We Have Contact

Over the last few days I have successfully gotten a darkroom working in my bathroom and made a couple of prints on my brother’s outdated photo paper. While there is still a good amount of work to be done to have it fully capable, it still feels so wonderful to be back in a darkroom again! You will be hearing more about it in the future here on the site but for now, just for the fun of it really, I thought I would give away the first darkroom printed image I have made in 10 years or so for free.

Yes, it’s exactly what you see above, a tiny bit of poorly exposed contact sheet to be sure all was in working order. It’s a little bigger than a business card and has a couple spots of water/chemical left on it but I figured it would be cheap and really easy to toss into an envelope and mail to someone who may enjoy having a tiny quasi print around (anywhere in the world!). The images are from the Pacific Coast in California and Yosemite and were taken with my trusty little Olympus XA2. I fully plan to begin selling darkroom prints with time as I settle back into my darkroom life so keep an eye out!

So, if you would like this fine little piece of 50ft memorabilia to tack up on a wall or toss in a drawer somewhere, signed the back as proof simply toss a yes, or please, or thank you or any comment really into the comments below with a valid email address (never ever shared or used for anything else) and next monday the 18th I will randomly pick a name and write the person to get a mailing address. Sound good?

Update: So great to see all of you jumping in for a chance to win the little print! I just wanted to be sure it’s clear that this is the piece you see above, a small test strip of a contact sheet I hear talks of frames and the like down below and its fantastic but I want to be sure no one is disappointed in its humble small nature. Maybe I’m being too modest, who knows.

I would also like to mention that this is just the beginning, in the coming month or so I will be launching the new site design and am planning a nice giveaway and during that time a couple of proper darkroom prints will be among the fun things to share with everyone in the process. I am excited about the future and excited to the the interest this simple memento has conjured up so as always, thanks so much for your kindness and support!

Looking Ahead

Many of you have been asking recently about the often referenced new design coming “soon” here on 50ft. Rest assured that it is in fact still on its way. Due to some delays in the coding and ongoing tweaks to the design I have had to push back its launch a few months but hopefully if all goes according to plan I will be launching sometime in March. It may seem like forever but I fully plan on having the new look be around for a long time to come and I may as well get it as close to perfect as I can manage. In preparation for the changes I have been working on a lot of fresh ideas and fun new projects to introduce on the site. Some of them will take time to be fully realized but I hope to have one that has been a long time coming ready within a week or two of launch and that is a photo book.

I have been publishing here on fiftyfootshadows.net for a little over three years and if you include my previous online projects I have been making and sharing wallpapers online for over 10 years. In the three years with 50ft I have shared over 300 photographs in wallpaper form and I have long considered creating a book to document the journey so far. Upon doing research and preparation to make this long standing goal a reality I came to find that publishing every single image would simply be too expensive to justify and realized a condensed collection of fan and personal favorites would be equally as satisfying.

This is where I need your help.

I don’t want to overlook anyones favorite photos in the process of curating the book and would love to hear feedback on which wallpaper images you have enjoyed the most over the years. This means any photos of my own creation and excludes the reader favorite Flickr Spotlight posts which I plan to bring back this year as things settle in with the new layout.

The book itself will be printed in a limited quantity,  I have yet to decide on exactly how many copies I will be making available but I am leaning toward only printing 50 copies to add to the value of the purchase. It is, after all, a milestone in the progression of the site as well as my work as a photographer in showcasing this side of my photographic journey. I am still exploring printing methods and am deciding between a few ideas. The largest factor in this is of course the end price. I am looking for the best combination of price and quality and I can’t bring myself to just settle on the first printer that I come across. I am all too picky for that and hope the attention to this detail will be appreciated for those of you who end up with a copy.

So everyone, time to voice your opinion, what are your favorite wallpaper images here on fiftyfootshadows.net? Leave a comment here in this post or mail me at fiftyfootshadows[at]gmail.com. I will take any and all suggested images into consideration and will update this post when I finnish the process of collecting images. Thanks so much for the help!

