AppleJack

It is not just a breakfast cereal. It is a powerful tool for helping to fix a broken down Mac. Here is a little presentation that was made for the Cypress College Advaced Digital Workflow Class.

Apple Jack’s

You can download a copy of this PowerPoint document from here.

Bullet Effects with Canon 5D Mark II

The Matrix was one of the first movies that I can remember that used bullet effects to accomplish a camera spin or movement while slowing down time. It would take setting up a bunch of camera on a rail system. Then making sure that cameras were setup to capture the action in the timing and frame sequence need. Afterword it would take an animation team to create digital backgrounds and clean up the action footage to put together. Now think about having say 52 cameras, all setup to shoot at the same time. That looks like what Rip Curl, in collaboration with Timeslice Films, did for a campaign shoot in Malaysia’s Sunway Lagoon Wavepool. Timeslice Films with their software is able to now take the shots and put them together for a live broadcast now. This is just some of the stuff that is just making the future of the DSLR cameras look even better for making films.

My New Table

I have been finding it a little bit difficult to study while at home lately. The living room always gets me to sit back and watch hours of TV that I didn’t mean to watch. I have way too many games on my computer when I actually get a change to work on it (family always playing Farmville). Lately I have had to go into school just to be able to do my homework, but now I have found a solution. Yesterday I went out and got a table for my dining room. It is nothing too big; just a little something that I could sit at away from the TV and all of my games and work. Since putting it together, I have spent almost the whole rest of the day studying accounting for an upcoming exam on Monday. I think my plan is working.

Data Back-up

Paranoia is a constant problem when it come to my photo archive. Awhile ago I was introduced to a program that would help with keeping my files synced on multiple hard drives. The program Carbon Copy Cloner looked to be just the thing that I needed. Plus it doesn't cost anything. It would just check to see if there were any changes made and then copy them over to the back-up drive. After the first back-up, which could take some time, only modified files would be copied over. This makes for quick back-ups between multiple drives.

The only thing that could have made this program better would be if it was cross platform compatible. Right now Carbon Copy Cloner is only for Macintosh computers. Since I only have PCs, it really didn't do me any good. I have been on the hunt for something that would be similar to it on the PC. Knowing that I need to back-up my files I keep searching for a program that would work. I spent a couple of months looking at back-up programs like Norton Ghost and a few others ,but they never did what I wanted. After almost giving up, I decided to start from ground zero. Unfortunately I was using the wrong terminology. I asked myself just what did the program actually do. Check to see if there were new files and then transfer them to another location. Once I started looking for syncing programs everything started looking up. I found Allway Sync.

It works almost identical to what I was looking for. Plus it too was also free. Now I have my photos on four separate hard drives and peace of mind. There is nothing better.

Test Time

Well, school is back in session. Assignment have been given out, an tomorrow is the big day that I go and take my first test of the semester. So it is going to be off to the DMV for me in the morning. Yes bright and early I will be taking my behind the wheel driving test, and this time hopefully will pass. I have been putting this off for a while but my friend' Grace, Krista, and Vergil all decided to give me a helpful shove in the right direction. I have had my permit for almost a year now and with it getting close to expiring the decided to give me a crash course in driving, no pun intended. Grace started me out by driving home at night when the roads weren't that busy. After getting a better feel for it Vergil started taking me out during the day time to drive. I don't know how he got stuck with that scary job, but I am thankful. The information that he imparted on me has really helped my driving. To keep me on track for getting my license, Grace made my appointment a couple of weeks ago. This was to make sure I would at least take the behind the wheel once before I would have to start all over again with the written. Hopefully all goes well and I will have my license tomorrow, but either way I think I might need some coffee in the morning just to keep my head twitching they way the DMV examiner will want me checking my mirrors.

