Turbo Squid Rocks!!!

For those of you that don't know about Turbo Squid you are truly missing out on a good thing. Turbo Squid is an online consignment house of 3D models, textures and assorted media. I became a member in 2002. I was interested in 3D and trying to teach myself the art of modeling, texturing and animation. I used a free copy of Cinema 4D version 7 that I got free in an issue of 3D World. I found it quite a challenge to create complex models and texture them. I never got that proficient at it, but I did post a few of my better ones to Turbo Squid.

Every so often I get a check in the mail from Turbo Squid. They are usually for less than $20 but I get so stoked. It is like a long-lost uncle that sends you a card in the mail with a little birthday cash.

The TS community is huge now. The have grown many times larger than when I started. I think they are the backbone of the gaming world. It is far cheaper for a business to buy a model that can used in perpetuity for a small sum than to pay a modeler to build one. I think a lot of design firms start with TS models and then tweak them to get the one they need.

If you are making 3D models I encourage you to put them on Turbo Squid. You'll never know when a long-lost uncle will remember your birthday.

Brick Update Finished!

I just finished a video update to EWU's Pass Through the Pillars Brick Campaign website. EWU is paving the Hello Walk with engraved bricks to provide student support funding. I think this update will be successful due to the fact that donors can already see the bricks that others have purchased on the walk.

Depth of Field

Here is another Photoshop tutorial I Stumbled upon. I found it at psd tuts plus. It is a type effect that I am seeing a lot of lately in modern website design. I add a bit of noise to soften up the edges and give a more realistic look.

The Trouble with (Apple's) Color

I am a big fan of Apple's Final Cut Pro video editing application. I have used FCP since its first version that I bought installed on a close-out G4 that I bought in 1998. Since then I have bought two other updated versions and a third for work. Since version 5 FCP has come bundled into a "Production Suite". The suite includes FCP, Compressor, Soundtrack, Live Type and Motion.

With FCP version 6 there came a new potentially ground-breaking application bundled with the suite- Color. It is a stand alone color corrector that is touted to rival expensive Black Magic's Da Vinci. This application could possibly revolutionize the way film and high-end video were produced and color corrected.

Problem is... it isn't all that good. Color's UI is still unfamiliar to me after 2 years. It bears no resemblance to other applications with the FCP suite. Navagating it is more like using Shake than FCP. The cool things that Apple has done with other apps within the suite have no relevance to Color.

One thing that really kills me is the lack of an eye dropper color picker to select a point of color for white balance. FCP has one in its Color Corrector filter... why did they not think it was important for Color? Another gripe is the lack of sliders anywhere. Motion, Soundtrack, FCP all make use of sliders. Color uses a scrollable positive numeral that is accurate to six positions after the decimal point. This is probably a hold over from the professional color-grading application that it originated from.

Overall I like the concept of a stand-alone application to tweek/finesse color other than the built in Color Corrector of FCP but Color falls short. I hope in the latest version it is rebuilt to be better than the original.

EWU Athletic Lettering

I found a tutorial on creating athletic lettering at The Design Playbook . I created an example of my alma mater Eastern Washington University in Cheney, WA.

Merchants Use flickr to Feed Sites

Here is an example of an online merchant that uses flickr to propagate their web pages. In this instance Bike Mate uses it to feed a flash rotator. Using this technology, a business could make an online catalog of current products using item numbers as metadata tags within flickr. You could start with an excel spread sheet of current products with quantities and item numbers. You convert the spreadsheet into an html table and have the item numbers pull in the photos.

Kittitas Sunset Over the Oats

Here is a series of photos I shot in Kittitas this summer. Kittitas is the epitome of rolling hills and wind-swept prairie. I shot it with a slower shutter speed and from a tripod to emphasize the movement. My Nikon D60 captured the oats as they flowed in the breeze. In Lightroom I did something I seldom do which is to reduce the Clarity of an image below a value of 0. Clarity values below 0 create an edge softening effect reminiscent of old large format board cameras.

