The concept

Simple! Shoot photographs all around you and then merge them together with the help of a good piece of software.

Taking the photographs

So you found a beautiful spot.

First thing to take care of is being stable when you shoot. If you’re lucky enough to have brought a tripod with you, then use it (even better if it has a degrees marker… note that there are even professional 360° panorama tripods for a smooth shooting out there). If you don’t, then try to assure you can be the most stable of your feet by using an element on place. Could be using your elbow on a big rock and turning around it, or putting your back on a barrier, cross (whatever) and turning around carefully.

If you’re concerned about the photo having several lighter/darker areas (and if your camera allows you to manually adjust settings), set an exposure and keep it all along your shooting. If you simply have a low budget cam, are in an hurry (or again, whatever) I think you can accomodate with it without getting an horrible result (see panorama above).

Next important thing, don’t try to shoot the minimal number of photos: overlap! Start from a precise point, shoot, then slightly turn and for next shot, include at least 1/3 of the precedent one. Oh and one thing. I shoot vertical when I can: more photos, but also more space on the panorama.

One thing you’ll see when using the software, and especially if you haven’t used a tripod or you wasn’t able to be very stable, is that there will be some lost area above and below the panorama. So when you shoot, center your subject and imagine that some details will be lost above and below (think about it as a safe area).

Putting the magic in action

So you’re done with your shooting, and you’re back home, happy but somewhat tired. Download your stuff and hurry to open Photoshop!

In the menu, browse File > Automate > Photomerge… and you’re in (see? no big deal)! Leave the settings by default and load your entire serie of images, hit OK and let the software do its work.

After a certain while (depending on how many shots you’ve taken) you get your brilliant panorama, yay! Warning though, as the Photoshop file can be huge (the one above was quite 1 giga large) and if you haven’t a powerful machine enought working on it could be of some pain (hyperactive people have to show patience here).

Your panorama looks a little bit like a puzzle yet, due to that blank areas on top and below (as mentioned previousy). Simply crop your image to remove that and that’s it, congratulations!

See my panorama in real size on Flickr

PS. Thanks to Stephanie for the automating trick. If you’re kind of a masochist or like things done in the traditional ways, you could also have merged your photos one by one (correcting levels, saturation, perspective, etc) for each shot… as I was doing before meeting Stephanie, lol.

I’ve been pretty busy on my french website Vie Nomade, sharing articles and resources about my nomadic lifestyle project.

I’ve also been designing an working a lot. My freelance projects are coming along nicely and motivation is at its top!

I’ve recently launched my professional webdesign website (only in french for now, but an English version should be ready in the forthcoming months): it’s called Daedeva.

And here are some projects I rencently launched for my clients:

• A new design for BD-FIL, the International Festival of Comics, Lausanne
• A new design for Swiss Animation
• A new design for Cercle Suisse Japon

As some of you may already know, I’m a wannabe location independent and I’m preparing myself (and looking forward) for this cool lifestyle design experiment.

The website was built on Wordpress, but you already know how much I love it, right? It features my photos also!

As you can see, there’s a brand new design. I hope it will be a comfortable feeling to navigate through my pages :) Soon, its architecture will also be refreshed and adjusted to better fit the content.

Gone for all these months, but why? Well, not really gone! I was busy behind the scenes. I’ve been publishing several travel/freelancing related articles on my french blog Blanc Horizon (there should be something in English coming out soon). I’ve also been working on several website designs (as you probably know, that’s my main job, I’m a freelance webdesigner), shooting photos, and even trying my hand at mini video reportages (you can see me there speaking in french about Lonely Planet and their cool website).

I’ve also been pretty active (and still am! do no hesitate to get in touch) on Twitter. Also working on my business website (but I’m not done yet). My portfolio is suffering from a terrible lack of update, booh. I should really do something about it one of these days!

Well, stay tuned for the soon-to-come changes and news going on here!
And thanks for reading :)

This is la Grand-Rue in Fribourg (Switzerland), the city where I currently live :)

I have been really glad to take part in this great initiative! Check out the article I wrote about being yourself in your business approach: Make a difference by being yourself.

However, I will definitely be back soon! I’m currently looking for a new home and as soon as I’ll be installed and relaxed, be sure to see me back :)

Meanwhile, feel free to follow me on FriendFeed (daily activity) and also to check ou my portfolio (some projects will be posted pretty soon).

Wishing you the very best and looking forward to keep back in touch!

The photographs showcased in this article are from the Library of Congress gallery.

One of the thing I prefer doing during those days, is to look for the inspiraton of other artists. But there are so many amazing portfolios, galleries and journals that it can sometimes be frustrating if you loose yourself in that jungle!

