Nevertheless, the upgrades:

As you most likely have noticed, the homepage now just shows and excerpt, rather than the entire post. This means you can see a lot more in one page, and will make the whole thing much simpler to scan through.

There’s also the floating social bar, on the top right. It doesn’t really benefit you, as much as it benefits me. So have fun.

The search has had some major surgery. It now sucks less! Search results will be ordered by relevance, not date. It also only shows a portion of the post, rather than the entire thing. There’s now some handy text up top, telling you what you searched for (in case you forgot?), and the amount of results the little monkeys inside my website have deciphered.  Oh, and if there’s no results, the top turns red, for extra visual feedback.

This is probably the least noticeable one, but one of the more important ones. The entire site, sans the css3, is now said to be standards compliant!

Oh, and IE6 doesn’t have the honor of this site anymore. That honor has been transferred up the ladder of Microsoft, to IE7. Much better(!)

To sum everything up, I don’t like sleeping at night when there’s work to do!

For one, we were in a holiday park, there was a toilet block right next to us, there was people everywhere we turned and civilization was just on the other side of the park road. Secondly, there wasn’t much of a fire. I say ‘much’ because we did go down to the beach one night and have a little bon-fire. But all of our meals were cooked on the little gas stoves or barbeques in the park. For me it’s just not quite the same.

But really, the tenting was pretty good, the food was really nice, and the boat trip was plenty fun, we actually caught three eatable fish. The one downside was there were 3 pre-pubescent teenager with us. My brother and his two friends, with all of their crazy kiddie energy, such as the type which reared it’s ugly face at about 7am, when me and my friend were trying desperately to sleep.

Photography was pretty good though. My friend is also into photography, so we went around the beach and water’s edge, taking some interesting shots. I’ll be posting some of it soon. However, the thing which most annoyed me was the lack of my new 50mm f/1.8 lens. I was really hoping on Thursday afternoon, right before the Easter public holiday, that it would arrive. But sadness ensued when I arrived home with no package sitting on my desk.

Nevertheless, it was waiting for me on my return home, and this afternoon was lots of fun, as I fiddled around with it. It works amazingly well for portraits with a crazy low depth of field.

So overall, it’s been a pretty eventful couple of days. I’m really tired, addicted to coffee and my room needs a massive clean up.

Goodnight.

Basically, year 11 been hitting me kinda hard these past few weeks. That coupled with my unsurpassed procrastination skills, has managed to put a stop to me taking many photos.

However, the end is in sight, a few more weeks and I shall be on holidays! I should be able to take more shots round then. I’m particularly looking forward to a possible camping trip to some beach in NSW. Not sure if I’ll go but if I do, there’s bound to be a good sunset or two… I hope.

Anyway, I guess that all sums it up. Only other thing that’s changed really is my addictions. Anime has been postponed leaving room for House and more recently, Top Gear. Which is simply awesome in all of it’s British glory.

Despite this, I’m already seeing some major difference in reflections and tones. Something previously unseen with my old, blurry MASSA Polarizer.

Also, you may have noticed I haven’t been spitting out artworks at a very fast rate. I can’t really blame year 11 because it isn’t school’s fault. I just haven’t really done much recently. The weather hasn’t been all that amazing and I haven’t really been anywhere special.

Last of all, the other day I purchased a Premium membership on deviantart.com. If you haven’t already checked out my page there, I encourage you too, despite it containing largely the same content as this site. Maybe you’ll find something I did ages ago.

Before the SLR

It really all started a year ago, on a family holiday in New Zealand. With such awesome land and waterscapes passing us by every single day, it was hard not to try and capture some of it on camera. Of course back then, all I had was a Kodak point and shoot, or as I called it, the point and pray. So with that clutched in my hand, I ended up taking endless amounts of photos. They were mostly terrible, and sadly not all due to the camera. Despite being halfway through a photography course, I really wasn’t that good.

So that really started my passion for getting a better camera. I don’t really know when I finally decided I was going to get one, but I know around about when I did, I started seeing awesome photographs everywhere. Just about every second morning, I would walk to school with light beams shining down from above. I would envision an awesome photo of just about everything I saw, which was very annoying. It was like everywhere I went, the environment around me was constantly rubbing in the fact that I hadn’t saved up enough.

1000D-Day

Finally, after several reiterations of the standing payment deal between my Mother and I, enough money had been saved to at least purchase a refurbished Canon 1000D on eBay. It took a while convincing my parents to let me take out a loan, from their wallets, but as usual, I got my way eventually and my camera was on the way. All this time, the environment continued to taunt me and I had to continue to work to pay it off. It got all the harder when the camera arrived, and it had to be tucked away until I had the money.

But after a quick deal with my brother, which was essentially a loan to pay off a loan, I had the money due, and the camera was mine. It was plenty fun for the first few weeks as I tried out all the different camera settings, options and adjustments. However, once that blissful stage was over, it was time to realise that all those amazing photos you see of lush valleys or stunning sunsets, wasn’t all as simple as pointing the camera and pressing the shutter release. There were times where a hint of doubt would sometimes enter my mind about whether the expensive gear was such a good idea. Of course I knew, if I hadn’t shelled out, I would continue to be constantly environmentally taunted. So it really was the right decision.

The Here and Now

So this brings us to just about now. The last few weeks have been once again blissful photography awesomeness. Looking back and seeing how far I’ve come was a great boost and I’m starting to really enjoy just taking photos. Finally, I’m seeing my environment as something much more true to their real photographic potential. I have been out several times for some night photography, which was very educational, and the recent rain has given me some new subjects to play with.

Overall, I’m quite happy with my camera purchase, and I won’t have any problems about answering that question my Father set to be answered one year from now. Was the purchase a good idea? Definitely.

Twitter hasn’t really given me much in terms of input. I just give out, and out, and out. And I am greeted with a general silence.

Various forums have never been very good either. Then again, I’ve never really immersed myself in any of them. I usually only join out of necessity.

and facebook, what can I say about facebook? Facebook, is still a joke. From the games to the groups to the millions of people screaming for a dislike button. (It will never happen)

deviantART has been the only network which I’ve really gotten into, and it has been worth it. It has given some great feedback which has helped me grow as a designer and a photographer. More than that, just seeing mountains of other peoples photos and designs have been great for inspiration and goals.

To illustrate this, just take a look at the first photo I ever submitted. Sunlight through the Trees Overexposed, overly natural colours and overly generic.

and then one of my latest. Yellow Awe
It isn’t hard to see that I’ve gotten better. I’ve still got a long way to go, but at least I’m on the right track. Which is good.

So anyway,
Thank you to everyone who supported me by commenting on my artworks. It has been awesome!

I knew, that like all other versions of embed-design.com, I would eventually grow tired of these constant static changed, and leave my site desolate in a dark corner of the vast interwebs.

Enter, WordPress.

After finding this great tutorial on Jestro.com, I realised that the previously idolised task of converting my website into a wordpress theme, was no longer just a fantasy. Although this tutorial didn’t complete the job for me, and only converted the design on a basic level, it gave me the kickstart I needed to begin to understand the way WordPress works.

And so after a few days work, the website is now updated. It now features a more blog-like navigation system. Rather than two different “feeds” for Artworks and the Blog, they have been merged into one steady stream. Offering the ability to only view certain categories to the immediate left.

Comments, are also a major new feature which I had envisioned from the beginning. They have finally been installed and are working exceptionally well.

So now that the power of WordPress is running the back-end of my humble website, the front-end can be given more attention.

Which is good for you, isn’t it.