URC Architectural Details

Here is a photo I shot yesterday while walking around campus. I was asked to get photos of architectural details for the back cover of our alumni magazine. The concept is to use small thumbnails of various buildings to form a grid. Then the reader must guess where the photo was taken.




Here is a shot of Monroe Hall. The giantic Sugar Maple towers over the hall.

Fall EWU Photo Walk

I shot this on a photo walk last week. It is of an architectural element of the University Recreation Center at EWU. I used Lightroom 2 to pull out a more punchy, dynamic exposure. The cranked Saturation and Vibrance make this pop.



Here's a shot of Showalter Hall. I love the way a 17mm lens distorts the perspective.



Here's a shot of Patterson Hall. The oak trees turn a nice orange color in the fall. The 80mm lens setting forces the background nicely out of focus.

Candid Portraits

A candid portrait of Dr. Rodolpho Arévalo I shot during a faculty awards ceremony. The mixed lighting gave a bluish halo to the subjects.I like this kind of photography I like. It shows a subject engaged instead of staged.

Audio Post Work

I just finished another audio mix for a television commercial to air regionally in the Inland Northwest. I mixed it on Apple's Soundtrack.

100,000 + Hits on flickr

The Eastern Washington University flickr account has hit over 100,000 hits today. The first upload on the account occurred on July 8th, 2008 with a single photo of the front of Showalter Hall. Currently there are 2,745 images on the site.

The current methodology I am working with is to increase social networking by utilizing flickr as a image feeder. An example can be found here. It is an monthly newsletter sent to the University staff and includes photos fed by flickr and linked back to the photo on flickr.

With the posting photo sets to the University facebook fan page and the inclusion of flickr on the University's website redesign, the sky is the limit for the growth of this account.

Yoda's Brick

Here is a shot I did for EWU's Alumni Association. Their recent campaign to pave the Hello Walk in front of Showalter Hall has had a measure of success. It appears that Yoda of Star Wars fame was actually an alumni of Eastern Washington University. I thought it would make an interesting Stumble! so I flagged it and tagged it "Star Wars Yoda Brick Quote". As of a few minutes ago It recieved 1,524 hits. Pretty remarkable considering that the University's next most viewed photograph has a little over 500 and has been up for about nine months. Props to StumbleUpon and the power of Star Wars.

FamCam

Here is my favorite frame from I shoot I had today at the University. It was titled "FamCam" and is intended to be a photo message home to family and friends of students living at EWU. I used my favorite Balcar Mini Z1 with and umbrella until the wind knocked the thing over and damaged the brella. Hence this was shot with a bare bulb. I processed it in Lightroom 2. I didn't have to do much editing as the exposure was pretty decent from the camera.

Ivana

Here's a shot I took of a Music faculty member. Strobist info: two Norman strobes shot through Chimera soft boxes and a Balcar Mini Z1.

Theater Ad #3

Here is another theater spot I mixed using Apple's Soundtrack.

BeFunky

Found this cool online photo manipulation app at www.befunky.com. This is supposed to be an Andy Warhol effect.

Fitness Center

This is one of my favorite frames from a recent shoot I did at the Fitness Center at EWU. Using Lightroom 2, I color balanced the light and reshaped the tone curve to give it a more industrial look.

Turkeys

Here's a shot I took in the spring of 2008. The exposure was terrible. The white balance was shifted extremely pink. I used Lightroom 2 to pull a reasonable exposure. I cranked the vibrance up to pull some richness in the colors. I love what vibrance does to polarized windows, it turns them a beautiful shade of teal blue. It was exciting seeing wild turkeys foraging around on the front lawn of Showalter Hall.

New flickr Widget

Get this widget at roytanck.com

I found this cool widget at roytanck.com. It is pretty cool although it did take me a minute to figure out where to get the RSS of my photostream. I resized it to 400 pixels square to better fit this blog. The rotation of the globe is affected by mouse-over also. Pretty cool.

Profile Photo

I just had one of my portraits added to a website. It is of EWU Music Professor Michael Waldrop. He teaches percussion here at the University and is a very interesting and thoughtful person. He called me because his current portrait was outdated and he need a new look. I shot it with Norman strobes through Chimera soft boxes. I shot it with a Nikkor 85mm f 1:1.4 lens wide open to give a narrow depth of field. It is much better than his previous version.

