preview shot on Dribbble. I'll try to write it up at some point, but a combination of Matt's orginal and viewing source on my site should show how it's done in the meantime.

On a more techy front, I intially used MongoDB as the data store for the new site. It seemed like a good idea as the site is effectively just serving up documents (photos or journal posts) and I'd been wanting to have agood play with MongoDB. I used Mongoid as the ORM with Ruby on Rails.

It was all going quite well, but as I added things like photo sets (where a photo can be in multiple sets), my lack of MongoDB experience and the data looking more and more relational triggered me to switch back to good ol' MySQL. Again, I might write this up at some point in the future.

Go look at the new

Anyway, I've rambled as usual. Go and check out the new site and let me know what you think!

PS: I wrote most of his post on my iPad. A year into owning it and it's the first time I've really attempted any long form writing on it. It was pretty smooth apart from all the extra key strokes required to write HTML tags.

The video that sold me on buying a Canon 5D Mark II

A couple of years ago, just before I was due to go on holiday to the States (for an awesome road trip from Denver to Yellowstone and back) I started getting antsy for a camera upgrade. I had a Canon 40D (which I still keep as my second camera): a fantastic piece of kit, but being a gadget freak I was keen to move up a level.

While umm-ing and ahh-ing about whether to shell out a couple of grand on a 5D, I came across two videos that sealed the deal in my mind. The first was a snowboarding video filmed on 'Powder Mountain'in Utah. The second, and the one that really knocked my socks off, was the video below by Michael Fletcher: Images of Western Australias's Kimberley. It's 14 minutes of pure beauty and every time I watch it I get a huge longing to visit Australia.

I'm delighted with the 5D by the way. Especially for landscape shots it's just an amazing camera. That's not to say I haven't got my eye on a 1D Mark IV now, though that would be more for sport and wildlife photography.

GuideGuide: useful guide placement tool for Photoshop

Screenshot of grid guides being applied, from Cameron's site.

I'm posting this as much for my own future reference as anything, but GuideGuide by Cameron McEfee is a really useful guide generator plugin for Photoshop.

It does stuff like applying guides to mark the centre of the document as well as guides for a whole grid layout, complete with rows, columns and gutters.

If you design with grids, this should save you a good amount of time when first creating your design files in Photoshop.

2010: A Year in Pictures

I recently decided to look back at my photographic output for the past year and decided I didn't get out with my camera anywhere near often enough. This much I already knew, but I did manage to get out and take some every month, except October which was an all-round terrible month for me.

Anyway, here's a round-up of the photos I did take, with a bit of text summing up each months photography with links to the matching flickr sets.

January: Snow & Style

Durham Cathedral, Durham. 1 January.

Design Museum, London. 24 January.

Coffee stand at the Southbank, London. 24 January.

The year started up North with my family. On New Yearâ€™s Day I went into Durham with my Dad to take photos while there was still plenty of snow lying.

My other photo outing of the month was a quite successful one walking along the Thames from the Southbank to the Tate Modern one evening. I was really pleased with how a few of these photos came out and it got me into doing a bit more post-processing on my photos. This photo of the Design Museum is still one of my favourite photos Iâ€™ve taken.

February: Geek Foosball

Geek Foosball Final. Bar Kick, London. 11 February.

Bar Kick, London. 11 February.

Notting Hill, London. 6 February.

February saw the return of the great London Lebowski events organised by Dees. This time the theme was Geek Foosball, with a mini foosball tournament at Bar Kick in Shoreditch. Not only was it great fun, I managed to get some pretty decent photos as well.

A few days earlier I'd been to Notting Hill when my Mum and one of my brothers came down to stay. I didn't get any particularly good photos, but have included one of some cool old cameras in Notting Hill market. Later in the month I went to the British Library and took a set of photos so uninspiring I've never uploaded them.

March: London Lebowski 2

London Lebowski 2. Trocadero, London. 23 March.

