things what I writ

Life in 50mm

November 17, 2009
327/365
327/365 by Tim Caynes

Goodness knows why I haven’t got one until now, but I just got my hands on a new (to me) 50mm prime lens for my Sony A350. I’d been quite happy with the 18-70mm kits lens since I got with the camera, but then, I didn’t really have anything to compare it with. I was so taken with other examples of what you can do with a fast 50mm from other flickr users that I’d tried to force the 50mm off my old Minolta SLR onto the Sony body, but it just made a strange crunching noise and so I thought I’d better stop. Even then, it’s taken me about 6 months to even track anything in ebay to see what kind of prices we’re talking about.

In the end, I spent a good few weeks searching for a Minolta AF 50mm in good condition, as the Minolta lenses fit on the new Sony bodies without any other convertors or rings or whatever you stick in the middle. The 50mm comes in a couple of flavours, and depending which one you’re looking for, is either relatively easy to track down, or is like some fabled artefect from Narnia that enables you to control the destiny of humanity just by looking through it backwards. The common one is the f1.7. The Narniascope is the f1.4. Having determined that my budget was less than a pony and that the Narniascope would set me back around a couple of tons and a monkey or 2, I settled on tracking the perfect 1.7 variety. In the end, it was a case of getting lucky with the bidding across a number of similar-looking lenses, which I’d narrowed down based on the description and small things like whether the seller looked like an arse or not. 79 quid and about 1p later, I’d won myself my very own Minolta AF 50mm f1.7 (will fit Sony A200, A300, A350, A700, etc.), which was packaged up and dispatched to me very nicely from a very helpful ebay seller.

Its early days, and I haven’t posted anything to flickr using the lens, but I’ve taken a number of test shots and looked at them on my whacking great 24.1 inch monitor and the results are rather splendid. Its not the best camera in the world. Its not the best lens in the world. But its a half-decent camera and its a pretty good lens and all I know is I’m kicking myself hard, right now, under the table, for not getting it 11 months ago, when I started taking 12 months worth of self portraits. The thing is, of course, I now have to change lenses on my camera for different circumstances, and I hate changing lenses, dust freak that I am. I’m thinking I might just use the 50mm forever.

Actually, of course, since my camera is am APC sensor or whatever you call it, what I’ve actually bought is a lens that effectively has a focal length of about , erm, 72mm or something, so its way tighter than I was expecting. But its ok, because I’ve got long arms.

oh, never mind

August 29, 2009

I was going to write some puntastic eulogy about working at Sun for a million years but all I can think about is a pen
I lost in the Sale office in 1993. Goodbye then.

how wrong can you be

August 13, 2009

you see now 5 years ago I thought it would all be alright but it seems it isn’t. if there was a sense that there was something to be optimistic about then it was entirely reasonable to be chirpy but 9 years of pointy stick avoidance makes jack a dull boy. its hot here, but then, you don’t know where I am.

I like big architecture

July 21, 2009
heathrow 3
heathrow 3 by Tim Caynes

its all very well sitting there in your office pointing your camera at yourself and then painting shadows and highlights all over your face, but sometimes you might need to get out into the real world and turn your camera around to look through it, rather than looking at it. and what better place to do that than in a place where you are surrounded by lots of shiny new architecture like the new terminal 5 building at Heathrow airport where there is the most shiniest and most enormous bits of architecture I’ve come across recently. I mean, I rather like big shiny bits of architecture with walls of glass and unfeasably large skeletons, but there are only so many times you can stand in front of the Forum in Norwich getting the reflection of St Peter Mancroft over someone from the BBC eating dough balls with a Chianti at lunchtime.

one of the reasons I like photographing big architecture, especially modern, Richard Rogers style architecture, is that it often lends itself very well to post-processing of the style you might inadvertently call post-modern-urban-apocalyptic-galvanised, or, um, shiny. and that’s the kind of post-processing I like to do, most often with my own face, which, in its own way, is a kind of post-modern apocalypse anyway and is often quite shiny, but in general, works better with loads of glass. and metal. so when I was lucky enough to be British Airways-bound for Colorado via terminal 5, for a user experience summit with a twist, I wasn’t going to miss the chance to fill up my memory card with geometric shapes and reflections the size of Norfolk. in fact, I got there over 3 hours early, which, after a 4 hours National Express coach ride on the 727 is the minimum recovery time before a 9 hour journey in economy, armed with 2 cameras, a home-made sandwich, and the sun even came out. a bit.

the nice thing about terminal 5, it seems, is that you can actually take a dslr out and point it at things without fear of incarceration. the most interesting shots were to found on the outside of the building, landside, so probably not too much to worry about, but I was also able to wander freely within the terminal after security, airside, taking really rather pointless photos of concrete and aircraft noses and the occasional departure board. the most interesting bit, however, was the largest escalator I have ever seen, which transported down to the transit to take you from terminal a to terminal b. this wasn’t just a large escalator, this was an escalator with its own vanishing point and although I was unsuccessful in getting a perspective view down from top to bottom, or from bottom to top, that was worth using, I did catch some of it in this rather nice overlap of escalators, elevators, staircases, suspended walkways and other shiny stuff, just before heading to the transit. you can just about make out the people crammed into the glass elevator, which, right after I took this photo, crashed through the roof and landed in a chocolate factory.

incidentally, although I had meant it to be the point of what I was writing but as usual lapsed into something completely different. I used a number of things to process this photo, but it was a combination of Topaz, Photomatix, Photoshop adjustment filters and a fair amount of painting things with a brush, which I really need a tablet to do properly, and not the kind of tablet that gets rid of the headache I’m giving myself.

