Joker of the Scene & A Trak & video
1/2 JOTS x Ryan Stec x CineCitta x Le champion du monde x 2/3 Stylusts
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This video. Basically, I was running around taking photos and then sequencing them with a live stop-motion animation tool called ToonLoop which then broadcast the images on a collection of LCD panels. The original video had no audio so I added one of the latest Jokers of the Scene remixes to liven it up a bit. The song is around 8-minutes long and sounds very evil and absolutely nothing like the original song (which sounds like it was written by Freddy Mercury & Michael Jackson’s hypothetical baby, writing the theme for a television series aimed at gay children – amazing). The actual video image loops at about 90-seconds. Watch/listen, however long you want!
Ryan had three projectors connected to project single images over three screens. I was working with Vancouver VJ CineCitta who has been embedded-in-Ottawa as a Graffiti Research Lab operative taking sanctuary in the ArtEngine lab, cooking up crazy like the mobile graffiti iPhone app he’s working on.
Here are the photos from that night. Some of them didn’t make it into the video…
As a bonus, here are some photos from A Trak’s stop into Ottawa.
Final bonus…Here is the song used in the video
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Mika – We Are Golden (Jokers Of The Scene ‘Are Not Who You Think They Are’ Remix)
Graffiti Research Lab à SAW
Ça fait déjà une semaine depuis mon retour à Ottawa. J’étais en tournée pendant vingt jours avec un groupe métal que je connais. J’en discuterai un peu plus bientôt (dans quelques jours) mais voici la liste de villes qu’on a visitée:
Ottawa – terrain de camping super épeurant pas loin de Swastika (Ontario) – Thunder Bay – Winnipeg – Saskatoon – Edmonton – camping moins épeurant à Jasper – Vancouver – Kamloops – Calgary – Regina – Brandon – (Winnipeg) – Grand Forks – Fargo – Sioux Falls – Minneapolis – Pella – Indianapolis – Windsor – Ottawa
En tout cas, vendredi dernier, on m’avait invité à documenter un évènement présentée par ArtEngine, SAW Vidéo et le festival Hiphop 360. Mis en vedette ce soir-là, dans la Cour des arts, était une équipe du Graffiti Research Lab, DJ Huggs et Ghetto Blaster Sound System. Soirée autant médiatique qu’elle était intense. Excellente musique, technologie impressionnante et des averses à ne pas oublier. RAIN…maaaaan.
La présentation par GRL était ce que j’ai plus aimée. Utilisant un logiciel personalisé, une plume numérique (encaissée dans un Sharpie Magnum), et un Wii-mote, on était capable de créer des dessins temporaires sur le Centre Rideau!
C’est possible qu’on en fasse plus bientôt et de façon plus mobile. Nous planifions des différentes activités pour le prochain Disorganized aussi. Stay tuned.
Use S60 as a remote for Macs, iTunes
Do you have a Nokia (S60) phone and want to control your computer with it? Read on.
My previous cell phone (SE w810i) had a pretty decent bluetooth remote that I could use to control the mouse cursor and various media players I use (iTunes, mPlayer, Quicktime, etc…). It was cool but didn’t really have much to offer that wasn’t already in the standard Apple remote. However, I liked not having to remember the dedicated remote if I was traveling though so when I got my Nokia N95 last year, I was disappointed that it didn’t have a bluetooth remote as a standard. Problem solved: Salling Clicker.
I haven’t tried them all but it has custom remotes for programs like Powerpoint, Keynote, VLC and Quicktime. In addition to controlling your slides, for Powerpoint and Keynote, this app uses the phone’s screen to display presentation notes too. Could be useful?
What I’ve been into most has been controlling iTunes via wifi from the opposite end of my house. There’s a lot of potential here – especially for homes that have in-wall speakers connected to one system. Clicker’s iTunes interface reminds a bit of a classic iPod but with the added luxury of a search feature. Here’s a screenshot:
This app was released nearly two years ago but it’s new to me and using it makes me feel like I’m in the future! The home automation industry is slowly catching onto using cell phones instead of remotes but there is still a way to go. Imagine using programs like this to easily control lighting with your phone? USB powered designer floor lamps?
