Productivity quick tips
I’ve recently been trying to keep things as simple as possible with regards to my photography as well as all the “stuff” that is part of the business. In doing so I’d like to share with you 2 of my recent discoveries.
My first suggestion has to do with reading interesting articles online. I read a lot of photography blogs and crative inspiration articles. As you might know, web pages are full of ads and “stuff” that distracts from the actual text you are reading. Readability is a tool that makes pages a joy to read. it’s a little bookmark that you place on your browser toolbar and with one click it cleans up the page and leaves only the information you want to read. Check out the following example:
Page from the New York Times as it normally appears. This is a quick news item. Less than 1 page which you need to scroll down to finish reading:
An here’s how it looks like after one click on Readablilty. No scrolling, clean borders and easy to read:
A super simple tool that makes reading articles online much easier on the eyes!
The other tool is part of the Mac OS and it helps when you are reading those great articles online and you find a word that you are not familiar with (English being my second language I often use this to learn new vocabulary). This is a shortcut to the dictionary that all Mac computers come with. Lets say you are reading an article or writing an email and you need to check the definition of a word. You simply have to place your cursor over the word and hold down Control + Command + D and a tiny pop up window appears over the word you selected with the definition. Easy and very useful.
As you can see there is also the option to select either the dictionary or thesarus at the bottom of the window as well as the option to open the Dictionary application.
Hopefully this 2 tips will be useful to you. I know that for me this little things make a big difference in my daily work routine.
Aperture 3 is out
Apple has released Aperture 3. Even though I’m a Lightroom user I’ll be checking it out to see what’s new although I see a lot of new features that already exist in Lightroom (colour labels, image presets, printing presets) but we all benefit from Adobe and Apple competing in this field.
Quick update on blocking flash on your browser
With all the noise being made about the iPad not having support for Flash I remembered my post on disableing Flash on the browser (which you can read here) And remembered that I forgot to include a solution for my PC using friends. Well I found one and it’s called Flashblock and you can find it here.
It works in Firefox and it will make your browsing faster and less annoying. By the way if you are using Internet Explorer on your PC you should really move to Firefox. Better experience overall.
Good start to the year!
The first post of the year and January is almost over! It was a busy start to say the least. I’ve been living inside Photoshop this past month and I’ve actually had a blast. I recieved a new Wacom tablet that has made me a speed demon. I’m now using an Intuos4 medium and the difference from my old Graphire is just unbelievable. I should have invested in the new one a long time ago.
One of the major speed boosts comes from the new Radial menu. Program any button on the pen or on the tablet to show this menu and when you activate it you get a circular overlay where your pen is positioned. This menu can show any command that you need to access frequently. And it gets better. You can have a submenu of commands so the total number of items available is huge.
Wacom Radial Menu
I have arranged this menu so that I have my most used actions there. I just need to click the back button on my pen and in that instant and wherever I am on my screen I can create layers, change brushes and add masks to name a few.
I’ll add more of my Wacom tricks in the next post but since I have to run and actually work on some shots I’ll leave you with a cool link to some cool images.
Mathew Albanese has created some amazing landscape photos but the cool thing about them is not that he was at the right place at the right time to get them. He actually created the landscapes himself as miniatures. Everything is “fake” but it looks real. Great creativity to figure out how to mimic what we see in nature with things like paprika and parsley! Go check it out at the following link:
Happy Holidays!
The year is almost over and I’ve been working on a variety of projects up until yesterday. It seems things will be a little slower in the next two weeks and I look forward to spending time with family and enjoying the Christmas season.
Best wishes and I’ll see you in the new year.
Happy Holidays!
A few shots added to the website
I’ve done a bit of house cleaning on the portfolio images and have added a couple from recent shoots. There’s a couple of shots I’ll be adding in the next couple of days so more to come soon.
Lightroom 3 Beta
Yes, it’s been busy the last couple of weeks around here and although there is a lot of stuff I will post about soon, this news needed to be shared. Adobe has released Lightroom 3 Beta to the general public. This means that you can download a copy right now and start testing it and sending feedback directly to Adobe. Some of the new features that stand out for me from the brief overview I did are the following:
The import window is totally redone. It’s more “workflow-ish” than the previous version (yes I just created that word and I like it). You get a column on the left for your source of images you would like to import, a center area where the images will preview and a right column that shows the possible destinations for your imported images.
At the top of the import window you get all the possible ways your images can be imported (copied, moved or converted to DNG). The new window also has a minimize mode where you just see the basic options and no previews which works great with another new feature which allows you to save presets of how you import images. More on that on a future post.
The slideshow module now allows you to save your slideshows as video files. A simple menu allows you to select the size of the video that you want and it takes 1 click to save. I’m glad to see an iPhone optimized option as a default since I’ve been planning on creating a video portfolio for my iPhone and this will make it super easy to update it with new content.
The last one that intrigued me just by looking at a couple of demo movies online is the concept of Publishing that has been introduced. I’m not clear on exactly how this works but it seems that you can publish (export?) collections of photos to a folder (or iPhone / device) and keep track of what has been sent to that destination. It sounds to me like a versioning system but will have to dig deeper to see what it does.