The OC Fair

A while back a couple of friends and myself went out the Orange County Fair. It looked to be a heart attack just waiting to happen. Everything is deep fat fried there pretty much. Deep fried Twinkie, Snickers, sandwiches, and even butter. Deep fried butter, what could that possibly be? Could it be a stick of butter placed in a fryer bucket and just dropped in? My friend Grace just had to find out. She decide to order that and also get the chocolate covered bacon. Well, the bacon was apparently pretty good. The deep fried butter on the other hand was just a churro that was drenched in popcorn butter. I was not daring enough to try it, but by the look of everyone's reaction the buttery churro really did not seem that good. Food definitely was the key to our visit there. I wound up having a barbeque beef sandwich with lemonade which tasted great. While at the fair we did not go on any rides, just managed to walk and eat. We did stop by the art exhibits for a while. As soon as I walking into the Visual Arts Gallery, I immediately recognized from the Legacy Photo Project. Douglas McCulloh was one of the juries for the show this year and several of his pieces were on special display during the show. During my time at the Cypress College Photography Department I have had the chance to meet Doug a couple of times and it was nice to see his work again. After it got dark and the petting zoo close, Grace and Randy decided to head for home. Before Vergil, Krista, and myself decided calling it a night we left the fair and headed out to Harbor House in Sunset Beach. It was well out of our way, but Vergil was craving some food from there. Also with the new school semester coming up, it will be harder for all of us hanging out together so one last hurrah was in order.

Summer is coming to it's end

It has been a while since I have posted to my blog. This summer seems like it has gone by quick. I took a trip to Vegas with Grace, Randy, Krista, and Vergil a little while back. There was some excitement going down the shark tube water slide at the Golden Nugget Hotel. Other than that, I have been spending the summer learning about video editing. I watched all 8 hours of Lynda.com’s training for Adobe Premier CS5 and almost half way through After Effects CS5 training. Once I get a little better, I might start turning this into a video blog.

This upcoming semester is going to be a little different for me. I am going to be spending less time at the Cypress College Photography Department. The business building will become my home again. I have decided to take up accounting. I know it doesn’t seem interesting, but I am hoping to look for a somewhat steady nine to five job in the future. I will not be completely away from the photo department this semester. I have enrolled in the conceptual photography class. There is nothing like a class where the object of the class is to just make stuff up. My instructor will be Jonathan Fletcher aka “Mr. Pinholio”. Well that is about it. I will start posting more frequently now that the new semester is getting ready to be starting back up.

Things to come

I have been thinking about upgrading my Photoshop CS3 for a little while now. The computers at school have allowed me to get use to the new interface of CS4. I was almost ready to pick it up on JourneyEd.com at an academic price. On a whim, I decided to look around for when the release of CS5 would be. The very first website I found was CS5.org. After looking at the first video that shows off some of the new features of CS5, I decided to hold off on CS4. From the sites speculation on Adobe's usual release times it could be as soon as this April when I could pick it up. Right now it would be nice to move up to CS4, but CS5 looks like it’s bells and whistles look to be a good reason for waiting. So for now it looks like I am holding off from upgrading right now. He’s hoping CS5 will be out in April.

Winter Break

Well, it has been awhile since my last blog. During this winter break I have been spending most of my time watching Lynda.com. It has been hours of fun, learning, and a refresher on some of the programs I am always using. With all the time I have spent watching these training videos, it has helped my retouching quite a bit. Some of my favorite courses that I have watched so far are "Beyond Skin: Going Deeper with Photoshop CS3" and "Photoshop CS4 Retouching: Fashion Photography Projects". They showed me better way to organize my workflow, and to "reduce and simplify" as Chris Orwig would say. I went back to a couple of images that I corrected before watching the videos and reworked them. With the new techniques that I am incorporating into my workflow the images have really started to pop. This upcoming semester my post productions should be great. Now I just need to work on some concepts to shoot.

Capture One 5 Workshop

Since taking the Advanced Digital Workflow Class at Cypress College, I have been introduced to many new and fun programs. One of them being Capture One 4. It is a great raw processing engine for photos and with the pro version shooting tethered to a computer is a breeze. While surfing the net and Calumet’s website, I just happened to notice that they were have workshops on the new Capture One 5 software. The closest one to me is the Calumet Los Angles workshop on Feb. 1, 2010. After seeing the deal that everyone who takes the course gets a free copy of Capture One 5, I was hooked. The normal cost of the program is $129.99. Registration for the workshop is $49.99, so you get the software and two and a half hours of training on the software. If anyone from the Digital Workflow Class is going to be going let me now. Right now Grace and myself have signed up for the Capture One 5 Workshop.