I have decided to share with you some of my favorite photographic websites today (and I will mostly also share other type of artworks in the future) in order to offer you a guided road. The galleries you will see below are in no distinct order and subject (on purpose, difference stimulates). So relax, and enjoy the tour!

• Pawel Fabjanski
  Urban photography. Amazing contrasts and unusual concepts.
• The Library of Congress
  Vintage photography (and a ressource).
• Jack Radcliffe
  Black & White portraits, that tell real person history.
• 3191, a year of evenings
  “we are stephanie and mav. we live 3191 miles apart. we don’t stay up too late.”
  Every night, each one of them shoots a photo of something he’s living or watching.
• World Press Photos of the Year (2008)
  An interesting mix of events, portraits and research.
• Eric Ryan Anderson
  An interesting mix of portraits, travels and architecture. An eye for textures.

• Darren Holmes
  Dark moods and portraits. Strange muses and fine poetry.
• Photoshop Disasters
  This one is mostly fun: it highlights touch-up mistakes in magazines and avertisement.
• Catherine Chalmers
  How can an hoard of cockroaches and flies represent the human comedy? Catherine shows it. Bizarre and moving.
• Armed America
  Photographing American people in their homes and asking them “Why do you own a gun?”
• Marc Lagrange
  Vintage, pin-ups and portraits.
• Bart Pogoda
  I particularly enjoy the Reportage & Landscape photographs.

• Marc Riboud
  Historical photography (check out for the May ‘68 gallery)
• Peter de Mulder
  Fashion photography (underwater fashion, too)
• Li Wei
  Bodies everywhere.
• Jan von Holleben
  Dreams of flying.
• The Big Picture
  News stories in photographs.
• Branislav Kropilak
  Particular perspectives and points of view.

• Mi-Zo
  Very particular fashion photography. Not your average details!
• Catherine’s Animals
  Animals on kitschy studio patterns. Lovely!
• Koen Demuynck
  Fun adevrtising photography with amazing atmospheres.
• High Dynamic Range (HDR) Imaging
  A collection of ressources by PSDtuts
• LSD Photographers
  You’ve got to love their still lifes!
• Shorpy
  The 100 year old photo blog (historical photos).
• The National Geographic’s Daily Dozen
  Here’s a nice collection of photos from all around the world (and you can contribute, too)
• Frozen Food
  The name says it all. Interesting textures and colors.
• Classics in Lego
  Some good old classics revisited. Original!
• Urban Exploration
  Discover forgotten and forbidden places, in HDR.

I’ll most probably post about some of the various challenges I encoutered and techniques I used in the future, but for now, this article is blatantly dedicated to self-promote myself ;)

Many thanks for visiting!

I thought I’d share a concise review about Zenphoto now that I’m familiar with it.

Plus

What I particularly loved

• It is easily skinnable (if you have decent CSS/XHTML skills)
• It is very user-friendly for administrators: you can modify your descriptions and tags on the go if you’re logged in, without switching to the admin interface.
• The image management is just GREAT. It keeps your original image on your server, so whenever you change the dimensions of your images (let’s say if you’re planning a redesign) it adapts right away to your new dimensions (provided your original is big enough).
• There is a function that allows you to automatically add a watermark. You can upload you own PNG watermark (which can also be changed later without you having to re-upload everything).
• It has some cool features such as very functional tags, tag cloud and an RSS feed.

Minus

What I didn’t enjoy at all

• There is no function to move an image from one category to another, which is pretty BAD: you have to reupload and refill your details if you want to do the switch.
• It does not completely validate due to “&” not being hardcoded in URLs (plus several other minor errors).
• The RSS feed keeps track of the latest uploaded images. I expected it would sort the images by date.

Overall…

I would say I enjoy Zenphoto and recommend it, provided some of the features I mentioned will be added/corrected.

• CMS: Zenphoto Gallery
  This nice CMS takes care of your photo or art gallery like a charm! Is really light and has nice functionalities (RSS, tags, search,…) Most of all, it is really simple to manage and customize!
• Educational: Six places Flash doesn’t belong
  This great article explains well the pitfalls of an heavy use of Flash. I couldn’t agree more! Flash is great, but using it with parcimony is even better.
• SEO: Cheat sheet
  SEOmoz offers a nice and complete SEO cheat sheet for web developpers.
• Inspirational: Face Hunter
  Clothing styles do definitely inspire me! “A man out and about in london and beyond: eye candy for the style hungry”
• Wordpress: Completing the CMS
  An excellent selection of plug-ins to help customizing Wordpress deeper.

And, if you have links related to the ones I’ll be suggesting, don’t hesitate to comment them, I’ll be glad to review them.

