Portland Photographer Ryan Unruh reached out to me to do some post work for a Jordan project he was shooting and the results are now live at Nike Inc and Sole Collector. I went with a 3d solution to this request and really happy with the result.
Here's What It Looks Like When You Replace Photographers With iPhone-Wielding Reporters | Raw File | Wired.com
Earlier this year the Chicago Sun-Times made national headlines when it purged its photo staff and replaced them with iPhone-wielding reporters.To track what many suspected would be a decline in the paper’s visual coverage, Chicago freelance photographer Taylor Glascock started a Tumblr that compares the Sun-Times’ photography with that of its competitor the Chicago Tribune, which still uses staff photographers.
“I think that you can’t just assume that if you give [reporters] a camera they will come out with the same result as someone who is trained,” says Glascock. “If photographers had to write all the stories it wouldn’t be pretty either.”
For about a month now, Glascock has been watching the way both papers cover the same story. Sometimes she posts side-by-side screenshots from the papers’ websites. Other times she posts side-by-side comparisons of the papers’ front pages.
The State of Rendering – Part 1 | fxguide
How competitive? Since we wrote the first Art of Rendering story, just 18 months ago, the landscape has changed dramatically. New renderers and whole new approaches have been released. There have been dramatic improvements, renderers have died, others have been bought, and there is no sense that the process is anywhere near over. Rendering, once a fairly predictable evolutionary space, has become like a quickly moving landscape. For this story alone we have done over 20 interviews and we will be covering 14 major production rendering platforms. We have aimed to focus on production renderers for animation and VFX and not even really touch on game engine rendering, GPU rendering and mobile offerings. Art of Rendering saw many compliments but also a host of complaints. To paraphrase a quote from the first article, “rendering is now a bit like a religion.”
Photoshop CC: modest upgrades shackled to terrible “rental” model | Ars Technica
Coming back to Earth a bit and looking just at Photoshop CC, is this a worthwhile upgrade? I think it has some compelling features—I use the Camera Raw 8 as a filter a lot for grading rendered 32-bit images, and the camera shake reduction is very good. But thanks to a shareholder-oriented license model that places Adobe customers in a bad spot, the entire line of Creative Cloud applications comes with a massive asterisk hanging over them. I think that Photoshop CC’s features are nice, but the licensing drawback is so severe that it leans this version toward “don’t upgrade.”
Video Library — Ctrl+Paint - Digital Painting Simplified
This is the Library, where you'll find all of the free Ctrl+Paint videos. If you're a total beginner, try watching the videos in the order they're listed! I've ordered these videos to ease you from traditional techniques into digital ones. If you're looking for a specific topic, or want to build your own curriculum, I invite you to watch them in any order you like! Scroll down to see the whole list, and have fun painting!
Just gonna put this here....
Source: http://ctrlpaint.com/library/
Chris "Daddy" Dave: ACTUAL PROOF
Chris Dave & the Drumhedz - Actual Proof
Chris "Daddy" Dave - DrumsIsaiah Sharkey - GuitarKebbi Williams - Sax & Flute
Jermaine Williams - Bass
Cause I need music to get through the days.
Necessity brings him here, not pleasure
Paintings by Samantha Keely Smith
Title: Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Canto XII, line 87
VIA: But Does It Float?
I am a sucker for Turner-esque paintings like these.
New Behance work
In case you have not been to the Danklife Behance Portfolio recently, we added a few new galleries there. One for Nike in store imagery for the House of Hoops style and another for a "Workout" project for Sanford Health shot by Robb Long.
Pricing and Negotiating: In-Store Display for National Retailer
Shoot Concept: Beauty shots of professional talent in a studioLicensing: Use of three images in any media (excluding Outdoor and Broadcast) in North America for 2 years. Although we avoid vague language whenever possible, the client insisted on using this language, effectively conveying Advertising, Collateral and Publicity use of the images as defined in our T&C.
Location: A studio in New York
Shoot Days: 1
Photographer: Up-and-coming beauty and fashion specialist
Agency: Mid-sized, based in the Midwest.
Client: Prominent retailer with approximately 2,000 stores in North America.
Here is the initial estimate:
You should all probably bookmark this as well. These types of examples are priceless.
Danklife Essay on A Sporting Life, daily inspiration for sports creatives.
I have a new Essay published on A Sporting Life about the importance of Photography for great post work and a brief write up of the World Basketball Festival Project we did last year. Here is a small section:
“Some people like to say how something is all done in post and that photography does not matter anymore. In my experience that statement could not be further from the truth. A bad image can only be pushed so far before it falls apart. With bad photography post time is spent making images look acceptable instead of making them look great. The better the starting file, the more that can be done with the image in post, the better the final image. It’s pretty simple.”
