Destinations, The Official Panedia Weblog

I’m Ricky,

the first non-Aaron photo-taking-guy. I also don’t have a title yet. Photographer is OK, it fits the bill, but it seems too mundane for something as outrageously cool as Panedia.

As Aaron said, my background is in commercial photography, and I come to Panedia from RMIT University, where I was a student and more recently the photography department technician. Now THAT was an inadequate job title, I tells ya. Basically I fixed stuff what needed fixin’, and that meant I picked up a few basic engineering and electronics skills along the way, which I will be bringing to Panedia in the form of some cool gadgetry to help future photographers do their job faster and more accurately, as well as my hopefully self-evident photographic talents!

At the moment I’m working on our vast backlog of images from the recent Fraser Island junket/meet-and-greet/Panedia team-building exercise ’08, polishing them up ready to be put through the Panedia production line.

One of the issues Aaron and I have encountered along the way thus far now that photography is coming in from different streams, is how do you keep things consistent in terms of the overall ‘look’ of the images. As photographers, we all have our own ideas about what constitutes a nice-looking image. It’s open to interpretation at the best of times, but with something like Panedia it is vitally important that the look and feel of the imagery is relatively consistent.

Over the coming months we will be developing a ‘look book’ that contains presets for the basic conditions we will be shooting in, which should lead to being able to shoot in a multitude of different lighting scenarios, and being able to produce a panorama that will not look out-of-place alongside panoramas that have perhaps been shot months ago by a different photographer in different conditions.

So keep an eye out for a bunch of my photography coming online shortly, and I’ll be blogging here about anything that takes my fancy, photography, gadgetry or travel-related.

In the meantime I leave you with a lovely shot of the TSS Maheno wreck on 75 Mile Beach, Fraser Island, QLD. Click through for the pano.

-Rick

flickr stream

what I’m listening to

Rodrick…or Rick as we call him around here, started shooting for us full time a couple of weeks ago. In that time he’s already added hundreds of panos to Panedia. From Fraser Island to The Melbourne Motor Show and the Melbourne Grand Prix, he’s been very busy.

Rick is a talented still and pano photographer whose work can view viewed on his personal site www.rodrickbond.com. He ‘s a graduate of RMIT (Royal Melboure Institute of Technology) with a bachelor of photography. He also builds some very cool stuff, so he’ll be working on R&D for our photographic processes and helping set up systems to make life easier for future photographers.

Contrary to the photo seen here of Rick on Fraser Island, he’s not a crazy homeless man, although Rick might say otherwise. And finally Rick will be blogging here as well, about things that strike his fancy.

Aaron gave me a quick introduction yesterday but I want to expand on that a bit.

I’m the guy that does… lots of things. That’s why we’re having trouble giving me a title I can put on my business cards. I’m a web designer, web developer, programmer, wordpress lover and wrangler, database designer, UI designer, tester, blogger, server admin and bug hunter, it’s hard to put a banner over all of that. For an example of what I’ve worked on so far there’s Panedia’s Wallpaper website which I created from start to finish. There’s this blog too.

As for blogging, I want to primarily write about the things I enjoy reading about at other “business” blogs — my philosophy for writing in general — write for my own taste. When it comes to business blogs, anything behind a product or service, I don’t want to be sold the product, I already like the product, that’s why I’m looking to read more about it at the blog. What I do want to read about is the process, how that product exists and what decisions were made to get there, I want to know about the things you don’t see looking in from the outside.

One of my favourite applications on the Mac, Things has a great example of a product blog. They go into great detail about the motivation and process of new features. One post that particularly stands out was on the creation of the recurring task UI. It includes screenshots of the many layouts they tried before settling on the ideal solution. It’s really interesting stuff that without a blog, you just don’t see.

Aaron and I are constantly going through this process when making decisions and planning new features for the products we work on. The process of making these decisions is extremely interesting to me and so, I’m sure, would be just as interesting to outsiders.

Elsewhere I write, link to and comment on things that interest me at Valhalla Island and I’m a huge Twitter user.