(the image here was a desktop from way back in 2008)

50ft Under Attack (Updated)

It has been brought to my attention that 50ft’s wordpress installation has been compromised and some readers are being forwarded to annoying virus protection sites and equally annoying other sites. If this happens to you at any point browsing the site PLEASE send me an email john(at)twistedsun.net to let me know. I found a bunch of malicious code in my database and cleaned it out but something is apparently still lingering. This is affecting some users sometimes but not all the time. Im not sure if its on any browser or just select ones.

I know very little about such things and I am doing all I can to track down the problem so if you have any suggestions or have any troubles let me know. I am sorry for the mess, it is really really frustrating that hackers would exploit simple wordpress pages for their own gain… Thanks for understanding and bearing with me as I get through the issues at hand.

UPDATE: Things are under control now as far as I know, I have cleared out nearly every file in the site and replaced them as well as cleaning out my database of all hacked code. Took some time to find it all but it seems to be taken care of and more security has been put in place to prevent future incidents.

I am so very sorry to anyone effected by this, the reason for it happening, turns out, was a server venerability where hundreds of wordpress users on my server were effected. I will be keeping a close eye on measures they take to prevent it from happening again. I can’y have my readers at risk because of that!

Thanks for everyones help with the matter, it was greatly appreciated.

One Shot/Note

Quick note as well, while I am writing a post here. I have noticed a huge increase in traffic lately here to the site and its motivated me to pick up my plans to refresh the design of the site as well as introduce a few refinements on how things flow so I can build for a better future here on the site. I have the design mostly done, just needs some tweaking then coding it into place so wish me luck with that. Hopefully I can get things in place over the next couple of weeks for that and launch sometime next month. I just wanted to make note of that upcoming transition because I am pretty excited about it. In the mean time, I have plenty of nice wallpapers lined up for release and I will do my best to keep them coming in the coming weeks as work starts to pick up during the spring rush. I also have a new music post coming which will include a Spring music mix for everyone, something I would like to turn into a monthly or seasonally available thing. At any rate, thanks for stopping by and I hope to see you again soon!

iPad/iPhone Wallpapers & Hi-Res

As some of you may have already read I recently started contemplating upping the resolution of my desktop images here on 50ft and after a number of really helpful comments I have decided to do just that and from here on out desktop wallpapers will be released at a 2560×1600 resolution for all you big screen users out there. For the most part, unless your crazy enough to chose a “stretch image to fit screen” option, the aspect ratio should crop naturally to fit all smaller screens out there as well. Also within this change I figured I should go all out and start making two other resolutions available in each zip download as well which are image files for the iPad and iPod Touch/ iPhone.

When researching resolutions and approach to making these two new versions for each desktop I realized that it can get a bit tricky cropping the vision originally had when composing my photos into these new aspect ratios. With the phone/touch I have to rethink the orientation of the image and make it available in a portrait crop and also be mindful of where the clock and slide to unlock bars sit on the screen so I can do my best not to cover up any important aspect of the image with these black bars.

Then, there was the even more complicated task of trying to decide on how to crop images for the iPad home screen which was especially tricky at first because I realized that as the device rotates the orientation changes so its not as simple as having one simply 1024×768 image. They must be cropped at 1024×1024 in order to be scalable to both horizontal OR vertical dimensions and I have to be aware of how the image will look in both positions and attempt to frame the composition to work both ways and make sure nothing too important gets totally cut off in the rotation. Whew.

So what I have done is create a simple photoshop file where I have one semi transparent layer that represents the two different orientations and the square space in the middle that will appear in either rotated state. I simply crop an image down to where I think it will work the best and then drag this layer from that file over to see how it will frame in either orientation. I have also done the same for the iPhone and its black bars composition blockers.

Of course, the iPad resolution and thought process is all but speculation until I get my hands on one or someone confirms this idea for me. PLEASE write and let me know if I am totally wrong in my assumptions here

I think that these transparency files could easily benefit others out there who wish to make iPad wallpapers and have them function as well as they possibly can in this new morphing wallpaper world so I have put the iPad and iPhone photoshop file transparencies together in a zip for anyone who wants to play around with what I have been talking about here. You can get that zip by clicking here.