About
/ Feb. 22, 2011
Hi there — My name is Michael Stanaland. I grew up in West Texas, but now I’m a city boy living in D.C.’s fabulous Dupont Circle. I spend 9-to-5 working for a print publication. My off-hours passions include photography, web design, all things Apple, cooking and travel.
This site was inspired by Chris Glass, whose talent far exceeds mine. Heck, some bits of this site are a blatant rip-off, so I hope if I ever meet him I’ll at least get to shake his hand before he punches my lights out.
Camera Equipment
- Leica M8.2: Even though I took some really nice photos with my Canon 7D, I never felt like I “connected” with it. It was too big and had more features than anyone would ever use. I wanted something more akin to my first SLR camera, a Minolta XG. After months of reading Steve Huff’s blog, I ended up selling my 7D gear and buying a Leica M8.2 on ebay. While it certainly has its limitations, the operation fits me better and I love the look of the images it takes. Inn fact, it’s rather astounding considering the technology behind it is 7+ years old. I look forward to the day I win the lottery and can buy the new M.
- Leica Summicron-m 28mm: Simply a wonderful lens that gives a 35mm equivalent on the M8.
- Zeiss ZM 50mm Sonnar: I have a love-hate relationship with the lens (this basically explains why), but for the price it’s nice to have in your camera bag and sometimes the images are just perfect.
- Leica Summarit-M 75mm: The Summarit line is grossly under-rated … I love the images I take this this lens.
Desktop software
- Adobe Creative Suite: The essential design tools with which we all have a love-hate relationship.
- Aperture: used for photo organization and basic editing. Any heavy lifting I do in Photoshop.
- Espresso: For those who prefer to code by hand, this is a great web editer from the guy who created CSSEdit.
- CSSEdit: A can’t-live-without-it CSS editor that is in dire need of an update.
- Transmit: The standard-bearer of FTP clients.
Server side
thatmichael.com is hosted by Dreamhost and powered by WordPress.
HTML5 and web standards
I built this site using HTML5 and CSS3 markup, and I’ve made little to no attempt at “backwards compatibility” for web browsers that don’t support web standards (read Internet Explorer.) I believe web standards are important and I adhere to them on every site that I build. Every page of this site’s HTML markup should validate as either HTML5 or XHTML 4.01 Transitional, and its layout is built using valid CSS.
Web browsers that don’t suck
References
- HTML5 for Web Designers: A teeny-tiny book that make sense of all the HTML5 hoopla.
- Dive into HTML5
- CSS3 For Web Designers: Not as good as the HTML5 book, but still not useful and concise.