I'm wearing a shirt into work today on which I've written a small rant about the lack of working fans in the building. These trailers get hot, man. I managed to work in some of their safety jargon too. I figure either no one will bat an eye, or they'll walk me out for my tasteful use of the word "FUCKING" as the centerpiece of the shirt. Will report back later on employment status.
Yesterday was a first for me. I was involved in an official HR investigation. Luckily, it wasn't about me. You see... my boss' boss is a serious bully. This person is regularly condescending, cruel, demoralizing, and just generally unprofessional. So HR called me up and asked me some questions about my working environment, the atmosphere at the office, and other general things. They also asked a few pointed questions about this individual. It felt great to be completely open and honest about how bad it is - but not in a whiny, complaining way... just in a frank, factual sort of way. Now we'll see if anything changes (which I seriously doubt).
honestly - I almost hope they do.. I know it would inevitably end with me losing my job - but if that happens, I have a decent case for retaliation reparations. I'm not the litigious type, but you want to preach harassment and then let a guy go who calls out senior leadership on their flagrant, documented, and recorded abuses? Come at me bro... . Also... I know I'm not the only one who was involved. I am probably one of the more junior people actually. This person is a Senior VP, and at least four of this person's direct reports (a mix of VPs and directors) have all be interviewed by HR also. It should be interesting.
Planning my photographic adventure this week! A little disappointed it's going to be mostly east coast - Was hoping to get to know the West coast a little more. But it's still going to be dope! Got about 4.5k worth of equipment! Can't wait to learn how to use it. Now, I got to figure out how to trick my brain into not fucking up. To say I'm absent minded is an understatement. The other week, I went to show an apartment to some people and forgot the keys to the building. I once forgotten my passport on the coffee counter in the airport. Today, I had to buy tiles and somehow figured 5×5 = 35 and am now wasting an extra 2h to go get these 10 extra tiles. I make lists and systems and stuff, but I'll still find a new and unexpected way to fuck something up anyway. At least it has given me great problem solving skills as a result.... anyone got any advice?
Maybe all you need to do is, before you transition from one space to the next, simply stop. Take one breath with your eyes closed. And be present for a moment. Rather than trying to force your brain to do something "OMG what am I forgetting?!?", simply give it the space and time to Do The Right Thing. I'll bet your brain will be more on point, if you give it permission to be.
My personal method for attempting to keep my squirrel brain in check is to use a small notebook and a note taking method loosely based on bullet Journaling. Keyrings always have a keychain with a clip on them so they can get clipped to my bag. This serves 2 functions: 1 being that I can see and know that I didn't just lock my keys in the car (did this for the 2nd time in my life on a particularly squirrelly day a few weeks ago) and 2 it keeps me from having to dig around the bottom of my bag for them. I have a grid-it in my bag to keep little stuff corralled also, like my multitool, lip balm, mini sewing kit, etc. But the main thing is to write stuff down and check it off when done or schedule it to a different day if it isn't happening today. And always measure twice before cutting or buying supplies.
