Pearl

Some of you may have seen the short with with Will Ferrell called, "The Landlord". I'll not include a link in this post but Google it and ye shall find.

A few years ago I was approached by our InFlight group about doing a short video along the same lines. So here is a fun little video, despite it's technical challenges. It's never easy shooting on an airplane.

 

A year or so after we made this video we revisited the whole idea of Pearl and made an entire series of videos featuring Pearl, played by Livia Hirsch, whose mother is a flight attendant and father is the captain in the video above. Each was a bit of a challenge, not because of Livia though. It's just tricky to plan a shoot when you need an aircraft and you're always at the mercy of maintenance pulling the plane out to go replace one that got called off the line for one reason or another. 

This was a really fun project to do and I am still in touch with this family today. Livia is growing up and can still sport the attitude. Hope you enjoy this.

Proud Parent

So we went out and braved the crowds at a few stores on Black Friday. This is usually not the way I like to spend that day but at least I was with my wife and daughter so it was fine.

Lily, our two-year-old is an avid reader--at least she thinks she is. I have wanted to snag a photo of this for some time and I finally got it yesterday so here it is.

Carefully inspecting a Finding Nemo book.

iPhoto...

I mentioned in my last post that I'd be blogging about iPhoto. I realize that the majority of those reading this blog are not Mac users, but this is worth some discussion in my humble opinion.

Every new Mac comes with a suite of software called iLife. This software package is meant to help people document and share their memories. It has a video editor called iMovie, a music creation app called Garageband, and last but not least, a photo manager called iPhoto. These are all tightly integrated and allow you to get creative with you photos and your music.

iPhoto offers a lot of truly compelling features to let you manage and make great things with your photos. Like Picasa, iPhoto has a feature called faces that will scan through the photos you add to your library and  analyze them. It comes back with suggestions based on your feedback and will get "smarter" every time you use it. This is a really neat way to sort your images and allows you to looks back over time and almost have time flash before your eyes. It also has the standard features of albums, keywords and events to help you keep track of your photos. If your camera shoots video, those clips will automatically be added alongside the photos you add.

If you go for weeks or months before you import your photos off your camera you have the option to split the events as they come into your computer by the date they were shot. iPhoto also looks for information about the location where the photo was taken. Many smartphones and some of the newer cameras on the market embed this information in the file. iPhoto will bring up pins on a Google map and show you where your photos were taken.

iPhoto sports a full spread of image editing tools all of which are non-destuctive, meaning you cannot accidentally edit the original. You may not know that every time a JPG image is opened, edited and saved it loses quality much like photo copying a photocopy.

For being a piece of bundled software this is a really nice image manager and editor. If you have a Mac you should give this a look.

Photo Management vs. Photo Editing

In my last post I wrote about dipping into Photoshop. But long before we even get to photo editing we should talk about photo management, because there is a HUGE difference. With digital cameras having been in the mainstream for almost a decade there hundreds and often thousands of images in any one person's library. When was the last time you looked through your images to see what you have and where you've been?

The idea of photo management is that you sort, group and share your photos. Even the best photographers don't have perfect photos with every shot. They go through their shoots and decide which pictures are junk, which ones are worth taking a second look at and which photos are definitely the keepers and will be sent to Photoshop for further editing to make them perfect.

There are several ways of going about this task. I'll go over some options in order of price point. Let's start with FREE.

Google has made a pretty good piece of software called Picasa that works almost seamlessly with you Gmail and Blogger. It's completely free and you don't even need a Google account to get it.

Picasa will search through all of your computer (or just the folders you want if you prefer) and will load them into folders. From these Picasa will search for faces and uses some pretty advanced computing to find all the similar faces so you can created groupings of photos of the same person. Pretty cool. It will also let you so some basic editing like red-eye removal and brightness/contrast.

For being free this software is really a good deal. If you're not using anything to help you keep track of your pics. Give it a look. You just might find it handy.

Tomorrow: iPhoto and Photoshop Elements

Entry to Photoshop

If anyone is looking into dipping into Photoshop but don't want to fork out the big bucks to buy the app and then have nothing to do with it, may I recommend a piece of hardware. The best part is that Photoshop Elements comes bundled as well as a few other apps depending on the level of product you buy.

The device in question is called the Wacom Bamboo. The Bamboo is a small, entry-level graphics tablet. It comes with a stylus but no mouse. It leaves out the mouse because it is also a touch device, much like a trackpad, iPhone or iPad. It features a technology called multi-touch which is explained in the video below.

Multi-Touch Explained

The Stylus
A stylus is similar to a pen without any ink. The surface of the tablet and the stylus itself interact to make over 1,000 levels of sensitivity. This sensitivity can be used to make a brush more or less transparent as it's applied or to increase or decrease the size of the brush.

In some programs, the stylus can be used as a handwriting device. While it's not as fast as typing it can be a more natural approach for certain people.

