You too can loose 9 pounds in 2 days by living as a pile of biomorphic goo on the bathroom floor why being lovingly held in the warm embrace of food poisoning. Just ask me how!
A bit behind here folks due to the afore mentioned lovely G.I. distress, bare with me while I play catch up on some projects. Seriously, the worst case I have ever had. On the bright side, this toast is freaking AMAHZING this morning.
The recent unveiling of the Mac Pro has divided a lot of professional users who hoped Apple wouldn't fix what wasn't broken. Phil Schiller's words from the announcement—"can't innovate anymore, my ass"—made it clear that Apple used the venerable workstation as a Guinea pig to prove that it can still get its machined-aluminum groove on. Sure, the design and engineering of the Darth Pro are brilliant, but as I pointed out in my critical look, the Mac Pro needed shrinking as urgently as I need a Hermès man-purse. Whether it will pay off remains to be seen, but some people who want more flexible hardware options aren't convinced. I know one video editor who's already abandoned OS X for Windows because their work depends more on GPU power with apps like DaVinci Resolve. A big box with multiple PCI Express slots is more important to them than added desk space.
So this is pretty much exactly where I am at with my work flow as well. Great write up.
Matt Davis and Kyle Wiley from NonBox asked if I could lend a hand on some trade show exhibits for Primus. I thought the concept was awesome and hopped on board. Mulitple composites involved to make the backgrounds. Photography by Jelani Memory who did a great job on the lighting. You can see more in the portfolio or on Behance
The Nike Tech Pack website is live with all our post work. It all came together really well and they use the imagery in a great way. Very happy to have been involved in this one.
Andre Simmons from Nike asked us to help out with the Fall Tech Fleece product line and it went live not too long ago. We had over 300 images with crazy tight timelines but it came out super slick. Really had to do some interesting tricks do deal with that heather fabric.
Client: Nike NSW // Product Photos: Ryan Unruh // Athlete photos: Unknown.
The Jordan project we did with Ryan Unruh was just picked up on AdWeek. Always a good thing!
Photographer Nicolle Clemetson ask us to help out on her project for Gorge.net and we happily gave it all we could. She is one of the few to be allowed into the danklife home base which is in the center of a dormant cinder cone somewhere in Oregon.
This Spring I was approached by Dan Zimmerman at Big Giant to help come up with an Illustration for Starbucks new summer drinks. The Illustration was deemed too far out of theme with the motion project and was shelved fairly close to completion. I was quite happy with the work though and really enjoyed the project. You can see how it was made and more in my Behance portfolio
Just some snaps from the coast the weekend of 7/28/13. Had a great relaxing time and picked up four new pieces of art while out there.
The new rig consists of 7 Mac Mini mid-2011 servers, each connected to an M-Audio ProFire 610 interface for MIDI and audio. Each player in the Ensemble has his own dedicated computer. I chose this Mini model because it has a quad-core processor and dual 500GB internal hard drives. I’m not using any server functions on it. The second internal drive is a clone of the first, maintained by Carbon Copy Cloner; whenever the machine boots up, the clone is updated and older files archived. All computers are run headless via Ethernet from a MacBook . All machines have identical software loads, except for their manual IP addresses and desktop pictures which have the computer name embedded in them so I can tell which one I’m looking at. I have written a number of custom Applescript applications as front ends for rsync to manage synchronization between machines, a subject worthy of a separate discussion, so I won’t go into that now.
While not directly related to Photography I found this interesting on how they solved these issues. I like the use of mac minis as well. I am looking for some options for a render farm and I may do something like this.
Really good overview of lights and rendering for anyone doing any kind of 3d. Very educational.
Jesse Southerland at Bicycling asked me if I would be interested in illustrating some bike review images for the Aug 2013 issue and it turned into a fun 3d study. He wanted a projection on the bikes originally, but then we slowly shifted to old school 70s style wall paper murals in room wholly generated in 3d. Lots of fun bits like hand painting in the tears in the wall paper. Great to see them half page!
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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....
Chris Dave & the Drumhedz - Actual Proof
Chris "Daddy" Dave - DrumsIsaiah Sharkey - GuitarCause I need music to get through the days.
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.
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.