Flickr Banners

After searching for universities with flickr accounts in an effort to see how other institutions use this resource I found a few that were doing interesting things with web implementation. The University of Charleston uses flickr to feed a flash banner on their homepage. The images used can be found in their set here.



New Jersey Institute of Technology uses a similar approach feeding a rotating web banner on their homepage with images pulled from flickr here.

It makes total sense to use flickr in this way. Edits to the banner don't have to involve touching the code, simply update the flickr set that the banner is pulled from. Cloud computing is evolving into a new method of content control. Also the update to content is instantaneous. Our current web server takes over an hour to update a web page, with flickr as soon as the content is updated in the set you simply refresh and the content is posted to the web page.

Definitely Worse Than My Bark

Here is a photo I snapped during a recent photo shoot at one of EWU's Summer Dental Camps. It is a mounted in the dental chair and is used to educate students on proper use and technique of dental instruments. I think these things bleed less than the human equivalent. The bokeh, the greenish tint and the polished shine of the gums make for an interesting photo.

Web Shooting

I have been working on a series of marketing photos for my employer's new website which is several years in the making. The images are to be used for the rotating flash banner. The banner is to have it's graphic element on the right side. The banner is 960 x 321 pixels. Subsequently the Rule of Thirds is out the window. I am basically shooting "Halves" where I cut the photo down the middle and stuff on the right is in focus and the stuff on the left is a blurred out.

In my camera cabinet I found a truly great lens. It is a Nikkor 85mm 1:1.4. I had the University pick up a Canon FS-72U lens filter set with a ND 8 neutral density filter. With the combination of the super fast 1.4 aperture and the ND 8 I can get extremely tight depth of field. Here are a few examples.

Study Abroad: Cross Boundaries

Here is a video that I just finished for Eastern Washington University's Study Abroad Progam.

Another New Eastern Theater Ad

Here is another ad that I mixed.

Moving Keyframes in Motion

I just happened upon a strange quirk of Apple Motion 3.0.2. Maybe it's existed all along in previous versions but I just found it. When you keyframe a behavior, in my case keyframe the speed of a Motion Path, and move the behavior on the timeline the keyframes don't move. They stay rigid to the time of their creation. This causes problems when you want to move a layer with a behavior to a different spot on the timeline because all that beautiful motion you just created has to be redone.

But, I found a work-around!!! Simply slide the behavior to the new time you want in the timeline. Place the play-head on the first frame of the moved behavior and then select the clip the the behavior is attached to. Simply press the letter "i" to set a new In-point. The clip should start at the same point as the behavior. Now go to the end frame of the behavior, be sure to left arrow key back on frame select the clip again and press the letter "o". This sets the Out-point of the clip to the same as the behavior.

Challenge Course Leap of Death

Here's a shot of me jumping for a trapeze on Eastern's Challenge Course.

New Eastern Theater Ad

Here is the newly completed theater ad for Eastern Washington University. It will play regionally in theaters before movie. Eric Galey and Stu Steiner created the spot. They asked me to come in and mix the piece which I was glad to do. I hope you enjoy it. Tell me what you think about it.

Cross-Processing Effect

This is a shot of author Pat McManus I shot earlier this spring. I StumbledUpon an online Photoshop CS3 tutorial recreating the Cross-Processing effect. Back in the days of film, chemistry was a big deal. Each individual film stock had precise chemistry and processing recipes that had to be followed to generate the desired look. Occasionally, photographers would have happy mistakes where they followed the wrong recipe for particular emulsion. Colors would shift dramatically, grain would enlarge.

This is my attempt at recreating the effect. I had to tweak the tutorial a little bit . I think it looks like a lot like The Matrix.

From Lightroom to flickr by Magic

I was given a link to this great Lightroom 2 plugin by a good friend that throws me tidbits of social networking goodness occasionally. This plugin allows you to export directly to your authenticated flickr account. It is truly a timesaver.



