As an experienced photographer, as well as a web designer, I am usually the one behind the camera taking photos of other people.  I decided, however, that I wanted to try a self-portrait - but something a little more interesting than the norm.  I enlisted the help of friend and dancing instructor Chantal Huntley, from Smooth Latin Groove, as well as two assistants Caitlin Boag and Scott Walsh, to shoot a photo of us “dancing in the rain”.

Here’s the result!

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If you’d like to add the hilarious comic strip What The Duck to your website, here is a quick and easy solution using PHP.

First, we need a function that will fetch the What The Duck RSS feed and parse it into an array from which we can extract what data we want.  This function, below, is called getWhatTheDuck() .

Second, we need another function that will take that array of data and format it.  We can display just the latest comic strip or any number up to the total featured in the RSS feed.

For the purposes of this sharing of knowledge, the code will loop through the array and output everything that’s available.  It should be a simple matter to change the loop to go through only once if you only want to display the latest strip.

See the PHP code

See the PHP script in action

Download the PHP script

Photography and web design are a happy couple.  I have undertaken many web design projects where I have produced custom photography to be used as part of the design.  The following is a brief article written for amateur photographers in one of the online photography forums that I manage and is included here for your interest:

A lot of photography books/resources that I’ve read talk about how important light is to a photograph. Understandable, really, seeing as a photograph cannot exist without light. That said, a common error made by studio newbies (I have been guilty of it myself) involves using too much light. In other words: Where are the shadows?

Below are two photos that I took of the talented Jessica. In the first photo I lit Jess with a large softbox from [slightly] camera right and used an umbrella on another light (left of camera) to help light the background. In the second photo I lit her with a bare bulb (except for some flagging to stop flare) that was located directly where she’s looking and elevated a little.

As you can see, the flat front-lighting produced an unflattering portrait and is utterly boring. Meanwhile, the side-lit photo brings out Jess’ cheekbones, gives her arms definition, and creates natural contrast (not Photoshop contrast!) that exists because of the shadow present in the picture.

Long story short: if you front-light then that light will reflect back off your subject and onto your film/sensor… you won’t get a great deal of shadow. Have a look at your favourite photographs - there is definitely light there, but consider how much shadow there is and how that shadow was achieved.