It’s been almost a year since my friend Kyle and I have taken off to the high desert of Southern California to get away from civilization and explore for a few days. This year we’ll have another person joining us, and maybe my brother will come if we’re lucky. Two weeks from now we’ll saddle up and escape from Orange County and up the 15 past Barstow and Baker up to Beatty eventually.

The deserts of the Southwest are a fascinating place, both for their raw beauty and varied climates. Winters can easily get below freezing and Ive spent a night freezing in single digits and snow in Joshua Tree National Park. Ive also melted in 115 degrees in Death Valley in the summers.

There is a sense of history in these places, like the Mojave Preserve, where abandoned mines and homesteads slowly waste away. Its a memoir of westward expansion, dreams fullfilled or otherwise, and of the ability for people to survive adverse conditions to make life better for themselves.

Its an eerie site to see these desolate places, abandoned and in the background of immense open space bounded by hues of magenta, red, purple, and blue when the day breaks and the night falls. Sometimes you are hard pressed to see other folks out in remote wilderness, and thats they way I like it, at least for a few days.

This year sees a homecoming to Death Valley National Park and surrounding region, a place I have not traversed since I was 17. Also on the itinerary is the Southern Nevada desert and the likes of Beatty and Pahrump. Maybe I’ll run into Art Bell. Pass on the alien abductions, please.

For some cool photos check out Ken Rockwell’s past trips there.

The reason for going here is to see some ghost towns like Ryholite, which still has plenty of buildings and parts of a bank. We’ll be hunting Desert Pupfish who dwell in cracks and crevasses under obscenely difficult conditions and manage to survive. I suspect meeting some high desert residents and hearing their life story to round out the experience is in order.

Sounds cool, lets go.

The final elements of the final project are coming together. Last week saw the last actual photography at Midway Truck Stop and this week was mostly editing material for the flash component and getting the flash parts completed and caught up. Currently the flash package is finished and just needs to be integrated into the code for the web page. The website is being finished up with some functionality being added. The final project will have its own sub heading on my website. The coding functionality that needs to be added pertains mainly to making the CSS class elements smoother and easier to work with.
The overall layout is very simple and similar to this Photocrati WordPress theme, except that there are more grays. The image slideshows for the portfolio gallery will be HTML based, much like the assignment for class. This is for straightforwardness of coding, and ease of use for those on older or slower machines, and to keep the site size small overall. I just want to present the work in the most straightforward manner possible without looking like it is 1999. The screen shot below shows the menu for two chapters in one flash component, which are an audio slideshow and captioned gallery. There will be another stand alone flash element that has a short video made on Midway Truck Stop as well.

http://www.poweringanation.org/coal/

Overall Coal, a Love Story, is a very well executed multimedia project. It was the gold winner of the 2012 COPY Gold award in large multimedia and it shows. The site uses HD quality embedded Vimeo clips and a clean layout for navigation. There does not appear to be flash, except in maybe some of the site layout. It is probably CSS based. Overall the color scheme is pleasing to the eye with black, gray, and white as the main colors for the background and text. There are also yellow accents for some subtitles that fit in nicely with the theme.

It is clear that the creators spent a lot of time making the project. The depth of the interviews, material, and cinematography are very high quality and show that some serious planning and storyboarding went on before hand. The combination of talking head interviews is paired nicely with landscapes and B roll. There was probably some serious funding behind the project too.

The overall interface is clean and easy to follow. Most of the videos are easy to access and load reasonably fast with a good Internet connection. The point of the project is clear on the top of most pages with the electric plug and art. There was also a geographic focus on the Virginia Coal country and a wide array of subjects, from a coal miner to his daughter as Miss Coal in a beauty pageant. Overall the project is successful because it combines a good presentation technically and aesthetically with strong journalism and excellent video.

For EPJ:

src="player.swf"
width="300"
height="300"
allowscriptaccess="always"
allowfullscreen="true"
id="player1"
name="player1"
flashvars="file=http://www.stuartpalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/FLASH.swf"

FLASH

Click on the link below to play the audio file!, or use the controls below to play it directly on this page!:
Interview at Rockbridge High with Ben Amiot

On Friday October 21st the Rockbridge High School Bruins celebrated their annual homecoming football game. Feeding hungry fans was Ben Amiot, whose daughter is a Senior. Amiot has been a volunteer grill-master for the snack stand at football games for the last four seasons. He will hand over the reigns at the end of this season.

ben amiot interview

With Apple’s “Lets Talk iPhone” event scheduled for 10 AM on the West Coast, the iPhone 5 launch is inevitable. It will be interesting to see how Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook handles the launch and how AAPL’s share prices respond in the minutes and days following the announcement.

A lot is riding on Cook’s presentation, his first official product announcement since Steve Jobs left the top spot over the summer. If the iPhone 5 or 4s knocks it out of the park, Cook has a product that sells itself. I predict that there will be a lot of analysis in the business press about Cook’s presentation and how it differs from Job’s historical performances. In the tech news, there is going to be an initial strong response, either an uproar in support or lambaste, probably the first.

Personally, my reason to purchase a new iPhone is if it has a better camera. The iPhone 4 has become my everyday point and shoot, and its very close to completely replacing compact digital cameras in my book.

EPJ Website Review:

www.karlgrobl.com

Karl Grobl is a humanitarian photojournalist who does most of his work in South America and Southeast Asia. His primary focus and portfolio is work for NGOs and aid organizations. He also leads or instructs travel photography workshops. His website was recently updated after being a basic html page for at least the last four years.

The new site is effective and uses minimal flash while keeping a clean, simple feel. There is a black background and white text, with white and yellow-ish accents. There is a clear delineation on the top navigation bar of a main portfolio, clips, published work, specific countries, etc. There is also a section for special projects and even reviews of equipment he uses and how he travels. Overall it is a well executed and informative site. I had a good deal of criticism for the site, but when checking it out for the purposes of this review, found that it was completely redone! I usually visit the site every month or so.

I like that there is a cool logo that is unobtrusive. The first thing you see are the portfolio images, then the navigation bar and more information below. Karl knows that the images are what his website is about, and everything else is secondary. The gallery is effective because it does not auto-play, and has easy to use navigation arrows for seeing the pictures. The photos seem to display at around 1000px each in width, so they look great on a 15 laptop and aren’t too big for smaller screens. This is a photo website, after all. A reader really gets a good feel of the work Karl does and I am pleasantly surprised at how much better and improved his new website is.

EPJ Multimedia Project Revision