A friend lent me a wide angle lens for a while, and I'm really loving being able to get so much of the landscape into one photo without needing to make a panorama.

Fairly interesting development from Google - I've noticed that they now spider (and display) thread information from forum results. This is fairly useful if you're searching for something specific and want to find a thread that has been posted recently, or contains a large discussion about a particular subject.

Here's an example of how it looks:

It seems to work with vBulletin and phpBB from a quick few searches, quite cool knowing that Google goes into this sort of depth when returning results!

Was up near Morialta this weekend and happened to catch the sun just hitting the side of a rock face.

PNG alpha transparencies are something that most graphic designers long for on the web. The ability to overlay/fade something over a background, especially when it is dynamic content is amazingly useful. Drop shadows are probably the most requested, and while firefox, safari and IE7 support this behavior, IE6 simply doesn't do alpha transparencies at all (who would have guessed!).

There has been an interesting fix available for quite a while now from TwinHelix, which added support for IE6 using the AlphaImageLoader filter. This works great for a lot of situations, however it didn't support repeating backgrounds, which is something quite commonly requested (for borders and frames).

The same people who released the first fix, now have an alpha version of a small javascript include, which adds support for repeating backgrounds.

While adding these fixes does add a little more filesize, it can sometimes be a necessary evil to serve an extra 5-10kb of files to IE6 - in 2008, that is not a particularly large price to pay.

I know I will be starting to think a bit more about including some alpha transparencies in my designs now I know a viable solution is out there.

Have been looking at buying another lens for my camera for a while now, and came accross a lot of information regarding the Canon 50mm f1.8 II prime lens, which is very cheap (~$130.00) but provides amazingly sharp photos, along with going down to f1.8.

The advantage of being able to stop the lens so low, is that you can shoot in quite low light conditions, although the depth of field also gets a lot narrower at the same time. This makes it great for portrait photos, food photography, or anything where you're trying to really highlight something, but not have the background distracting attention.

When taking photos of people, the "bokeh" behind them is something that this lens really is good at creating.

Can very much recommend this lens, I've uploaded an example photo here (which was taken in very low light) and I shall hopefully have a lot more to come!