Pete LePage

Thoughts on web development, life, and photography.

Top 10 Design Mistakes: #8

Time to continue my top ten list of web site pet peeves-and we’re in at number 8 with something that requires a little bit of balance, because for many sites, it’s a requirement, it’s the only way they really are able to provide the content that they do, for the price we pay… #8 Advertising Is A Reality, Sometimes # Somebody once said, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”  And the web is no different, someone has to pay for the content that we’re consuming online, whether it’s through me doing this in...

Top 10 Design Mistakes: #9

Continuing my series of top web design mistakes that are often made by web developers, lets dive into number 9. #9 Hansel & Gretel would need bread crumbs to find their way! # Have you ever visited a site where you’re not quite sure what you’re supposed to do once you land on the site?  Or that as your surfing around, without using the back button in your browser, you can’t get back to where you were before? There are a couple of ways to look at this when you think about building navigation on your sites. ...

Top 10 Design Mistakes: #10

As promised, I’m going to start my series on (as my friend Sarah called it), “10 Things I Hate About Your Website”. And in reality, I admit to be guilty of many of these, so really I think I should call it “10 Things I Hate About My Websites”. This series is aimed at web developers who often find themselves having to do some design work, whether it’s just that little bit here and there, or you’re the only web person at your company this applies to you! I consider myself a web developer - not a web...

Water Baths

Water baths are useful for affecting the shadows or highlights, depening on how you look at it. Water baths retard the development of shadow detail, so it allows highlight detail to develop while the shadow detail is “put on pause”. During normal development, the paper is placed in the developer and agitated while in the developer, allowing fresh developer to replace areas where it has been exhausted due to the shadow development. (Note, it is important to think about this process on a very small scale.)...

Split Grade Printing

Controling contrast and darks/lights is a fine art printers more challenging roles, especially when dealing with difficult negatives. Getting that highlight to come in at a nice point, and that shadow to print where it is not too stopped up can sometimes be really difficult. Split grade printing is another tool that a printer can add that will help to give them more control over their prints. Using the split grade method, a print is broken up into two separate components, the highlights (which are...

Pre-Development Bleaching

Sometimes, reducing contrast is something that a printer wants, and for one reason or another cannot obtain easily. For example, using a graded paper, or having only a high contrast developer available. When this is the case, it’s possible to reduce the appearant contrast to any grade below the current value. Interestingly, pre-development bleaching acts completely opposite to how post development bleaching works. Pre-development bleaching will affect the shadows first, and the highlights are left to last....