This is one of my favourite photo’s of Charlie, one of my twin boys. I took it whilst on holiday in Croatia, and he’s on the beech showing me the ‘treasure’ he found. (Click the image for a larger version) Basically the bits of smoothed glass that were all over the pebbled beeches. My boys loved finding ‘treasure’ on the beeches.

The image was shot with a Canon 550D with a fixed 50mm lens and small aperture.

Here’s a couple of higher resolution stills of the 3d scenes.

Here’s the menu designs I produced for the various restaurants in the hotel. The idea was to create something with a high end feel, that was obviously part of a suite of menus, and had the flexibility to easily update the inner content as and when the menus changed.

The sales pack had to be something special, but still achievable within sensible budgets. I designed a heavy card enclosure, with a recess for the required brochure, an insert system for floorplans and spec information, as well as provision for the USB stick. Each brochure was personalised, and was sealed with a Zaya branded ribbon.

External 3d render of the brochure pack showing the line work design details as well as the Zaya ribbon.

When someone is buying into such a luxury lifestyle, they want something unique – the Nurai fragrance, exclusive to home owners on Nurai.

The USB stick is designed around the from of a pebble. It’s tactile and in keeping with the spirit of the island.

The site for the Predator X11 was created using wordpress to enable the client to content manage the site. The Team Xtreme guys can add new news stories and race reports easily to the site without getting involved in any coding. The styling is applied automatically to the new pages and everything is kept nicely organised and up to date. In addition team drivers can add to their own ‘blog’ and post specific info and setups for their Predator X11 cars.

A few of the ‘action’ pictures were kindly supplied by oOple and the legendary Jummy Storey. The other pictures of the car, taken for the spec pages were photographed using a light dome tent and photographic lights in my garage !

Hopefully the site will help promote Team Xtreme and their Predator X11 car both in the Uk and abroad.

Here’s a little info from the site.

How do we approach web design?
We’ve created a course that specifically addresses the need to ‘design’ — as well as build — websites. The web design industry values graduates who can use the software — and be creative with it too. The course combines creative modules in Design Methodology, Image Manipulation and Typography with technical modules in XHTML, CSS and other relevant mark-up/scripting languages. Work related learning also features extensively.

The creative and technical skills you learn are also repurposed for a print design module, further increasing your employability.

We work closely with professionals to ensure there’s a high degree of industrial relevance to the course, so that you’re ready to make an immediate impact in the web design/graphic design industries.

Who’s the course suitable for?
We recruit students from many different backgrounds: those who are studying — or have studied — on creative courses [for example Graphics or Art and Design]; or those from more technically oriented courses such as ICT or Computing. We welcome industry professionals wishing to gain a formal qualification, or adults wanting to re-skill so they can take up a new career.

After shooting all my pictures on my trusty Canon 400D, I finally decided to upgrade to the all new Canon 550D. The draw of shooting full HD video on an SLR was simply too much ! The £700 price tag was difficult to swallow, but a quick search on ebay showed that the 400D would fetch around £300, so the upgrade was on.

I bought the camera from amazon, which was great as I took out their credit card when I purchased the camera, which gave me £15 discount. There was also a promotion that Canon were running for £50 cash back, so I was looking good to get a great deal. When the camera arrived, it promptly died and refused to switch on. Not good. I went through the very simple amazon returns policy, and a new camera was dispatched straight away. A very good customer experience considering that it was all done on-line.

With my new (working camera) I began to get to grips with all the new features. The most enticing of which is the Full HD video capability of the camera. The quality of video is terrific and the camera will shoot at 720 at 50fps or at 1080 at 25fps. The image quality with the canon lenses is very good and it’s easy to achieve a nice depth of field effect to give your footage a very cinematic feel.

Still shots are a whopping 18 million pixels, enough for anyone really ! The shots do look really nice, although i’ve not pushed things on the stills front yet and need to play around with the Raw settings and such like. The other ting of note is that the kit lens is now an image stabilised version, so shooting in low light should be much easier. Battery life looks good, and overall i’m very happy with the camera in these early days.