This talented programmer is living in Japan. His name is Jeffrey Friedl. After downloading and installing the plugin I was having trouble with it enabling. I sent him a bug alert and he emailed me with a fix within a few hours. Great customer service for a guy that was just demo'ing his plugin.

The plugin basically puts the functionality of flickr into the export section of Lightroom. You can not only upload the exported media to flickr but you can click about a million option boxes to totally optimize the way your media is handled by flickr. You can put your photo in a preexisting set or create a new one. You can send the photo to a group photo pool. You can specify the level of permission the photo gets and then send a tweet about it.

I love it when software goes above and beyond by not only giving me what I want, but giving me 100 extra things that will give me new ideas for working. That's what makes great software. Check him out .

Big Projects: Good Riddance!?

I always love/hate big projects. I have been working on a large video project for the past six weeks and it is coming to an end. It entailed all of my production skills: writing, scheduling, shooting, editing, recording, mixing, and nearly endless tweaking. This project is the kind that has many management types contributing their opinions, and only little old me to carry them out. The piece is quite good and I am happy with it.

So now, I am moving on to another project that I have to have to manage from start to end. What this next project will hopefully lack is the layers of approval the previous project required. What I have been learning about video production lately is not how to make an effective three-point edit or how to trim a clip by three frames but how to get the client to tell you what they want. The client needs to understand that what they want is not the finished product, but the intended consequence. That is a major difference.

If your client walks in and wants a seven minute video, you will have a hard time pleasing them no matter what you give them. If what they want is clearly defined such as a marketing video that will appeal to an 18 - 24 year old male that will increase direct traffic to a website promoting a sports drink you have a definite strategy that is measurable and attainable.

The hardest part is still having your client understand your vision. There is no way around it. Non-creative people just don't get it. Their brains are not wired to understand creative people or creative things. They may nod their heads in agreement, but you might as well be speaking a foreign language. They just don't get it.

Twitter a Passing Fad?

I have recently become bored with Twitter, the social networking site that gives you only 140 characters to tell your story. Although forcing one to 140 characters has added succinctness to web correspondence, it limits you to speaking in "teasers". In news terms, a teaser is a when you set up a problem for the viewer right before a commercial break in the hopes of the viewer returning to the program after 2 minutes of mind-numbing marketing. An example of this would be "Stayed tuned to see if this tornado wipes out a school bus filled with second graders..."

You can see that if you set up an expectation in your audience then fail to meet that expectation you disappoint them and they will move on to another channel. The same thing happens with Twitter. Who really cares what you are doing at the moment? Why should I care that you found something cool on StumbleUpon and want to reTweet it?

I guess that I really don't care what you are doing. If you have created something interesting then tweet it. If you have nothing to say that is interesting or personal to you then don't.

I think this is the reason that so many tweeters are giving up on the process. Check out this article for more details.


http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,,25406742-36418,00.html

StumbleUpon as a Marketing Tool

Yesterday after implementing StumbleUpon tools including the Firefox toolbar I decided to do a little test. I picked one of my photo from a trip I had to Cannon Beach in January of this year. The light was great and the Nikon D60 performed admirable for its first time out of the box. I clicked on the "I like it!" button on the StumbleUpon toolbar. The results the next day were remarkable.



One great thing that flickr does is analytics on referring websites. This makes StumbleUpon a unique marketing tool that is measurable and trackable. You can clearly see just how effective StumbleUpon can be below. Similar to YouTube in it concept of channels, a user can tailor their stumbles to their own likes. Similarly your online content that you refer to StumbleUpon will be viewed only be users who have made a conscious decision to see content similar to yours.



The process I am developing is to incorporate this involves creating interesting, compelling assets then throw them out to social networks via facebook, twitter and StumbleUpon and ba-da-bing you have a pseudo-viral marketing campaign.

Stainless Steel Eagle Logo

20090413CampusTour009.jpg
Originally uploaded by ewuphoto

Here's a photo I took yesterday on a campus photoshoot. I cropped and color corrected the photo in Lightroom 2. I think the added vignette and intense yet muted highlights compliment it well.

