Last few days were very windy. Tall office towers create ideal conditions for directional wind. The wind has some chill factor as it is after all Australian winter. In addition to lower temperatures the wind is also a nuisance for girl with long hair. This photograph of a girl in a long coat fighting the wind away from her hair is a classic city scene.

Technique wise this is quite different from the way I take street photographs. This is a lot more spontaneous and the photographs are taken from very close.

• Tags:
• black and white
• chill factor
• girl
• long hair
• office towers
• Photography
• street photography
• sydney
• wind

A photograph of a two Asian girls giggling next to me at a pedestrian crossing. I did not understand what they were talking about but it must have been very funny as they were laughing uncontrollably.

• Tags:
• asian girls
• black and white
• humour
• joke
• laughter
• pedestrian crossing
• Photography
• street photography

There is not a lot to be said for this scene of a homeless woman with her bags and a can of Jim Beam.

In a recent conversation with a social worker I was told that many beggars will not accept food or any other form of help but money because they are either addicted to drugs or alcohol.

Perhaps it is not the case here and she is enjoying her can of JB as many of us enjoy a beer for lunch.

• Tags:
• alcohol
• black and white
• homeless
• Photography
• street photography
• woman

Our Golden Retriever puppies are now two weeks old. They are growing very fast and are in excellent health. At two weeks a major development for puppies is the opening of the eyes and first very clumsy steps. The puppies are strong enough to explore space around them within 1 meter.

Mind you getting so far from the pack and mum means major drama, and once they realise they are too far major alarms are given – lots of puppy squealing. Some of them try to bark already and the biggest pups even mastered a form of growling.

They are so incredibly cute it is hard to leave them alone. I think their adorable looks and behaviours justify well the term “puppy love”.

• Tags:
• dog
• dogs
• golden retriever
• golden retriever puppies
• golden retriever puppy
• Photography
• puppy love

There are certain fashion trends that make me really uneasy. One of them would be the super dark glasses, which make eye contact during conversation impossible. Another fashion trend is to wear the hoodie everywhere. I think it is the lack of identifiable human feature that make these hooded tops look rather unfriendly.

Just look at this photograph of a young man in a dark alley in his dark cloths and headed covered with the hood. Is this an inviting scene? Would you venture behind him into this alley?

• Tags:
• dark alley
• dark cloths
• dark glasses
• eye contact
• fashion trend
• hooded tops
• hoodie
• human feature
• Photography
• street photography
• young man

There wouldn’t be too many people who are not familiar with a hit song by Cake called “Short Skirt, Long Jacket”. So, when I saw this four school girls in Long Skirts and Short Jackets I thought how funny to see them while I was listening to the song with a totally opposite “attire”.

• Tags:
• black and white
• humour
• long skirts
• Photography
• school girls
• short skirt long jacket
• song
• street photography

When I first spotted this homeless man at the famous Martin Place fountain, I knew he was a real character by the way he was dressed alone. Little did I know that few minutes later this homeless man will be teaching tolerance and acceptance to a large crowd of people.

Today, an ethnic and religious group has organised a protest / campaign for their alleged prosecution. No, they are not prosecuted here in Australia and no, no one interferes with their religious believes. After all Australia is a free, democratic country.

This group of people was protesting events in another country – their homeland as I was told. They are very well organised and persistent. They stage these protests very often. They are often dressed in traditional outfits, have number of speakers and often some entertainment. They have thousands of leaflets to give out to the passers by.

Almost nobody takes these leaflets from them, even though it is hard to pass Martin Place between Pitt Street and Castlereagh Street without passing at least 20 outstreatched hands handling the leaflets out.

Why don’t people take them? Perhaps because their large posters are mainly in another language and only small text in English. Perhaps because their issue is somewhere else, in another country, another reality and Australians at large often tend to think immigrants should leave their issues at the border and enjoy the life here as it is.

Enter Mr. Tollerance as I have called this homeless man. While the protesters were trying to hand out their message he approached them with a stack of his own leaflets. None of the protesters would listen to him or accept the leaflet. Why? Did he look storage, perhaps foreign to them? Were they uncomfortable with his peculiar attire?

The organisers of the event should have watched this man with a lot of interest, as their participants treated him the way most of the Sydney crowd treated them. Tolerance and acceptance are indeed hard to learn.

• Tags:
• australians
• castlereagh street
• homeless man
• large crowd
• leaflets
• Photography
• protest campaign
• teaching tolerance
• tollerance
• traditional outfits

This photograph of a blue Water Lily with reflection in the pond yet again comes from Cairns Botanic Gardens. It was photographed in natural light in the evening. I really loved the reach variety of the blue colours in the flower’s petals. The reflection in the water retains some of the flower’s colour, which I must say was a bit surprising as the light was rather low.

The lily was in some distance from me so I used Canon EF 70-200 F/2.8IS lens at ISO800 to compensate for the evening light. I am quite sure I must have had the IS turned on as this was a hand held photograph.

Did you know that blue water lily (Nymphaea caerulea) also called blue lotus and sacred lotus was considered a solar deity by ancient Egyptians.

• Tags:
• botanic gardens
• Cairns
• Canon
• canon ef
• Colours
• flower
• petals
• Photography
• reflection in the water
• water lily

Today I have selected this photograph of leaf veins as it reflects closely on the subject of my code changes behind this blog. Similarly to the leaf’s vein structure, which creates here a beautifully presented hierarchy pattern an Internet page has its own structure called HTML.

There are some beautiful websites on the Internet, created by graphic designers using a “paint” applications, which totally fall apart if seen without CSS style templates. This happens because these graphic designers do not understand information architecture offered by HTML.

If you are here just because of my photographs you may find the text following this point too “technical” and it does not relate to photography directly.

