Posts filed in ‘Administration’
CTRL-ALT-DEL
I have too many blogs, and I don’t update any of them nearly enough. The problem is that I jump from one project to another, and if you’re only reading one of them it seems as if I’ve fallen off the planet. Add to that the fact that I’ve found a use for Twitter, and I’ve been doing lots of that (come follow me, I’m leftspin). To solve this little dilemma, I’m resetting this blog by consolidating all of my writing under this domain from now on. It’s the only domain that I have where it makes sense to do so. Here are some of the topics that you might see here:
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Photography, as before
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Cloud computing—my company, Topia Technology, Inc., plays in this space with Skoot, our cloud data management application for Windows and Mac.
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Food, because I’m a foodie, albeit a shy one. Sometimes I take pictures of the food I cook.
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Mac & iPhone development
Don’t worry, all of these subjects will be nicely segregated into categories by a new site design that’s currently sitting in a Photoshop PSD file.
By giving myself permission to write about whatever I want in a single place, I’ll be able to post without fear of being off-topic.
Oh, and by the way, I’m a Mac user, but COMMAND-CTRL-EJECT just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Yes I’m still here
An acquaintance recently wrote to tell me that I suck at updating my blog. I agree with him—but I have an excuse: I have a very short attention span.
Okay, so I didn’t say it would be a good excuse, but there you have it.
Ideas always pop into my head at the most inopportune times. It usually happens when I’m stuck, or have writer’s block. I use to make myself focus. I would write the idea down, file it somewhere, and then try to forget about it. A little voice in the back of my mind would always tell me that I’d never finish anything. Regardless, I could never re-focus, and would end up wasting a lot of time anyway.
Recently, I figured that trying to focus on my current task was a stupid strategy. It’s hard enough trying to build motivation to do something, and here I was trying to suppress it.
These days, if I get excited about something, I work on it. As for the project I was working on, I just have faith that I’ll get back to it. If I don’t, then maybe it wasn’t that important.
This blog is one of those projects. I don’t want to stop writing it, but then again I don’t want to feel I have to write it. That takes all the fun out of it. This time, the release of the iPhone SDK has me busy. But don’t worry, I’m still around.
I do have another image in the works. My dad recently bought a Seattle Mariners collectable train set. The image is about half-done, but when I finish it, I’m sure I’ll have something interesting to post. In the mean time, here’s the partially finished image to whet your appetite.
Techniques 101
Wow, how time flies. I look up from my “real” job, and almost a week’s gone by.
The tutorial I mentioned in the last post is still in the works, but I realized that for novice Photoshoppers to really understand what I did, I’d have to spend some time explaining the techniques that I used. So, instead of doing it in one swell foop, we’re going to bone up on each technique individually. Each technique I show will correspond to a step in developing that photograph.
Tomorrow, we’ll start off with a quickie on how to use layers and masks. After that, you’ll want to pull out your MySpace photo because I’m going to show you how to quickly remove all of your unsightly blemishes. And it won’t even require you to freebase Proactiv Solution.
I apologize in advance to those of you who’ve been waiting with baited breath, but we’re going to be good kiddies and wait until Christmas to open this present. But unlike a Christmas present (and perhaps inappropriately, a little like a strip tease), the good news is that I’m gonna let you peek inside the package as we go along.
First tutorial posted: Making Your Photos Pop
One of the ideas I’ve had for this site is to provide a soup-to-nuts view of how a real production photograph goes from the camera, through the digital darkroom, and then finally to its intended real-world use. For example, the seals photo in the last post wasn’t just an example photo, it was an image that I created to sell as stock.
Unlike other sites, I didn’t want this site to be a collection of disjointed tutorials. If there are going to be tutorials, they should be in context to the development of a real production photograph. Originally, I intended to contextually link to tutorials that are already available on the internet, and post them under the techniques section of this site. However, I figured it might be fun to create my own.
I don’t intend for my tutorial collection to be the most comprehensive on the web, and I still intend to link to all the wonderful tutorials that are already out there. But as there’s any number of ways to do something, the more tutorials the better. That said, I’ve posted my first tutorial, which shows you how to give more presence to your photos. Incidentally, I used this technique in the seals post. I’ve updated it to link to this tutorial.
Here it is: Making Your Photos Pop. Enjoy! And please, like any good photographer, I’m open to constructive critique. Leave me a comment.
No insightful forethought here
Does a blog have to start out pretty? Get the design together, maybe make a nice logo, and then launch with a bang, right? I suppose you might need to do that if you’re trying to impress someone. Fortunately, in this blog, I’m not. Currently, you won’t see a thought-out custom design or logo, just some text and Kubrick, the default WordPress template. This is because my projects have a tendency to become held up by design. And because lots of them also get stuck there, I’ve decided to post now instead of later. I’m not sure doing so is such a bad thing anyway; perhaps for certain things, design doesn’t have to happen up front.
Up-front design makes a lot of sense when it’s expensive to produce something, like a car, or a complex software program. But what about when change is cheap, like on this blog? Maybe you don’t need an up-front design. For these things, design can (and perhaps should) be evolved.
You might be thinking that I’m just being lazy—and I’m not going to deny that; you’d be right. But there’s nothing better than when the right thing to do is also the lazy thing to do.
One of my original intents for this blog was to show you how some of my photographs are built from their raw materials. I figure that if I’m showing you how that’s done, it wouldn’t be too far off subject to show you how the blog itself develops. With that in mind, I will be taking snapshots of the blog as it changes during its lifetime. That said, here’s the first one:
Okay, so now I’m off to write the first worthwhile post to this blog, one that actually has something to do with photography. If you by chance run across this page in your random internet wanderings, I’d love for you to leave a comment. It’s always nice to know that I’m not just shouting into the wind.