StumbleUpon Buttons

I've recently been turned on to StumbleUpon by a co-worker. It is a website that is truly web surfing at its best. Instead of surfing by keywords or by links on a webpage, you surf by recommendations. Basically it's social networking where someone else does the surfing and you reap the benefits.

There is a toolbar you can download for Firefox that is utterly simple. Just click on the "Stumble!" button then you are off to some of the most interesting sites on the web. There is a log-on and a profile that you can create where you can tailor your stumble to different criteria. Mine include graphic design, photography and guitar. You can also send a stumble to your contacts which I have use quite a lot. Another feature is the "I like it!" button. It works rather like Pandora's thumbs up thumbs down feature and tailors future stumbles to your liking.

I found another tool to integrate StumbleUpon into other applications. I found it as a stumble from StumbleUpon itself. The Buttons & Tools is a another simple code generator that gives you many great options on the size of the button you wish to add to your blog. As you may have noticed I put a StumbleUpon button on the bottom of each of my blog entries. Now an interesting blog entry can be contributed to the global pool of stumbles.

2009 Spring Flowers

Spring flowers have survived the flowers at Eastern Washington University.

Flickr, the Future of Broadcasting?

Flickr can possibly have a actual real-world application?!

Let's say you have a number of large displays situated around you business. On these displays you show photos, events and marketing messages through PowerPoint. Now you can feed these displays through flickr. Shazam! Flickr is now something more than just an easier way to share photos with your friends.

Simply put your favorite photos in a set, click the slide show button, go full-screen and violá you are broadcasting you photos. The beauty about this is that you don't need the PowerPoint application on every computer you just need an internet connection and a browser. Updating is also supremely easy. Just drop an new photo in the set and arrange the order to your liking.

All this would be total awesomeness if only the slide shows would loop. Flicker built the best slide show solution on the web but forgot to put an option to loop. I wrote flickr a flickrmail. I got several responses, one of which I believed was actually from a person. I hope that they really consider this added functionality.

Is Twitter the Be All End All?

The integration of social media is the next leap in computing (human) evolution. I have always said that content means nothing without context. That being said, up until now the concept of creating digital media has been absolute, meaning it is a stand-alone entity. We create a photo to be put on a discrete website, we create bit of copy to be put on a discrete website never to be seen by anyone but the intended user.

Now we can create a photo or bit of copy that can be used and shared by millions with each use being referenced back to the creator. With that, context is king. It not what we have... but how do the things we have relate to other things. It is not enough to have a story, a map, a video, a photo, a graph, a pdf without their reference to other pertinent assets. That's where the rub comes. What is pertinent to the message?

Twitter is a great simple tool, but being simple it lacks serious functionality. Where Twitter shines is its ability to integrate itself into other media. That is the key to being viable in the future. How open is my network? How easy is to share my information with other? Why would anyone ever want to use me?

Pat McManus speaks at JFK

20090331PatMcManus079
Originally uploaded by ewuphoto

I shot this yesterday at the Pat McManus reading in the Kennedy Library on the Cheney campus of Eastern Washington University. The turn out was exceptional with approximately 350 people in attendance. The lighting in JFK is horrendous. Mixed lighting with overcast daylight streaming through the windows and a nasty mix of tungsten and fluorescents. I just picked a white balance that would give him the best skin tone. Pat McManus to see the rest of the set. for more photos.

Slideoo is the BOMB!!!

This handy slideshow from Slideoo is simply awesome. I can think of all kinds of marketing and branding opportunities for this puppy.

INPA on Location

It is the another "every other Thursday"... time for an INPA meeting. This time it is at a location in Spokane Valley that I have never been to before. I hope to learn lots. I'll twitter any important facts.

John and Ruth

John and Ruth
Originally uploaded by skypilot53

Here is a shot from Kurt Langland during our February '09 INPA shoot. It was really an incredible experience. If you are a photographer in Spokane check us out.

Twitter+Idiots=Death of the Jury System

A recent New York Times article gave the chilling tale of the idiots being chosen as jurors for our nation's courts causing mistrials because they can't stop twittering. I think the judges in these cases should let these morons spend a weekend in the county jail to think about what a fair trial means to them. If you can't stop twittering when under court order maybe you should be removed from society.

