November 2005 Archives

A stimulating afternoon with my muse ended up with a little Modeling Experiment. Playing with real clay made me realise a few things :

• Physical artistic media are messy but it is precisely because they involve the senses of touch, sight and smell, that they are so much more powerful at stimulating creativty.
• I should to use more physical media.
• I am out-growing the kind of illustrations I have done so far. I need to explore more abstract, organic and textured graphic works.
• Now is the right time to practive modeling in general and learn Zbrush in particular.

Still in the process of updating the gallery with pictures I want to share online.

I created the Games album for shots taken while traveling through some of my favorite games. Not only they can be as intense as movies or books at times, but some of these games are so visually engaging that taking pictures while playing becomes very similar to taking shots during your latest vacation.

I also created an album for some of my favorite pictures of Masks and updated the Statues section with shots of mortuary art.

The migration to Gallery 2.0 is now complete. I spent some time over the last couple of days to find ways to integrate Movable Type and Gallery. In both cases, lack of time to delve into APIs forced me to take some shortcuts.

These examples rely on the use of Cold Fusion as a scripting language. They could probably be adapted to PHP instead, but then again, I don't have much time to learn PHP beyond simple editing of existing code.

Displaying Gallery content from Movable Type

Gallery offers a nice way to embed images from remote pages. By simply looking at the URLs used by the image-block option of Gallery, I came up with the following modules for Movable Type :

    <CFOUTPUT>
        <CFHTTP url="#gallery2url#?g2_view=imageblock.External&g2_blocks=randomImage" resolveurl="no" />
        #CFHTTP.FileContent#
    </CFOUTPUT>

This module displays a random image from the Gallery. Change the value of 'g2block=' by 'viewedImage' to display the most view image. '#gallery2url#' is a cold fusion variable to the URL of the 'main.php' page of your gallery.

   

I finally found some time to migrate the whole gallery to the Gallery 2.0 system.

This has been going smoothly so far. It is a lot easier now to load new images, create albums, and organize images in general.

 I also took this occasion to load photographs, draft 3D images and missing images that have been waiting to go online for a long time.