I have been thinking about a topic I could blog about. So there was some quick brainstorming and I’ve had some ideas. But writing about color theories is boring and it has been done a million times before.

Hence I came up with the idea of giving you an insight into my personal photography as well as post processing.

My first post is going to deal with the Frog crosses Sunrays photo.

The first things I looked out for were the weather and a great location to perform some macro shoots. Actually I had been waiting around 2 weeks until I was satisfied with the weather.

After arriving at the garden I walked around and looked out for some interesting shots. I wanted to analyze the location first and shoot afterwards. This way I could clearly determine the importance of each shot. There was a great variety of different and also some exotic flowers. But there was also this noise which happened to catch my attention. Usually I tend to listen to music but luckily this time I was not.

So I went around searching for the noise. I was expecting a frog but I was excited at the same time too.

When I was nearly at my subject ,the frogs, I could see another photographer lurking for the perfect picture. Looking at his equipment I saw that he was not some novice geared up with some cheap stuff but rather with a 5D MK II and some 200 mm macro lens. Of course I took the chance to talk to him and exchange some ideas. Photographers tend to be really kind. It’s not the first time that I have been discussing with one. Nevertheless the small talks give you a different insight and some new ideas.

Getting the photo I have uploaded took me approximately 20 minutes even though it was a really small pond. But waiting for the frog to come into a nice position was the main key. Additionally there were some grasses which made it quiet difficult to come close to the frog. Thanks to the Live View I could push the cam into the grasses. I usually prefer the viewfinder but in this case it was just the perfect situation to take some use of the live view.

As you can see in this picture I already considered some segmentation while shooting. Shots with their subjects in the middle are mostly boring thus I try to avoid them. Besides the segmentation I also had to keep an eye on the sunrays. If they would not cross the eyes of the frog the shot would not have turned out this great. The sunrays emphasize the frog in this shot greatly.

The work after the fun

Nowadays there is no photography which does not go through some post processing. Thus the fun begins at this point. Some may underestimate the Post Processing but it is in fact as important as the way you have handled your camera. If you are doing it right you can get out a lot more and emphasize certain aspects of your shots.

This is what the shot looks out of the cam. As you can see it lacks a lot of contrast compared to the finished version.


And this is exactly what has been done in Post Processing. Some simple contrast and highlight shading as well as sharpening it while resizing. I didn’t do much more but these small changes are effective and make the image much more appealing to the viewer. There are no secrets behind those methods at all. Usually I tend to do more but if you are starting out with a great shot you have less to do. Thus you should do a few shots and not leave with only a single one. As I have written before – it took me 20 minutes to get this shot. Well spend time in my opinion !

Have a great weekend.

The content and the design

Why did I go with this design ? Why did I choose WordPress ? Which scripts do I use ?

Even if you don’t want to, after entering a website you always have a look at the design (except if you are ignoring CSS). The design of a website is the element that fills up the space around the content. I am clearly pointing out that the design is secondary. What is important is your content and how you display it. My content is partially filled up with images and secondarily with blog entries. Thus the main focus of the front page relies on 2 big images and 3 extracts of the blog.

Do you see any fancy graphics on my site ? Well I don’t and there is a simple reason for that: As I said the content is my main subject. This means anything I post has to match up with the background and provide a good experience. If there would be only a single color in the background it may end up in some bad contrast depending on specific colors used in my images. The result would be an unwanted (bad looking) effect that the visitor has to experience. Of course this can be solved if you choose your colors smartly. Specific colors have a much wider use. Just to tell you some: light tones which are nearly going towards the white color, brown or beige. But personally I don’t want to distract the user with this kind of stuff. My background pattern is clearly separating the content and the background.

Why did I choose WordPress

Well first of all it is open source and really well documented. I have had used WordPress about two years ago and it did not change much on the front end. I code my site and insert the php snippets to make it fully functional. That is all I have to do and if I need something special I simply look it up in the plugin database. Thankfully there are a lot of plugins which do a really great job providing more functionality. I for myself am not a php coder thus I would not be able to code any of these plugins on myself. Of course some of those don’t need the knowledge of PHP at all but it’s still faster to have something like the Maintenance Mode plugin instead of writing it yourself. This saves you time which you can spend much better on more important stuff. So I thought I would be listing up what I am currently using for this site as the developers surely deserve some credit.