Trocadero, London. 23 March.

It seems the only time I got my camera out of the house in March was for another London Lebowki event, this time the eponymous London Lebowki 2: geek bowling at its finest!

More top fun had, but not a great evening for my photography skills. Still, here are a couple of photos.

April: The North

Climbing a fence somewhere. Ahem.

Max. Washington. 4 April.

Sage Gateshead. 28 April.

North Shields. 30 April.

In April I made two trips back home (the North East of England): at the start of the month for my Mum's birthday and again towards the end for the excellent DIBI conference.

It was great to spend some time with my family. There'd be more photos online but I'm forbidden from uploading photos of my Mum!

DIBI was a really good conference and looking at this year's lineup I can't wait to go again. It's great to see the North East starting to show signs of having a decent web design/development scene and the Sage Gateshead is a great venue for a conference.

While I was home for DIBI I also managed to get in a quick photo mission with Krishna. We headed to an abandoned old railway building we've known about for years so I could get some stills and he could get some video. It was a glorious sunny day and I'd been hoping to get nice atmospheric shots of what is a quite scary building when it's dark. By the time we got there I just wasn't really in the photo-taking mood which was a shame.

It was however, still a reminder to me of the cool 'missions' I used to go on with my mates back home, whether it be for photography, skating or just a laugh, and how I don't get up to anything like that now I'm living in London.

May: Night Safaris & Sunshine

Natural History Museum, London. 11 May.

London. 22 May.

Kielder. 31 May.

May was a decent month for me taking photos. It started with the first Night Safari at the Natural History Museum in London: a great late-night tour of the museum where scientists from the museum give a talk on their specialist fields and show items not normally on display. While the tour and the talks were hugely interesting, it was almost a bigger plus for me to be in the museum at night, with very few other people. The photographic opportunity was worth the ticket alone!

The weekend of my birthday I went into London to take photos with my flatmate, Ken. It was a ridiculously sunny, hot day and it was fantastic. We started at Trafalgar Square and worked our way up to Buckingham Palace, then back down to the Southbank and the Aquarium.

To finish the month off, I went back up North again to celebrate my birthday with family and friends from home. We worked in a little trip up to Kielder Reservoir on another lovely sunny day. Looking back at these photos, the UK actually got a pretty decent amount of sunshine this year!

June: Skating

On the DLR. Canary Wharf, London. 23 June.

Canary Wharf, London. 23 June.

For some reason I can't remember, I didn't take many photos at all in June; in fact the only set I have is when Krishna was down in London and I took a few photos of him skating in Canary Wharf.

July: Summer!

Goodwood Festival of Speed, Goodwood. 2 July.

St Paul's, London. 10 July.

The fine weather continued in July and with it a couple of good photo opportunities: the Goodwood Festival of Speed and another beautiful sunny day in London.

I was actually going to give the FoS a miss, but then some family friends offered a pair of free tickets they had and I wasn't going to pass those up. Ken and I drove down for the day (another sunny one!) and the festival was just as fun as I remembered. We spent so long up on the forest rally stage that we ran out of time to see much of the rest of the show in the one day we had tickets for. Many photos were taken and I did a write-up of the event on this blog.

The following weekend the weather was even better, so I headed into London for a walk around the shops and to take pictures. I walked for hours and eventually wound up on the St Paul's side of the Millenium Bridge where one of the Play Me, I'm Yours pianos was set up. It was a perfect scene, with some really talented pianists entertaining the small crowd with their varying styles and I ended up sitting there for over an hour listening and taking photos.

August: Castles

Eastbourne Pier, Eastbourne. 21 August.

Bodiam Castle. 21 August.

At the start of August I bought a new car, a 3.2l V6 Alfa Romeo GT (see September below for picture) so I clearly needed to get it out for a drive and it was a great excuse to go and take some pictures. Radek, an ex-Gumtree colleague, hadn't been to a proper English castle yet so we drove down to Bodiam Castle and then Eastbourne. Bodiam is almost a picture perfect imagination of a defensive castle: square, big defensive turrets and surrounded by a moat. In other words, very cool.