Flickr War

Well, another month down in Grace and my Flickr war. Only three more to go.

Grace's Flickr

My Flickr

Racket Ball Challenge

Clifford Lester has been playing racket ball for a while now. He has gotten really good at the sport. So when Luis Munoz challenged him to a match, it sounded like it was going to be a good competition. Luis had been playing up the challenge all day trying to psych Cliff out. He new that Cliff played a lot, but Cliff didn’t know that Luis had never played before. It wound up being less of a match and more of a practice for Cliff. At the end you could see who won by who was sweating less. During an intermission for Luis, Grace went in and gave it a try. Wearing completely the wrong cloths and having no shoes did not help her game either.

Most of the time while Luis was playing Grace was shooting video with the Canon 5D Mark II. She is trying to get a feel for it so she will be able to show students how to work it. I on the other hand decided to shoot with the Nikon D700. After a few minutes of getting use to Nikon’s ergonomics, it was a good and responsive camera. The autofocus was very quick and the aperture priority seemed to give pretty good exposures. It was fun to use something other than my regular old Canon 5D. If I hadn’t already invested so much money into Canon I might have gone over to Nikon. But at the time I went with Canon they were to only ones with a full frame digital sensor. Now that times are changing it seems that both camera systems are equally as good now. It is now at the point were Canon and Nikon are just playing leap frog with each other. Canon had full frame sensors then Nikon made one. Nikon had amazingly high ISO’s and now Canon does also. My best advice in getting a camera is to get whatever feels good to you.

Our Broken Window

On the same night of the Available Light Class we had a problem at the Cypress College Photography Department. Grace went into Studio 2 and noticed some glass lying on the floor. It didn’t look like any of the typical glass that we have around the department that might have broke. On closer inspection, she noticed that it had the same tint as the large plate glass window that are in that studio. Once she opened up the blinds there it was. A perfect shaped hole that fit the glass found on the floor. Grace immediately called campus security and talk to the auto body department to make sure no one was standing under the window. From upstairs the window seemed to be fluctuating with the wind and seemed like the rest could fall out at anytime. When Campus security arrived, they decided to break the rest of the window out just to be safe. So with all of the excitement going on, Grace and I decided to document it by photographing upstairs and from ground level. After patching the hole with some black plastic the nights excitement ended. The next day a plywood board now sits where the window us to be.

Available Light Field Trip

A couple of days ago Clifford Lester took his Available Light class on a field trip. The trip was to a building he had found that was still under construction, but the walls there were great backgrounds for a fashion photo shoot. I came along because I wanted to see the class in action. While I was there I also worked as Cliff's Digital Tech for the first part of the class. It was actually fun being on location as a tech. Since we didn’t have any outlets, it was a new experience trying to set everything up and try to conserve power. Cliff had Krista and Chris scout the models that we were shooting that day. After Cliff’s demo I took part in some of the shooting. I mostly focused on taking pictures of Krista’s model Courtney. I really like the class and next time it is offered I will see about enrolling in it.

Flickr War - October

Well another month down in Grace and my Flickr war. Now there is only 5 more months to go before our year long battle is over. Since we started I have been in the lead and she keeps talking about when she is going to pass me up. Hopefully she will start that soon. It isn't really fealing like a challange anymore. Come on Grace you can start anytime now.

Grace's Flickr

My Flickr

Time Lapse Photo Shoot

Time Laps from John Halligan on Vimeo.

I have been wanting to do a time lapse of a photo shoot for some time now. Krista allowed me the opportunity to try this on her photo shoot with Ross Davidson. I wanted to make a video showing how the setup, shooting, and tear down goes. Because of sometime consternates on my part, I wasn’t able to start shooting before everything was setup. Next time it should go a bit smoother now that I know how to get everything setup. Now I just need to learn how to actually use my video editing software.

Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta

What is new in Lightroom 3 Beta - Part 2 - Part 3

An instructors of mine told me that he never looked forward to Photoshop upgrades because he had to almost relearn everything. Once he started to use Lightroom all that changed. He actually started looking forward to updates and upgrades. Everything new that was put in to Lightroom just help to improve the program without changing much of the layout and feel of the program. Well, now it the time to start testing out the next version of Lightroom. The Public Beta was just released yesterday, so do not need to have a previous version of Lightroom to try it. All you need to do is go to Adobe Labs to download it. Some of the new features in Lightroom 3 Beta that are listed on the Adobe Labs site are:

• Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
  
• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
  
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
  
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
  
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
  
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
  
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
  
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)*

The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) have already released some new videos to help get people up to speed with the new changes to Lightroom 3. The videos are demoed by Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski who are great speakers on anything Photoshop and Lightroom related subjects.

If you do decide to use Lightroom 3 Beta it will be valid until April 30, 2010. So it seems like the new version will be out hopefully be fall of next year.

A New Use of an Old Toy

My friend Robert Williams needed some help with a project for the Advanced Digital Workflow Class. He needed a partner for the midterm practical and his schedule was booked solid because of work. I decided to help setup a shoot so he could tech for me. I really had no idea what I was going to setup for the shoot. He wasn’t able to make it to the fashion shoot that I setup with Krista Skustad, so that left me with one day to think of something. The day before Robert and I were going to shoot I received the Drobo that I had order a couple of days earlier. I had planned on replacing my HP MediaSmart Server with this new fine and shiny Drobo, which gave me an idea. This would be the thing we would shoot. After all, from the time that I got the thing, it was a little bit of a pain to manage. Most of the time I just left it shut off because I was tired of having to trouble shoot it. Now I finally manage to find a use of the old thing. As a Prop it worked fantastic. It never beeped at me, got angry and flashed red lights at me, or just constantly give me warnings that it processer was working at 183 degrees Celsius. Now I actually like the thing. More or less as a paper weight now.

The New Pen and Paper

(Update the video has been pulled because of the unauthorized use of the Nike symbol.)

Courier User Interface from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

This maybe a conceptual idea from Microsoft, but I really like it. I hear everyone is waiting for Apple’s announcement of a new tablet computer, which from rumors will be I big iPhone, but I think I will like this a little bit more. If it come to market the way it is shown here then it would be an amazing thing for me to use at school to organize my notes. The old pen and paper notebook might just become a thing of the past. One of the key features that I like about this design is that it looks like something that I am already familiar with. The good old pen and paper. A problem that I might have with Apple’s Tablet is that none of the rumors talk about it having a pen. I think it would be easier for me to jot down notes in a class with a styles then it would for me hitting a virtual keyboard. The interface of this device also seems to be a little more appealing to me. I like the idea of two screens. It is the way I look though most binders and note books right now. Plus when I open an application or program it should not cover up the whole screen like it might on a single display screen. I am really looking forward to this technology. Right now I am thinking this would be a good way to draw up comps and sketch ideas for some of my photo shoots. Hopefully this come to market the way it is looking in the concept video and not some watered down version of this.

Original story about the Microsoft “Courier” can be found on Gizmoto.

Living Art Media

Living Magazine Cover & Spread - Outside Magazine from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.

I was looking through some blog feeds this morning and came across one that really caught my eye. It was an article about Alexx Henry and his work with the new media, living art. He was a guest speaker at Image Mechanics Collision Conference up in Los Angles not that long ago. That is where I first got introduced to this new media of living art, or sometimes called living canvas. It is the hope of the print world that with new technologies that are in development that one day bring our magazines and news papers to life. I really like this concept since it has been around for years in many movies and television shows already. Right now this is still in its infancy and the market for selling this kind of stuff is not there yet, but it is coming. Now as photographers it seems like we are going to go through another transitional period of stills to video. It should be a fun time ahead.

The original post was from Photography Blog.