• Anti Internet Explorer 6 Plugin – I don’t support this old browser any more and I actually don’t care if there are any bugs. We live in 2010 and people should be able to update their browser. It may sound harsh but face the truth.
• Maintenance Mode – This keeps you guys out as I am setting up the new blog and gives me full access to all the features. This helps a lot on spotting the last few bugs.
• Widgets Reloaded – Thanks to this plugin I can easily manage several functions in the sidebar such as excluding categories without having to change any files. Fast and efficient.
• Magic Fields – The Magic Fields plugin is one of the key elements of my site. All the sublines I am having are basically custom fields which I simply fetch in the template files. With Magic Fields I can make those fields appear in the post editor of WordPress. It also checks if the fields were filled or not which gives you an additional heads up. I would not want to miss this plugin anymore.
• WP Page Numbers – I guess this plugin is really well known. Instead of only having the “previous” and “next” links this plugin features page numbers. This helps a lot while navigating through pages and is much faster.
• WordPress Hashcash – validates comments and blocks off spam. It uses Javascript to indicate if a page was opened by a bot or a human.

Moreover there are some other jquery based scripts which I use.

• Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery – This effect is used for all the thumbnails linking to my photography and webdesigns. The effect is slightly changed from what you can see in the tutorial above.
• Slimbox 2 – The good old lightbox script is a great addition to any website dealing with images. Slimbox2 sticked out the most for me.

The Code

As I already said once I started off with XHTML and CSS and slowly added the desired jquery features I needed. After everything was functional (static) I started to include the WordPress snippets to fetch up headlines, the content… etc.. The overall design is build up as a usual WordPress design would be – header, index, sidebar, footer. Additionally I fetch up my navigation in an additional file as well as the icons at the bottom of the page. This makes it much easier to edit them if needed. I also have several CSS files just to keep everything clean. Besides there are three template files. One for the blog and the other two for the showcase sections (photography and web). Big thanks goes out to my mate Shahz for helping me with the site.

Launching this blog one of my main ideas was to provide some information about the general work flow. There are a lot of blogs which simply display awesome work but never get to tell the intension nor the idea which lead them to do what they did.

In this first article I am going to describe the way my logo was created.

I have already chosen my domain name a few years ago www.in-ess.net and it’s basically the shortened version of internal-essence. Having those two keywords I could imagine a few concepts but those were not realizable as a Logo. They simply lacked attributes such as working monotone (black on white for instance). Some semi transparent waves simply would not work because they cant be used for specific work.

As you can see the logo can be used in any variation. This aspect is really important as it makes it universal to use. For example on water marking as photographers tend to do or while having a presentation.

The process

When I am starting a new project I tend to do some brainstorming. I am simply trying to imagine some iconic work that matches up with the niche and key words. In this case it was the design niche and the words internal and essence. I am not going to say that this logo was done within a few hours after my first attempt. It was more likely a long term project on which I worked on and off. Thus having several miss guided tries such as these.

As a perfectionist but also a minimalist I could simply not stick up with any of those concepts. There was a simple reason for that: They did not appear to be unique or interesting. Both were just some typo work you can see everywhere on the web. It would have been plausible for some niches but on the design niche you have to stick out and attract people. How would someone remember one of those logos and address them to my site ? There is just a really small to no chance at all.

Well one day I have had an idea for a new logo. This idea was kinda developing in my head and I had to get out my graphic tablet and draw it up onto a canvas and play a little bit with the different elements. I was not able to reach what I had in mind but rather something different which was kind of unexpected but still followed my main idea. My main idea was a pyramid or triangle. The triangle simply displays the graphical side as it is a symbol for geometry. The pyramids built up round about 2500 b.c. were incredible and their purpose was to combine earth and heaven to pursue for something higher. Of course my aim as a graphic designer is equal. Even tho it may not be god what I am trying to reach but it is the superior kind of work. Thus this symbol was perfect for me.

As you can see above, it all started with a simple and thin line and developed over to the nearly final staged concept. The third step added some simple guides which helped me to find the right angle. The fourth step was already a try but it went out of the bounds. So it was not really what I was aiming to do. The last step is the summary of everything that was done above. It simply puts together all the ideas and experience gained throughout the progress and displays the final logo.

As you can see the concept started from something that does not look like the final piece but developed throughout with a few small steps. This is simply because of the fact that I had something amongst these lines in my mind and the creation was not hard at all. Basically its the left bar (symbolizing the i) duplicated and twisted.

Conclusion

Summarizing my experience and knowledge leads me to the point that logos do not need to have great artificial effects. They rather need to display the main values of the company which they are going to be used for. A logo is more likely designed to have a high recognition factor and to be unique. This does require some time and research to identify with the client or company. In this case it was my personal work so I could be free and I also knew the expectation towards my main values. Nevertheless being free does not mean that you can be less critical. This logo would not exist if I would not expect my own work to meet specific standards.

All in all logo work should not be underestimated. It should be unique while serving some simplicity and recognition value in it. It is very important that the logo works in both ways: colored and monotone. I hope that you enjoyed reading this small article on my working progress and thoughts about logos.