I went up to Newcastle again for the bank holiday weekend and took a few photos on the beach at Alnmouth, just before it started to rain.

September: To Spain

Alhambra, Granada, Spain. 19 September.

Scotney Castle. 4 September.

Millau, France. 24 September.

Aside from a quick afternoon trip to Scotney Castle at the start of the month, most of September was spent on a three week road trip to Spain with my brother, Christian. I'm still planning to do a full write-up of the holiday, but you can check out the photos at flickr.

November: Ice Skating

Somerset House, London. 26 November.

I went to a second, Halloween-themed Night Safari at the Natural History Museum at the start of November, but sadly don't seem to have got any better photos than I did the first time out. I got a surprise reward of a thanks to Gumtree and then at the end of the month Dees organised another London Lebowski event: ice skating this time, which was awesome.

December: Snow

Penshaw. 27 December.

Gumtree, Richmond, London. 15 December.

Washington. 24 December.

December was the coldest on record in the UK and thankfully that was mitigated by lots of lovely snow fall. That said, by the time I got up North for Christmas with my family, I didn't get a chance to get out and take many pictures before most of the snow was gone.

We did go out for a lovely walk in the park by Penshaw Monument on the 27th though, while there was still a load of snow, and I got a couple of decent shots. I was playing with my newly-acquired Canon S95 and ended up taking more video than stills. It's a great little camera though and will hopefully mean I take more photos when I don't have the 5D handy.

2011

This year I'm setting myself a target of taking more photos than I did last year and of course to get better at taking pictures. I've got the fancy Canon 5D Mark II and some decent lenses, I just need to train myself to be better at using them which will only come with more practice.

I also spent much of last year saying I'd go on a photography course of some sort too, but never did. This year I plan to change that.

January has started reasonably well on the photography front, with a walk round Saltwell Park in Gateshead on New Year's Day (photos not yet online) and a tour of Highgate Cemetery with Jodi last Sunday.

Now I just have to keep it up!

Git GUI client for Mac OS X

Since I switched to primarily using a Mac a couple of years ago, I've been on the occasional lookout for a GUI client for Git without much success.

Late last year Tower launched in beta and is looking quite promising. I haven't had much chance to play with it yet, but have been impressed with what I've seen so far.

Aside from Tower, I've found the built-in Git interface to Jetbrains' awesome Ruby IDE, RubyMine, to be really nice as it's built in as part of the development workflow. It's far less visual, but probably more useful as you work on stuff (assuming that's Ruby!).

Related: Git GUI client for Windows.

Play Me, I'm Yours

While the weather was still gorgeously hot last month, I went for a wander round London and ended up at St Paul's where I came across one of the Play Me, I'm Yours pianos being played to a large crowd.

It was an almost perfect scene: beautiful music being played enthusiastically, a crowd that had gathered round naturally and St Paul's cathedral as a backdrop. I ended up staying for over an hour listening to various players having a go, each with their own style.

What a brilliant idea these pianos were.

More photos over on flickr.

Goodwood Festival of Speed

This year I was lucky enough to be given a couple of free tickets to the Goodwood Festival of Speed by some friends of the family and not having been in a couple of years I jumped at them.

The tickets were for the Friday, the quietest (and perhaps best) day to go to Goodwood if you can only do one, so I took the day off work and headed down to Goodwood with my flatmate, Ken.

When we eventually escaped London traffic and got to Goodwood it was lunch time, but a quick burger and we were on our way up to the forest rally stage at the top of the hill. There was a WRC event on elsewhere in the world that weekend, so there weren't as many modern contemporary rally cars as the last time I went, or the star drivers, but there were still plenty of classics, including a Lancia Stratos.