• Lifehack/Tool: Remember The Milk
  This is the nicest to-do list I tried! You can have several lists (i.e. work/personal), easily classify your tasks with importance (it is definitely user-friendly/ergonomic, plus, it has a cool interface).
• Inspiration: Web Form Design
  This article showcases fun/original/classy concepts and ideas for form design.
• Geeky/Stuff: GorillaPod and MonsterPod
  Have you seen those cool and versatile pods for your cameras? I really like the Gorilla one!
• Wordpress: Download Counter
  It’s the plug-in I’m using on my Goodies page. Transparent integration and well, it works :)
• CSS: Transparent PNGs in IE6
  The title says it all ~ have your PNG working in that ol’bad Internet Explorer 6!

And if you would like more daily goodness, check out below, my del.icio.us mini-feed!

In this article, I’ll be speaking about my own experience, and then share some advices that I consider like useful for a first teaching experience.

Photo by JISC infonet, under a CreativeCommons license.

Your first audience

As I said, it was my first experience. I never had a chance to previously confront / speak up in front of people as a professional (I took theater lessons, but that’s not the same audience, isn’t it?).

It is always challengy to fight up the stress of this “first time” especially when you are in a (quite) unknown environment.

Choosing the right technique

I remembered the good old days of tables. It was so easy to learn. You know, when we designers were completely unconscious of accessibility, standards. When we didn’t need to pay attention to several browsers, to use hacks, conditional comments, special techniques!

Good old days did I said? No, I didn’t mean it – I’m so glad of the “standards revolution”! Despite the fact it was an easier approach for webdesign-newbies, I just didn’t want to teach anyone an obsolete approach. So I took the challenge to teach them the right way. Which is way more abstract.

I mean, floats? Positioning? Inline/Block elements? Transforming inline to block, block to inline, ugh! Not so easy-to-grasp concepts!

The time factor

24 hours to teach anyone how to create a standards compliant website, from design to coding, is nearly impossible. Nearly! In fact they did it, they learnt in a record time how to create a little website with divs.

Of course you can’t expect their code to validate or be browser-bug-free, or their design to be in a kick-ass Web 2.0 style (that’s where experience comes in).

But being realistic, I had to provide them a tool from which they could then learn on their own.

The new environment

The environment was quite unknown for me. I knew a few teachers from that school (something like 2) and the rest was a big discovery. I had the chance to be well and warmly welcome by most of them, and this allowed me to meet new interesting people.

But this added to the difficulties! Not only was I learning how to teach in an immediate environment, I was also learning to know new persons, new jobs, news points of view.

That, maybe, would look like a simple and natural process, which it was, but the brain was so much sollicitated by all this new situations that I went home, at night, completely tired. I felt very good with myself (positive, I mean!) but just like I had a brainwash ;)

Getting attention and estimating the knowledge

I had a lot of chance, the students were all eager to learn how to manage this new tool that would allow them to showcase their illustration work. I think the level of attention you get when teaching is really important and could demotivate you if you encouter no interest. This was fortunately not my case!

The knowledge is also something tricky. Again and fortunately, they had some Photoshop knowledge, but they hardly saw one line of code during their life so the approach wasn’t actually the same than teaching to a bunch of geeky informaticians ;)

And here comes the close relationship between attention and knowledge ~ I’m pretty sure someone that really wants to learn is able to grasp quite anything. And this first experience confirmed it.

Technical difficulties

I have the habit of working on PC, with my PC software (i.e. Notepad ++) and I was confronted to a Mac when I arrived. I already worked (several years) on Mac but having to switch softwares, systems (and even networks) was pretty difficult and lead me to situation where I had to ask students “how to”!

Then, the network which wasn’t working correctly, didn’t allow me to share easily the dummy files I had prepared for analysis and experimentations… And also, the Web wasn’t working properly, and as incredible as it can sound, we basically learned how to create a website without having access to the Web!

Recommendations

What I would recommend for one’s first teaching experience:

1. Be prepared. I had a “dummy” student that heard my lessons, stopped me when I was telling something too abstract and making suggestions during the whole process. This really helped me a lot! It also confronted me to the need of structure. Creating a website implies so much little bits of knowledge! To teach them all properly you have to give them an order. And the first order you have in mind isn’t always the appropriate one.
2. Bring them some “cheat sheets”. Expecting your students to know each important HTML and CSS attribute in only 24 hours isn’t realistic. Bring tools that will help them during the process.
3. Be rested! This one is pretty important. If you’re tired, your stated of mind will probably not be encouraging for students to learn from you. If you’re rested and shiny, your will most probably send “good vibrations” for a warmer studying environment! Do not allow everyone to bother you the night before your first day ~ switch your phones and mails off.
4. Be consistent. Teach them by using real examples. Or you will quickly face the typical “but you said that…” followed by your answer “yes but that was meant to be as an example, in fact, it’s…” In such a little amount of time, you have to make sure every detail you say has an importance and can be used in a real context. Students will mostly take everything as necessary.
5. Be structured. If you switch to a subject from another, to then switch back again to the first one… you will most probably get everyone lost.
6. Take time to relax. As soon as you have a break, go outside or have a drink. If you focus on your learning non-stop, you will feel too much pression and this could lead to a burn-out. It is important to oxygen and distract your braincells properly ;)
7. Ensure your tools will function correctly in your new environment. The best thing would be to prepare the classroom previous to the arrival of the students (which isn’t always possible). If you can, test the projections, the Internet connexion, your new softwares, the network… Those are really things that can make you loose a lot of time (and credibility, which is important to get attention).