Finding Servers

July 17, 2009

Hot, well, warm on the heels of our storage finder, we have recently deployed the new server finder, which replaced a previous incantation of finding functionality which was held together by hello world string and was somewhat creaking at the edges. The new server finder is based on the architecture we developed for the storage finder – they are, in fact, 2 renditions of the same finding platform – and so leverages the features that make it so worth the investment of effort.

As with the storage deployment, the key to making the server finder successful was, well, a number of things, but the main thrust of our efforts was defining the data architecture that make the relationships between product groups, products and product attributes a meaningful one. This can only happen with some Herculean efforts being undertaken by our publishing teams in conjunction with the product marketing teams, who really understand what is important and relevant about the products they market. Really, the finder itself is just a layer of abstraction on top of the data set underneath, and in theory (as we are at pains to try and progress), can be applied to any well-structured data set. What matters, is whether the data that a customer, user, or casual visitor is presented with, and the methods they can use to interrogate that data, enables them to reach an appropriate destination. In other words, they might know where they want to go, they might have a vague idea, or they may have no idea at all, but if we’ve done our job as well as we should be doing it, the directed searches and filters that the finding platform utilizes should provide a the equivalent of a product sat-nav, but avoid the 18-wheelers that get grounded on hump-back bridges in the middle of Hertfordshire on the way to the new Tesco Express.

Probably an analogy too far there, but it is by way of illustrating that the key to the finding platform is the data that it manipulates. I mean, we did a number of detailed usability trails, with various rapid and high-fidelity prototypes, struggled over the tiniest nuances of labels and gradients, fought compromise on page region refreshes and a followed number of other noteworthy user experience best practices, but in the end, if we built our application infrastructure on top of a taxonomy akin to a river bed full of shopping trolleys, we’d only be providing half a solution, which, in fact, is no solution at all.

We’ve still got a number of things to work on that didn’t make it into the first release, such as enabling product comparisons across products and, more difficult, across product in different product families, but take a look for yourself and let us know what you think. Comments are more than welcome, especially ones that are nice.

Awevangelizing

May 4, 2009

When you’ve got something you really want to say, but really want to say well, what is your best method for getting that message across, so that it plants a wow seed in the minds of your audience? You know, the corporate presentation equivalent of freshly baked bread and an ergonomically sourced spiral staircase centerpiece when you have house viewings? Recently, the web experience team here at Sun have had a couple of great opportunities to spread our message about the web experience lifecycle, our role in how we enable partners and stakeholders to maximize their potential on the web and, well, more importantly, how great we are. These opportunities were manifest as review meetings with executive management (there’s a few of those going on), and, maybe more exciting, the chance to spread the web experience message to a larger group of design specialists.

Once you’ve established that in the 2 days you have to create this meisterwerk you won’t be a) compiling a National Geographic style video documentary including over-the-shoulder footage of senior designers bevelling a fish and marble-backed talking heads reminiscing wistfully about Network Computing launches, or b) be building ‘presoworld’ in the Sun Microsystems Second Life hub where your SVP will have to negotiate the training course just to learn how to fly to your portal where they’ll have to find a place next some anatomically altered engineer masquerading as Wolverine in an OpenSolaris free virtual tshirt who clacks their fingers over an imaginary keyboard throughout the entire session, or c) in person, then what you’re most likely left with is filling that vital 25-minute timeslot with a presentation. I mean, not even a web-based presentation, but one that you put together with slides, templates, stickmen, graphs and everything.

Of course, traditional slideware is anathema to most self-respecting web experience design professionals, but, since I have a rather low self-respect threshold, and 1.5 days left, I though it might actually be a nice way to get our message across. More importantly, the presentation was required to be ‘taken away’, meaning it would, by design, need to be easily located in a laptop file system and spewed onto a white screen or even just viewed on-screen on the back seat of a taxi to Redwood City. With these core requirements in mind, it was painfully clear that however I created it, it would end up as a PDF, and so it was just a question of what applications and tools in the slideware creation cycle I picked from to build the thing out, knowing that, since I’m as manically possessive as any designer, I need to have TOTAL CONTROL OVER ALL THE BITS. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what I used (InDesign) or what other tools helped me out (Photoshop, Illustrator, FastStone Capture), because having settled on the nuts and bolts, it was all about the bread and butter. Thankfully, it wasn’t a solo effort to actually create the content – the web experience design team is crammed with wonderfully skilled and articulate individuals who can deliver that stuff – but there was a certain slackening of the reigns in terms of consolidation of content, arrangement and style, which is obviously the bit which appealed most. And the style I chose was awevangelization.

Awevangelization – Which I would patent, if I had any clue as to how that happens – is “the method of communicating one’s value in such as way as to avoid any ambiguity in that message through the tactical deployment of stuff which looks so awesome that it must be true”. As designers, we’re constantly, subconsciously striving to deliver projects that awevangelize, in that the frameworks that support the message render it unequivocal. There is, of course, a sliding awevangelical scale, depending on the strategic approach for the campaign or message. Viral is not awevangelism in its purest form, but it applies to execution, in so much that if you are required to understand a fake to be real, then it must be an awesome fake. Similarly, you might choose to derive design impact from actually sliding off the scale altogether so that you, apparently, have no impact at all. But other designers know that really, you’ve just done a modulo on the awezangelization scale and actually, you’re super-anti-awesome, which is, of course, awesome.

In the end, for the presentation. I just made the background black and did that mirror reflection thing with screenshots, but everybody is so busy these days that they don’t even have time to do that, so it seemed to rate fairly high on the awevangelical audience feedback metrics. Which made me happy for a while. Until I remembered I’d forgotten to submit a project brief for sidebar ordering to encapsulate requirements for content attachments to document types for sun.com in our publishing system. That wasn’t quite so, well, awesome.

Listening Post: Aphex Twin: Flaphead

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