ben syverson

After 15 years of careful camera gear stewardship, you’re bound to slip up.

On a music video shoot last week in New York, I changed lenses and set my 24L on the grass beside me. We wrapped, and later that night, we had torrential rain. Just a complete deluge. Our friends’ kiddy pool filled to the brim with rain water.

The next morning, I walked across the lawn, and my heart stopped. There was my poor little 24L, sitting patiently on the grass. It was half-covered in mud, and completely soaked. There was water inside the lens… big condensation droplets inside the focus window. I was too freaked out to even take a picture of it. “There goes $1700…”

I ran it inside, unscrewed the UV filter and rear lens cap, and immediately buried the lens in a big box of dry rice.

I checked it every few hours, and prayed to the camera gods for mercy. After 12 hours, I couldn’t see any condensation inside, so I decided to wait 12 more hours.

After a full 24 hours in the rice, I inspected it all over. No water to be seen. I picked it up, brushed it off, and took a deep breath. I switched it to manual focus, and slowly connected it to my camera. It came up in the menu as the correct lens, meaning the camera was talking to the chip on the lens. “Well, at the very least I have a manual focus lens.”

I took another deep breath and switched it to autofocus. A half-press of the shutter, and the ultrasonic motor snapped the whole scene into focus! I don’t want to jinx it, but so far, it’s as good as new. And probably cleaner. I kept right on shooting the video with it.

So for that, zombie lens from beyond the grave, I hereby christen you “Ophelia.” May the rest of your days be as dry as the dustiest corner of the moon.

Objective C, AppKit & Foundation

With several development projects going on the iPhone, Mac and web (both server-side and client-side), I recently standardized on a single programming language and development framework, for the sake of my own sanity. The language is Objective-C, and the framework is AppKit & Foundation.

That of course makes sense for the iPhone and Mac, where AppKit and Foundation are part of Cocoa. But it’s unusual for the web.

On the server side, I’m building a kqueue-based dynamic server in Objective C that can be compiled under GNUStep for deployment on any machine.

On the client side, I’m working with Objective-J and Cappuccino, an absolutely incredible browser-independent implementation of AppKit & Foundation (and much more actually, including CoreGraphics). Given how many developers are piling onto the iPhone, I think the Cappuccino’s future is very bright.

Standardizing means that when I want to add an item to an array, whether its for the iPhone, a Mac, my server, or a web application, I never have to shift gears. It’s always:

[array addObject:item];

It’s bliss.

Graceful Degradation

I recently launched a web update for Susan’s business site, up in the air somewhere, and I took it as an opportunity to improve the semantics and aesthetics of the HTML and CSS.

We were having problems with the Blackberry web browser, because I had her product images loading into the background of a div via CSS. Blackberry just ignored the CSS, so the product images wouldn’t come up. Also, all of the navigation menus would come up first, so every time you loaded a page, you’d have to scroll down to see the content. It was also annoying if you listened to it on a screen reader; you had to listen to every menu option before you could hear the content, for every page.

The first problem was solved by loading the product images with a standard img tag, as it should have been all along. However, on pages where the image is just a background (such as the “info” pages), the image remains a CSS background, so it doesn’t load the unnecessary image on non-CSS browsers.

The second problem was solved simply by rearranging the HTML so that the image comes first, then the product information, then the product menu, finally followed by the less-used menu items like “info” and “links.”

This is essentially how the site is supposed to look, as rendered in Firefox. You can make the browser window as large as you like, and the image will appear to go on forever. (Click for large image)

Here it is on the iPhone. Under duress, I added a meta tag to the HTML to change the viewport width. Apple, I’m speechless. This should so obviously be a CSS property instead.

Finally, here’s how it looks in elinks, a text-based browser. The site remains understandable and navigable. elinks is even listening to some CSS, floating the right-side menu items to the right!

This is my favorite site I’ve designed. It feels like a full, rich experience, with big images and a catalog feel. Yet the entire site—all 51 pages and their images—takes up less than 2MB (it would fit on a floppy!), so it’s quick to browse, even over slow mobile connections. I love it.

Oh my god… I’ve been waiting for this moment for years!

Goodbye Islip, hello LaGuardia!