The first shot in my Project 365. People going on a walk on a cold, but sunny December 30 in NorCal.

I took this pic with a 200mm tele and manual focus. It is also cropped, straightened and saturated a little bit.

Of course, I am two days early for a 2011 start, but rules are there to be broken, right?

As some of you may know, lately, I’ve become more interested into photography again. I’ve been taking pictures on and off, especially when traveling, and of special events. But I haven’t been actively working on improving my technique for a while.

Enter JP and morgamic, whose excellent pictures (and perhaps some lens envy) kept inspiring me to get out my camera over and over again. Just recently, I also started filling the gaps in my lens collection: I now have the ability to take pictures anywhere between 14 and 200mm focal length (before the crop factor), dramatically widening the range of pictures I can take.

So what better than a little photo project to keep the ball going? I came across Project 365, whose premise is simple: For a full year, take a picture every day and share it with your audience. All right, I’m in!

All other rules you get to pick yourself, with some people also suggesting to create some “anti-rules” as to be realistic and keep it a fun and achievable project, so here we go:

• I’m going to do my best to take a photo a day, and upload (and blog) it somewhat close to the time I am taking it.
• If I take a bad photo, I won’t beat myself up about it.
• This includes cell phone pictures. In fact, limitations of the equipment are probably what makes this even more fun to do.
• If I really didn’t take a picture one day, I’ll fill in one from my archive. Or improvise. We’ll see!

My personal goals are to increase my knowledge of photography and my ability to take good pictures — not only with expensive equipment. So I’ll try to flip settings on and off, apply filters, get closer, move further away, crop, or distort my pictures, hoping to find new and exciting ways to display reality.

Feel free to follow me on my journey, and don’t be shy to comment, both positive and negative, on the photos I take.

Oh, and if you are a photographer yourself, feel free to join in on the fun! Any questions?

Surely, you’ve heard of many fancy new features that HTML5 and related technologies bring to the Web now and in the future: open video on the web, canvas, transitions, what have you.

But sometimes it’s the smallest things that have the biggest impact. Besides these hyped features, HTML5 also introduces a number of semantic form fields. Before, the only textual input the web knew was, well, plain text. It was up to the web application developer to enforce certain rules around that, like making sure the input is a number, or not empty, or even a valid website address (URL).

Firefox 4 understands these new input types and helps the user by enforcing correct values even before the users submits the form. By handling validation on the client, this enables a consistent form validation UI across websites and keeps the user from constantly submitting forms and wait for the server-side form validation to pass or fail. (NB: This does not relieve the developers of performing server-side checks in order to ensure the security of their web application).

Here is what this looks like in a recent prototype of the Firefox Input site:

Another fun little feature, also pictured, is the placeholder text attribute. The grayed-out placeholder in a text box shows you an example of what you might enter into this field. Rather than explaining correct values in a huge label or a side note next to the field, developers can show their users much more easily what data they would like them to enter into the form fields.

All of this makes for fewer mistakes entering data into web forms, which is both beneficial to the user (getting the job done faster) and the developer (collecting better data). Win-win!

For much more detailed on HTML5 forms, placeholders, validation, etc., take a look at Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Dive Into HTML5. Also, don’t miss out on Anthony Ricaud’s in-depth description of HTML5 forms in Firefox on the Mozilla Hacks blog.