David Emery Online

Regular readers will know that I have a – how shall I put it? – tendency to redesign this site at the drop of a hat. So much so that the assorted different versions got featured in a presentation at SXSW last year.

So, with that in mind welcome to version 9 of de-online.co.uk!

It’s actually been over a year since the last version was launched, and although I did tweak that a little as the year progressed that’s the largest amount of time between different version since I launched this little corner of the internet. This version, it has to be said, is not a huge departure from the previous one and carries a few of the themes developed there forward; the large photo headers, the colour red for links and highlights and a similar main typeface choice.

Last time round that typeface was Trade Gothic, with Helvetica used for body text, but that involved using Sifr (flash-based text replacement) which I was never happy with. This time round of embraced the wonders of @fontface and used two freely available fonts in the form of League Gothic for headings, and Steinem for body text, both of which I think look lovely; it’s nice to be able to get away from the standard font choices for once!

Let’s see – what else is new?

I guess the main layout change is the introduction of the sidebar. I’d been thinking for a while that it was probably harder then it should be to see the most recent blog posts and that bringing in photos and twitter updates would be nice as well; that’s pretty much what sidebars are for, right? I’ve also added in a ‘Music’ section – ideally this would be automatically powered by Last.fm but I couldn’t be bothered to actually make that work (a project for another day) so for now it’s a manually updated list of what I’m listening to at the moment.

The whole thing is packed full of CSS3 type goodies, although not as many -webkit-transition’s as I’d like as Webkit these days seems to have all sorts of rendering glitches when using them (dear Webkit team – please fix this!). I’ve also managed to remove a bunch of javascript that used to be used to scale the top header image – now most of that is done using the new background-size property which scales backgrounds to fit.

I’ve no idea what it looks like in any flavour of IE – probably a bit rubbish to be honest, and I’ll fix it at some point I guess.

Anyway; I hope you like it – it probably could be better, but it’ll do for now…

“3 songs, no flash.”

It’s the standard – and also mildly disappointing – phrase you hear more times then not when you pickup your photopass before a gig. I ‘get’ why it’s done – I know if I was a band I’d want fans in front of me rather then photographers, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating. If you don’t know the venue there’s always that hope that maybe they don’t have a strict policy, although chances are that if they don’t have limits then they probably don’t have a photo pit either which brings its own set of challenges (mostly surrounding the fact that you’re pretty much rooted to the spot).

I know, I know – never happy, always complaining.

The lack of flash is normally ok – I’ll use flash if I can, but only to boost up the light that’s there already; pretty much all of my favourite photos I’ve taken are made interesting by the stage lights. That being said, every now and then you come across a gig where the lighting guy decides not to put the front lights on and you’re pretty much screwed (see Julian Casablancas at the Forum where I only had a couple of decent shots from the photo pit, and one of those was illuminated by someone in crowd using flash…).

The 3 song rule though is a bit more challenging. That gives you about 10-15mins to take all of your photos, which really ain’t a huge amount of time. You’re really under pressure, and you’ve got to somehow get decent shots whilst also varying them as well – no one wants 20 identical shots from a gig.

Now, I exclusively use prime lenses for all my photography – a ‘prime’ lens being a fixed lens that doesn’t zoom – which makes it doubly hard when working under the 3 songs rule – do you waste time between songs changing lenses to vary it up a bit, at the risk of getting less useful shots if you’re shooting with a longer (more zoomed in) and potentially missing something while you’re switching, or do you stick with one lens throughout risking having lots of shots that look the same?

Normally I try and swap between lenses but this week I shot Vampire Weekend, who performed at the Garage in Islington, and if you’ve ever heard their music you’ll know that they have a predilection for pretty short songs which makes things a bit tricky – no real time to switch lenses.

All is not lost though – you just have to move your feet a bit. Compare these two photos:

Both of these are shot with the same lens (the Canon 24mm f/1.4) but are obviously at different ‘zoom’ lengths – the first being a 2/3rd body shot with a good amount of background in, and the second being much more head and shoulders based. All you have to do to get between those two ranges is either hang back a bit or push a bit further forward; these aren’t the best examples to be honest as you could push it a bit more if you want to – the second one is as far forward as you can go really, but you can certainly get more zoomed out then the first if you want to; a photo bit is at least a meter deep, and you can normally lean in by about half a meter as well giving you 1.5m of ‘zoom’ that’s easy to forget you’ve got.

You can see more photos from that gig here, and my 2 part ‘How to be a gig photographer’ series here and here.

HTML5 video goodness: no browser plugin, no Flash dependencies

I know a lot of people have linked to this already, but just in case you haven’t seen it yet this is well worth checking out. Obviously HTML5 video is not ready for prime time yet – Ogg is not a video format I’m going to encode in, so hence it only really works in Safari+Chrome – but when it is it’s good to know that not only will video playback be better then it currently is in flash, the user experience (read: slickness) will be as well.

MusicDNA, a new file format that looks a lot like Apple's iTunes LP format, wants to bring liner notes to the 21st century. MusicDNA is a new rich-media extension for digital music files that enriches songs and albums with additional data like lyrics,

I’m not super into the idea of these new ‘rich-media’ music formats – does anyone really want them? – but what I really don’t understand about either this or the rival CMX is where the hell people are supposed to buy these things from?

You’re certainly not going to be able to buy these things from iTunes (as they already have a rich-media format and have implemented it in the form of iTunes LP) and is it worth anybody’s time to make one of these things if you can’t sell them on the biggest music store?

Music discovery site thesixtyone unveiled a radical—and gorgeous—redesign a couple days ago. The redesign presents a single, lush full-screen photograph as each song plays, while smaller snapshots fade in and out screensaver-style. The controls are

Thesixtyone redesign certainly looks nice – obviously I’m a big fan of the full window photo thing (in fact my 2009 Top 20 was going to look just like that but I ran out of time). However, I agree with the ‘revolting’ users – it’s practically impossible to use now, and it feels like lots of functionality has been lost (I don’t know if it has or not, but it’s impossible to find things that used to be there).

Pretty and experimental is all well and good, but it needs to be useable too – see the way Hype Machine does it; the main site is super useable, but then they go and do cool, different things for their 2009 Zeitgeist alongside it.

Design and usability can be done at the same time – it’s not one or the other.