I should end this, nerdiest-post-ever, now but here’s a photo of a house I shot last fall. Within it, a lot of automation work was done to control lighting and A/V equipment. See that little circle near the edge of the green wall? That’s a sensor connected to the thermostat! You could probably program that remote in the bottom right to make you coffee.
Startup question marks and backing up your HD
A few months ago, starting up my computer resulted in an intermittent question mark flashing on my screen without going any further. Not good. I called Apple and consulted their support article for said problem. Nothing. I thought I’d share my experience because while it was annoying, it helped me learn a bit how startup disks work.
My harddrive would start up but it could no longer boot OS X properly. On one of the last times it worked properly, I quickly backed up the internal 100gb disk using a great program called Caron Copy Cloner and the SATA cradle I wrote about a while back.
For a while (longer than I should have), my computer was booting from this external drive. Imagine the computer as a living body whose heart, linked via USB, existed outside said body. Not pretty.
Nowhere close to as mobile as I normally liked to be, the alternative was going without a computer for a week while AppleCare tried fixing it. In the end, I decided what should have been an obvious option: upgrade the internal drive from 100gb to 320gb. The downside: Even with a dead drive, this upgrade was not at all covered under AppleCare. Bummer but it does feel nice to have a bit more (3.2x) storage space in my machine.
In other news, I don’t normally go for this stuff but the Belkin Flexible USB Cable Adapter is a neat gadget that has made it easier for me to constantly have a USB cable protruding from the side of my computer.
To photographers who post photos to Facebook…
This is sort of old news but as more and more photographers start creating Facebook groups or pages to promote themselves, I think it deserves mentioning. The main idea of this post is that if you use Facebook to promote yourself, do it in a way that drives traffic to your own website. Also, make sure your website is easy to use and look at.
Long story short, according to the user agreement, whenever you submit content to Facebook, you are granting them a license to do whatever they want with the images. Wired even did a story on people’s profile photos ending up in online ads. It all reminds me of when a band from Ottawa got their music used during a Super Bowl broadcast because they consented to this type of thing simply by posting their songs on MySpace.
Here’s the bit from the user agreement:
“…you automatically grant … an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise…”
Generally, I like what Facebook provides but I can’t stand behind the idea that an ad-supported, for-profit entity might use my images without working out a deal with me first.
Solution? Don’t post images or post only watermarked images. For a long time, I didn’t like watermarking but given the amount of uncredited photos that float around online, now, I’d almost prefer more images to be watermarked so that if I see one I like, I can at least know who took it and find more work by that same photographer. I mean, watermark or not, I don’t plan on printing enlargements from photos found on the Web… Does someone’s name or logo really deter from the work that much? Thoughts?
More info:
Facebook Terms of use
A Visual Society
Wired
The hand that rocks the SATA cradle
About how many gigs do you shoot per month? I asked this to a few people yesterday and no one really had a straight answer?
It is difficult question to answer. Until recently, I’ve always managed to keep photos from the last two months saved on my my laptop before backing it up to external drives. I also save each shoot in folders organized like this YYYY > MM > YYYYMMDD_subject so things are always easy to get to. Savvy? But now, I’m lucky if I can keep a month’s worth of photos on my computer…There’s just no more room…
Until yesterday, I had been using external drives for backups but, as cheap as they’re getting and as nice as Neil Poulton can make them, knowing how cheap internal drives are too, it sucks to spend premium dollars on a fancy box. But, hard drive enclosures are made so ugly and user-UNfriendly…
What’s a photographer with growing terabyte requirements to do?
Get a SATA cradle!
