Category: personal

Saturday scenes

JasonLeave a comment

While I finish out the next tutorial on sharpening in LAB mode, here’s a few tidbits from around the web from this morning.  Popular Photography has a good basic set of guidelines for people on composition and making your photos pop!  Check it out on their website here.  The Online Photographer also has some good links up for those interested in photography news and such from Friday, so surf over there when you have a half hour to spare (dense reading at times, so not for a quick scan).

The Digital Photography show featured Chris Orwig from Wacom on their last podcast, who came on to talk about their latest innovative tablets with a bamboo theme.  These apparently also caught the eye of PC Magazine who wrote rave reviews about them too.  Check out DPS and the PC Mag reviews for more details here and here respectively.  (The podcast is a weekly routine for me…so shout outs to Scott and Michael…)

The sharpening video podcast should be up in a few more hours.  In the meantime, happy shooting!!!

Outpatients and outages, but we have a new tutorial!

JasonLeave a comment

It’s been a few days since making a post, as there have been a few issues that have come up, not the least of which was an outage or two from my provider. As a result, I was not able to get online for more than a few minutes at a clip for Monday and Tuesday as a result.

Additionally, I had an outpatient procedure done yesterday at the Doctor’s Office so I needed a little time to recuperate after that. Things are slowly working their way back to normal though, and I have the first in a two part series of tutorials designed to give some insight to my work flow and the use of the LAB workspace for both lightness and curves adjustments. Check them out via the link at the end of this post. In the meantime, happy shooting, and I’ll be back in a day or two with the remainder of the LAB work space tutorial…

Curves Adjustments in LAB

Weekend Wrap-up

JasonLeave a comment

Quite a few newsworthy things happened between Friday and today.  The legendary Scott Kelby gives us his top ten (actually 11) blogs to visit – among them those of fellow gurus, Matt Kloskowski and  Dave Cross.  Others that made the list include Moose Peterson, John Nack, and David Ziser.  While it’s always fun to see what others, the best part is that he invites others to post their favorites in his comments section.  Given the visibility of Scot’s blog on the internet, many are obviously taking obvious advantage of the opportunity to shamelessly plug their own sites.  So…it’s become quite an extensive list of blogs, and CB shall take advantage of the opportunity itself here before the day is over.   I’d highly recommend stopping over to see what fun stuff is there for useful info.

In other news, there’s a great tip on Strobist for implementing a ring light in a pinch.

Since this is the Canon Blogger, I should probably give a nod to DPReview on their informative analysis of two new Canon printers, the Selphy ES2 and the ES20 with pretty fair results.  May be worth checking out depending on your printing needs.  Canon’s press release on the products are also available in their newsroom here:  Canon Newsroom

Finally, for the 3 or 4 people that read this besides myself, the weekend trip to Baltimore was a lot of fun.  It was good to see the family, and I got a few neat shots from Camden Yards where the New York Yankees squeaked out a win over Baltimore.

Terrible Tuesday Stwess!!

JasonLeave a comment

Well, terrible Tuesday’s post is about the length of my latest video podcast severely biting me in the you-know-what.   As it turns out, Flash has this limitation of 160,000 frames, so to circumvent that, there seems to be only two options:  record in shorter segments and splice them together in Flash with Action scripts (I don’t have Flash…using another software solution right now, still in trial form…), or encode as a FLV file (the shorter flash videos have been encoded with the more common SWF format.  SWF gives higher resolution, loads faster, and is also more common…so I didn’t even know much about FLV prior to tonight and my history with swf/flv players in WordPress.  Well, since I don’t own flash, my only real option was to encode as an FLV file.  This is taking forever!  I am now looking into how to do Action scripts and purchasing Flash as it seems this might be a more viable long term solution for me…but, it does delay the Camera Raw tutorial another day.  It did give me some time to sit down re-tune the blog to allow for embedding flash video files locally, without needing to hang a video podcast out there hanging in the wind where it can’t get picked up by the all-important blogger feeds of the masses (iTunes included). So, I think I shall call it a night early, and make sure things are picture perfect tomorrow after work. For today, I guess the “masses” that tune in will just have to wait along with me in agony!

No news for Monday

JasonLeave a comment

Well, that may not be entirely true, as Tips from The Top Floor has a few updates both in audio and video format, so stop over there for some weekyl news and info about Chris’ trip to the great ole U.S. of A. He’s going from CO on to California, and then some other place before finishing up in St. Lucie FL, so if you get a chance between now and Oct. 18th to listen/view – you may wanna do so as now I am even thinking of making my way down there for a few days.

Please also say a prayer for Scott Sherman and Michael Stein from The Digital Photography Show. Before this week I did not know that their affiliation began because both their children are affected by Cerebral Palsy.   Scott’s had to have a surgical procedure this last week, and yet he still managed to find some time to produce the show. Suffice to saw, I would have been long gone and Canon Blogger would not have even been on my radar – so thanks to Scott and Michael and my prayers go out to both of you as you walk this noble path – esp. to Scott given the recency of its impact on his life personally.

