ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

As you’ll be likely to know, assuming this isn’t the first post you’ve ever read on my site, I’m currently in the process of redesigning my site. The design is still very much a work in progress and no bits are actually finished yet, but I’m starting to get further on down the line with the colour scheme and the images that I want to use. After that, it’s just (hopefully) a case of plugging it all together and away we go.

Obviously, it won’t be that easy, but that’s the theory.

Anyway, I had a problem. I wanted a picture of a Bunsen burner on my site (as I’m sticking with the “web chemist” theme, just changing the images). The question was where to source one from?

I scoured Google image search, various free photo sites such as Stock.XCHNG without much luck. Sure, I could find pictures of Bunsen burners, but none were quite right. What I was after was a side on view of a bunsen, showing the purple/blue flame, and with the rubber tubing visible to the side, ideally running off to the left. A simple, straight-forward iconic image of a Bunsen burner.

And could I find one anywhere? Could I heck (or words to that effect). So, I’m left with two options — either find an image of a bunsen that’s on the web somewhere and try and hack it using graphics packages to suit my purpose … but after one attempt at that, it’s obviously a non-starter. Changing colours, shapes and moving things around, yes. Drawing parts of a Bunsen from scratch so nobody can tell it wasn’t originally part of the photo, no.

So I was just thinking to myself:

It’s a shame I’m not still at school really. If I was still doing A-Level Chemistry at Heathfield, I could just have popped along to the science lab with my digital camera and taken a photo myself…Internal Dialogue

At this point, you should ideally see a picture of a lightbulb, but you’ll just have to imagine it. Why not ask someone who does use a bunsen if they’ll do it for me? Great. Now who do I know that uses a Bunsen burner…

…as it turns out, nobody. I know nobody who uses a bunsen burner. Bugger.

Oh well, no harm in asking, I suppose. So I send off a little email to my old school (only actually it’s not really my old school, it’s the new school that was built on part of the site of my old school) telling them about the situation, accepting that it’s a daft request and just hoping maybe someone will be able to help.

I don’t know whether the sheer daftness of the request worked in my favour — after all, working in a school I doubt there are many people phone you up and ask you if you’ll take pictures of Bunsen burners so they can stick them on their website, is it? Anyway, a gentleman called Tom Mounsey — who I believe is one of the technicians — was kind enough to do the honours for me — and even squeeze me in before the half term holidays, with a superb photograph that was almost exactly what I was looking for.

I say almost but I couldn’t — and didn’t — expect something that was exactly what I was looking for, given that I wanted to be able to change the main background colour to fit in with the colour scheme of my web site, and it’s difficult to get a background that is exactly and uniformly #110404 in the real world!

So I had to make a couple of adjustments, tweak the size and so on, but I would like to go on record as offering my wholehearted thanks to Tom for an excellent photograph that was perfect for my purposes and was of vastly superior quality to anything I had expected.

And if you want to see what I’m actually going to do with it … well, you’ll just have to wait!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 1:57 am and is filed under Blogging, Local Interest, The Pickards, Web. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.