New Tricks

I've been playing at being a photographer for a few years now. I've considered myself an "advanced amateur" photographer, capable of/making money with my photos but not making a living off them. An advanced amateur should know their way around a camera and most of it's custom settings and functions and can take consistently good photos. I have a strong knowledge of what my camera is capable of and how to adjust it's various settings to get the image I am after but there have always been a few settings that I haven't looked into yet with much detail.

Tonight I decided to play around with some of them and have learned a few new things and set some custom functions that will help me make the adjustments to the settings I need to capture the image I want. I've also began to experiment with the long exposure going beyond the shutter speed settings of my camera, which go from 1/4000 of a second to 30 seconds. In the "Bulb" mode (I don't know why it's called that at the moment) you can make an exposure as long as you need manually by pressing the shutter release once to start the exposure and then a second time to end it after the desired length of time has passed. With this you can leave the shutter open indefinitely but you need to know a few things in order to get the image you desire without wasting hours experimenting until you find the right settings.

To practice I brought out my Alien sculpture and played around with some lighting to get the desired look that I envisioned. While it took more work than I would have liked to get the lighting set up just right what with my limited resources for custom lighting, I did get a photo that is fairly close to what I was after. The only thing that was disappointing with the outcome was that the long exposure brought out the fatal flaws with my low end SLR. I had to remove a lot of bad pixels to get a clean image I wanted. So now I know that there will be a lot more touch up work to be done on any long exposure I take with my current camera body but at least I'm prepared for it now.

So I've learned some new tricks and have really gotten to that "advanced" level as I have finally learned everything my camera can do and have experimented with those settings and functions. Although I've never used any of the preset auto modes that give up full control to the camera.

Canon Digital XTi with EF 17-40mm f/4L USM lens
Settings:
Focal length - 35mm, Aperture - f/14, ISO 100, Shutter Speed 275/1 sec. (4.5 minutes),
Light Metering - Evaluative, Format - RAW
Touched up with Apple Aperture 2 and Adobe Photoshop CS3

A Professional Look

Another quick update. This is a photo I took last week to use as my portfolio ID. Don't I look like I know what I'm doing?

Film Noir

**Caution: Excessively long explanation ahead**

Those of you who know me well, know that I'm a big fan of film noir and that I've been wanting to do something in this genre for a long time. I've come up with and subsequently thrown out one idea after another for the last ten years. There have been a few seed ideas that I had held onto feeling that they could work if I could just figure out how to make them grow properly but always had trouble with getting the idea to germinate.

I held onto those ideas knowing that someday I'd be able to make them grow into a good story. Last week I sat down with renewed determination to bring one of those few ideas into a full fledged concept with a clear direction and enough information to begin proper research.

One seed idea I had is a neo-noir set in the not so distant future with a detective on the trail of a faceless assassin. Another idea I had was less a story and more a scene set in a more traditional 1930s noir period. That scene was actually a dream I had and it was pretty intense considering it had only two characters and one of them was a bloody dead mess. It was vivid enough that I was able to write it out in detail immediately upon waking. It was that idea that I started to work on after all, I already had a strong opening scene loaded with story potential.

The problem was that it was an introductory scene and usually the best place to begin writing any story, especially a mystery is with the ending. You need to know where you're going before you can get there otherwise you're just wandering in the dark and will end up with nothing more than a disheveled mess and you will lose your audience before the second act has had a chance to get started.

So I had some questions to answer before I could go anywhere with the story. Number one being, How does this end. But in my scene I already had all the dialog, in voice over of what was running through the protagonists head at the gruesome scene before him. His dialog was very detailed, dramatic and revealed a lot of information about his state of mind and relationship with the victim but it posed more questions than three seasons of Lost and they all needed to be addressed.

When I started working I was in the mind set that the protagonist was a private investigator who found himself on a case that was far bigger than he could have imagined. That idea alone kept me from being able to answer most of the questions posed by his dialog. Some of the things that ran through his mind didn't quite fit with the small time, strait arrow P.I.

So hitting a road block I decided that rather than throw out what I had managed to develop like I had previously done, that I would instead step back away from it for a moment and look at the bigger picture as I would an illustration. I looked back at my other seed ideas and came across the neo-noir with a detective on the trail of a faceless killer and then it hit me. The man isn't a P.I. or detective but a man out for revenge and not for the death of the victim from the opening scene, that was an unfortunate casualty of his personal war.

Along with that I learned exactly how the story ends, while it will end as I had first determined I now knew much more of the details. I also learned that this story leads directly into that detective story with the faceless assassin which is great because it answers a lot of questions related to that story.

Now I'm very excited because I can finally start some serious research on a story in a genre that I've wanted to work in for a very long time. In addition to research I can also start sketching up ideas which is where the accompanied art comes in. It's more a scene from the second story which begins where the first ends.

Oh, yeah. I drew it in Corel Painter X with a custom calligraphy pen.

