Title • cool passion

Update: I've just had a quick discussion with Neil Bayliss regarding the sharpening of this image. The version that's up now is less sharp than the one I posted earlier but, I hope, looks a bit more natural. The original version can be seen here.

I took this a couple of weeks ago and initially didn't think about using it here; mostly because I've been posting landscape format shots for the last four months, but also because I couldn't produce a version of it I liked. But, after looking at this shot over at Mike Golding's site, and reading about how it was done here, I decided to try it with this shot. Basically the 'trick' is to extract the red channel using the channel mixer, akin to shooting with a red filter, and I think it's quite effective as used here.

The only other issue I had with this shot was trying to decide what size to use. I could have set the height to be the same as my regular shots (i.e. 525px) but I think that portrait shots of that size are rather too small. So, I went to the opposite extreme and kept the width the same as my other stuff. I know this means that unless you have a 1280x1024 monitor (or above) you'll need to scroll the image, but I think this shot works quite well as two halves (so to speak). I remember looking at this shot at daily dose of imagery and thinking that there were definitely some shots that actually benefit from being scrolled rather than seen all at once. I'm not sure that this one is one of those, but I don't think it causes too many problems to view it this way.

This is another shot of Blackpool's North Pier, and the structure on top of the pier also appeared in this recent shot.

Oh, more mundanely: I finally got around to recoding the archive pages and writing the relevant bits of CSS. The main archive page actually looks quite attractive again now ;-) And if you do have a look round the various archives please let me know if you find anything that doesn't work, or doesn't work as expected. I've done a fair amount of testing, but there's normally some browser incompatibility issue somewhere along the line. One thing I am quite pleased with is the drop-down navigator in the right side-bar. It gives you a list of all the entries, an ordered list of the top 50 commented entries, and also lets you select the monthly and category archives. If you only visit every few days this would be a good page to bookmark.