Flickring Digital Archives

Flickr's The Commons is a quiet revolution in digital media. Various government and private museums and archives from around the world have agreed to publish their photos to flickr and make them available to The Commons. You can download several sizes of some very famous photographs. You can link to them and email them to friends. One feature that appears lacking from all entities is the ability to embed. If that ability existed then I would have embedded one of those famous photos myself on this blog.

Flickr What Are You Doing?

This latest iteration of flickr stats is idiotic! Removing 'All time' views and referrers to add stats from 'So far today' is pure stupidity. A concise list of the most popular photos on our flickr site enables us to create target market driven content. Now that is gone. Here's an idea. Add to functionality don't take it away.

Your customers expect a certain level of service. I feel like they are in breach of contract. I spend $25 a year and expect things to remain as they are unless I get a notice. Don't they have anyone that does customer service over there?

Twitter Spurs Education

Calendar Blur
Originally uploaded by John Demke

I just created this by using Illustrator and Photoshop. I found this tutorial with a link found on a twitter feed from Layers Magazine. If you have engaging content then tweet it.

Embedded flickr Slideshows Increase Visiblity

A few months ago we placed a link to a embedded flickr slideshow on the University's home page. The concept was to provide a quick glimpse of life at Eastern without spending a lot of time programming it. After researching several different flickr enabled slideshows we settled on flickr's own. It is clean and easily re-sizable and loads very quickly. Another great asset is the full-screen mode. Our Admissions reps can show this to a group of prospective students with a projector. This is a great tool for small businesses. It is up to you to create good perceptions of your business and enable others to see them.

To date we have recorded 1,787 visits to our Photo Tour page. That is fairly significant as it makes up 5.5% of all the traffic on our flickr site. Not bad seeing that it took about two days to make to page. Now I am creating new flickr slide shows for individual departments and programs for them to embed on their sites. Share with me how you are using flickr slide shows.

Twittering Old Fool

I finally did it! I set my cell phone, and not a smart phone at that, as in device to feed my twitter account. Now I get the joy of texting to #40404 and watching my tweet propagate to my facebook and blog. It is truly a magical experience. I just am wondering how useful it is.

A Bridge to flickr: Metadata Propagation

Here's a little table that is in beta. It is an attempt to determine what metadata fields Adobe Bridge inputs and flickr outputs. This can help with serialization of media content.

Data Sets	Adobe Bridge CS3	flickr.com
File Properties	Filename	*Information may be propagated from Filename, Title or Headline.
	Document Type	File Type:
	Application	Software:
	Date File Created	Date and Time (Original):
	Date File Modified	Date and Time (Modified):
	File Size	File Size:
	Dimensions	Image Width: and Image Height:
	Dimensions (in inches)	Dependant upon Dimensions and Bit Depth
	Resolution	X-Resolution: and Y-Resolution:
	Bit Depth	Bits Per Sample:
	Color Mode	Color Space:
IPTC Core	Creator	Artist: and By-line:
	Creator: Job Title	By-line Title:
	Creator: Address	Creator Address:
	Creator: City	Creator City:
	Creator: State/Province	Creator Region:
	Creator: Postal Code	Creator Postal Code:
	Creator: Phone(s)	Creator Work Telephone:
	Creator: Email(s)	Creator Work Email:
	Creator: Website(s)	Creator Work URL:
	Headline	Headline:
	Description	Caption- Abstract:
	Keywords	Keywords: and Subject:
	IPTC Subject Code	Subject Code:
	Description Writer	Caption Writer:
	Date Created*	Date Created:
	Intellectual Genre	Intellectual Genre:
	IPTC Scene	Scene:
	Location	Location:
	City	City:
	State/Province	Province- State:
	Country	Country- Primary Location Name:
	ISO Country Code	Country Code:
	Title	Object Name:
	Job Identifier	Original Transmission Reference:
	Instructions	Instructions:
	Provider	Credit:
	Source	Source:
	Copyright Notice	Copyright:
	Copyright Status
	Rights Usage Terms	Usage Terms:
	Raw Filename	Raw File Name:
Camera Data (EXIF)	Exposure Mode	Exposure Mode:
	Focal Length	Focal Length:
	Lens	Lens:
	Max Aperture Value	Max Aperture Value:
	Flash	Flash Mode:
	Metering Mode	Metering Mode:
	Custom Rendered	Custom Rendered:
	White Balance *Note this value is of the original image.	White Balance: *Note this value is of the original image.
	Scene Capture Type	Scene Capture Type:
	Serial Number	*Not displayed.
Camera Raw	Raw Filename	Raw File Name:
	White Balance *Note this value is of the adjusted Raw image.	White Balance: *Note this value is of the adjusted Raw image.
	Temperature	Temperature:
	Tint	Tint:
	Exposure	Exposure:
	Recovery	Saved Settings Parameters Highlight Recovery:
	Fill Light	Saved Settings Parameters Fill Light:
	Blacks	Shadows:
	Brightness	Brightness:
	Contrast	Contrast:
	Vibrance	Vibrance:

