EightyOne

Today I finished off my first roll in the Holga, which I promptly dropped in to Clock Tower Cameras in Brighton. The prints should be ready on Monday, and I can’t wait to see the results (however they may turn out).

The film I used was Fuji Pro 400H, which is a colour film ideally suited for indoor lighting and overcast conditions outdoors. It’s supposed to be stored under 10 degrees Celsius (e.g. in the fridge), which is something I’m not used to!

I thought I’d try to be patient and wait to see how my first roll turned out before loading the next one, so that I could tinker with the camera to improve the results next time around. However, me being me, I just couldn’t wait and have loaded in a roll of Ilford HP5 plus 400 ISO black and white film. There are plenty of brilliant examples of black and white Holga shots, so I’m hoping I can achieve something interesting too.

Yesterday (Monday 2nd) I received a parcel in the post from Hong Kong. It was the Holga camera I’d ordered via eBay only 3 (working) days prior!

The Holga is a dirt-cheap ‘toy’ camera made in China and designed in the early ‘Eighties (hence its, er, robust looks). The camera seems to have a real cult status among enthusiast photographers, with European distribution handled by the Lomographic Society, but it is also used by many professional photographers for its distinctive qualities.

It’s those distinctive qualities that attracted me to the Holga. A poor-quality plastic lens, vignetting, light leaks and the possibility of multiple-exposures were all things that I found really interesting, especially when compared to standard digital photography. The camera lends itself to experimentation, and being so cheap and easy to replace, virtually encourages modification (with plenty of help in doing so available online).

The camera also uses medium-format 120 film. Once the default consumer film, it was pushed out of favour by 35mm film, but produces large, square negatives ideal for big prints. The Holga can produce twelve 6cm squared exposures, or sixteen 6 x 4.5cm portrait frames from a roll of film. Thankfully, plenty of labs still process 120 film at a reasonable price.

I’m really looking forward to experimenting with both colour and black and white film. I’ll be sure to share the results!

Following in the footsteps of Radiohead’s ‘Pay as you please’ scheme for In Rainbows, two other major artists have released new, free-to-download albums.

Manchester indie veterans The Charlatans have made their new album, You Cross My Path, free to download through radio station XFM’s website. This is prior to a CD release in May, and would appear to be a move to support their UK tour in the same month. Fans are also being offered the chance to buy a Deluxe CD and ticket bundle.

Also free to download is the first part of Nine Inch Nails‘ experimental, instrumental album, Ghosts I – IV. This obviously serves to sell the 36-track work in its entirety, which is available in several formats. These work in a tiered way, which gives an option for people with varying degrees of interest in the work.

• Free, 9-track download of Ghosts I
• $5, 36-track download of Ghosts I – IV
• $10, 2 CD, Digipak with 16-page booklet. This is released in April, but comes with an immediate download à la Radiohead.
• $75, 2 CD, 1 DVD with audio in multi-track format for remixing, 1 Blu-Ray with high-definition audio, in a fabric hardcover slip case
• $300, ‘Ultra-deluxe limited edition package’ (the site doesn’t specifically mention what’s in this)

The Charlatans approach is going to be quite common, with bands releasing free music to encourage people along to their gigs. To the contrary, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor is looking to promote sales of his new album with a ‘try before you buy’ approach.

Also of note is the tiered release strategy. Those with a little interest in Nine Inch Nails or Ghosts I – IV can sample the free downloads. Those who would have already given some consideration to a purchase (or perhaps grabbing it via BitTorrent) will probably feel that $5 for the download is easily worth it. $10 is a bargain price for those who like their music on a physical format, while the $75 and even $300 packages (the latter of which has sold out!) will really appeal to die-hard fans and those with an eye for something special.

These are two artists with different musical styles and different approaches to the changing music market. The both have the same agenda, though — to bypass record labels and get their music out to their loyal fans, and hopefully win over some new ones, too.

If you’re a web developer, there’s only one issue this week that deserved your attention: Browser version targeting.

On Monday, A List Apart published an article — Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 — that described a new, Microsoft-led method, of instructing browsers to use a particular version of its rendering engine to render a web page — in other words, which set of prior bugs or incorrect/missing parts of particular specifications a page needs to appear as originally intended. Version targeting uses a meta-tag in the head of a web page to specify what particular version of a browser the page was written to work with.

Questions about the motive or necessity for version targeting aside, one side-issue that has stirred up a lot of attention is the default behaviour of Internet Explorer 8, which will implement the proposed targeting. If the version targeting meta-tag is absent, IE8 will not use the most recent, standards compliant code to render your page, but will instead fall back to rendering as IE7!

To convince IE8 to render your nice, clean (X)HTML and CSS using its most standards-compliant engine, you need to add this meta-tag to your pages, which, I agree, sounds completely backwards.

The reasoning for this behaviour is that it is Standards-savvy developers that will know to implement the meta-tag, while legacy content that goes unmaintained will still render as originally intended. However, I’m not convinced that the proposed default behaviour will actually solve anything.

Surely, most of the problems that Microsoft are trying to address with this proposal are incorrectly coded sites, created for IE6 and earlier. Falling back to IE7’s rendering would only benefit those who have developed their sites using IE7’s ‘Standards’ mode, or at least updated it to render correctly in IE7.

IE7 was a big leap forward for Web Standards, as it was the first new release of Internet Explorer for around 5 years, and supported parts of the CSS 2.1 specification that had been missing or incorrect in Internet Explorer 6. However, this leap forward came at a cost for developers not adhering to Web Standards, as sites that looked correct in IE6 now looked broken in the more standards-compliant IE7.

If IE7 is the default choice for rendering sites that do not feature the meta-tag, then websites developed for earlier versions of Internet Explorer will still reveal their problems under ‘No meta-tag, IE7 mode’, anyway. Meanwhile, while IE7 does still have its issues, I believe that tightening up the Standards-support is hardly going to have catastrophic effects for any sites that were developed for IE7’s ‘Standards’ mode.

It’s also worth mentioning that sites that rendered in IE7’s ‘Quirks’ mode (that is, using IE5.5’s rendering engine) should be unaffected, as they will still be rendered in ‘Quirks’ mode in IE8.

I haven’t seen this particular point raised anywhere in the various blogs commenting on the proposal, or the associated comments left, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some detail that I have missed that may invalidate my point. However, the more I think about and read up on version targeting, the less I like the idea.

Not only have we finished the new demo, but I’ve also managed to get the new site up and running in time for its launch!

I took a different approach to my previous attempts, and came up with a design first before converting that to a Wordpress theme rather than trying to build a design as a theme. It’s a little minimal at the moment, but the plan is to work in some odd details and do some tweaking as and when I feel inspired to! I’m not exactly a ‘that’ll do’ sort of person, but the most important thing was to get something I was happy with together, and go for perfection after the launch. :)

The design is a fixed-width, single column layout, with a horizontal navigation at the very top of the page and a large banner for the demo underneath. I removed the banner for anything but the home page, although this leaves the other pages looking a bit sparse, which is something I’ll have to work on. Also, I plan on implementing some archives sorted by month and category.

I’m also trying out Google Checkout for selling copies of the CD online (£1 + P&P!). As the service didn’t launch that long ago, Google are waiving the fees (which are still cheaper than PayPal) for the rest of 2007, which is quite nice. It makes it very easy to set up a ‘Buy it now’ button — this simply links through to Google Checkout to handle the rest, which is all we need since we’re only selling a single item. We’re also giving the CDs away to people who come along to our gigs — it’ll be interesting to see what the demand is, both at gigs and through the website.