Rarely does anyone visit our office at the back of the Stout Library without saying “Wow, what an amazing view”.  And rightfully so.  It’s an amazingly beautiful look out into the south side of the Oldfields gardens.  With out a doubt a wonderful source of inspiration and natural beauty.

So back in March as the snow began to recede I would regularly peer out into the drab naked trees with great anticipation of watching them green up and return  to the former glory of last summer.  As luck would have it someone shared this link with me around the same time.  It’s the Timelapse group on vimeo and there are some breathtaking videos created via time lapse photography

Here is one example that blew my mind.

This all got me thinking.  What if I stuck a camera facing out of our window for a month and took a photo every half hour?   Well, sounded like there was only one way to find out.   So here is 1 month of spring as taken every half hour, condensed into 23 seconds.

Watch as the gardens go green.

Filed under: New Media, Technology

Spring at the IMA has always provided one of the most spectacular opportunities for photographers to capture the natural beauty of our grounds and gardens, a respite for leisure, family activities, and the chance to supplement your portfolio to attract would be business prospects in a sagging economy.

The welcome mat is always out for all to participate in this annual rite of spring and fall, but if you have ever been a guest at a private wedding in the gardens, attended an event in the Nourish Café or Deer Zink Pavilion during peak shutterbug activity, you may not appreciate the migratory habits of local photographers during your special occasion.

Although the plumage and ritualistic mannerisms are interesting to witness, these moments cannot adequately compare to the swallows of San Juan Capistrano, or the great migrations of wildebeest and zebras of the Serengeti Plains.

A component of our mission is to serve the creative interests of our communities by fostering exploration of art, design and the natural environment, and that certainly implies photography, so the question remains: How do we welcome photographers, both amateur and professional to our horticultural oasis, and still maintain the decorum necessary for all to flourish without resorting to complete banishment of photographic exploration? Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Art, Art and Nature Park, Local, New Media

Auto-rotate proved more confusing than anything else

Yes, the image above is supposed to be confusing. It’s one of the lessons learned from collecting feedback and tracking events on the TAP iPod tour for Sacred Spain. Patrons didn’t quite realize that as they interacted with the tour, we were secretly shooting off messages to a server.  We tracked everything from incorrect codes to device rotations.  All in all we collected over a quarter million events.  Almost half of those events were rotations of the application layout.  We heard back from people that they were “catching up with the rotations”.  Based on this we have decided to flat remove any rotation from the next tour. Everything will be in portrait mode with the exception of video playback.

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Filed under: Technology

I’ve written similar posts in the past. It’s usually when I realize I’m supposed to blog at the last minute, so I scramble for some inspiration and typically end up recapping some of our current projects. Fortunately, The Nugget Factory projects are usually pretty cool.

You may have heard, that we softly launched the new IMA website on Tuesday? Well, we were kind of busy with that recently. But we’ve kept our eyes on a couple of other projects, including a major video documentary. You may recall our first major documentary, on Maya Lin which we debuted on ArtBabble. A pic of Dan on location for that documentary, below.

Senior New Media Producer Dan Dark, on location in Walla Walla

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Filed under: New Media, Travel

The IMA software developers have been using revision control software to manage their code for some time now (as all good developers should).  Think of it like Time Machine for your Mac.  We save (a.k.a commit) our code at many points in time so we can roll back to any of those points later if needed.  Recently we rolled over 10,000 commits which got me wondering what’s happened during that time.  I stumbled across some tools a while back that can visualize these software repositories.  One of the cooler of the bunch was gource.  Our full software tree is far too large  to follow so I thought I would take a look at how the ArtBabble code base has evolved since we started working on it in April of 2008.  The result was pretty cool:

Below is the list of who you see in order of appearance.

• 
  Ed
• 
  Matt
• 
  Charlie
• 
  Kris

Filed under: Technology