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August 05, 2005

Hona and the Madman

Hona and the Madman

   Returned again for a sunny day in the Madman's limestone quarry for a follow-up photo shoot with the '78 Caddy.  This time, the light and weather were much better and I took some 330 shots.
   The shot of the day is Mark Madson (the Madman himself) and our model for the day Hona.

August 03, 2005

   We returned to "Madman" Mark Madson's limestone quarry to do a photo shoot on his custom 1978 Cadillac Eldorado.  Unfriendly, the weather didn't want to assist and rained on us most of the shoot.  Still, we had the model pose for us on the Caddy so we could get some shots and decide what we want for the next shoot.  The lighting was poor and ISO 400 was just barely getting the shutter speeds high enough.  So, the pictures are not great, but they are just a test run.
   Picture for today is one of the shots from the quarry.  The lighting isn't wonderful, but the shot turned out alright.

August 02, 2005

IE bug workaround

   It took some time, but I think I figured out how to get IE to render background PNGs and not break the links in the process.This link talks about our problem:
Apparently, the dimensions of the background image affects IE's display of links. That's a pretty ugly bug.
   The site also quoted some test they had done to see if various sizes worked or not.  I found that the sizes 2x10 and 2x2 didn't work for this site-- it fixed some links, but not others.  1x1 PNGs, however, seemed to work everywhere.  That seems to be the solution to the Internet Explorer broken link problem with the CSS "_filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader" hack.
   Checking over the site statistics, more than 70% of hits come from people using Internet Explorer.  I do hope Microsoft has fixed these issues in IE7.
   Picture today is a selective color photo of Jake.

August 01, 2005

IE problems

  We discovered today that Internet Explorer doesn't like our script generated news page.  While it looks correct, the links for adding a comment, viewing other images in gallery and viewing images in other sizes don't work.  In Firefox-- the browser I use for all design work, everything looks fine.
  To be sure I wasn't being Firefox specific, I brought the new page and gallery script generated pages into compliance with the HTML 4.01 spec as validated by the W3C.  This didn't seem to help, but wasn't a bad exercise.  My pages contained several HTML 4.01 mistakes-- mainly missing ALT tags for images, using the BACKGROUND tag in TABLEes (apparently no longer valid) which I replaced with STYLE tags and ampersands ("&") used all over.
  The link problem is specific to IE version 6.x.  Opera doesn't have any problems with the links.  IE 5.x doesn't have a problem either.
  Todays picture is actually from July 28th, but deserving of the front page.  It's doctored in an unusual manner.  I started with a hard contrast black and white selective color (eyes and lips).  Then, I did a gradient mask that allowed the color to fade in on the edges, but not in the center.  I'm still not sure I like the end result, but we'll see what others have to say.

July 31, 2005

  We traveled to Skydive Chicago Airport in Ottawa, Illinois to jump out of a plane at 13,000 feet.  It was a long day for 60 seconds, but an experience like nothing else.  Unfortunately for photos, I wasn't able to bring the camera along for the jump-- so all the shots were on the ground.  In anticipation for my own jump, I forgot to photograph some of the many jumpers coming in.  The photos I did take were of our general group as we waited for our turn.
  The picture for today is Amy J. displaying her hacky-sack skills.

July 30, 2005

Falling Down

Falling Down

  Today, we went to a Little Limestone Co. gravel pit off of I-43 just outside of Beloit.  There, Jake, Juliet and I film and photographer "Madman" Mark Madson drop a '84 Park Avenue off the edge of the cliff onto the quarry floor.
  There were 5 drops total, turning the car into pile of twisted metal.  Attending the event were a film crew making a commercial and a reporter from the Beloit Daily News.

Show all the sequence pictures from the drop