New Work in the wild: Zepp

New project for Zepp on the danklife Behance portfolio and here as well.  Matt Davis and Kyle Wiley from NonBox came to me with a project for box illustrations for Zepp and I thought this would be a interesting project to show how the scope of the style can change and the problem solving that goes into it. The original concept was that since the Zepp reader would track data regarding your swing we would add data / numbers flying off the trails from the swings.  It changed a bit from there.  Athlete photography by Jelani Memory.

Oneonta George Hike

Went on a relaxing hike in Oneonta George over the past weekend and took a few snappies. Now we are back in sub freezing temps…. boo.

FX-Ray Skin Retouching Tut

Huh, this guy actually knows his stuff.  This is pretty much the best way to do skin and clothing.  I am rather surprised someone made such a good tutorial of it. Many props to FX-Ray.

New Flexible Paper Sculptures by Li Hongbo

Li Hongbo’s stunning, stretchable, paper sculptures, inspired by both traditional folk art and his time as a student learning to sculpt, challenge our perceptions. With a technique influenced by his fascination with traditional Chinese decorations known as paper gourds—made from glued layers of paper—Li Hongbo applies a honeycomb-like structure to form remarkably flexible sculptures.

An investigation into expression through one of the oldest mediums in history, Li Hongbo invites viewers to experience paper and sculpture in a revolutionary and insightful new way. Utilizing his expert knowledge of paper’s natural strengths and weaknesses, the artist has transformed the media to stretch, twist, elongate and retract as if it were a giant slinky. Through this juxtaposition of playful mobility and a traditional aesthetic, Li Hongbo breathes a unique life into his works that stuns and awes the viewer.

Via- This is Colossal

New Work in the Wild: Nike NCAA

Ryan Unruh had me do the post on these shots for Nike NCAA.  It was refreshing how he took it past normal catalog "Lay down" styles.  See more at Sole Collector.

A pro with serious workstation needs reviews Apple’s 2013 Mac Pro_Ars

“The Good

Impossibly quiet operation, even under load.
Power consumption at both idle and full load is amazingly low.
Space-saving design is a marvel of engineering.
Dual D700 OpenCL scores are incredible.
A good upgrade over previous Mac Pros for poorly multithreaded programs.
PCIe SSD is exceptionally fast.
Thermal temperatures are safely in spec for extended workstation-style usage and GPU operations.
Good pricing for workstation-class GPU options.
Affordable relative to similar configs offered by competing workstation vendors.
CrossFire enabled in Boot Camp so you can get very good gaming speeds.
The Bad

Drivers are to blame for some very low OpenGL results for the FirePro D700 in OS X.
Reliance on external devices for PCIe expansion increases cost and has some short-term compatibility implications for some.
Lack of Nvidia GPU option and CUDA problematic due to Apple’s lackluster OpenCL developer support.
If mid-life GPU upgrade kits aren’t offered for these machines, they will age badly for 3D and OpenCL work.
Despite the FirePro logo in the Windows AMD Catalyst utility, GPUs appear as Radeons in Boot Camp, so it’s not recommended for Windows pro apps unless a FirePro driver becomes available for these GPUs.
The Ugly

Lack of dual-socket CPU options means that the 8-core Xeon E5 v2 gets the same multithreaded CPU performance as the mid-priced dual-CPU Mac Pro from 2010. It’s bested badly by more recent dual CPU workstations, even for the 12-core.
If you are using programs that are poorly multithreaded throughout, then an iMac is frequently a better option due to faster clock speeds.”
— http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/01/two-steps-forward-a-review-of-the-2013-mac-pro/

The Death Of Expertise

This isn’t just about politics, which would be bad enough. No, it’s worse than that: the perverse effect of the death of expertise is that without real experts, everyone is an expert on everything. To take but one horrifying example, we live today in an advanced post-industrial country that is now fighting a resurgence of whooping cough — a scourge nearly eliminated a century ago — merely because otherwise intelligent people have been second-guessing their doctors and refusing to vaccinate their kids after reading stuff written by people who know exactly zip about medicine. (Yes, I mean people like Jenny McCarthy.

In politics, too, the problem has reached ridiculous proportions. People in political debates no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to insult. To correct another is to be a hater. And to refuse to acknowledge alternative views, no matter how fantastic or inane, is to be closed-minded.

...

Expertise is necessary, and it’s not going away. Unless we return it to a healthy role in public policy, we’re going to have stupider and less productive arguments every day. So here, presented without modesty or political sensitivity, are some things to think about when engaging with experts in their area of specialization.

 

We can all stipulate: the expert isn’t always right. But an expert is far more likely to be right than you are. On a question of factual interpretation or evaluation, it shouldn’t engender insecurity or anxiety to think that an expert’s view is likely to be better-informed than yours. (Because, likely, it is.) Experts come in many flavors. Education enables it, but practitioners in a field acquire expertise through experience; usually the combination of the two is the mark of a true expert in a field. But if you have neither education nor experience, you might want to consider exactly what it is you’re bringing to the argument. In any discussion, you have a positive obligation to learn at least enough to make the conversation possible. The University of Google doesn’t count. Remember: having a strong opinion about something isn’t the same as knowing something. And yes, your political opinions have value. Of course they do: you’re a member of a democracy and what you want is as important as what any other voter wants. As a layman, however, your political analysis, has far less value, and probably isn’t — indeed, almost certainly isn’t — as good as you think it is.

