I have been lucky enough to attend an Art Wolfe Workshop where we spend two days shooting and then a morning editing what we shot. The stuff Art thinks about when he is shooting will start making you think outside the box and get your creative juices flowing.
Pebbles and Burnt firewood merge to make this contrasting photo of form and texture on Rialto Beach, Olympic National Park.
Sadly not everyone can attend an Art Wolfe Workshop as they start at 2000 dollars, not including travel or accommodation for most of the trips.
But now, for the first time in his career Art is offering portfolio reviews starting at $99. For anyone looking to improve their photography or a Christmas Present for a certain someone I highly suggest this fantastic gift¹.
¹ Full Disclosure: I am related to Art, and he helped direct me in my photographic career. I also now work for Art Wolfe Inc as their website designer/manager. But I would recommend this regardless of my connection with Art Wolfe Inc.
When New Year’s comes along we all make a few New Year’s resolutions that are unachievable or broken instantly but this year I made my goals more work orientated that would help me achieve more productivity and make it easier to collaborate with others. ( I actually start writing this post in February. )
One of these goals were met by finding a project management software that actually works for me instead of me working for it. I found that with Asana, It’s is as much of a project management software that I need and when I asked others to start using it there wasn’t a whole lot of backlash and they all started using it. It has cut down on the mass emails with multiple changes.
The other major goal was use of a revision system for larger project. I found that easily accomplished with GitHub.
I found listing the combination of GitHub and Asana extremely useful and productive.
Other achievements were less business-oriented but more community orientated like submitting my first bug report in both WordPress and Firefox. Both of them are confirmed as a bug. It allow me to help other users and other developers showing what I am seeing and moving the project forward it feels good to help out.
Meeting Matt Mullenweg at Buddy Camp 2012 in Vancouver!
While I did join the UI group I found it hard to keep up with the emails and weekly meeting and such when I had project deadlines looming of my work. But also the WordPress UI group merged and for good reason with the WordPress core dev group.
New Theme
Around the same time I was looking for a new theme for robertdall.com, as my previous theme Orange Coffee had been showing it age for quite some time. The new default theme Twenty Thirteen designed by Joen Asmussen under the direction of Matt had just been themed and was in alpha stages of development. I took an active participation in the testing phase.
This lead me to learning the complete development process for default themes.
While it’s a short list… It was a journey of sixth months taking me from barely understanding how to submit a trac ticket to actually having css committed into Twenty Thirteen.
While I like Twenty Thirteen there was a couple things I really wanted to change as well. I needed something darker and to keep the post titles above the content. Ever since wp 3.4 (June 2012) child theme were accepted into WordPress theme directory I decided to submit my very first theme to the theme review team.
So if you reading this blog post your actually seeing my first child theme that was accepted into the WordPress theme directory called R2D2.
For a guy who never makes New Year Resolutions I certainly didn’t break this one… In fact I contributed more the WordPress community then I though I was ever capable of…
What’s next?
Funny you ask that… development for the new theme Twenty Fourteen just got started and yup I plan to be involved with this one too… All this open source contributing too… It’s addictive as you get some much back in return.
A couple months back some photographer friends of mine on Facebook linked to a video called Silver & Light by Ian Ruhter. The video is masterfully crafted and leads you through a story of a photographer who lost his way and then found it again. I will let the video do most of the talking because it is truly one of the more inspiration videos I have seen in some time. (And I say that rarely). Here is the video… I’d would suggest you click full screen… Trust me it will be worth it.
“You being a photographer should go to the next one… Ian Ruhter is speaking” replied Mark
My Jaw dropped…And I was lucky enough to win tickets in the lottery system that is set up for Creative Mornings and arrived early…
Ian Ruhter speaking at Creative Morning Vancouver
It was really great getting to see another photographer speak… I use to go to photography conventions all the time back my photojournalism days. I felt such a kinship with him after hearing him talk and yet he left his normal photography for Wet Plate… I had moved from my normal photography to Web Design… But we both wanted to tell stories… Visual stories because writing was so hard to do when we both young…
I introduced myself briefly to Ian… a shake of a hand and a thank your story is really inspiring… I was able to ask a question during the Q&A thanks to Mark running around with the mike. Which you should be able to hear in the video. I hope to see some plates from his time in Vancouver.
