I’m not going to lie, Chris is good not a miracle worker and so quite a lot more practise is still required, but that’s certainly true of any aspect of photography, and having never really attempted serious motorsport photography before, I was not expecting miracles. I’ve added a few of my favourites below.

It was just a shame the weather made for quite a soggy day, but Chris and Joe (from the YRC team) made the whole day a great experience, including meeting Ollie Jackson, and Max Coates, and getting up close with some of the cars.

The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World

Nick Harkaway

15 May 2012, 18.00-19.00 Watershed, Bristol

An age of isolation, warped communication, disintegrating community. Where unfiltered and unregulated information pours relentlessly into our lives, destroying what it means to be human. Or an age of marvels. Where there is a world of wonder at our fingertips. Where we can communicate across the globe, learn in the blink of an eye, pull down the barriers that divide us and move forward together. Whatever your reaction to technological culture, the speed with which our world is changing is both mesmerising and challenging. In The Blind Giant novelist and tech blogger Nick Harkaway draws together fascinating and disparate ideas to challenge the notion that digital culture is the source of all our modern ills, while at the same time showing where the dangers are real and suggesting how they can be combated. Ultimately, the choice is ours: engage with the machines that we have created, or risk creating a world which is designed for corporations and computers rather than people. This is an essential handbook for everyone trying to be human in a digital age.

Link

The Higgs Boson and Paul Dirac

Peter Higgs and Graham Farmelo

16 May 2012, 19.30-20.30 St George’s Bristol

Two of the giants of modern physics were educated in Bristol’s schools. Paul Dirac, who co-discovered quantum mechanics and predicted the existence of anti-matter, always regarded the excellent education he was given in Bristol – in physics, mathematics and engineering – as crucial to his career. Dirac’s success inspired the young Peter Higgs, who attended Cotham school, and later predicted the particle now named after him and the subject of worldwide attention. Graham Farmelo, author of The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac is in discussion with Peter Higgs and Robin McKie, science editor of the Observer.

Link

News International & Me

Tom Watson MP

20 May 2012, 17.00-18.00 Arnolfini, Bristol

Tom Watson MP has led the pursuit of News International in parliament. His new book tells the full behind-the-scenes story of the phone hacking scandal, revealing the connections between News Corporation, the police and politicians, and explaining how they became unravelled. With unique information and access, Watson shows what went wrong with some very prominent British institutions and marks the moment when everything began to change.

Link

Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists

Rebecca Stott

20 May 2012, 18.30-19.30 Watershed, Bristol

Rebecca Stott’s Darwin’s Ghosts is a masterful retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men who had the imagination to speculate on nature’s ways and the courage to publish at a time when to do so, for political as well as religious reasons, was to risk everything. Just one month after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received a letter that deeply unsettled him. It accused him of failing to acknowledge his predecessors. For all the excuses that leapt to mind, Darwin knew he had made a grave error in omitting to mention his intellectual forebears. Yet when he tried to trace these natural philosophers, he found that history had already forgotten them. More than a tale of mummified birds, inland lagoons, Bedouin nomads, secret police files, microscopes and curiosity cabinets, Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists is the story of an idea that would change the modern world.

Link

First up, a trip to Westonbirt (2 shots) with my new Tripod (Manfrotto 190CXPRO3) a fantastic piece of kit, I would thoroughly recommend giving it a try, and the light weight feel is great. There was then a trip to York (3 shots), with Kate taking us on a guided tour of the snickelways, then on to Thixendale.

A beautiful sunny day along the river in Bristol (2 shots), with the SS Great Britain, saw another photo opportunity (again with the tripod).

Finally on to a location I cannot recommend enough, we had an amazing weekend in Stratford, visiting the birthplace of Shakespeare.

On the same note, you too can enter the Westonbirt Autumn Photo competition: http://www.flickr.com/groups/autumn-westonbirt-competition/ and if you need a day for it, then I can vouch for the fact the amazing colours will definetley still be there tomorrow.

The lectures really helped in getting to grips with how to compose a good wildlife photograph (I’ve just got to try to put it into practise).

Here are a few of the shots taken on the day at Bristol Zoo.

A screenshot of the Pro Plastering website

In order to give the site a slightly sleeker look I have added a few extra’s to the quite simplistic site layout.

Improved Font Usage

I have in the past made use of sIFR but I have found it to be not exactly user friendly, that’s not to say it’s not a brilliant tool in it’s place, but I prefered to cut out flash entirely if it’s only going to be used in very limited quantity. So I decided to give embedding the fonts a go, as I knew this would be a safe option, as it degrades gracefully where unavailable, i.e. a normal font would be shown in place and so it would not ruin the site layout.

Embedding the font into the page through CSS

Above is sample code showing the small addition required to add your font into the page, here we can see the ttf (true-type font file) would be uploaded to a folder called my_fonts within the same directory as your style sheet, it would then be used to display your <h1> tags (1st header).

Gallery / Image Styling

I have long been a fan of the jQuery javascript library and tend to at least make passing use of it within most web projects, as it tends to just add polish to an interface, in a useable and compatible manner. For this project we wanted to showcase Nev’s plastering/renovation jobs and allow these to be easily accesible to the user; the best for this seemed to be through the use of thumbnails and a lightbox plugin.

Code required to add the fancy box plugin to the page

There are several good jQuery lightbox plugins but the one I keep coming back to is Fancy Box (at time of writing on Version: 1.3.4) (mostly due to it’s amazing flexibility for content). This was going to be ideal for this project as it allows for grouping of images into galleries within the page, and is very straightforward to plugin.

Social Networking

Additionally we wanted to allow an additional marketing angle, the addition of Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons, I will discuss this area in greater detail shortly, but if you have any thoughts on this area then please leave a comment after the beep.