Interesting observations though I do not agree with all of it. 

Source: http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-de...

Abstract CGI Study

Here is a abstract study I did yesterday, rendered over night and printed out this morning.  Loosely based on works by John Chamberlain, I wanted to explore some different finishes / materials and do a lighting study with brushed steel.  Keeping the highlights smooth on the steel and placing the lights was fairly tricky to get how I liked.  Slightly added a HDRi map of some clouds in a landscape to just give a hint of location to the reflection. Printed on Ilford Gold Fiber Silk. 

Lightroom for iPad briefly appears on Adobe’s website, coming soon with $99/year cloud subscription | 9to5Mac

The benefit of the $99 service will be that users will not need to store several hundred megabytes or gigabytes of high-resolution photography on the iPad. They can just store it in the cloud or synchronize from their Mac. These photos will still be able to be edited and managed on the iPad, and changes will be synchronized back. Yes, it’s very much like an “iCloud” for Lightroom. A video of the prototype app is above at around 19 minutes in.

 

Hmm.... this is actually the first good idea I have heard from Adobe for awhile.  If I could edit my personal work on my ipad and get away from the computer that would be a huge plus to me.  This could possibly get to me to actually break down and subscribe instead of owning if it works as described. Screw the cloud though, lol, I'll use my NAS thank you. 

I would probably buy tomorrow if they made Lightroom support .PSBs (if anyone at Adobe is listening). There is not a single DAM solution out there that supports it.  I have to make jpgs with big text saying JPG of PSB so I can find it in there. 

Source: http://9to5mac.com/2014/01/17/lightroom-fo...

Adobe creating a cycle of Continuous Customer Disappointment.

 I was chatting with photographer Mike Powell the other day and he was asking about the new rental model Adobe is using now.  While I am on the record as being fully against it, I found a nice break down with a more concrete business view on why it is such a bad idea.

 Adobe

While creating a predictable revenue stream from high-end users, Adobe has created two problems. First, not all Adobe customers believe that Adobe’s new subscription business model is an improvement for them. If customers stop paying their monthly subscription they don’t just lose access to the Adobe Creative Suite software (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) used to create their work, they may lose access to the work they created.

Second, they unintentionally overshot the needs of students, small business and casual users, driving them to “good-enough” replacements like Pixelmator, Acorn,GIMP for PhotoShop and Sketch, iDraw, and ArtBoard for Illustrator.

The consequence of discarding low margin customers and optimizing revenue and margin in the short-term, Adobe risks enabling future competitors. In fact, this revenue model feels awfully close to the strategy of the U.S. integrated steel business when they abandoned their low margin business to the mini-mills.

Money is something people live on. Exposure is something people die from.

 If you own a small business or are self-employed, sooner or later you will be asked to work for free. The more successful you become, the more requests you’ll get.

But with the right response, you can turn these freeloaders into something positive.

You may want or need to work for free, especially when you’re just starting out to build a resume, client list or broaden your skills. At any time, you may be happy to donate your time and talent to good causes or very good friends.

Here are some ways to respond to common requests:

I can’t pay you, but you’ll get great exposure

  • What exactly is the nature of the exposure? How will my name and description be used? Will you have a link to my website?
  • How many people will be there?
  • I’ll need a testimonial from your company for my website and brochures.
  • Thank you, but I obviously have enough exposure since you contacted me.

Couple more examples in the link. Great advice here for anyone in a creative field.  

Link: What to say when you’re asked to work for free.

Some new CGI work

Just thought I would post some CGI projects I have been tinkering with.  The Lebron shoe was for Nike and was never published so I just added that to the front page.  I tweaked on it to add the "Lava" texture the other week which I thought made it more interesting.  Shoe is from a photo shot by Ryan Unruh.

The text piece is a interior study where I am working on getting the floors and lights working right.  Having a issue where I can't get the light working right in the bottom left. The abstract is just a study in making abstract art in CGI that I banged out yesterday. Both of these are entirely CGI.

Happy Holidays

Genius!  Not my work BTW.

Credits Agency: Victors&Spoils Music: Trans-Siberian Orchestra Original Content: globaldemocracy.com

Creativity is rejected: Teachers and bosses don’t value out-of-the-box thinking.

It’s all a lie. This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

 

“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,” says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. “As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,” he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.  

 

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_s...

Sculpting with Light

For 35 years, I’ve been a fine art and commercial studio photographer and for 24 of those years, I’ve used Light Painting (I like to refer to it as “Sculpting with Light”) as my method of lighting subjects. Many years ago, I discovered that light painting was not only a great tool for solving problems (which was initially the reason I started experimented with it), but it also was a way to enhance, reveal and celebrate certain aspects of subjects that weren’t visible to me under normal lighting conditions! There is a transformational quality to the light, and ordinary objects can become extraordinary when seen in this “new” light.