SpikeL

I cry.

There's two things that always gets me. The first is the movie Armageddon, there's a scene towards the end where Bruce Willis sabotages Ben Affleck's oxygen line and pushes him back into the elevator and says something like, "I always thought of you as a son and I'd be proud of you to marry my little girl. It's now your turn to take care of her." Call me emo but that scene gets me every time. Perhaps if I watch that scene over and over again like 50 times I'll become numb to it. I think Michael Bay should've stopped making movies after Armageddon because I think transformers is trash :)

The second thing that's always a tear jerker are the groom's mother at weddings. Perhaps it's because I myself am a dude and have a pretty good relationship with mi madre and imagine myself one day being in those shoes. But after a couple is married and they step down from the altar to greet their parents. When the groom goes over to hug their mother, the mother always seems to cry and I have to (metaphorically) punch myself in the stomach to hold back my own tears. It's worse when both the groom and mother are crying.

The bond between a mother and a son is just one of those indescribable things.

One of my own theories as to why this phenomenon takes place is Mom cries because her ability to be at her son's side for any situation is now replaced by another woman. Her thoughts towards the bride, "You break my son's heart and I'll kill you!"

Or perhaps in a moment as a mother embraces her son, she has a flashback of all the memories of when her son was but a boy. Getting into all the things boys get into as a child. (Mother's always seems to say, "You may be a man but you're always my baby boy.")

Whatever the reason it's obvious the bond between a mother and a son is deep. I'm not sure what may be going through the minds of grooms and their mothers on a wedding day but I'm sure when it's my turn to be a groom I'll understand fully what they experience.

But until then...if you happen to see me photographing a wedding and the groom is about to embrace his mother. Feel free to punch me in the stomach so I won't have tears in my eyes while taking their photo.

SpikeL

a major accomplishment for tulyfoto, well in my eyes at least...tulyfoto.com has been a horizontal scrolling website since its official relaunch. when i was developing it, i had a talk with mark jardine of tapbots and he mentioned how horizontal scrolling websites aren't used much because it isn't user friendly. since then i knew i had to implement a way to make it easier to navigate through the pictures.

i used a jquery script that chris coyier from css-tricks recommended but the thing is it wouldn't work in firefox for me but it did work in the example chris coyier had. the following was true as well, the example chris had didn't work for safari and chrome but it worked for me. based on our site's analytic this was a problem because about half of the visitors to our site were on firefox. this wasn't much of a problem for mobile safari on the iphone since it works so well with the iphone's touch controls but on a laptop or desktop it was.

one day i came across the site, the horizontal way. a nice website that showcases horizontal scrolling sites. they even had a template with a custom javascript that seemed to bind the window scroll to the mouse wheel successfully in IE and firefox. not to mention a few other capabilities which were nice. so i decided to rework the tulyfoto website to take advantage of this.

i'm in the process of picking up some php and mysql so i decided to let tulyfoto be my official guinea pig in delving into the language. i must say the way the code can be organized is quite pleasing and being able to use the good ol' switch statement to execute certain javascript codes that handles the menu on the website was nice.

the code is a lot cleaner in the back end and it should be easier to roll out new features in the future. i'm hoping to create a custom cms so my not-so-techie partner can also maintain the website.

one of the bumps i ran into while making the changes was that the horizontal way's script didn't work for safari and chrome. so i thought i'd just try the script the script chris coyier had recommended and voila! across all browsers now we have horizontal scrolling via mouse wheel. i'm not sure why the individual scripts wouldn't work for certain browsers but together they seem to work interestingly well.

i also got rid of the lazy-load script. it was a script that would determine the visitor's current view and load elements based on that. so that the website wouldn't load all at once and "speed" up the loading process. while it was a cool script it would make the scroll bar shrink extremely fast which caused an unwanted viewing experience.

all i have left now is retheming our wordpress install so that it takes advantage of this. i think i need to also work out some kinks in the layout for the blog. it's not the most efficient but for now i'm happy with how far the site has come.

feel free to mozy on by to tulyfoto.com and test out the scrolling. let me know if it works or doesn't work for your browser. to my knowledge it should work for firefox, safari, chrome and IE7 and up. the only major browser i haven't tested it on was opera.

SpikeL

Spring is definitely here. With temperatures up in the 70s. Although it's nice to walk around in short sleeves and sandals. I must say I miss the cool evenings of San Francisco springs/summers. I remember when I worked for my uncle's in-laws at their CNC fabrication company I'd drive home in the evenings and just stare in awe as the clouds roll over the hills that surrounds the bay. A very majestic site.