Finally, Strobist had a couple cool posts recently, first one about Flickr where you can see your “ranking” on there – serious submitters only though as if it’s less than that, you probably won’t show up many times. Another cool post is about using small off-camera lights to help illuminate landscapes. A neat example is there too, so go check that out.

Finally, another podcast is ready for viewing! I did run out of time for production tonight though, so will have to wait until tomorrow to finish it, but promise a rather lengthy one (about 30 minutes) is forthcoming and discusses quite a few details about working in Camera Raw for your post processing. Stay tuned and it should be online in less than 24 hours! Until tomorrow then…Happy Shooting!

Closing out the week with a new tutorial!

JasonLeave a comment

That’s right, I’ve finally got enough of an act together to record a new tutorial. It’s another Photoshop tip, and this week is kind of a tangential feature of Photoshop, in that it’s not one you would typically use Photoshop to produce as Adobe has other products that perform this function better. There are also other applications on the market that do this equally well, and probably with equal if not better results, but if you don’t have them, PS is a neat alternative, especially for preserving things like drop-shadows and text style treatments like gradients and other stuff commonly associated with Photoshop. In any case, the tutorial is linked at the end of this post. You can download for iTunes from the link as well.

In other news, I also was able to successfully arise early enough to catch a sunrise shoot at Isle of Palms today. I had my trusty Canon XT with me, and I found myself enjoying swapping between the 18-55 kit lens, a Sigma macro lens, and my Canon 70-200 4.0 L The colors were okay, but nothing really spectacular to write home about thus far in my review of the shots. I’ll hopefully have a few to share tomorrow, but in the meantime, enjoy the video podcast. Until next time, Happy Shooting and enjoy the weekend!

Creating PDF files in Photoshop

Non-photo post again today

JasonLeave a comment

Hate to do this two days in a row, but I am just swamped at work, and got home quite late.  Suffice to say, I am still very low on the learning curve for the MBP and may have to resort to a Windows box for the next post with any meaningful content.  Although I will say I am a little confused about the available tracks for Garage Band.  I would think that these tracks would be included when shipped if it’s as easy as a download away.  WHy force us through a 2 gig downoad?  Plus, if Garage Band tracks are independent of the Software Update service, then why make us go through SUS first before downloading the latest patch files and tracks for the software that was supposed to be “full featured” on arrival…the first nit on the MBP – Garage Band goes through SUS – why?  Seriously…Cupertino, are you listening?  I could have made another podcast on Windows by now and GB still hasn’t downloaded/installed the tracks needed to mix something together.

No post today..

JasonLeave a comment

Following the trend of the more visible photoshop guys (a.k.a. Scott Kelby), there will be no post today beyond this:

My MacBook Pro arrived today, so I am anxiously crawling up the learning curve (Garage Band is nt the most intuitive of applications for a Windows user to adjust to..on top of the button placements, I’ve never even used the app before.  But it is getting easier here and there).  I’ll be back in a few days with hopefully a few tutorials and some of my thoughts on the new acquisition!  Hello Macworld – here I come! 🙂

Western Digital steps up to the plate

JasonLeave a comment

Having recently been through the ringer on some rather questionable customer service policies, I felt compelled to also give a glowing review of a recent experience I had with another company – Western Digital.

Let’s set the stage: About a week ago, my antiquated desktop computer started exhibiting its age with the recognizable whirring of a hard drive about to fail….it still whirs consistently throughout the day. Since I knew it was past the return policy for Best Buy (30 days), I started backing everything up to my secondary slave drive. With all that copied, I started the search for a replacement…then it dawned on me – this should still be under manufacturer warranty!

So, I broke open the box (not broke, but you get the idea), pulled out the affected drive and started making notations of P/N’s S/N’s and all that gobbledygook. Then at Western Digitals website I entered the S/N as requested to find it was purchased less than a year ago and is still covered. Yay! I can get a replacement! Now, here’s the best part – they will send me the replacement in advance. Meaning? I can install the replacement, copy files over and stay up and running without any downtime to speak of. Yes, a credit card is needed to ensure I return the defective drive, but that’s to be expected in todays day and age.

Anyway, kudos to Western Digital for a great RMA policy – others could learn from you! 😉

wd-policy.jpg

Flash player plugins

JasonLeave a comment

Well , I was going to post a cool flash tutorial I put together on leveling horizons, but some temperamental coding issues have put that on hold. Suffice to say, if anyone can explain to me the difference between FLV and SWF players/readers, how to implement them and write posts embedding them, please post here or email me direct, because the documentation on WordPress and horribly written documentation thus far just really bites hard. Even with my fairly solid grasp of HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, and JS understanding, the world of flash is leaving me just a little bit clueless…

So, for the time being, here’s a link to the video: Horizon Leveling Tutorial

ETA: Many thanks go out to Ryan Thomas from FredMiranda for letting me use his image in the tutorial…