Profile Widget

Profile Widget
Originally uploaded by John Demke

A fun little widget that creates a banner for your flickr profile using your photos and stats. It is free by a site called Big Huge Labs. The cool thing is that it is dynamic. When you change your content or contacts the image changes which is totally awesome. They have some pretty cool stuff to check out on their site.

Ruth at INPAs February Shoot

Ruth
Originally uploaded by John Demke

Here's another frame from this past February's INPA shoot. This is Ruth, a very willing model.

Kristina at INPA

Kristina
Originally uploaded by John Demke

Here is a frame I shot at the last INPA meeting and photoshoot held Thursday February 26th. Peter Boden and Paddy Hoy were so generous to let me snap a few frames on their set using their model Kristina. I was interested in their DIY lighting devices. This is shot with their cardboard tubes.

I have so much to learn about flash photography. I am going to bring my soft boxes next time.

INPA Photoshoot

I just got back from the Inland Northwest Photographer Assembly photoshoot and I am stoked. I found this association through their flickr group. There were about thirty photographers and models in attendance. Many photographers set up portrait studios in various room in the Web.com building on Washington Street. The vibe was great. I felt excited and everyone there were very understanding, engaging and willing to give advice. I learned a lot about strobe photography in particular, something which I am truly lacking in. I am so excited to go shoot some of my own stuff.

Cheap (and Accurate) Color Photo Printing at Costco

Last fall, Adobe came to campus and gave an all- day seminar about their new CS4 products. I really enjoyed the new functionality of Photoshop including their improved panoramic stitcher. The lecturer mentioned something to the class which blew me away. He said that you could print color photos accurately from Costco.

Costco hired Dry Creek Photo to color profile every one of their photo printers and place those profiles on the web. The benefit of having the color profile of a specific printer is that you can accurately adjust your photograph in Photoshop to show you what the print is going to look like. How many times have you gotten photos back and the seem too dark?

So the question is why spend the money for expensive photo printing when you can go to Costco and get a Polish dog and a Coke for $1.50? Be sure to follow all of the instructions on the Dry Creek site for best results.

The Two Towers

Here's another frame from my winter vacation to Cannon Beach. Check out my Landscapes set to see other shots like these.

Metadata in Bridge

Adobe Bridge CS3 is a great tool for browsing photos, videos, and documents, but it really excels at is metadata editing. Metadata is the extra stuff, besides actual picture data, that can accompany a digital photograph. There are two classes of metadata within Bridge: EXIF and IPTC Core.

EXIF is fixed, uneditable data that comes directly from your camera. It contains a host of cool information about the focal length of the lens, the shutter speed, the ISO and metering amongst others. One of the more Big Brother-esque bits of data is that it records the camera's serial number, so if you sent your product registration into Nikon, they now know every time you post a picture to flickr. Spooky.

