High Dynamic Range Photography

With all the advancements in technology we still don't have the ability to take pictures that can pull in the full range of light that our eyes can see. That is why you see windows that are all washed out, or lack of details in clouds in photos. The sensor on any camera can't see everything that your eye can pick up. I guess the good Lord did a pretty good job in making us. As for camera's, that's where High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography comes in. It is a crafty technique of taking several photo's of the same subject all at different exposures, then with the magic of the computer and even some cameras, blending the images together so that we can have all that tonal range in one photo. It sounds complicated but it really isn't. 

Canon 5d Mark ii - Full Frame Camera

I recently upgraded my camera collection to include the full frame Canon 5D mark ii. I did a lot of research before I bought it and the drop in price because of a newer version coming out soon was helpful in deciding on this pro camera. It came down to the 7D and the 5dii. I found out that the 7D was not a full-frame camera nd the 5D was. I wasn't sure exactly how beneficial that would be to me but I do enjoy having a wide-angle of coverage with my photography.

Calgary Fitness Centre Understands Importance of Online Presence

Trico Centre for Family Wellness found out the easy way what running a website with a quality CMS is like. The ease of use was a no-brainer for the staff at Trico Centre to decide on. Wordpress was their first option until I spoke to them about ExpressionEngine. Though it isn't hard to convince someone of its power. I worked with the staff at Trico and we decided on a final design before I built out their site in ExpressionEngine, then gave them some lessons on using ExpressionEngine. Next they added all of their content and were even able to create the menu on their own in the format that worked for their business, they created and manage all of their contact forms. Before launch I enabled the powerful caching features offered by EE and the site loads extremely fast for all of their visitors. With close to 800 visitors a day, their site is ready to propel them into the modern age of the internet.

Canoe Financial Gets a Facelift

I was hired by Canoe Financial, one of Canada's leading investment management firms focussed on Canadian investments, to rebuild their website to make things easier for them to update. I used ExpressionEngine leveraged some modern add-ons to make things simple to update for the client. I even developed a custom add-on to ease their task of manually adding fund data each day. Their time maintaining the website each day has drastically decreased because of the new website and I was happy to have worked with them on this endeavor. The website was also able to take advantage of the amazing caching features offered by ExpressionEngine so as to allow it to load with incredible spead. It was a hectac time in December working morning till night to achieve the desired outcome, but success prevailed in the end.

Wakamow Heights gets a new site

After many many years of constantly being asked by my parents to change things on their bed and breakfast website, I decided it was time to introduce them to ExpressionEngine. The time came and today it became a reality. Wakamow Heights bed and breakfast, has a new website as of today, so I guess its an early Christmas present. I was even able to do all of the photography for it. The photo's include breakfast pics, room pics, common areas, the grounds and pictures of the exterior of the house. It uses ExpressionEngine as the CMS so they can update pretty much every aspect of the website. I even gave them the ability to change themes, including background images and colors, so they can update the look of the site depending on the season of the year. I am extremely happy with the website and hope it garners even greater success for Wakamow Heights.

New Kinoli.com Website

Kinoli has been around for 5 years and our website was getting a little dusty. So it had come time to build a new one. We wanted a nice looking, simple website that uses our favorite CMS, ExpressionEngine, to manage it so we can make updates a lot more often. So welcome to our new website. We hope you like it. We will hopefully be able to spend a little more time updating our portfolio and latest news, now that it just got a lot easier for us.

Let us know what you think of our new site.

Westside Recreation Center

This was a pretty exciting website that we built with ExpressionEngine. We got to work with the design team at Juice Creative and found it a breeze to build it with ExpressionEngine. It was also our first time using an EE plugin called Structure. It is a great plugin that gives a hierarchical representation of your site pages in the back-end, making it simple for a client to find what piece of content they need to update. Needless-to-say, we'll be using Structure from now on with our clients. ExpressionEngine has a great following of developers and their are a lot of top quality plugins available for it because of that.

Check out the Westside Recreation Center.

Kinoli Made a New iPhone Application

We recently designed and developed a new iPhone application. Our friends at Istros Media Corporation in New York came up with this concept of building an app for AICP in the hopes of saving their client up to $50K in printing costs annually. The iPhone application essentially replaces a printed directory of all the registered AICP members around the world. Not only does it save them printing costs but it also allows them to update the content at any time they want, since it is being loaded from their web server. Any member with a directors reel also can link to that reel. We have some great prospective ideas for the app that will likely be added in the near future.

Take a look at the application.

Some of My New Favorite Things

Espresso, CSS Less, HTML Zen Coding, Google Font API and last but not least JQuery. As my development has been evolving over the last year and especially over the last month or so I've come across some new tools for my toolshed. Whenever a developer finds a new tool, he usually uses it because it speeds up his process or it makes things more efficient for him. All of these do that very thing. Here are my new tools. 

Simple J-Query Tooltip

Recently I had the need to create a rollover tooltip similar to what you see at iGIFTLIST.com/gift-ideas/. I was needing it to work throughout the website, not just in one area but on multiple tags, some were on img tags, some were on button tags and some were on a/anchor tags. So I thought what better way to do this than J-Query. It can't be matched on how it can find the areas you want in your code through javascript. So the code I came up with uses only about 20 lines of code.