This can be done whenever you have only one database or several ~ the technique is a bit different for each case. You will find in the Wordpress codex enough informations on how to perform these installations : Installing Multiple Blogs.

However, and despite following those instructions, I quickly ran into problems. My installation was working just fine with the default permalink structure, but as soon as I tried to customize it, every page and article was linking on my blog located at the root (pointing on a brilliant 404 error)!

Here’s a solution!

How to get a correct permalink structure

With multiple blog installs (on the root, and on other folders).

1. Duplicate your .htaccess file located at the root of your website. It should contain the following lines:
   # BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
2. Edit two lines, indicating your installation folder.
   I.e. if my fresh install should be located at www.exiledesigns.com/books:
   # BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /books/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /books/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
3. Save as a new .htaccess file and upload it in your new folder directory (here: books).

That’s it, you can now properly customize your permalinks!

The solution was kindly offered by Mochu, a mod on the very helpful Wordpress support forums. Thanks!

You can grab them for free in the Graphic Boutique.

Another new creation was for Veerle’s “What is Graphic Design” competition. I usually don’t take part in competitions a lot but this one was pretty exiciting as I came up quickly with a concept and some graphical ideas : “Graphic Design is Interaction”. However, it took me a lot of energy to realize something viable (ideas aren’t enough!). My entry can be seen in my Flickr account. Also check out the other entries – there are some really good ones.

(If you don’t know what these services are about, you will find some ressources to look further at the bottom of this article.)

I mostly use these plug-ins in order to add valuable content to my website, but also, so that my blog acts as a kind of platform that will display my various affiliations and contributions on other web spaces.

Thanks to the great Wordpress community, I found some neat plug-ins, easy to install, use, and even customize. Here’s a small list :

Eightface’s FlickrRss

Displays the most recent photos from your Flickr feed.
You can choose how many photos you want to display and you can also display photos from Flickr groups or communities.

Alexking’s Twitter Tools

Displays the most recent “tweets” from your Twitter account.
This one has also pretty straightforward options (i.e. how many tweets to display) but it also allows you the possibility of twittering right from your Wordpress interface, create blog posts from Tweets (and vice-versa) and create a daily digest of your tweets (for the heavy Twitter users !).

Linuxbrit’s del.icio.us plug-in

Another pretty straightforward one, with the possibility of choosing how many links. Can also display tags and descriptions, but I haven’t tried these ones yet.

More ressources about these social services

As promised above, here are some links of interest concerning these social services :

• Wikipedia’s Flickr page
• Stephan Spencer’s interesting article “What is Flickr and why should I care“
• Wikipedia’s Twitter page
• Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking utility. Check what is it by viewing CommonCraft’s neat video “Social bookmarking in plain English“
• Wikipedia’s Del.icio.us page

(note that my own Flickr account isn’t representative, I still have to work on it ;)

I’m hoping that you will find here soon more webdesign tutorials, tips, tricks, multimedia news, exclusive goodies but also a wide list of useful links and ressources, ideas/discussions about freelancing, and as previsouly, a daily portfolio (but really maintained !).

This, of course, will take me probably several months to prepare, launch, and also maintain (because I don’t know yet what my 2008 timetable will look like ;) Many thanks for your patience !

PS. Have you seen my professional website, exoconcept ? It has finally been launched a few months ago ;) It is in french for the moment, but should be translated in English soon (well, kinda) !

Simulate colorblind vision with your own Web pages

In Tenerife we learnt that European passenger laws bring several rights, for flights belated with 2 hours and 1500km (which happened to us) such as paying any fees occurring to the passenger due to the delay they caused (hotel, tickets, refreshments, meals, unused and reserved night hotels). But the Easyjet staff in Madrid was not even helpful (they just said : “we cannot do anything, just go on the net reading what your rights are, you could maybe get a refreshment” (which we never had, ahah). I don’t know if it’s incompetence or if that’s really how the company works… I’m working writing a nice letter right now in order to see if we can get some compensation… cross fingers please ! (notice they also did break my suitcase on the return trip, sigh). I’ll keep you updated on this.