Pictures by John Dawes

December 29, 2004
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    “the photographs are the stars” - you’re not wrong Bren… That’s a very awesome portfolio and I can’t wait to see the rest…

    Pete Barr-Watson / 29/12/2004

    Cheers Pete!

    Brendan Dawes / 29/12/2004

    like it. one minor point though: the interface as it stands allows for the same photo to be opened multiple times. it would also be nice to be able to reverse the process, and drop the photo back as a negative onto the lightbox.

    patrick h. lauke / 30/12/2004

    Yeah they’re good points - I’ll fix the multiple times thing. Though as regards the dropping back onto the lightbox, I wanted to have a degree of freedom with the photos - so you can put a photo on the left and have one on the right, viewing 2 photos at once. Obviously that wouldn’t be possible with dropping the photo back to be a negative. It’s still a nice idea though and one I may look into. Cheers.

    Brendan Dawes / 30/12/2004

    Beautiful shots, I love the effect of the backlighting and the expressions on Ali’s face.

    He looked to be really at peace and in some ways quite childlike. Did you dad do any ring shots of him?

    David Bamford / 04/01/2005

    Yeah I think so - thought I can’t be sure!

    bren / 04/01/2005

    My Dad has always been one of the biggest influences on my work and career. He’s been a professional photographer all his adult life, most of that concentrating on sport, covering some of the worlds biggest sporting events in his 40 plus years of being a photographer. As a personal project I’ve started to put together a small site with collections of some of his best work. The first of these collections, featuring Muhammad Ali has just been launched.

    ali interface

    For the main part of the site, the section where you view the photographs, I created a kind of virtual light-box that displays the negatives, purposely thrown on the screen in a random way. I wanted to have a very clean interface that encouraged “rummaging” around without any other kind of buttons, and I wanted it to be very tactile. And for the techy people out there I also wanted it to be super simple to admin - so all the thumbnail negatives are generated on the fly in PHP, created from the full size photos.

    But that’s all secondary - the photographs are the stars.

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