The Digital Negative

The smoke clears

I just finished up a grueling 3 weeks at work. For those who don't know, besides photography, I'm also a computer geek at a large, well known and sometimes misunderstood software company. I work on the new Windows Live Calendar team creating the coolest, most powerful online calendar service ever. That may seem a bit biased, but check it out yourself and see. We opened the service in beta to the world at the end of 2007 and are hard at work adding new features and polishing up the edges for the upcoming full non-beta release.

So what has been kicking my butt for the past few weeks? Browser printing. I'm convinced that printing was an after thought for all browser developers. Creating a professional print solution for a web application using the built in browser capabilities is about as tedious as mowing your lawn using a pair of scissors (trust me, you will miss a spot).

Have a web page that uses absolutely positioned items? It won't print on Firefox if it is more than one page long. How crazy is that! This is a bug that was reported to the Mozilla guys in 2002. It finally just got fixed for Firefox 3 and they aren't going to post of fix for the current version 2.

IE is a little bit better at printing but it sure isn't without its own problems. Browser printing in general is like a black box that you stuff a web page in one end and hope what comes out the other end resembles the original.

I'm just glad it's over and I can now return to my regular program.

Exploration of the Dog as Pop Art

After taking those photos of Toby the other day, all I could think about was trying it again on some other dogs. Lucky for me my buddy Mike seems to spawn little dogs and he currently has three. I had lent him a lens to use this weekend for a wedding shoot and figured it was a great opportunity to pick up the lens and shower his dogs in 1200w/s of ringflash goodness (I had it turned way down as to not cook the little guys).

 

Sanjo

The shoot went really smooth and I loved the results. I really can't wait to explore the series more and see how it evolves over time. To build up the collection quickly I'm going to be hitting up friends and neighbors for a few minutes of time with their furry family members (of the canine species).

 

Chloe

 

Teddy

I did it

This week Skyler put together his first sentence. "I did it." He also switches it around a little and says "I get it." The little milestones are so exciting.

His favorite words: ciao, sure, up, binky, choc (for chocolate milk), moo (what a cow says), pete-z (pizza), drink, mommy, daddy, train, jump and ta-da (said while spreading his arms and legs).