Whatever you got, it probably has a memory slot or two on the dial. 5DMkIIs, for example, have a P1, a P2, and a P3. Build presets that work for each of the things you do a lot of. Example: exteriors, interiors, night. At the start of every shoot, make sure you've got a preset selected. Take a picture. Look at it. Does it suck? If yes, try another preset. If no, stick with that preset. That will get you started. Every. Goddamn. Day. You can experiment beyond that but you know that you started out in a functional place. (this shit was a lot harder back when we shot film)
Okay - here is my first trial with the equipment i'll have. Comments, critique? http://imgur.com/a/ot4ws I messed up the first picture a little and the house is not very sharp because of it. Also having a little trouble conveying the true colour of the rocks in picture #3 (it's the same location as #4 and #5 and looks hella different.) But overall, I'm pretty happy with the result :)
TOUGH LOVE FOLLOWS This is the last time you will ever show up a picture you "messed up" even "a little." Your job is not to take pictures, it is to make images and with cards as big and cheap as they are you have zero excuses to ever not capture exactly what you're after. Never take "a photo." Take 20 at least. Literally. Hold down the damn shutter and get five minutely identical shots each time. Set it to bracket. Shoot up or down 1EV in half-stop increments always. ALWAYS have what you intended to be in focus, in focus. Picture 3 looks like ass because it's in shade. Your psychovisual complex has better gamut than your camera. You will never make a shade photo look as good as a "in light" photo. That said, post-processing is essential with digital photography. Behold. Instagram filters for Lightroom. WORKFLOW 1) take a shitload of pictures 2) Ingest a shitload of pictures 3) go through and rate good stuff 3, 4, or 5 4) Filter off everything unrated 5) Tag everything that's left 6) Auto-adjust everything that's left 7) Tweak the shit that's good 8) rate everything that isn't good 2 9) Winnow it down to one or two good shots of every subject 10) SHOW THAT. Shot #2 shows promise. When you shot that, did you blow out the highlights? Because if not, bring the sky back in with a grad filter. And if you did, get good at fixing it.
Better? It's still a bit blown out, but it was literally the sun there. I guess I'll have to shoot a bunch because they're asking me 7-10 shots per subject so they can make their selection too. Time to watch some data lightroom management tutorials. You're right about not showing messed up pics anymore, one big reason I did was to show I was out there working on something and not just sitting at home all day. I'll have to go re-shoot that location properly tomorrow morning - at least it will show fast progress on my part. I think they expected a bit of a learning curve when they hired someone without a real background in photography (theoretical or practical), but the steeper it is the better! Thanks a bunch for all the feedback, appreciate the tough love :) I feel like a better photographer just after reading this. Do you think I should mess around with LUTs? I was thinking of keeping it as non-sylized as I could, since the point is to sell rocks and I don't want to colours to be too far off reality. And trendy faded black pics are going to look like shit in a couple of years.
Hella better. Do you know your histogram? In challenging light situations (like shooting into the sun) don't shoot what you can see, shoot what you can record. Obviously if the actual sun is in the frame you will have a little clipping but if the whole damn sky is white you need to underexpose, just not so much that you lose detail in the blacks. And yes. You need to know Lightroom better than you know Gmail. You're going to spend about 1.5x as long cranking through media as you are shooting it. The better you get at doing that the better a photographer you will become. LUTs - I had to look that up as to how it related to photography. We use them for color correction in cinematography because the big scary RAW cameras used to spit out log color and you needed to turn it into linear color before you could show it to the director and have him not freak out. But apparently when photographers talk about shit like that, they're basically saying "I wish we could cross-process film without having to shoot film!" YeahDON'T. It's artsy bullshit advertising crap that if the art director wants, they would have asked a looooooong time ago. Put it this way - it was the core of an iconic Gap ad campaign... fifteen fucking years ago. Not only that but you can do that shit whenever the fuck you want. If they wanna cross color your shit once it gets to editorial they can do it without your assistance (or permission). If I were you, I'd shoot a color card every time the light changes and then tweak it in Lightroom until it's what you need. I recommended the MacPhun stuff because there's a bunch of fucking handy shit in there:
This girls in the photo are the focal point, and their color is washed out and flat. If you'd shot this image in three frames - one over, one under exposed - then you could bring the color back into the girls and really make them pop. KB's got good advice. I've seen his photos. He knows of what he speaks!
