John Chiara is a local San Francisco photographer who built his own truck-sized camera. He details it’s operation in the above video and it’s nothing short of impressive the way he creates and manipulates the exposures. John’s process and results are fascinating, and it’s not just about the scale of the camera, the results themselves are truly beautiful. You can see more of his work at the Von Lintel Gallery site and get more info at the LighDark site.
Lomo has released "the world’s very first pre-loaded and ready-to-shoot RedScale film" and the results look pretty interesting. Redscale is an old concept; it involves loading the film backwards and shooting through the base which has a protective coating which shifts colors into the red. Now you don’t have to go through the hassle of loading your film backwards to get this effect. Lomography
Fubiz has a post up entitled "70 Amazing Business Cards" and while I wouldn’t go as far as to call all of them "amazing", there are some nice examples in the list making it a good resource if you’re looking to make some for yourself. My personal favorites are the embossed style, I love that texture, it makes the card feel so much more substantial.
I have always been sort of torn on the subject of business cards. On one hand, I love the type-based examples, they’re so clean and to the point. But on the other hand, that doesn’t always say much about the work the holder of the card might expect to find on your site. For mine, I ended up settling on mini posters on each side with the pertinent info worked into the original poster designs, sort of a quick glimpse of my portfolio.
I just got home from Seattle after playing Decibel Fest on Saturday night. The show was a lot of fun and the crowd had some amazing energy. Thanks to everyone for coming out, I appreciate you having me up and hope to see you all again real soon. The Sight Below, Deru, and Lusine were incredible, was great to be able to catch their sets on such a huge sound system. I don’t have any pics from the set so if anyone has some posted on Flickr or something, let us know.
I wish I could have taken a lot more pics around town, but time was short and I never got a day to make it out with the camera. I did manage to get one shot (above) of the Space Needle from the hotel window. I love that thing, all we have in San Francisco is a stretched out pyramid. I’ve been to Seattle in the past but it was a nice refresher course this time around. There’s really a great vibe there that reminds me a lot of SF, but with way better coffee shops. They also have some amazing food; we had breakfast at a crepe place called "611" this morning. Off the charts.
I’ll post tomorrow on the VJ who did visuals for Lusine, it was incredible.
Flying out to Seattle today for tomorrow night’s show. The show has sold out so I’ll see you all out there, and if you didn’t make it in this time I’ll be back up soon enough I’m sure. The doors open at 8pm and I’ve been informed I’ll be on around 11:15pm. I’ve worked out some new visuals and added some new effects and tweaks for this set so it should be fun trying it all out for the first time. I’ll also be playing a new unreleased song along with some of the old favorites.
I’ve got my D80 with me so hopefully I’ll get some good shots of the city while I’m up there. And for those of you who have been asking about video from the live sets: We taped the Toronto show at the Drake, it’s still in production but should be up in some form soon so stay tuned. See you tomorrow…
It is said that Leonardo Da Vinci lived by the principals of what is now called polyphasic sleep; basically meaning he followed a rigidly structured sleep schedule allowing for only 3-4 hours of sleep per day. Sounds pretty crazy, but it does net the faithful around 21 waking hours per day. Apparently you take several naps during the day as opposed to one big sleep at night and somehow your body adjusts to this and thrives. I must admit the concept is appealing, all that extra time each day. But judging from how I perform off even 6 hours of sleep I am pretty sure I’m out of the running as a candidate anything like Da Vinci’s system.
That doesn’t change the fact that I want this alarm clock. Designed by Marc Owens, the clock operates on a very simple system that makes adhering to the polyphasic cycle easier, and better looking. More info can be found at Yanko Design.
A contributor to this very blog swears by polyphasic sleep and seems to thrive on it. Anyone else getting by with this system? Do you get more work done? Let us know in the comments
As if you didn’t already know, Adobe today announced the latest iteration of it’s Creative Suite, CS4. There aren’t any real surprises and most of the updates fall squarely in incremental territory. I am excited about the intelligent image scaling and GPU acceleration in Photoshop. I was a beta tester for Photoshop so I’ve had a chance to see these features in action. I didn’t notice any huge performance gains with the GPU acceleration, but then again my workflow doesn’t really include a lot of the tasks the new feature is supposed to speed up. I also got a chance to get a 64-bit version of PS running on my Windows XP 64 install to test out the performance now that Photoshop can actually "see" all 8GB of memory in my system. Again, the performance gains weren’t really noticeable which was somewhat disappointing. I think the cause of this was file size though. I think once you’re dealing with files that occupy more space in memory than you have physically installed in your system, the scratch disks are the key. In other words, I don’t think Photoshop seeing and extra 6GB of memory is really all that important when the file you’re working with is taking up far more and still writing to scratch disks.
I’ll admit though, I just haven’t had the time to really put it through it’s paces and get any real figures, these were just my initial impressions from the limited experience I’ve had with the software. I guess I just always looked forward to the day Photoshop became 64-bit with GPU acceleration as the day I could effortlessly tear through an 18×26" poster @ 300dpi without so much as a screen refresh delay; sadly, I don’t think we’re there quite yet. All that aside, I’m always excited to have an update to my favorite software. All of the previous updates have added great features / functionality and this version is no different. Link
I’ll be playing a live Tycho show this weekend in Seattle (Sat. Sep. 27) as part of Decibel Festival. I’ll be doing full live ISO50 visuals along with the music. Here are the details, hope to see you all out.
GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL LABEL SHOWCASE
Tycho (San Francisco) : Seattle Debut Live A/V Set – Ghostly International, Merck Deru (Los Angeles) : Live – Ghostly International, Merck Lusine (Seattle) : Live – Ghostly International, Hymen The Sight Below (Seattle) : Debut Live A/V Set, Ghostly International
Venue: The Baltic Room – $12 presale / $15 at the door – Doors open Venue: 8pm / 21+