Nothing Hurts Like My Back

If you like vampires raise your hands. If you like music raise your hands. If you like vampire music videos raise your hands. I personally don't care one way or the other but I did have the opportunity to work on a vampire themed music video last week with Oh Rio! Productions. I worked as a production artist putting the set together and moving things around as needed for the shoot and I was also the stills photographer. It was a lot of fun but a lot of work that had to be done in a very limited time frame.

The song is called "Nothing Hurts Like Love" sung by Jimmy Demers and written by Diane Warren. The video also stars in addition to Jimmy, former supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, and Hollywood actress Amy Smart. I don't know how long it will be before the video is completed and available for viewing so don't bother asking me, I'll share that info as soon as I find out. The song is about three minutes long and we recorded hours of footage so the editing process could take a while.

While I took hundreds of photos I will only be able to share a handfull with you at the moment but I will share lots more eventually.

Mac Attack

I used to think that I knew what I was doing when I turned on my MacBook Pro. I've always been the guy that my family and friends go to for tech advice and questions like "how do I...?" especially in regards to Mac computers. Since I had first become a Mac user (that sounds like I'm on drugs and in a way...) five years ago I have become very familiar with how the system works and how I can do things quickly and easily with shortcut keys. Its been years since I've drag and dropped files to the trash can, had any hard drive/disk images on my desktop for file navigation and for the most part I try to keep my desktop free of all files and folders. I had even started using new features introduced in OS X.5 Leopard like dock stacks to locate multiple programs into one small location in an attempt to keep my dock uncluttered and organized.

There was one time when a friend of mine and fellow Mac user had an issue with his MacBook that I couldn't fix for him. I tried everything I could think of to alleviate his problem aside from reinstalling the operating system. I thought that there may have been something else that could be done that I was unaware of so we took it into the local Apple store to have a "Mac Genius" diagnose the problem for us. We'd get it fixed and I thought that I might gain some new Mac knowledge. As it turned out all that could be done was to reinstall the operating system and I in fact knew more than the "Mac Genius." So I went home afterward with the impression that I was something of a "Mac Genius" myself and have been living under that assumption ever since, that is until I randomly came across a YouTube video of a fourteen year old kid.

I was so impressed with how much he knew (surprisingly more than what I knew) that I watched all of his tutorial/tip videos and followed many of the links to websites with useful free software to improve my computing experience. I also learned of some tools that would change user interface elements like program and system icons, the dock, and certain applications. So I spent a lot of free time learning new tricks and modifying my software aesthetics. Now I have a clean new interface and a pathetically empty dock, in fact the dock has become almost obsolete now.

While some of the new software I got is very useful and increases productivity quite a lot it's the shortcut/action modifier keys that I am the most pleased with learning. They are all built into the operating system and have always been there to use, so learning a new one that is extremely useful is both exciting for me (so what if that makes me a geek) and very disappointing because I should have already known it. So for those of you that use Apple computers I will be sharing some of the more useful shortcuts for the most common actions later on.


For now I'll show you a screenshot of my current system set up. You may notice that on the desktop there are icons for the hard drive titled Rose (the computer's named Rose, don't ask), a connected server titled mac, and a connected USB flash drive titled Flasher. Normally those icons are not visible on my desktop but I included them so you can see that more than the generic folders have been changed to have a wood finish. Most of the system icons have been changed to a wooden theme. You may also notice the selected program Flock which a web browser built on the same engine as Firefox and has become my new default and the Mega Man icon next to it which is the most awesome application ever. It's called MegaManEffect and if you use a Mac and have ever played a Mega Man game then google it, and download it. That's it for the moment.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Bonfire of the Insanities

It all started innocently enough. We were young and stupid. Well, more stupid than we currently are anyway and attending Allan Hancock College in an attempt to become less stupid. Brett, who welcomes everyone he meets into his fold like a blind retarded sheep invited me to join he and his friends at Oceano Beach for a little bonfire. He said it starts at 5p.m. so I arrive a little early just to be safe. Around six someone else showed up and things got going. Next thing I knew I was one of the gang and we were having bonfires as often as we could.

Then, one by one, we all (well almost all) moved away for school, work, or school and we ended up in Southern California. Since the great migration we hadn't had a true beach bonfire experience but we always talked about getting around to doing it again as soon as possible. Five years later we did.

Over the Winter break we would all be close enough to the legendary Oceano Beach. So we began to plot the flaming end of any number of wood and wood-like substances along with the consumption of carbonated yellow snow, more commonly known as Mountain Dew. We set a date for Dec. 26, the day after Christmas and a start time of 12 noon. One by one we all began to show up, maybe just a little bit late.

And so it begins. Burn baby burn!

A little 007 homage.

A little chicken dancing.

The Mike.

The Mike went for a little swim. Apparently, the ocean is a powerful force.

From light to dark.

As things cooled down we all began to curl up around the fire.

Coraline

So there is a new film from the director of Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas and it's called Coraline. It looks beautiful with stop motion animation that moves the medium forward. It will be presented in stereoscopic 3D. To see some of what has gone into the creation of this film go to coraline.com and type in these passwords to view the individual clips.

stopmotion
buttoneyes
moustachio
puppetlove
armpithair
sweaterxxs