Commercial photographer and serial iPhone camera user Chase Jarvis has recently popularized the idea that “the best camera is the one that is with you” in a big way. Armed with a camera small enough that you’re willing to carry it everywhere you become free to capture moments, record mental notes, and other save images that would have otherwise passed you by. Though his weapon of choice is a cell phone camera my weapon has recently been an artifact of a decade ago picked up off of eBay — the Casio WQV-1 wrist watch camera. Though it only takes postage sized [120×120 pixels] black and white images it does so in a way that satisfies my bestcam needs.

I got wrapped with work early yesterday [no 3 day weekends for freelancers] and ran over to South Mountain Reservation to catch the long shadows of a late winter day and the sunset from one of the overlooks in the park. Found a pretty sunset and a nice way to kick off the week.

Digital video and digital photograph formats are so close, and yet so far away.

On many cameras like the Nikon D90 I use, the difference between capturing one or the other is a switch or a button away, and destinations for the content like Flickr do little to distinguish the two formats. However, when you get the memory card back to the computer what you do with them and how you process the captured files is worlds apart. I don’t have a handy solution to process images and video in the same way, but here’s one way to help the management of the files by using a still reference photograph as a hook for the metadata though our workflow from acquisition right through publishing onto web sites.

For a recent project I was given the task of creating a lightbox style help dialog. The dialog was intended to highlight content of an odd or unknown size in addition to the more controlled information box. Essentially a figure in the shape of 2 adjacent rectangles of variable sizes that needed to be highlighted. The backbreaker — the 8 sided popup needed a large, opaque & diffuse drop shadow to make it stand out off the content.

This was the perfect use case for CSS box-shadow, but its also a public facing promotional site that for good reasons couldn’t just thumb its nose atMicrosoft Internet Explorer. The value proposition for any new CSS property – to make things like shadows and gradients easy to develop and manage with one rule replacing old complex solutions – is lost if you still have to code for that old complex solution juggling multiple PNG images and layering in added markup. Still, that work sounded painful to write for IE6, IE7 & IE8 as well as Firefox, Safari and Chrome so I started looking for an alternative in the proprietary MS filters which are supported in Internet Explorer 5.5 and up.

At some point tomorrow I’ll be posting an article covering CSS box-shadow and some tricks to make similar effects in Internet Explorer. This will be the first article in a new weekly series of articles I’ll be writing in 2010 as a participant in Project52.