I don't know that I agree. The shot is actually a very well composed line-out - the cobbles recede to infinity and the tower and tree line recede to the same point, which happens to be the sun. I might be tempted to rule-of-thirds it a little better but cropping is going to happen at the editorial stage anyway. When you consider that the shot largely exists to sell the beauty of the cobblestones it works really well; if you were to use this shot in editorial the bottom half of the image is available for copy. If the goal wasn't the cobblestones I'd fuckin' silhouette every human and tree in it. They're too muddy and disorganized to feature. Rather than making them pop I'd try to will them into oblivion. elizabeth - this would be a great use for an ND filter because if you had like an 80% or 90% gray on there, and shot into the sun, you could get a sky in one shot, get a long exposure on the tiles in another, and in that long exposure you'd have motion blur on the humans such that they suggested movement without being more than stand-ins for traffic. If she did want to tweak the saturation on the girls you'd do it with the brush tool. That rock wasn't nearly that red in the captured file, nor was the grass that green. But it sure as fuck was to my eye, so it sure as fuck got tweaked.This girls in the photo are the focal point, and their color is washed out and flat.
Yup rule of thirds has been a struggle. Submitted pictures with 1/3 cobblestones = not enough cobble stones was the feedback 2/3 cobblestones pictures are harder to pull off so they don't look too boring. And then i start running into depth of field problems where i got to do multiple shots to later blend everything in focus. (Which i still need to pull off successfully - tried a couple times today but turns out i need to take more pictures than i anticipated for everything to be sharp) Taking pretty pictures is significantly easier than taking pretty pictures of x. But with all the tutorials I've been watching and all you guy's help, I'm improving fast imo :) I feel like todays work is a lot better: https://imgur.com/a/RrH7F Still working at turtle pace in lightroom. Doesn't help my usual shortcuts don't work and sometimes mess up something when they correspond to some other action.
Ctrl-Z is your friend in Lightroom. Slap it like you're playing Space Invaders. If you need more depth-of-field you need to shoot at a higher stop. f/22, f/28 will solve all DOF problems. It will also suck away all light. Tripod. Shutter release cable. You need to get closer to the ground. If you're looking to make those cobblestones pop, get fuckn' on 'em. I've got a Bogen 3221 (that, I realize, is maybe a little older than you are) and one of the coolest things is it's got tripod threads on the bottom of the riser, too... which means you can mount your quick release down there, drop the camera upside down, and literally have it on a tripod half an inch above the ground. 
Yeah, thank god Ctl-Z works everywhere! I was shooting at the highest stop for most the shots - but the really close stones are still not in focus perfectly. Maybe i'm just being picky... Got that tripod and shutter release so all should be good. Scored the good manfrotto stuff, it doesn't do any fancy flips but is pretty solid :)
True on the exposure, the camera has a setting where it automatically takes 3 or 5 shots at different stop increments. I think you should try to reshoot that shot but shoot it about 2-5 min later, to help mitigate blown hilights a bit more. KB probably knows the rules better than I on people in photos, would you need a signed release from the gal and couple in the center if you were to actually use the photo commercially?
This is called "bracketing" as mentioned above. In a universe with a lot of time, you sit there for an hour. COOL TRICK - hold your hand all the way out between you and the sun. Put your pinky on the horizon. Every finger between your pinky and the sun is fifteen minutes and in general, you've got three or four fingers worth of rippin' good light (depending on the atmospheric conditions, shit might end as soon as the sun sinks or you might get an extra "finger" when the sun is over the horizon but cooking the shit out of overhead clouds. It's not so much about dealing with blowouts as it is capturing the varying light conditions as the sun gets more and more oblique on the scene. "Need" is the tricky part. In a full-fury film shoot for broad commercial release, you get a signed release allowing you to shoot in the location and hang up signs that say effectively "your presence in this location serves as consent for filming eat a dick." If you feature any of these people in a recording you get a release from them. If they're just bystanders nobody gives a fuck. If they're unidentifiable nobody gives a fuck. If you have no audio recording of them saying words nobody gives a fuck. In a Canadian photo shoot in a public place for commercial use outside the general public no one is ever going to care unless there's an ad agency with its panties in a twist that decides they want to avoid any appearance of missed licensing because they're pussies or because they want to beat you up on price (PROTIP: most "licensing" issues are "we want to beat you up on the price"). They'll skunk the photo because of the old couple staring at the photographer, not the girls walking across the frame. They're identifiable, they're jarring in the frame and they can poison the editorial. Pragmatically speaking it comes down to whether the customer cares. If the customer is stock, the people are unidentifiable. If the customer is bespoke, best ask first.True on the exposure, the camera has a setting where it automatically takes 3 or 5 shots at different stop increments.
