First of all, my apologies for the graphic nature of this shot… But Grace wants the world to see how effective this thing is…
We’ve tried, for the longest time, to use a bulb syringe to help clear Bryan’s congested nasal of mucus. But he hated it because the syringe is rather intrusive in nature. But this nasal aspirator works pretty effectively and got a lot of the mucus out in a few minutes what it’d take me 10 minutes or longer to do with a bulb syringe.
I spent sometime upgrading this blog to the latest and greatest… Unfortunately I spent way too much time on this biatch than I’d like to. But at least now I am in full compliance to the latest WordPress specs in terms of how things should be done instead of me hacking around the code base. There are still some quirks to work out, but at least they aren’t invisible to visitors (well, unless you are extremely sharp-eyed).
One thing I was surprised is broken in 2.3 is some small parts of the WP Tiger Admin plugin — one of my absolute favorite. Fortunately it’s nothing serious that’d stop me from using the theme, merely some interface quirks that just look annoying. I am a little disappointed that the author hasn’t fixed them yet… But no big deal.
So that’s one less thing I have to think about from now on…
I find it amusing to see the very few among the student body who are using unmarked laptops… and some of them are even using just plain pen and paper… 🙂 It must’ve been a long time since I went to college. The reversal in Mac:PC ratio in classrooms is astounding. I find it hard that anyone would best against Apple nowadays in both the stock market and the PC market.
PBS’s Curious George has been our favorite pass time both as storybooks and half-hour TV shows. Grace found the clip below on Youtube. And I think it’s possibly one of the best commercially animated clips that is fun for both the parents and young kids in terms of entertainment value and education!
That George is just so nicely drawn and animated… Stuff like that makes me miss doing animation… (but not modeling, lighting, texture mapping skeleton setups, character rigs or any of that technical stuff)
The character design was done by the moderately famed Shane Prigmore and Shannon Tindle. And I feel that the fine 2D lead animator Jeff Johnson also deserves credit… We are gonna have to watch the movie.
Last night I saw the storming coming and rushed to a mountain to snap a few shots. Unfortunately I got there a tad bit too late and missed that "magical" light that nature photographers talk about.
To make matters worse, at the end of the shoot, I saw a perfect juxtaposition of the moon against the oncoming storm and was about to snap a few more shots, that’s when I found out my CF card had been totally corrupted. And before I could swap it out with another CF card, the "moment" was gone… I was pissed. This image was among the few salvaged from the corrupted card where dozens were lost.
I was talking to Norris last night to catch up on stuff, and I asked how he liked his PowerBook that he’d bought cheap and used from another friend before he moved back to Canada. Keep in mind, Norris has been a die hard Windows guy. And when he first got his Mac, he had a few gripes and groaned about certain usability issues.
Fast forward to a few months later, now he proclaims he’d never EVER go back to Windows ever again — NEVER! Having been a Windows fan boy for so long, he explained why (almost) everything on a Mac is simply more superior and simple to use:
1. Everything just works;
2. Superior and more stable 3rd party apps; he said on Windows, you have to “figure out” how some apps work if it came from a 3rd party. But on a Mac, you just expect everything to work without you having to know how or even to 2nd guess why… Now, this was exactly what I was talking about. You miss out quite a bit of fun just by using Windows even if by some godly divine intervention your Windows box somehow never crashes or catches a virus/malware/Trojan.
3. Mac OSX is rock solid; can’t say that about Windows XP or even Vista; he had to use Vista for 2 days and was ready to throw it out of the Window at the end. He ended up IMing another friend about how to install Mac OSX on his IBM laptop — that’s how much he loves Mac OSX.
4. He proclaims that eventually people will see the light and start using Mac OSX;
5. He’s in so far as to ponder on getting certified as a Mac OSX support guy!
So I guess the lesson is, shut up and stop whining about Mac OSX if you’ve never even used it for more than a few minutes in an Apple Store. Once you’ve understood it like Norris has… well… once you go Mac, you can never go back!
On a related note, I took Bryan to the mall the other day and saw that, again, the Apple Store was pack house… while the stupid Dell “booth” got a few tumble weeds strolling by and was dead as ever. I wonder why Dell does that — setting up a booth to fail. It seems like they tried to put up some kind of physical presence to demonstrate how “great” Dell computers are… But even die hard Dell/Windows fan boys I know would be embarrassed to be seen interacting with the ugly booth.
We went to a birthday party last weekend and snapped some good shots. It seems like the only things we ever do nowadays are centered around the kids (as the way we like it). But some of our childless friends are having a “kid picture overdose”… I think the sheer idea of having children makes their heads spin. And then there are those who plan their activities purely around the adults and try to fit the kids in as inconveniences they try to solve (poor kids).
We went to a pumpkin patch with Bryan’s usual play dates over the weekend. It was unusually warm considering how crazy the weather had been in the days prior to that. The kids had fun, except Bryan still felt pretty sick and didn’t feel like jumping in for the fun.