The best description I have ever heard about the difference between using a stylus as opposed to the mouse is like drawing or writing with a fine pencil or writing with a bar of soap. It really offers a level of control that is simply impossible with a mouse. Now, depending on how hard you push or how far you tilt the pen you will get reactions from brushes that let you paint or apply effects to your images.

There are several benefits to using a tablet outside graphics and multimedia. Wrist strain and carpel tunnel syndrome pain are greatly reduced when a trackpad and/or a stylus is used. It takes some time to get accustomed to pointing with the stylus but it often becomes something most users cannot work without.


I mentioned bundled software. Each of the Bamboo tablets comes with a few pieces of software to help you get the most out of your tablet. The entry level Bamboo comes with an app called Sketchbook Express from Autodesk This app mimics real world brushes and paper and is a really fun way to get ideas on paper (pixels actually).

The top level, Bamboo Create come with three apps: Sketchbook, Painter Essentials and Photoshop Elements. If you were to go buy all the bundled software separately you would spend much more than the cost of the tablet.

The Bamboo offers three models: Connect, Capture and Create and is priced at $79, $99 and $199 respectively.

Blur be gone!

This week I want to show you some amazing tech coming from the Adobe labs.
This month Adobe hosts its MAX Conference where they show off their latest offerings and each year they show off a handful of whiz-bang new features. This year they showed a feature of Photoshop that will definitely help anyone who owns a camera.

Plays nicely with others…

This weekend as part of my pixel pushing efforts I was asked to shoot my younger cousin's wedding. Cool. Aside from being pretty good money and having a very refined process that makes it simple for me, I rather enjoy shooting for people I know…especially family.

The interesting thing was not the bride, nor the groom, nor the excitement that they finally got married. It was the interaction I had with the photographer. This was my first time shooting with this particular one and let's just hope it was my last. I have shot well over one hundred weddings over the last eight years and I have never had an interaction like this.

I need to explain one thing before I give you a handful of highlights from the day. As you may have read lately on the web or head while you were in the electronics department somewhere, most of the new still cameras from Canon, Nikon and Sony now shoot HD video. When combined with the right lens the footage as absolutely brilliant so I asked my younger brother, Craig, if he'd be willing to come out and shoot a second camera for me. He said he'd be happy to.
Here we are at the Bountiful LDS temple waiting for the bride and groom to exit and greet their families and the celebrations to begin. Craig and I are in different places gathering shots of family and friends as they wait. Everything is cool until the photographer approaches Craig and asks him to put the camera away to which Craig responds, “I'm here with the videographer and I'm shooting video for him.” The guy didn't know what to say so he left Craig alone and went to finish getting ready.

A few minutes later I'm at the very last door before the happy couple exits and I see the photographer (no I won't give you his real name, so let's call him Buddy Boy) approach so I reach out to introduce myself as Joe, the videographer. I didn't know at the time that he had the previous discussion with Craig. Buddy Boy had a puzzled look on his face and seemed so thrown off that he had to ask me three times what my name was. Apparently, Joe is a difficult name to remember.

My cousin and her new husband finally came out to greet us and my work began, but I quickly saw that this was going to be a bit of a challenge to work with Buddy Boy. He seemed to not care one bit about the work that I was doing and constantly walked in front of my shots for the first few minutes. It got even better when a few minutes later I was walking just ahead of the couple getting one of my signature shots and Buddy Boy came from behind, grabbed me by the arm and told me that I needed to stay by him and that I was ruining his work.

So I went into my "difficult photog" mode which is to do everything I can to still get my shots without holding up the event or cause a scene. That seemed to be working out well till we were at our next-to-last location. I told Craig that I needed a handful of shots to use for the DVD cover and disc label and to use the camera I had given him to get them. So we were shooting and all the sudden Buddy Boy turns to Craig and says, “I can't have you taking photos of my shots and posting them on Facebook, man.”

I turned to him and said, “He's doing exactly what I told him to do. He's shooting video almost all the time. I have told him to take several photos for the printed parts of what I'm doing. Can we get the shoot done please?”
Buddy Boy finished his shoot and left me to finish my work. I got my last couple shots and apologized to my cousin and her husband about the incident a little earlier. They said it was no problem and thanked em for coming out and I turned to leave.

When I got to the parking garage Buddy Boy was waiting for me. 'Oh great,' I thought. I then got a sort of lecture about how unprofessional Craig and I had behaved and that it was inappropriate to have another photographer on-site. I told him very calmly that I backed Craig up 100 percent in how he was working and that in eight years I had never had a wedding that was this difficult to shoot. He did not appreciate that tried to justify his position several more ways but I was not buying it. I had had enough of his whining so I said, "We're done here and this conversation is over." to which he replied, "You're walking away because you know I'm right and you're wrong."

So I'm opening it up to you as commentators, was it inappropriate for me to have a second camera there that could and did capture still images to be used on their final video? Let me know your thoughts on the matter.