Although the warm weather is welcomed...the hot steamy nights are not. Can't wait until summer rolls around and the hot weather comes full force with melting heat and pesky bugs -_-

I hear the summers in Germany are pretty nice. Can't wait till June.

SpikeL

being a wedding photographer is both a honor and nerve wrecking. on the one hand it gives me so much joy to be capturing a couple's fleeting, special moments but on the other hand it's a lot of planning, preparing, observing and a little bit of predicting when something is about to take place. once a moment passes it's something you'll never be able to recapture.

this past weekend i shot a wedding my dad was supposed to shoot for a family friend. he had never shot a wedding before so he asked me to take his place. i hesitated at first but decided it'd be a good opportunity to stay loose and prepare for the upcoming wedding season.

the thing about this wedding is the couple had already been married and so they were throwing the ceremony for their parent's friends. because of this it felt like the couple was just doing the motions and fulfilling their parent's wishes. when you look at a wedding photos, the ones that really stands out are the ones where a moment is captured. when a groom gazes at his bride walking down the aisle, when a father has their first dance with his married daughter, the expressions a bride has as her new husband gazes into her eyes and speaks a vow to eternally devote his life to making her happy.

these are the moments that as a wedding photographer you look for and capture. but i barely found any yesterday. nevertheless i did my best to capture as much as i could. but if the bride and groom are not into it, it shows. a wedding is a sacred union, a moment of joy and celebration as two are united to become one and journey life together. i hope i captured some moments and hope they expressed more sincere emotions during their first wedding ceremony.

SpikeL

I'm back for entry number two. It's been so long since I've been on tabulas (that is...since before my last post). And I must say it's matured quite a bit. I don't even know how I ended up here on tabulas but it's quite refreshing to be back. It's quite awesome to see friends I've befriended way before the days of twitter and facebook are still chronicling their lives here.

Roy if you're reading this (and I know you are since I'm going to leave you a comment on your tabulas right after I finish this entry), great job sir. Tabulas has come a long way.

The reason why I'm even writting at 2AM in the morning is because I stopped by roy's tabulas and started reading about his life. It's been a great read. Seeing his thoughts, his current challenges and of course his photos. I came to his entry about personal journaling as being dead and something resonated with me.

For me I think it's because of the hypes of blogs. Back before blogs existed I used to spend hours hacking away in photoshop, then spending countless more hours in Dreamweaver, just to create a personal space where I can share my thoughts and my happenings to my friends. But blogging and other social mediums have sort of taken that away. I've tried numerous times to start a blog and keep up with it but for some reason I just never saw motivation to keep up with it.

Perhaps it's because I feel the need to go out and make connections with others when instead there are places like tabulas where a community of people exist and can share their lives. To optimize my site so that I can rank well on google so that I can get hits on it. To rehash the things I have to say because is it relevant to an audience across many spectrums in life. To make things pretty because a blog isn't just a blog anymore it's a journal, it's a photo album, it's a portfolio, it's a resume....it's a lot of things. To tell you the truth most of the time I simply feel I don't have anything interesting to blog about.

I sit here looking at the tabulas logo in the top left corner and I just have to nod and agree with the slogan. Chronicle your life. Not just in 140-character updates but with some meat and thought. I don't want to know where you are 24/7 but, I want to know how you're doing, what you're going through and how life is treating you.

One of the great things I love about photography is it's a great way to document life. I love going to my parents house and whipping out my old baby albums and just flipping through the pages and watching life just unfold before me. But when I get to the end I get sad because it abruptly stops and I know there's so much that has gone on. I wish I had a little reminance of it to hold onto. Hahaha I guess it's a bit hypocritical of me to be saying this because I've deleted all my previous entries and just downloaded everything as a backup on my harddrive. But I look at the abrupt stop of entries I had with the most recent being in 2007 and I wonder what sort of things I could've talked about and simply shared. Would I have gone back today and nodded at the progression of my life or would I see a need to stop and take time to rethink the trajectory of my life?

It's funny because a lot of my old entries I remember ended like this. Well I've said a lot so I'm going to end it here now. It's true I have and I'm tired but as I close this entry out I leave with a sense of joy. It felt good to just write and chronicle this moment. I started off this year feeling it's going to be an awesome year and I want to chronicle it. No..not just chronicle it. I want to tabulas it.

Goodnight.