Does it really matter? I know that many people use social networking sites such as WordPress, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. They enjoy the experience without any Internet knowledge. This only happens because the companies behind these websites have written thousands of lines of code to ensure the pages created by their users still conform to some standards.

The key distinction is the web sites presence on the Internet. If you are given an exact URL, you will have no problems navigating to these pages. However, if you are searching for new information or researching a subject you have to relay on search engines such as Google, Bing or Ask. And here is where a well written content underpinned by a well designed HTML layout will make a huge difference. When the search engines index Internet pages they relay on the content to be on subject and be formatted in according to standards.

This is why I have selected HTML 5 to create this WordPress theme for my photography blog. It allows me for a mixture of presentation elements, which make the site look “good” and semantic elements which give the content a meaningful structure. Looking at my layout there is clear distinction which elements are responsible for what information.

I am not sure how successful this design will be in terms of SEO but I am hoping it will certainly improve on theme I have used until recently.

If you are a WordPress theme designer or perhaps you are more interested in HTML 5 implementation in a simple blog I am attaching the basic layout of my page so you can explore it. Please note this is a layout only and it is not intended as a working page or theme. It simply shows the organisation of my content and usage of new HTML 5 tags.

To make this layout work for you in WordPress you would have to modify the WordPress loop and many standard plugins, which you may be using now. In my case I have heavily modified Pagenavi, WPG2, TwitThis, AddThis and Simple-Tags. My modifications are very specific to my website and at this stage are not in a shape, where they could be released as a new generic skin and plugins package. Unlike standard themes and plugins, which work with any WordPress installation the changes I made created strong dependencies.

So, here it is – a basic structure behind Digital Photo

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
  <head>
    ... standard head content ...
    ... JavaScript specific code to add HTML 5 tags to the DOM ...
  </head>
  <body> 

    <!-- page wrapper -->
    <div> 

      <!-- page header -->
      <header>
        <h1>Site Title</h1>
      </header>
      <!-- /page header -->

      <!-- site menu -->
      <nav>
        ul>
          <li>... page navigation by page name ...</li>
          <li>... search ...</li>
          <li>... syndication ...</li>
        </ul>
      </nav>
      <!-- /site menu -->

      <div>
        Advertisement
      </div> 

      <!--[if lt IE 7]>
      <div>
        Ask people to upgrade fron IE6!
      </div>
      <![endif]--> 

      <!-- content wrapper -->
      <div> 

        <!-- left content wrapper -->
        <div> 

          <!-- left content -->
          <div> 

          <!-- article loop -->
            <article>
              <h2>Article title</h2> 

              <!-- article content -->
              <div>
                <!-- photograph -->
                <div> <!-- WordPress requirement otherwise renders <p> tag -->
                  <figure>
                    photograph
                    <legend>Photograph legend</legend>
                  </figure>
                </div>
                <!-- /photograph -->

                <p>Article abstract</p> 

                <div>... plugin icon links ...</div>

                <!-- article metadata -->
                <div>
                  <!-- article tags -->
                  <ul>
                    <li> ... tags ...</li>
                  </ul>
                  <!-- /article tags -->
                </div>
                <!-- /article metadata -->
              </div>
              <!-- /article content -->

              <section>Advertisment</section> 

              </article>
            <!-- /article loop -->

          </div>
          <!-- /left content -->

        </div>
        <!-- /left content wrapper -->

        <!-- sidebar -->
        <aside> 

          <!-- widgets:1 -->
          <section>
            <ul>
              <li> ... widgets ...</li>
            </ul>
          </section>
          <!-- /widgets:1 -->

          <!-- widgets:2 -->
          <section>
            <ul>
              <li> ... widgets ...</li>
            </ul>
          </section>
          <!-- /widgets:2 -->

        </aside>
        <!-- /sidebar -->

      </div>
      <!-- /content wrapper -->

      <!-- page navigation -->
      <nav>
        <ul>
          <li> ... page navigation by page number ... </li>
        </ul>
      </nav>
      <!-- /page navigation -->

      <!-- footer -->
      <footer>
        <p>Copyright notice</p>
        <ul>
          <li> ... social badges ...</li>
        </ul>
      </footer>
      <!-- /footer -->

    </div>
    <!-- page wrapper -->

  </body>
</html>

• Tags:
• HTML5
• Internet
• leaf
• Photography
• semantic
• SEO
• structure
• template
• WordPress

I am continuing changes to this photo blog with further adoption of HTML 5.

So far I have turned each post to an <article>, the sidebar is now <aside> and menus use the <nav> tag. I still use a lot of <div> tags to support the visual presentation. Admitedly it is a compromise. I have also converted the pagination links at the bottom of the page to a <nav>.

A more interesting change is to wrap each photograph in a <figure> tag and include <legend> tag inside to describe the photograph. I will be watching the performace of this combination with great interest, as there is no other way in any version of HTML to markup images in a sematic way.

Finally a lot of effort went into turning sequential output from WordPress of tags into an unordered list. It may be a small thing, but tags are just a list of links and should be groupped accordingly.

There are certain behaviours in WordPress that prevent me from some changes. Namely, I still have to wrap my photograph’s <figure> tag in a <div> tag otherwise WordPress inserts automatically a <p> tag, which is very annoying. I need to find the logic in the WordPress code and make all (including the new HTML5 tags) block elements exceptions from this behaviour.

I also need to figure out how to get Web Slices to work with HTML 5. It will depend on how IE8 treats the Web Slices markup. If it is purely class based, it should be relatively easy. However if it pairs up <div> tags and named classes than I won’t be able to do this and will have to keep old wrapping <div> structures.

• Tags:
• adoption
• behaviours
• block elements
• blog
• exceptions
• HTML5
• markup
• Photography
• visual presentation
• WordPress