MakingImages

Katie and Aaron offer some great advice on how to write content for the web.

Katie Steed and Aaron Wood run Slurpy Studios, a Harpenden based animation and web design company.

Photographers plan to march in protest over police terror stop and search laws:

“Photographers will be exercising their common law right to take a picture in a public place – and they will be doing it collectively.”

Could this be the most well documented protest march in history?

My apologies to any customers that have left messages for me on my voicemail but have not received a call back. My service provider has introduced a new “feature” which allows clients to leave messages without providing me with the ability to listen to them.

The frustrating thing is that I know that there are messages there but after spending an hour on the phone with customer services, and after having tried all their suggestions, I’m left with the advice that I should wait for them to resolve the problem at their end. Hopefully normal services will resume tomorrow afternoon.

Update: Everything is back to normal, thankfully.

I met the most amazing individual on assignment for one of my corporate clients a short while ago. The client wanted some imagery to help them market a new elderly care initiative in one of their homes which required some well lit interior shots of a resident using various pieces of equipment under guidance from a care worker. On the shoot there’s generally a little dead time where people are generally milling around while portable lighting is either being set up or taken down. It was during this time that I struck up a conversation with one of the models, Reg.

Reg, it turns out, is a World War 2 veteran and I was enthralled with his story … a story of early capture in the Mediterranean, 4 years of POW camps, learning to survive, to duck-and-dive, to live on one’s wits and a few brief instructions on how to deal with an unbalanced Polish soldier wielding a bayonet.

He talked and I listened, completely enthralled with his tale. A wonderful man that we all owe a great deal to and I for one took a great deal more away from that assignment than a few flash cards of imagery.

It had to happen sooner or later ….. We’ve decided to immerse ourselves further in the social networking side of life by Twittering. We can be followed here.

We always strive to delivery great imagery and an excellent service to our clients here at MakingImages and it’s always nice when that commitment is recognized by our clients. Last week we were delighted to received a testimonial from MHA, a commercial client that we have worked very closely with over the last six months, delivering imagery for their prestigious property portfolio.

Louise Owen-McGee, MHA’s Creative Services Manager, writes:

“MHA’s position as one of the UK’s leading care providers for older people has been established over 65 years of imaginative commitment and innovation. As an independent charity we are always looking to work with people who have an empathy for our values and an understanding of the aspirations of older people. John Joannides offers both of these qualities, as a specialist care interior photographer. His work is of the highest calibre, evidencing great attention to detail and commitment to delivering work that’s bang on brief every time. His imagery has enabled MHA to better reflect the choice and quality of its services by visually depicting the support, comfort and possibilities that MHA’s accommodation offers.”

MHA have been a delight to work with and their commitment to quality creative imagery and a quality product offering shines through. We’re very grateful to Louise for her kind words.

I had the pleasure of meeting Katie Steed and Aaron Wood of Slurpy Studios today, an innovative animation and web design production company based right on our doorstep in Harpenden. I invited them to the launch day of the Chiltern chapter of the BNI networking group and had a number of opportunities to chat with them about their business.

Two things became abundantly clear to me; they are excited about what they do and they are no ordinary web design company. Just take a look at their screenings and successes. It’s not just about web coding and design, it’s about the creation of something all together more interesting and dynamic.

I’m a bit of a fan of 2d animation and loved their animated “Death by Scrabble” video which they handed to me on a DVD during the meeting. The music video on the same disc was also great to watch and listen to.

There’s some seriously creative stuff going on in Harpenden right now.

Watch out for them in The George on the high street. They’ll be the ones with wireless laptops and a video camera.

These lego remakes of famous photographs are a lot of fun.

There aren’t that many bizarre sights in my home town of Harpenden. Prettiness it has by the bucket load, but bizarreness seems to generally have passed it by completely in its headlong rush to London. This is generally a good thing and considered entirely sensible but it is a little irksome when someone with a camera hankers after a little bizarreness for his lens.

In all honesty, I have not done that much searching and I am sure that after twilight, when the high street fills with merry makers, things get interesting but that’s not what I’m looking for. Well, not at the moment that is.

I say bizarreness generally passed Harpenden by because it did leave one particular item of interest in its wake.

Here’s an interesting article from Wired Magazine on the new work by film maker Darren Aronofsky. The film, titled The Fountain, started on a relatively big budget which then had to be dramatically downsized. This, and other reasons, encouraged Aronofsky to seek out new ways of delivering the kinds of special effects demanded by modern Sci-Fi audiences. The following starts at the bottom of page 3 of the article:

…Aronofsky’s team discovered the work of Peter Parks, a marine biologist and photographer who lives in a 400-year-old cowshed west of London. Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge. The secret of Parks’ technique is an odd law of fluid dynamics: The less fluid you have, the more it behaves like a solid. The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. “When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you’re looking at infinity,” he says. “That’s because the same forces at work in the water – gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices – are happening in outer space.

The microzoom optical bench furnished Aronofsky’s film with something neither a computer nor an old-fashioned matte painter could deliver – chaos, in all its ultra high-definition fractal glory. “The CGI guys have ultimate control over everything they do,” Parks says. “They can repeat shots over and over and get everything to end up exactly where they want it. But they’re forever seeking the ability to randomize, so that they’re not limited by their imaginations. I’m incapable of faithfully repeating anything, but I can go on producing chaos until the cows come home.”