IPTC Core are editable values that can contain information about the photographer, the copyright status and location of the shoot. The most interesting values that can be input are the title, description and tags. When you information in these fields magic happens when you upload them to flickr. These metadadata fields propagate themselves to the same fields in flickr. So by entering this important data in Bridge, you have the information for your own back up plus you don't have to reenter it when you post it to flickr. The data is pretty durable also. I uploaded a photo to flickr, downloaded it to another computer, uploaded it to Picasa and all the metadata came with it. It was awesome.

Flickr Slide Shows: An Easy Way to Show your Stuff

At Eastern Washington University, I am working to push the utilization and power of our online photo archive housed on flickr. Our site, ewuphoto, contains over 1,300 original photos and has accumulated almost 30,000 hits. What makes flickr cool is it built-in sharing functionality. You can download, link, email and embed approved content from our site but the killer app is its slide shows.

The slide shows are great. The content can be pulled directly from a bunch of different criteria including: photostreams, collections, sets and keywords. They look great, can be resized to fit different frames and can go full-screen with the single button click. Check out EWU's phototour for a great example of how this was implemented. In this case I made a set in flickr unique to the slide show. The slide show is Flash and it loads pretty quickly. The beauty of this is that if you want to change the photos in your slide show you don't have to go and rebuild the flash document, you simply go to flickr and update the set with the photos you want. Utter simplicity.

Careful Browsing: Finder vs. Bridge

Attention graphic designers! All is not what it appears to be. I had this problem come up yesterday at work. A designer in my department came into my office to see a preview of the latest photos I shot for a new marketing campaign. I put the images in the photo archive on the shared server and he went back to his cubicle. He IM'ed me a few moments later stating that he didn't see the color correction to the DNG files on his machine.

It turns out that he was using the Finder in MacOSX Jaguar to browse the photos. Apple has done some pretty good work in enabling their Finder to view camera RAW files, which is far better than Microsoft. But it doesn't apply the Develop settings embedded in the metadata to the preview. Hence when he views the files with the Finder the photos don't look color corrected. After I told him to try Adobe Bridge the color corrections showed on his previews.

The moral of this story is to always browse photos in Bridge and not the Finder.

Saving Lightroom Edits to Metadata

Lightroom is a great tool for digitally developing photos. It does what Adobe Bridge, DNG Convertor and Camera Raw 4.0 do in one easy package. The problem is that it doesn't do what Bridge does well... namely working with metadata. When you change metadata in Bridge such as a keyword or a develop setting the changes are saved to the DNG file automatically. In Light room the metadata may be saved to the Library, but not to the metadata. So when you make the perfect crop and white balance adjustment in Lightroom those changes will not appear in Bridge. You have to save the settings in Lightroom manually using the ctrl-s keystroke as it does not exist in the Edit tab.

Also another note: if you are in the Develop module you can only save the metadata of one file at a time, even if you select all. I found that if you jump back to the Library module, select all then save, all of your files will be updated.

The New Adobe CS4 is More Organic

I found this on a facebook friend's photo page. It is actually a flickr photo. This Japanese photostream is very avante garde and I love it. Check it out.

Score Me!

I just found a fun new way to interact with other people's photos on flickr. Score Me! (post 1, score 5) is a flickr Group that requires you to rate the photo of five other photographers in order to post your own. In return you get five rating on your own photo. It is pretty interesting to see how others view your art. It also forces you to evaluate others. I think I grade a little easily. Usually nothing lower that a 5.

The Other Father

I watched Coraline on Saturday with my family. I was pleasantly surprised in the fine quality of the story-telling. It may have been a little too deep for my 7 year-old, but the 10 year-old got it.

There is a cool flash builder on the site that allows you to upload a photo and put buttons over you eyes. Check it out.

My Little Hulk

Matt loves wearing costumes, always has. I hope he never grows out of wanting to pretend. I took this shot with my Nikon D60 with the onboard flash. I like the concentrated flash in the center of the frame.

Sick at Home

Last night was rough. I had to sleep with a bucket next to the bed. My dear wife was very nurturing as brought me Advil. I am such a baby when I am sick. She tolerates my "wussiness" like any wife learns to after being married for a few years. Yes, my wife is tougher than me when it comes to being sick.

My New Favorite Photo

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