I think you should try to reshoot that shot but shoot it about 2-5 min later, to help mitigate blown hilights a bit more.
KB probably knows the rules better than I on people in photos, would you need a signed release from the gal and couple in the center if you were to actually use the photo commercially?
dying to see what you got #cameraporn dying to see what you get... I'm super excited for your adventureGot about 4.5k worth of equipment!
Big night last night. Lots of heart, and feelings, and tears, and laughter, and joy. My old circus - Circus Contraption - disbanded back in 2009. Our last show - The Show To End All Shows - ran for two years, and during the last week of the last run we did a 3-camera video shoot of the whole show, with the intent to release a DVD. And then Things Happened, and hard disks with the video files on them were put in the back of a closet, and everyone went their ways and built new careers for themselves. The video was largely forgotten about. A myth that Circus fans told each other, hoping it was true, but never really believing they'd ever see it. Until last month. When someone excavated the old drives, got the data off them, slapped together a (very) rough edit of the full show. And last night, we rented out theater 1 at the Northwest Film Forum and showed the movie. Two shows. SRO. Most of the artists were able to be there, and this was the FIRST TIME any of them had seen the whole show from the audience's perspective! You don't think about it while you are watching the people currently on stage, but the other performers are back stage changing costumes, or running lines and pulleys making things on stage happen, or are simply fixing their costume/makeup before their next moment on stage. Maybe you are the juggler, and during someone else's act, when you hear the person on stage say, "Oh my! I wasn't expecting THAT!", you pull a rope. Then you hear the audience roar with laughter. Then you re-secure that rope, and go back to put on the hat you wear in the next scene. But you never see what the audience sees, or the result of your actions! Well, the performers finally got to see the show the way all of us had always seen it. And we all sang along with the tunes, and mourned the circus members who were killed a few years ago, and celebrated their memories with their happy on-stage antics, and ... it was a reunion. And it was wonderful. And I cried. Many times. sigh.
Thanks for the interest, my friend. They did give us all a DVD of the edit they showed, but I'm not sure it would make a lot of sense to someone who didn't know the whole story. The show is essentially a musical, featuring all kind of circus human stunts (like aerial work, juggling, clowning, etc), but it is also a full story and every character has their story arc. The edit - due to data loss reasons, technical snafus, performance problems, etc - jumps around a bit. One act takes place largely in darkness, with the juggler working with glowing juggling balls... that are all but invisible on the video, so it was entirely cut. In short, I am not sure the performers would let it out into the wild. It is not evidence of their finest work, and these people were serious perfectionists. (Hence the reason the video has been "lost" for 8 years...) Here's a clip of the first season's big finale. Shot by the sound engineer, it seems! (The basic idea is that the world ended earlier, all the debris and the stage falling apart, and it's taken over by cockroaches... umm... sexy cockroaches... who do a kick-line. Yeah.) And this is after the mermaid gets "corrupted" by man, and becomes... well... a stripper. (Shot by a fan in the crowd on a 2007-era cell phone, sadly.) And this... well... we were known for doing songs entirely played on bottles. People always asked for us to do Bohemian Rhapsody... so after close to a year of practice (on and off), the gang did a special show and played it. This particular song was not a part of the regular show (we did a different song during the show), but I think this may be the only video of our attempt. And this is a documentary film made in 2002 about Circus Contraption, when the circus was going through a particularly rough time, and almost broke up. So there's some stuff to keep you entertained for a bit...! :-)
I ran/hiked 44 miles last week. Changed my running shoes. Started going to yoga. Started dating a seemingly fantastic and oddly similar girl. Who is now gone for the next two weeks. Such is life. Had the following thought on Sunday and it was in earnest: "Maybe my life is kind of interesting." (hint: it's not).
