December has been quite busy for me. Working, studying, travelling, … And I’ve just realised, christmas has passed already. I hope it was as merry as everybody wished you to be :)

My first trip was in Slovenia - I was a tourist guide to be exact. A crappy one though, as I don’t know much history around the famous buildings and have no idea why some things are famous. But I have realised, Slovenia is very nice. Have a look:

Knowing Slovenia, I was prepared to fly to London. I’ve been there before, but it’s been a while, I was there for only one day, plus I was still quite young. This time I’ve stayed 4 days. It’s impressive. Very nice, so beautifully organised (mind the gap though) and full of kind people. And surprisingly the weather was much better than in Ljubljana.

bad news: I don’t have much time lately to blog.
bad news #2: I don’t have anything very interesting to write.
good news: I have time to take photos. I hope you like photos.
good news #2: I’ve been to Florence (Firenze). I’ve also been to Venice (Venezia).

I constantly kept getting that “hmm, I studied this once” feeling in Florence. In Venice as well, but there it was more “Look, a pigeon”.

What I’ve learnt? A few things …

• The Duomo in Florence is really impressively huge
• There is too much traffic in Florence
• Venice is peaceful. No traffic on the streets, just in the canals
• Pigeons in Venice don’t mind a bit of flash, but full power in their eyes scares them ;)
• Buying a katana sword is cheaper than a gondola ride in Venice
• Off camera flash really is that great. My luggage was a G9, a 430 EX and an OC-E3. And let’s not forget the superb Gorillapod.

The photos …

Quoting wikipedia:

Metelkova is an autonomous social centre in the centre of Ljubljana, Slovenia. It is located on the site of former military barracks (the Slovenian headquarters of the Yugoslav National Army) and was squatted September 1993. The site consists of seven buildings and was 12,500 m². [1] The name of the squat comes from the surname of the 19th century Slovenian Roman Catholic priest, philologist and unsuccessful language reformer Fran Metelko, after whom the nearby street is named.

Nowadays, Metelkova is a place where young people gather for various reasons, namely concerts, workshops, pint(s) of beer, or just to hang out. I’ve always liked this place for it’s artistic looks.

See for yourself …

It was a lovely Saturday afternoon and I took most I could out of it - I went to the bathroom. I took some equipment with me. I had a camera, some lens, flash, a tripod and a remote shutter release. Plus a black shirt. I opened the water pipe and started playing. Here are the results:

As part of my last year’s photography class, I had to make a photo album with some of my work. Rules of the game were:

• Needs to include 95 photos - 40 coloured, 40 black&white, 15 photoshopped.
• Format has to be at least A4.
• Each photo needs a photographic assignment and some notes on things you have learnt from it.
• Each photo must also be accompanied by information about camera model, aperture, ISO, etc.
• No photos of “cute pets” and “gorgeous sunsets”.

After postponing it for months, I’ve finally decided to finish the album last month. I did the layout and sent the pdf for printing to DigiFot. They did a great job printing it, and here are the results:

You can also view the PDF version of the album:
Photography - Dušan Smolnikar

Photos have been compressed, so may not look their best on screen. Colors also seem to show up more correctly in Adobe Reader than they do in Apple’s Preview. To view better versions of most photos, plus some of the newer ones, I’ve put up a gallery on flickr. It shall be regularly updated.

Best of
The photos I consider to be my favorite.

As some of you know, I was part of Zero.99 seminar in Zagreb, talking about web accessibility with Jasna Medar.

All in all, we had a nice trip. The seminar was quite interesting, some reports very informative and we got to see some funny videos as well. Professors were all very impressed with us (ego boosting effect). We got to see Zagreb afterwards as well. It’s a nice city. Looks good trough the wide angle lens, plus a local girl took us to a pub with home brewed beer. Tasty.

There are a couple of ways how you can experience what was going on. Non-slovene speaking readers may have a few problems with these. Just skip to the photos.

Videos
Open these with VLC. It’s best if you just copy the url and paste it into the url field of VLC’s “File -> Open network”

• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb01.ts
• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb02.ts
• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb03.ts

I’m not telling when I am on, but Jasna may be the first in video #3 ;)

Slides
You can scroll trough the slides we used for our presentation.

Photos
As always, I have a few …

If you’ve just tuned in, and want to know more about web accessibility, head over to Slo-Tech version of our paper - part 1 and part 2. If you either want to know even more, or don’t understand a word of this funny language, try the Web Accessibility Initiative.