Weather Class for Sailors

My son, Joseph Fillingham, will be teaching a class on weather for sailors through the Milwaukee Community Sailing Center. The class will be held on Thursday, February 28th, 2008. He’s posted about it on his web site and you can see more here.

Joe has a degree from the University of Wisconsin in Atmospherics and Oceanography. He has also been sailing the Great Lakes for many years and has been a sailing instructor for several years as well. If you have any interest in sailing and are near Milwaukee, Wisconsin you will want to sit in on this class.

new web site up

I’ve finally got the new web site up and most of the kinks worked out. I’ve still got to get the “client pages” completed but that can wait a little while, at least until I have a client interested in keeping tabs on their project through my site. Here’s a post I did about that page.

I designed the site by first assessing what my goals were in having a web site. Initially, my first three sites were focused on simply putting up on the web a limited portfolio of my work so that people that had already heard about me in some way could easily see what sort of work I do. This time around my goals are a little more.

I want this site to attract new customers, tell people exactly what it is I offer and answer the question why they should chose me to make furniture for them.

I started by surveying past clients and asking them what they would have liked to have seen on my earlier site. Most of them said they found the site by accident and were not exactly sure what it was that I did when they first saw the site. They had a felt need to find someone who would make a piece of furniture for them and even though that is exactly what I do my earlier site did not clearly communicate that. I decided that I would try and communicate to anyone seeing my home page that it was a very easy and simple process to have me design and make their furniture and that I would take personal care to make sure that they received exactly what they were looking for. Their need was met, they found me.

The rest of the site would be dedicated to showing that I had the experience and skills to accomplish the work they wanted done, that they would be very happy with the results and that they could trust me. The portfolio shows the breadth of my experience and the depth of my skills. It wasn’t easy to do because I really do not find it easy to “sell” myself (really!) but, since I think the best way to tell people about the experience of having me build furniture for them is to include testimonials from past clients, I added a page of testimonials. You may notice that the final home page differs from the image above by the added link to a testimonials page.

To build trust I decided to tell my story which is what this blog is all about, so I added a link to this blog. I also added a pretty basic faq page so that some of the initial questions can be answered for people upfront. On the portfolio page I’ve included sections for some of the art I’ve done as well as pieces in my current designs collection. These pieces are priced to sell on a made to order basis and I hope will generate some sales but if nothing else will give an idea of what my charges are like.

As I mentioned in an earlier post about the new site I did the design work for the site by mocking up pages using Paint Shop Pro and I had someone else, Nate Kroll, do the actual coding. We worked together with Nate telling me what could be done and what couldn’t and me getting back him with new ideas to work around initial problems. Nate needs to insert a credit for his work on the site and I keep reminding him to do so. He’ll get to it sooner or later, but I’d like to pass on any new jobs for web site building I can to him. I’ll be adding much more to the portfolio as time allows as I have images of many more projects and I’ll be digitizing my slide collection as well. Before I add too many new items though we have a slight technical glitch I’d like to resolve. The slider bar on the left side of the portfolio page resets when you click on related items thumbs and once the list gets much longer that may be disconcerting for people. I will add new art work though in the mean time.

Studio made slide scanner

I’ve never been happy with the results of scanning slides on my Microtek ScanMaker 4850 with the slide attachment. Some of the slides came out fantastic while others were horrible. So I started doing a little research into buying a new slide scanner and read quite a few online reviews and comments by others. While some seemed pretty good they were quite expensive and I wasn’t about to plunk down several hundred dollars for a scanner I wasn’t sure would really do the job for me. The lower end ones seemed to be no better than the set up I had already, however the least expensive scanner intrigued me. It was an attachment to your digital camera that held the slide. You would then point your camera with the attachment towards an appropriate light source and take a picture of your slide.

As I thought about this I decided I needed to do a little proof of principle research to see if this could really work. As I got into it I realized that I could put together something that worked on this principle myself. Here’s is the set up so far:

The set up starts with my light table, something I put together years ago from an old studio lamp and some sand blasted glass. I found that it really helped to eliminate extraneous light and to have the slide well away from the glass so that the camera could focus on the slide and not on the texture of the sand blasted (not really “ground”) glass. To accomplish this quickly, again I’m still in the proof of principle mode here, I taped together some card stock as shown.

It also was helpful to have the slide line up in the same place every time as my light table did not uniformly distribute light over the glass. The center was brighter than the edges. At this point I taped the box onto the glass and tilted the “light table” so that I could use my camera on a tripod to try a few shots. Those initial test images were promising but there was too much light coming in from the studio as incident light on to the slide.

I took a plastic container that once held yogurt, cut a hole in the bottom of it and painted it black and then set that on top of the slide holder. I placed my camera on top of that container and had my scanner.

When I get a little more time I’ll work on getting the camera settings fined tune. Here’s one of my test shots after a little doctoring with my Paint Shop Pro application.

I have got tons of slides, I can’t wait to scan some of the best and put them up in my portfolio of my new web site.

Milwaukee Art Museum, art and wilderness

I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in an online chat today with the new, incoming director of the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM), Daniel Keegan. The format was casual and the event was obviously meant to introduce Mr. Keegan to the Milwaukee community.

Here’s my 2 cents.

Q: Todd Fillingham of Milwaukee – The MAM has a unique relationship to Lake Michigan. Beyond Calatrava’s kinetic, architectural expression of this how do you envision the influence of MAM’s wonderful location in the shaping of future shows and programming?

A: Daniel T. Keegan - Thanks Todd. No question that the total environment of MAM includes its beautiful surroundings, parks and the lake. The Board and staff of the Museum have begun exploration of how the outdoor environment can be further developed as part of the Museum experience. I will pick this up as one of the opportunities ahead.

I thought Mr. Keegan, gave a good answer, especially since he was responding quickly and had many topics to respond to. My question however sought to go deeper than simply expanding the museum experience into the outdoors. I was thinking particularly about how this extraordinary work of architecture is sited within this city.

The significance of this location cannot be overlooked. Prior to the Calatrava addition the building designed by Eero Saarinen was and still is momentous not only because of it’s design but also because of it’s site. I do not want to discuss the relationship between architecture and site here, what I do want bring up though is the relationship between a building that houses and displays art, a great building that houses and displays art and this particular location.

The MAM is situated right at the water’s edge. At the edge of a great lake, one of the Great Lakes, Lake Michigan. This juxtaposes an institution dedicated to one of the civilized world’s highest accomplishments with the wild. For Lake Michigan is a wilderness. And yet this is not completely disharmonious, in fact it reflects a relationship between civilization and wilderness that art mediates. Cryptozoic impulses infuse art. Feral energy animates art. “Fear no art” the bumper sticker says, but who among us faces art unprotected, unshielded, undressed?

Art museums also govern much of the relationship society has with art, they create the means by which most people evaluate art, they offer access to art, they influence the creation of new art, they are gate keepers. MAM is at the gateway to the city of Milwaukee. Traveling from the wilderness into the heart of the city travelers must cross this threshold.

Surf Board Table III-ix

The table has been delivered! Here are a few more shots I took before making the delivery. If you’re interested, check out my portfolio.

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