A sunset inspired photo from my downtown jury duty adventures last week. This is from a giant wall of red glass downtown. I’m also a fan of this photo of a very different part of the same building but red point is my favorite of the two.
I recently discovered Apple Aperture 2.0 and have simply fallen in love with it. It’s hands down the most performant and powerful photo management software out there. Coupled with Adobe Photoshop CS3 (technically the entire Creative Suite) my workflow has been entirely revolutionized. Aperture makes managing a set of 5 photos as easy as managing 10,000. By stacking and grouping photos it’s possible to quickly triage a shoot, find the good shots, and archive the bad shots all with GPU accelerated speed.
Unfortunately I’m come to realize just how unorganized my photos were in iPhoto and am being forced to go on a holy reorganization quest - luckily a not quite as monumental now that I have Aperture to help me out. As a bonus I’m finding lots of old photos that with a little tweaking come out great. It’s like finding rough jewels in a mine, only I don’t have to get all dirty and sweaty - I can just dig away at my desk.
A new entry into my series of Two Union Square
Sunday, February 17, 2008
After several crazy weeks I’m finally starting to feel caught up this weekend. Throughout the course of the weekend I’ve completed lots of little tasks and chores that have been slowly building up in my life since my career got crazy (both work to do right now, and finding new work for a few months in the future) everything else seemed to get put on hold.
Having caught up my stress levels are slowly returning to a more manageable level. This is a good thing as my health tends to suffer when I get too stressed out and in a case like this getting sick would only increase how far behind was. I’m starting to get more energy back and feeling more social as a result. Traskpro development may slow down slightly in the coming weeks if I end up being out of the house more when not at work.
I even found the time to take a few photos in the last few days. The above shot of Mike being Mike was taken from joining him, Cyn, and Charlotte at Cal Anderson park for some impromptu picnic play this morning. I’m also a fan of this new addition to my sticker series, and to this shot from the Pink Parasol - a cute little boutique a couple of blocks from my house.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
While at the Leopard launch last night Mike picked up an 8Gb 3rd generation iPod Nano for his daughter. While over at their house this morning I was amused to see he was having trouble registering the Nano. Every time he tries to sign in with his Apple ID he gets the puzzling error “This person record requires harvesting.” (click the image above for a full sized view).
While I’m sure it has a valid technical meaning it’s a strange message to show to an end user. It almost makes me wonder - what kind of harvesting is Apple talking about here, a kidney or a crop?
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Shortly after putting the finishing touches on my glowing review of Skitch for Gear Live I was fooling around and created this meta-skitch recursive image. Oh the idle joy’s of modern computing! Seriously though - check out the Skitch review, it’s one of those apps that you likely haven’t heard of yet won’t be able to live without once you try it. If you want a beta invite follow the instructions on the review for an opportunity to win one from me. You might also want to check out the Skitch website or my expose-screengrab experiment with Skitch.
“meta-skitch” by sparktography
Monday, September 24, 2007
Yesterday brought the marriage of Akiva and Shae in a beautiful ceremony. Attending was an interesting experience for me as this is the first Jewish wedding I’ve ever attended. While I didn’t directly understand any of the Hebrew prayers or blessings it was still fun to observe. I was very touched by how emotional Akiva got - he was shaking during the ceremony, and you could tell it really was a bit overwhelming for him.
The photo above is my favorite couples shot. I also really liked this shot of Eric, my capture of Shawna’s back, and this trippy twin-like shot of Troy. For all photos from the wedding check out my Flickr set of their wedding, or check out their Flickr wedding pool where hopefully other guests will also post some of their photos.
Congrats guys - myself and all your friends are wishing you the brightest of futures and the best of lives together!
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
I did a little work on some old photos tonight to work them up as Apple iPhone wallpapers. I ended up selecting two of them as my favorites, and am posting them here as a triptych with sunlit frond which I posted about two weeks ago. They were all selected for their central composition, and color pallets to go with the frosted grey and blue popups that appear on the homescreen. All three of them have been resized to 320×480 pixels from the original version and I adjusted the colors to look their best on the iPhone screen.
To set one of these as your iPhone’s wallpaper click the thumbnail above, then save the origional version from the pop-up to your hard drive. Save it to the location your iPhone syncs photos from (the folder of your choice on Windows or a Mac, or into iPhoto on Macs) and sync it to your iPhone. Once it’s there you can select it by clicking on Settings then Wallpaper to get to your photo library then selecting the photo of your choice.
“Chain link iPhone wallpaper” by sparktography
“Sunlit frond iPhone wallpaper” by sparktography
“Contrail to God iPhone wallpaper” by sparktography