Been wanting to write up something discussing the importance of a great Photographer for awhile now as I am getting tired of people saying it's all done in post. So I was very happy to have the opportunity to publish this.
Rick Rubin Interview
I never decide if an idea is good or bad until I try it. So much of what gets in the way of things being good is thinking that we know. And the more that we can remove any baggage we’re carrying with us, and just be in the moment, use our ears, and pay attention to what’s happening, and just listen to the inner voice that directs us, the better. But it’s not the voice in your head. It’s a different voice. It’s not intellect. It’s not a brain function. It’s a body function, like running from a tiger.
“There’s a tremendous power in using the least amount of information to get a point across.”
Great stuff here for anyone in the arts.
Mind.... Blown
Bela Borsodi shot this album cover to look like 4 different photos, but it is the same frame. VIA: Kottke.org
Adobe Photoshop CC Has Already Been Pirated In Just One Day | Fstoppers
Now that Photoshop Creative Cloud went live just the other day, we didn’t know what to expect. However, news is out that just a day after the release, Photoshop CC has already been pirated and available.
So much for that stopping pirating. Another great example of how DRM just annoys the honest customers of your product while doing nothing to stop the pirates. I will not be updating to CC until I have to this time around. I'm sure they will stop upgrading the CS version of Adobe Camera Raw any day now and I'll see how long I can get by with Capture One for that side of the business.
I say this as someone who has been a first day release buyer for the past ten years. Way to go Adobe.
Vogue/Condé Nast Contest Attempts To Secure Free Images For Unlimited Use
The core problems we see are that:The sponsors have the perpetual, unlimited use of all contest entries. There is neither compensation for contest participants nor is there credit given for their work. Participants are required to sign a liability release and copyright assignment, and to indemnify Botega Veneta and Condé Nast against any lawsuits that may arise as a result of the usage of the photographs. Every entrant is required to waive any right to sue in the event of misuse of the photographs entered. The winner is being offered $10,000 for a shoot that would normally command several times that amount. The winner will be required to grant copyright ownership of all photographs from the shoot.
Annnnnd did it again! On AdWeek.
Once again we are featured on AdWeek! This was a awesome project we worked with Remco Vloon at Nike on. Lots of fun on this one.
Weekend Personal work
Been busy as all get out here so I have not been posting as much, many apologies. But in trade have some images I made this weekend.
Most shots are from a hike at Wahclella Falls on Saturday with a dead phone booth on Alberta on the same day and a 3d render test from Sunday night. The render is noisy and unacceptable but I still enjoy the direction it is heading.
Danklife on AdWeek
We made it into AdWeek's Curated Gallery again! This time with our a project we did with Travis Barteaux at Nike for their World Basketball Festival. Thanks to Travis for the the great direction and to the team here who made it possible.
Art Producers Speak: Kenji Aoki
All of my inspiration comes from geometry. When you have an object that needs to be photographed with a certain concept, you always come across complex visual problems that need to be solved. By thinking of the object as a pure geometric shape such as a circle or square, the speed required to visually communicate the concept of the image and the object itself is accelerated. The space that it’s in, the color, the shadows — balancing all of these elements allow these sensations to penetrate a deeper place.
Via: A PhotoEditor in the links on the left.
Nike Air Max ‘Sunset’ collection goes live.
A project we worked on with Photographer Ryan Unruh, ADs Brian Foster and Remco Vloon at Nike just went live and is getting some press. We were asked to go for a very "real in studio" vibe on this project and I do quite like the outcome. Read up more on it at Size Blog.
Fun project, thanks all!
Harddrive not on desktop or Finder but visible to Disk Utility in 10.8.3
Work up to a odd little bug this morning. Booted up the Mac and one of my drives was not showing up on the desktop or in the Finder window. So first thing I do is launch Disk Utility and I see it sitting there all fine a dandy. Odd, me thinks. So I run some repairs, fix permissions, sfae boot, zap pram and everything is all good but no hard drive on desktop still. Perplexing. So then I right click on it to reveal in Finder and this happens.
I get a "Ghosted" version there with all my files there and I can browse just fine (I just greyed out the file names in the screen cap). So it turns out that the Preferences somehow got scrambled and set this drive to invisible and repairing permissions will not fix it. Off to the googles where I found this page on how to fix it. Basically open terminal and enter this:
chflags nohidden /Volumes/YOUR DRIVE NAME HERE/
And there you have it. Apple seems to have a lot of bugs at start up and with permissions these days. If you keep losing connection to your PC look into this hack to fix that glitch as well.