The biggest lesson I got out of these past two photo sessions has been figuring out a comfortable work flow I can live with for dealing with 300+ images from each session. The colors are also becoming more consistent after monitor calibration, finalized output work flow using Apple’s Aperture, Photoshop and a decent conversion setting from Adobe RGB to sRGB color spaces. I’ve been getting some very constructive and positive feedbacks on the shots. Have a visit to my Flickr page and tell me what you like, dislike or any other thoughts on your mind!
I spent a day at Bryan’s pre-school last week to take some photographs in preparation for a portfolio I can use for commercial use. Photographing a bunch of active kids was definitely much tougher than I expected… But boy, did I get some great shots…
Generally speaking I think having invested in a MacBook Pro was one of the best investments in hardware equipment I’ve made for computing. But in terms of arts and photography, it’s looking a bit weak on the color front. My Eye-One monitor calibrator finally arrived today. So I ran a few tests trying to calibrate my monitor based on a few conditions. But at the end of the test, I was surprised to find that MacBook Pro’s gamut is actually pretty damn small compared to even sRGB!
Luckily Rob Galbraith found a fix for the 2nd gen MacBook Pro I have. Interestingly, he also noted that the latest LED-based MacBook Pros are the best of all laptops he’s tested as far as color accuracy is concerned. I look forward to the day when I can justify getting a decent display to edit photos with. Clean my mac x will help to monitor the system and optimize the storage.
I guess Ken Rockwell ain’t lying when he said color management is a silly thing to do unless you have super high end equipment that can both display and print those beautiful wide gamuts that digital cameras capture. Maybe I should dump Adobe RGB and go sRGB all the way instead since it seems no consumer grade monitor can even display anywhere close to the Adobe RGB gamut range… And most consumer grade print shops only print in sRGB, I could save myself a lot of grief having to manage and convert Adobe RGB to sRGB all the time! Hmmm…
It’s pretty rare to have both “arts” and “geek stuff” categorized for an entry. But I guess this is the beginning of things to come for me — back to the roots.
After not having touched photography in any serious capacity for 11 years, I recently started investing in the craft again. Brian agreed that I should diversify and do what I enjoy the most and try to make money with it. Instead of going back to film, I retired my faithful Nikon N8008s and picked up the most “film-like” DSLR I knew (Fujifilm S5 Pro, which is based on Nikon D200 body) and some new gears to go along with it.
I was pretty fluent and advanced with film and darkroom techniques having experimented heavily with black and white film and silver prints in college*. But the age of digital media ushered me into a whole new game in terms of photographic techniques with digital darkroom (or so to speak). Not surprisingly Photoshop rules in this area… So now I am scrambling to catch up having to learn more advanced techniques in post production processing. It will be a glorious day when the earnings from my photography breaks even with all the investments in equipment and time I have made.
Fortunately some parents that Grace hangs out with really like my shots of their kids and are thinking about paying me to photograph them for special events. My jaw dropped when one of the moms told Grace that an event held by her parents cost them nine G for a photographer. Then I went back to dig out the website of one of my wedding photographers whom agreed to be a backup photographer for almost nothing because she’d just started out doing wedding shoots — she now charges between $2,200 to $4,500 depending on the package; things must have been good for Connie.
I am excited but at the same time feeling a bit late to the digital photography game and doing it seriously. That scares me a little. It’s like asking me to go back to doing CG, special effects and all that crazy 3D stuff again — I know the basics and used to know quite a bit, but the industry has left me behind to rot while everything else has been advancing in leaps and bounds.
Nonetheless, let the good times roll. Hopefully my deteriorating back pain can take the abuse of toddler/children photography**. 😉
* I have Tom Fischer to thank for his Zone System class. There’s no better person to learn Zone System from as far as I am concerned since Tom was one of the top disciples of Ansel Adams having been Adams’ assistant/student for a number of years. And I also have Craig Stevens to thank for all the expensive flim/paper/chemical combo experiments — that was possibly the single most expensive class I’ve ever had in college other than color photography.
** Try squatting a hundred times within a few hours trying to take pictures at the same eye level as those toddlers while trying to chase them and capture the best shots…. Hanging out with kids is fun (the gentle ones are), but taking good shots of them is hard. I think my S5 Pro already feels a bit slow for them.
Chase Jarvis takes great images as a commercial photographer. But he could really take a page from Steve Jobs on his presentation skills.
Nonetheless, Jarvis hit a few great points on the nature of photography business. We’d been warned a few times back in college about them, but it was refreshing to hear them again from a successful pro. One interesting fact he made in this presentation was: Out of about 2,000 images during his shoots, only about six to 10 get picked for final editing — I once told Brian that great photography, skills and techniques aside, also has a lot to do with statistics. If I gave Bryan a digital camera to snap around all day long, a few of the images are bound to be interesting or even great to look at. However, it’s the consistency and depth at which great images are made that define the greatness of a photographer.
So off we go. Happy clicking.
via [Strobist]
Incidentally, Jarvis also has the sweetest on-location photography laptop setup…
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via [chasejarvis.com]