I got this thing yesterday for $47 and so far, it mounts just like an external USB drive and is running just as fast. The Drobo also seems like a good way to quickly swap multiple drives but I’ve read it runs a bit slow. Definitely something to consider though.
If any of you want to share ideas on backing up, file organization or generally, digital asset management, feel free to comment! It’s a topic that probably interests me more than it should.
Den ny website!
New design (tjek it out!). Pixelpost has served me well but having it and a Wordpress blog seemed redundant. Indexhibit (+ Wordpress) is the neue miniCMS in town.
Several project ideas mulling around. I should be posting more here. Adjust your RSS subscriptions accordingly!
Merci.
30 Photoshop shortcuts
Here’s a link to 30 awesome Photoshop shortcuts that aren’t exactly “secrets” but they aren’t really well known either.
From the list, here are some of my faves:
- 12. Hide other layers (option-click)
- 14. Blending modes (option-shift-letter, i.e. luminosity: option-shift-y)
- 19. Toggle between tools (shift-tool shorcut, i.e. brush: shift-b)
- 23. Flatten all layers without flattening all (command-option-shift-e)
- 24. Change workspace background
- 25. Fill background or foreground color
- 26. Switch between document windows (control-tab)
Photojournalism doesn’t traditionally do much heavy Photoshop work but it does rely on speed. Shortcuts like these can save a lot of time if you get into the habit of using them.
APC surge protector warranties
When my computer’s battery crapped out in Denmark, it was really easy to get a replacement. “They have me in their computer,” I figured. But, when four of the eight outlets on my APC surge protector decided to stop working, I figured I’d have to buy a new one but I tried my luck and contacted them anyway.
A few e-mail exchanges later and I was trading in serial numbers for a new surge protector! I didn’t even have to give my credit card number. There was a stipulation that said there’d be a return mailer so that I could ship the busted one back to APC but when Purolator came to my house, they didn’t have one. So now, I basically have one and a half surge protectors. APC, if you read this, you can have the broken one back if you want it.
All in all though, a happy and easy experience. Exceptional, in fact.
Wish I could say the same about cell phone service in Canada. 5 months in Denmark and I spent about $60 on pay-as-you-go service (including the cost of a SIM card). Not even a month into my return to Canada and I’ve already spent about that. Also, locked phones in Belgium are actually illegal. Amazing, right?
Flying with batteries
Announcements were made on January 1 that there were new rules on flying with wet-cell and lithium batteries. It all seemed a bit confusing to me but I guess they’ve been planning this for a while. How do I know? You would too if you always flew with a pair of these bad boys in your carry on.
Quantum Battery 1 (photo from Victor Grepo)
Nearly everytime I flew in 2007, I was held by security because of these things. Once, I was even questioned as to what they were…because apparently printing “BATTERY” on the top is an insufficient sign. The worst was at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv where they weren’t so interested in the batteries as they were in ALL electronics in my carry on, passing all major items individually through the x-ray (laptop, camera body, lenses).
Anyway, the whole thing has been riddled in confusion buy leave it to Rob Galbraith to clear things up for us.
The reality is that the changes most photographers will have to make when readying to fly are less onerous than the coverage might have led you to believe. … the main and perhaps only change we’ll need to make when preparing to fly is to consistently place spare camera and laptop Lithium-Ion packs into see-through, sealable bags, so as to not give airport screeners a reason to delay the passage of carry-ons through security.
All in all, as inconvenient as this seems, my hunch is that preventing the mass shipment of lithium on an airplane makes more sense than allowing the current war on liquid to reach the point where a guy chugged a litre of vodka instead of throwing it away. I mean, if single laptop batteries are liable to explode in my face, what could happen if I tried flying with a skid full of them?
So, TSA, Transport Canada and everyone else, I’ll put my batteries in plastic bags but please, tell me that you have plans to stop taking my orange juice away when I go through security. Can’t you just swab it to determine that it is the same orange juice that is available at the café on the other side?
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