general
My first Lightroom eBook is almost here
After keeping the project under wraps I’m finally ready to announce that my first Lightroom eBook will be coming out in a few days. It’s called “10 Supersonic Lightroom Tips” and it shows some of my favourite tips and tricks for using Lightroom. I’ll be posting more details as it takes shape in the next few days. Right now I’m working on the cover which I’ll post as soon as it’s done. Stay tuned.
Cool way to get inspired via RSS
The day I discovered RSS feeds my web browsing experience changed dramatically. I used to visit many sites, one by one, hoping to see some new content posted. This was slow and impractical. With RSS feeds you can check as many sites as you want from one convenient location…one single page. You can quickly see what’s new in your favourite websites and decide if you want to check it out.
There are many ways to read RSS feeds, there are special applications for this of course but I found that using Google Reader is the easiest. You open the Google Reader page with your feeds and see what’s new. If you want to read in more detail any item you just visit the site right there in the browser.
I recently found 2 feeds that are a great source of inspiration (Fubiz and FFFFound). They contain images of all kinds: photographs, logos, posters, animated gifs, etc. The problem was that I had to click on each news item in Google Reader to see the images. This turned out to be impractical to say the least (click, click, click….) So I searched for a better way to see the content of these feeds and to my surprise Google had the solution, and it’s great.
They have an option inside the Google Reader where you can select a group of feeds and have them displayed as a slideshow. Awesome! This is exactly what I needed. Here’s a video showing you how to use the Google Play option in Google Reader. Instant inspiration! Nice.
(by the way, your Google Reader will look a bit different since I installed a “skin” that makes it look way better..)
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 disabling 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.
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.
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?
2008
It’s been quite a few weeks since I posted anything here. The reasons have been many but overall they’ve been good. Good in the sense that I’ve been busy with multiple projects.
My goal for next year is to have things set up properly and update this blog with all the new projects I’ve been working on. Here’s hoping that in the next year, although the challenges will be many, we can all find the inspiration to keep us moving forward.
See you in 2009!
Away for 2 weeks
I will be going away on a trip for the next 2 weeks and will resume posting when I come back. If possible I will try to post some images from the road when internet access is available. For now I wanted to share 2 links I found today.
First an article on CNET showing a new form of light panel that is less than 1 inch thick and can be 30 inches high by up to 12 feet long. The potential for having lighted floors, ceilings and other surfaces is very interesting. I can see this technology in future lighting gear for photographers too.
The second link also on CNET talks about a new experimental camera chip developed at Stanford University that can create a 3D representation of what is being photographed at the same time as it captures the image. Each pixel on the chip can calculate how far it is from the subject and use that information to see its depth. A bit too futuristic but very interesting.
New website live
The new look for my website is ready and live. The old site design was from 2004 and needed a mayor redesign facelift. After much debating what tool to use I settled on SlideshowPro which works really well with Lightroom. I export the images directly from Lightroom and then use an HTML template around the slideshow. It took a bit more coding and time than expected (a lot more), but it’s done! I’ll be tweaking it and adding content frequently so stop by if you haven’t been there in a while.
orozco.ca
My new venture. Learn photography with me.