We spent a couple of hours in the forest stage, watching the cars fly round and taking loads of pictures. The jump towards the end of the stage was great, but as ever quite hard to get a good vantage point for taking pictures. The festival happened amidst a heat wave this year, so the mostly-chalk stage was massively dusty.

With only one-day passes time was quickly getting on, so we headed back down the hill to the main marquees and pavillions.

It was clearly an 'austerity drive' year as none of the manufacturer pavillions were particularly lavish this time round, though Alfa Romeo (celebrating its centenary) and Peugeot did the best jobs.

I got another chance to drool over the most stunning car of the past couple of decades: the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione. This is very definitely my current dream car. Alfa was also showing off the new Giulietta, which looks nice enough but I can't say I lust after. I'll be sticking to saving up for a second-hand 3.2 V6 Alfa GT I think.

The Peugeot SR-1 concept car looked pretty stunning, though the dashboard was a bit 70s sci-fi from what I could see peeking over the shoulder line (it was on a high stand).

Peugeot was really pushing the new RCZ to the full, though seeing it for real it looks a bit too much like an Audi TT. The sculpted glass 'cockpit' roof is a nice touch but seems like it's been toned down from the concept car I remember seeing a couple of years ago and other than that it's a bit bland.

I felt the main show-piece sculpture in front of Goodwood House was a bit poor compared to previous years as well. The cars involved were lovely of course (including my old fave the 8C), but I didn't get it. I read afterwards that it's apparently supposed to represent the Alfa clover symbol, but it was lost on me at the time.

Great fun

All of this is not to say the Festival of Speed wasn't fun this year; it was great fun!

The rally stage is always fantastic and catching a glimpse of Formula 1 cars blasting (or smoking) their way up the hill at such close proximity is something you don't get elsewhere.

The Style et Luxe concours had some stunning cars in it and I even ran into an old friend of my Dad's who was displaying his Maserati Quattroporte II. There was also a Maserati A6GCS which, apart from the slightly dodgy two-tone blue colour scheme, was beautiful and a load of Alfa Romeo supercars.

I think my favourite car from the Style et Luxe section has to be the Alfa Romeo Tipo 33 Stradale prototype; just a stunning car.

Moving round from the concours we headed to the paddock where you can get right up to the cars that have been launching themselves up the hill at speed all day. It's a chance to see some amazing cars up close, as well as catch some famous names (for example, we passed Jason Plato and Matt Neal having a chat on the way in).

In the paddock I found one of my favourite cars from my childhood: Gabriele Tarquini's BTCC-winning Alfa Romeo 155. I had a couple of Duke Video VHS tapes of the couple of seasons when the Alfa 155s dominated the British Touring Car Championship when I was younger and pretty much hero-worshipped them.

By the time we had made our way round the paddock, the show was coming to an end for the day and the sun finally crept out from behind the clouds. This was probably a good thing as I still got a bit sun-burnt despite the cloud cover.

The Festival of Speed was great as ever, but it definitely confirmed to me that you need to take a couple of days to do it properly (we didn't spend any time watching cars go up the hill!) and that the rather large amount of money I shelled out two years ago to be in the Kinrara enclosure was also worth it, dress code and all.

There are more photos from the day in my Goodwood 2010 set on flickr. I also cobbled together some of the video I caught on my 5D during the day, which you can see below.

Internet Explorer 6 z-index bug

Internet Explorer has a minor bug with z-index that often crops up when you have an element which is displayed as an overlay on top of other elements (e.g. lightboxes, drop-down menus and the like).

The problem is caused when the element you want to overlay is nested inside a parent element, which in turn has sibling elements. Normally, we just give it a z-index to force it higher in the display order but IE6 doesn't seem to pay attention. See the figure to the left or a live example.

Luckily the solution is quite simple: just add a z-index to the parent element that's at the same level in the source as the other elements that need to be hidden under the overlay, comme ça