According to my watch I ran my fastest mile and my fastest 5k last night. Mile: 7:27. 5k: 23:57. My heart rate was too high and the course is as flat as a board, but I'll take it.
We're all moved into the house and I finally managed to fire up the oven and make my first loaf of bread. The internal thermometer was spot on and had no trouble getting up the 475 - though the kitchen is stuffy without a fan. But I got to use up my North Carolina grown and ground flour and it's delicious. I have two courses up and running for the company I work at - a workshop on public speaking and a book club on having difficult conversations - both of which seem to get a lukewarm response. I want to develop a third course on decision making but for some reason I've been attacked by a bout of lethargy and nihilism - neither of which are great motivators. So I'm diving into the real question - do I change my occupation to seek more satisfaction, or dive in head first for higher compensation?
and snoodog I'm in for breadski. for some reason my last couple of bakes have all gone flat. I think with the rising temps, I'm trying to use my winter proof time and it's just consistently over proofing. A little competition might get me to pay more attention to my final rise.
Just got back from the East coast, half the staff at my warehouse job quit while I was away. Which is, uh, something. I'm going to try and drop down to 3 days a week there while I start my new job: Assistant Preschool Teacher Well, "job" might be a bit generous. I'm interning at a cool constructivist outdoor pre-K near where I live, and if I make it through the summer, I can start working there in a full time paid position in the fall. In any case, it's only 10 hours a week right now, and I'm happy to do it for free for the time being. I'm helping with storytelling and teaching songs and crafts and all that jazz. I'd like to work as a music teacher sometime soon, and I feel like this is a pretty good transitional step. ------------ My partner and I just moved in to our own (rented) house, and it's fucking great. Still in a state of disarray at the moment, but I'll upload some pictures tonight. EDIT: Some pics. Behold! a pretty disorienting panorama of our bedroom. Most of the art is made by either us or our friends, which is nice. A chair I found on the side of the road. I wanted to take a bit of our last house with us, so I painted this the color of our old kitchen, and reupholstered it with the kitchen curtains I had made. A little gardening my partner did while I was out East.
This weekend I went to the whitest outdoor festival since the Fyre festival in Amsterdam. It wasn't my pick but it was a rendezvous with a bunch of old friends. The music was entirely forgettable technodancetronics. Think Major Lazer but ten times more dull - I literally couldn't remember a single song. Nevertheless it was dance-able and we had a great time in the 25C sun. Had some amazing churros and I didn't even get a sunburn! Whoo.
Plenty of stuff that I want to share with you all, but I have to wait a little bit. Check this out: Thank you, veen! That is now the sign that tells people that they are at the office of Forever Labs. I love it. Things are about as hectic as can be, but I feel like they aren't collapsing quite as fast as we are building. Maybe Comey will say that Trump moved on him like a bitch.
A day of contradictions... Massive frontal storm has been rolling past since last night. Schools and universities closed across the province. Where I am there's been power outages and trees falling over but I'm told there's been flooding and thousands displaced in the low-lying areas. Further down the coast lightning has caused some massive fires fanned by the wind but unfortunately they have not had any rain to counter it. My old roommate is from there and his hometown of 70k people is being evacuated. It's big pine plantation country and it seems the town in basically encircled by flames. There's not much info coming through right now as it's the middle of the night so we'll only really know the extent of the damage tomorrow... :(
It's kinda hard to say anything that's gonna top the Comey hearing happening this morning. This past half of the week I was at a conference in Indianapolis, and I just got back last morning (when pubski was fresh). The conference was great. My boss got a big award, I got to meet up and hang out with my old lab mates. The whole environment felt very comfortable and I felt valuable and optimistic. I'm still in recovery/recollection mode, so #scificlub will be a bit delayed. I still have to figure out what our next material should be.