After a month of many long hours over numerous days and nights of designing, coding and getting over excited with the results, Frozen Designs version 7 is now live. Beyond the already blogged path of designing from content upwards, I have learned alot and it has helped push my skill sets. I have used alot of Javascript and I give thanks to those wonderful folk out there who provide the scripts to plugin and amend.

I think my biggest gain has been going through alot of my old photos and giving them a polish and shine using HDR (high dynamic range) logic. What is HDR I hear you ask? Well when you take a photo it can only capture a certain range of light (and in turn colour and detail). So often to get a good balance of the main subject matter you lose detail in the darker and lighter areas. So true HDR, is to take 3 or more photos capturing the correct exposure for the dark areas, the medium areas and the light areas. Then using some software such as Photomatrix you combine the images to give you a final image that shows the detail across it and with it some fantastic results. You can read more about HDR here, I will admit that alot of my images are only using one image and some digitial magic in Adobe Lightroom, but this was due to the fact I did not take the photos with HDR in mind and so did not have the range of exposures required. Even so it is amazing what you visual information a RAW image contains and the results have been amazing compared to the now quite dull originals, please go see yourself. HDR is something I will have in mind with future photo shoots and I will set up the bracket exposure on camera.

The design page I am very proud of, I still feel it needs some tweaking visually, but then in the words of Leonardo da Vinci ‘Art is never finished, only abandoned’ and a deadline for launch is proof of that. It was a chance to play with unique navigation ideas to view the imagery, again it allowed me extend my coding knowledge through image maps and CSS which is great way to create some fun interaction and still have accessibility in the framework. From here I want to work on design skills and improve what I can create visually using Illustrator and photoshop, maybe one day be featured in those design feeds I keep tweeting or passing on via my google reader shared items.

Anyway, if you are reading this I hope you are at my website already, if you are viewing this through a rss feed, then go have a dig around.

So with the website project relaunch at an end, what is next I ask myself. Well I have a new website to build for a client, need to get my creative writing back on track with posts to Imagine Tales along with a novella. Alongside these as mentioned, more photography and desiging of which the result will be posted up at my website and written about here. And I really do need to get out on my mountain bike.

Till next time.