Canon 8800f Scanner

Over the weekend I bought a new film scanner, the Canon 8800f. It’s pretty awesome so far and to give it a test I dug through the cupboards at home and into my ‘archive’ of film negatives, slides, and medium format positives and negatives, and started scanning a bunch of stuff into Aperture.

I was pretty happy with the quality of the scan, specially considering that my ‘archive’ is just a cardboard box and most of the negs were just thrown into the box about 10 or so years ago. Bit by bit over the next few weeks I’m going to clean and scan the lot in an effort to digitise my library.

Here’s a couple of quickly thrown together photos from ‘back in the day’ that I’ve uploaded to my photography website Mathew Packer Photography.

Both photos were shot at Mona Vale on the northern beaches of Sydney, and the skater is Adam Luxford. Hopefully I’ll get more slides and what not scanned in tonight

Mathew Packer Photography update

Over the weekend, between scanning film, I also managed to get a load of updates done on my Mathew Packer Photography website.

About a month or so ago I scrapped the Wordpress installation in favour of Pixel Post which I found a lot easier to use just as a photography website, I didn’t want to blog with it or anything else like that. So finally after just using one of the default themes for the past month I finally pulled my finger out and customised it to display what I wanted.

As you can see from the above screen capture I wanted to display a single photo on the front page, and I didn’t want to stuff around with fancy graphics and logos, I wanted the photos to speak for themselves. I think I’ve achieved that.

While you can click on the photo on the front page and begin to move backwards through my archive, based on date uploaded, you can also ‘Browse By Genre’ which gives you the following display with a drop down menu.

And last but not least is the Biography page, there’s not a lot of information on there at the moment but I’ll have it completed tonight or tomorrow, and if time allows I’ll even throw up a mug shot of myself on there.

So as you can see, it’s a very simple setup with a really simple interface, but I feel like it represents my photography in a much better light than previously.

If you want to go check it all out you can do so at either www.mathewpackerphotography.com or www.mpimagery.com

Cheers, Matt

.ASIA land grab

Well as of tonight, or tomorrow night if you’re reading this from anywhere in the US, the initial ‘land grab’ for the .asia domain’s will be done and dusted. Or at least the registration process, the billing will follow straight after I’m sure.

Seeing as I look after the domain registrations here at work I was well aware that there would be a major land grab for popular domains. Basically the process was that if you wanted any specific names you had to complete the pre-registration forms a few weeks ago, from there if you wanted the same name as another party then an auction would be held between the interested parties and once those were sorted out the domains would then be assigned on the 26th of March and that would be that. Pretty simple and straight forward.

With my work, and all my projects, I submitted a total list of 18 domain names for registration. At this point in time I’ve received verification emails letting me know that 15 of those names will be registered, the 3 that are outstanding don’t seem to be under challenge so I’m guessing there’s a mail server somewhere playing up.

Most of the domains I registered were either company or product names, there were a couple of fun ones thrown in like www.iwanttovisit.asia and www.iwasbornin.asia. Don’t ask me why I wanted those domain names, I just happened upon them when I was registering all the business ones.

Once we get all the final registration done and paid for I’ll write up a complete list of all the domains that I’ve registered, including all the .com and .com.au domains (I think I own about 60 or so domains in total). I’ll also explain my reasoning behind having all these domains, as it’s a little unusual to have so many.

Anyway, it’s Tuesday morning after a long weekend and I need to try and focus on getting some work done.

Catch you later, Matt

I Twittered This Today - 2008-03-23

• been a quiet long weekend for the most part, hanging out watching movies, etc. pretty well rained non-stop since friday night as well.. #
• eying off a blackberry curve, need to update my current 2.5 year old crackberry #
• oops, i think i’m supposed to be painting the house.. errm, anyone got any good excuses I can use? #
• mostly finished the first coat of paint in the kitchen, just need to do in behind the stove and the fridge.. after that it’s lunch time.. #
• kitchen looks really crisp and white with the new pain job. was about to start 2nd coat but it’s not drying as fast as i thought it would #
• I just ate sooooo many ribs! #

I’m With The Band - header

A week or so ago I mentioned that I was working on the logo / header for the new I’m With The Band website, well it’s finally completed (till I decide to tweak it again) and the only thing left to do now is to actually sort out the colour scheme.

The other thing I managed to finalise is the ability to subscribe to Reverb Street Press via email. Basically we setup a category on the IWTB website where each month we publish a downloadable PDF of that month’s Reverb and just by clicking on the cover you can download it. To make things even easier we published that particular category as an RSS feed and through the help of Feedburner we’ve now added a form on the front page of the IWTB website where all you need to do is enter your email address and voila, you get an email each month as soon as the new Reverb is published with a prompt to download it. It was tempting to setup an ‘auto-send’ email subscription however seeing as Reverb is around about 15mb it would break most people’s mail servers.

For now here’s what I came up with, along with the help of one of Reverb’s designer’s mates, for the header of the website.

I’m also finishing up a disco version, a dance club version, and more of a rock music version so that we can change them around every couple of months or so.

Time to finish up the rest of the colour scheme, I think I might also make the text larger and also customise each category header as well, oh and the Reverb signup form needs to look a bit different to the standard IWTB one so that people understand what they’re doing. Oh and I’ve also gotta lock in the advertising spaces so we can sell them off each month.

So yeh, almost complete!

And for those music fans out there, this month there’s interviews from Pete Townshend (The Who), Ian Brown (The Stone Roses), Coheed and Cambria, and not to mention Gnarls Barkley. Pretty damn tasty considering we’re a locally owned and produced press, and we’re not even based in Sydney!

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