photography
equipment
I use a basic Canon EOS Rebel 35mm SLR with 35–80mm lens kit, and either a 1A or Tiffen Circular Polarizer filter. Almost everything I shoot is on plain old Kodak 100 and 400 negative and scanned with a Canon FS4000 slide/negative scanner. At this point I can’t afford a full-frame 35mm digital camera, and until I can I’ll probably keep on shooting film. I occasionally use a Sigma SD-10 digital SLR with Foveon X3 sensor that I bought for work.
Photo editing is done with Picture Window Pro, although I use Photoshop 5 for final resizing, sharpening and JPEG compression because I’m more comfortable with its controls.
graphic design
HTML, CSS, Javascript and LATEX 2ε
Considerable experience in hand-set lead typography and my Zen æsthetic bias me towards simple, elegant graphic design. I am particularly fond of structural markup of content separate from the design and layout considerations. Even when multiple browser appearance is not critical, that is not always possible with HTML/CSS. Fortunately CSS is a significant improvement over HTML with a mix of structural and stylistic markup, and the concerns of legible, pleasing typography are rapidly being addressed in various ways:
This site is done entirely with HTML and CSS 2.1, and I have tried to use only structural markup. As a result of myriad bugs, Internet Explorer doesn’t do a very good job of rendering it. Firefox is much more compliant.
LATEX 2ε is another very useful tool that is occasionally quite frustrating, especially when creating complex tables with multi-row and multi-column spans. On the other hand the default formatting is highly legible, and insanely complex equations are relatively easy to typeset.
FrameMaker and QuarkXPress are good solutions for large documents like books. Microsoft Word can be used to good effect when styles and custom document properties are used with care to specify both structure and appearance, but this is rarely done. The result is a rat’s nest of localized formatting.
Logos
I enjoy logo design, although I have not done a lot of it. I also created the “styrofoam cup o’ Java” for Slashdot.org. Good logo design can be done most easily in FreeHand or Visio, but is possible even with Word or PowerPoint if you have an almost stoic patience.
Synposium SP Logo