Now I’m off to explore some more options and also to send feedback to Adobe. And that specifically is worth mentioning. Adobe’s policy of opening their beta program to the public is something I feel is greatly appreciated by their customers. The feedback is really taken into account to perfect the final version of Lightroom. It’s something I don’t feel Apple does as well and that I believe Apple should learn from Adobe.
“Best Camera” by Chase Jarvis & Ubermind
Fans of Chase Jarvis found a nice surprise this morning when they checked his blog for the latest news. It seems Chase has been working on an iPhone App for a while and it has finally seen the light of day this morning.
The App is called Best Camera and the name comes from the popular phrase “The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You”. This App gives you a bunch of filters and tweaks you can apply to the photos taken with your iPhone and is similar to other Apps on the iPhone (Camera Bag comes to mind) where you can get creative with your shots. The big advantege Best Camera has is that it has included a social aspect to the process. Any images you create you can then share with all the popular social networks from within the App.
You give the App permission to access your Facebook, Twitter, etc. and then using the Share button your photos get sent to all those sites at once. This really is a reflection of the whole philosophy that Chase has promoted for a long time. He is one of the most, if not the most open and generous photographers out there when it comes to sharing his knowledge and experiences.
Here’s a couple of images from the App in action:
The icon for Best Camera
This is the startup screen. A nice simple interface. I really appreciate good design and this just works.
Here are the main sections explained
I first went into the Settings and approved all the logins for my social media sites (Facebook, Tweeter etc.)
Then it was time to try things out. I loaded an image into the App by tapping on the second icon at the bottom. This takes you to the Camera Roll on your phone. You can also take a shot with the camera. I selected an image and I was ready to start checking some effects.
The first effect I tried was Candy. It gave the shot a nice saturated and contrasty look. I really like the intense orange colour of the beer.
I applied the changes and was brought back to the main screen.
I tried the Vignette icon and this is what I got. Cool.
If at any point in the creative process you want to remove a filter or go back to where you were a few steps back, you just press the icon with the two circles in the upper right hand side of the main screen (looks like 2 filters one on top of each other) and you are taken to this screen where you can tap on the “x” above each filter. It’s like having an “undo” command.
Finally when you are happy with your image you click on the big arrow at the bottom of the main screen and you select which social media sites you want your shot to appear in. It’s that simple.
Overall I really like this App. It is super simple to use, the interface is perfectly designed and it runs great. I think the social aspect is what’s going to make it a bit more popular with users than the other Apps that do similar things.
There are a couple of filters that I wish Best Camera would offer that you can find in it’s direct competitor Camera Bag but that’s a minor thing and I’m guessing that future versions of this one may offer more filters and effects. My ideal App would be Best Camera and PhotoGene (the other App I use on every shot I take) rolled into one. That would be iPhone camera heaven.
This is a great App and at 3 dollars it’s a must buy in my book.
scenes from california
As I slowly start going through the shots I have from my recent trip to California I find that post processing gives me the chance to create something that looks like the scenes I saw during those days. My opinion is that the image you see in your mind when you take a photograph is what you should try to show others afterwards so here’s a couple of exaples I’m working on. Very tough this thing about converting feelings into images but why else would you shoot then right?
Controling Flash (the internet kind)
Flash. In photography it’s an amazing tool that lets you have light wherever you go. It allows you to simulate sunlight and create cool special effects. You should learn to use and control flash if you want to expand your lighting knowoledge (unless you plan on shooting only during bright sunny days and even then you should use it!).
Today though, I will give you a little tip on the internet kind of Flash. The Adobe kind. I’m a fan of Flash. From the beginning it allowed me to create cool animations and interfaces and my current photography website is in Flash (here). But Flash has a couple of trade offs and yesterday I found a cool solution for some of those trade offs.
As a tool to create internet ads Flash just bugs me. Flash is known for being “crashy” and taking up heavy resources from your computer. Advertisers use it to create bright, jumpy animations that can get pretty annoying. And here’s where my recommendation comes to the rescue.
It’s called ClickToFlash and it’s a Mac only option (let me know if there’s a similar product for Windows out there). You download it and run the installer and in a couple of seconds an invisible shield has been raised against Flash on the internet.
From that moment on when you are browsing the internet all Flash content will be blocked automatically. You decide which animation you want to see and which you don’t need your computer to waste resources on. To show you how this looks here’s a screen capture of the New York Times with the plugin installed.
See that huge gray rectangle on the right? Yep, Flash.
Here’s the page without the plugin and all Flash content loading from the internet:
As you can see I didn’t need to download that big ad on the right when I arrived at the New York Times. It’s not that bad (although it did have a distracting animation) but I do prefer not to see if I can.
Ok so what are the downsides? Well, check out the page for the Space channel without Flash:
And here’s the site with everything loaded. Funny, in this case the ad is a normal html banner but the content of the page is Flash:
Another nice thing about ClickToFlash is that there is a preference you can set that tells it to offer you a higher quality videoclip when you visit sites like YouTube (it’s called H.264 but that’s just for the geeks). With this option turned on you can now visit YouTube and if there is a better quality version in H.264 of your video it will show it to you instead of the Flash (lower quality) version.
Here’s where you can get the plugin…and I did say it was free right?
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