Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you on the other side of the Atlantic. Kudos to the guys at No Caption Needed for the cartoon. It's beautiful!

Sound Advice on Multimedia

I'm presently working on finalizing my first multimedia piece and it's a complicated process. As photographers we naturally have a knack for the visual narrative, but the audio narrative is new to many of us and probably even more important. MediaStorm has just published a piece about working with music on their blog so I'm sharing it here. I hope you enjoy it.

Ten Tips for Working With Music in Multimedia
Posted by Eric Maierson, November 23rd, 2009

Music is an all too frequently overlooked facet of multimedia production. In this ongoing series of tutorials to improve your multimedia, I’ll explain 10 techniques that the MediaStorm team utilizes when working with music.

First, though, a few definitions commonly used to describe musical attributes.

Tempo: the speed of a musical composition, how fast or slow it’s played.

Timbre: the voice or sound of an instrument. A stringed instrument has a different timbre than a piano or a saxophone.

Pitch: the frequency of a sound. Bass notes have a low pitch; the upper octaves of a piano produce a higher pitch.

Rhythm: the variation in length between sounds and accents. Rhythm is often tapped onto a surface.

continue...

Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom Updates available

The Adobe Camera Raw 5.6 update can be found here and the Lightroom update 2.6 here.

X-Equals Blog - My New Must Read Blog

I've actually been following this blog for a few months now, but I find it to be the best when it comes to explaining a Lightroom to Photoshop workflow. As someone who seems to be continuously looking to streamline my workflow and thus spend less time editing photos, this is an extremely important tool. Check it out here!

Dispatches Must Read Article on "Revolutions in the Media Economy"

The beauty of Dispatches Magazine is the depth of their reporting, which today is a rare thing indeed. Today I came across a very well done and in depth article (part one in an ongoing series written by David Campbell) on changes in journalism. In part one it discusses the death of newspapers and contrasts that with the death of journalism. It also discusses a lot of the buzz word trends that we have been hearing about of late like the collapse of the advertising based economic model AND how to better monitize news with pay walls and itunes like per article payment models. Layout some time and coffee for this great three part read...

REVOLUTIONS IN THE MEDIA ECONOMY (1) - THE CONTEXT OF CRISIS

The way news and information is reported and delivered to citizens is undergoing profound transformations, especially in the United States and Europe. In the last twelve months commentary has been rife with claims about “the death of newspapers,” the end of journalism, and the impact this crisis will allegedly have on democratic politics.

In a series of four posts, I want to consider the revolution that is reshaping the media economy through which we come to know about the wider world. This first post deals with the reasons for this upheaval and how it is changing the economics of news. Because of the ground to be covered in providing the context of these changes, this will be quite a lengthy discussion.

The second post will look at how the structure of information is changing in this new economy and what it means for the practice of journalism; the third post will ask what these transformation mean for photojournalism; and the fourth post will consider some of the implications for universities and academic publishing. Continue reading here...


OR find Part 1 here
Part 2 here
Part 3 here
Part 4 here

Newspapers aren't doing as badly as we think

Last week Slate published a story on the state of the Newspaper Industry in the U.S. According to the writer, Daniel Gross, it's not all doom and gloom and he's seeing some positive trends.

The part of the article that most got my attention was this.

"This is the new emerging model—cutting costs, raising prices. It may still fail in the end. But we shouldn't act as if the online-only crowd has it all figured out. Every month, several million Americans pay to have newspapers and magazines delivered to their homes—a trick most online publications have yet to pull off."

In other words Newspapers, especially the National newspapers, are trying to replace the loss of classified advertising by increasing the newstand price. In other words they're trying to get paid for what they are providing! Doh!

Let's hope they suceed. If you want to read the whole thing, you can find it here.

Trafic Barcelona and Bruce Gilden

One of the beauties of living in Barcelona is that there is massive interest in photography and practically every week there is some kind of exhibit or talk about photography. One of the highlights every year is Trafic, mainly because the event is synched with workshops with some of the greats in contemporary photography. This year Trafic teamed up with a group of Magnum photographers and I went to some of the presentations.

In my opinion the star was Bruce Gilden. You can read more about Bruce at Trafic on Paco Elvira's blog, but I wanted to highlight one thing.

Often times in these workshops you learn things by listening to the photographers and having them critique your work, but I think you can almost learn more by watching them as they work and this is something that few photographers show in workshops. Many photographer's have problems overcoming their fear of shooting people up close without asking permission, but sometimes it just has to be done. That's how you achieve those magical moments. That being said, it's still difficult for many people, myself included.

Watch this video and you'll see how Bruce works. In the end, it's a barrier any good photographer has to overcome at some point. The key to remember is that you're not doing damage to anyone because it's just a picture! Watch Bruce in action here and thanks to Paco for mentioning this video to me.

The Preeminent Underwater Photographer up close with a Leopard Seal

Paul Nicklen repeatedly publishes in National Geographic Magazine and has won back to back World Press Photo. He's an underwater god! Enjoy him here in this short video as he gets up close and personal with a leopard seal in the Antarctic.

My New Favorite Site

This is a bit of a departure from my typical topics, but I recently bought a Mac Pro. After upgrading to the Canon 5D Mark II in December, the double in file size was crushing my mini Mac Mini. Despite the upgrade, I felt like the processing in Lightroom, Photo Mechanic and Photoshop was quite lacking until I came across the Mac Performance Guide.

Not only did it help me further maximize the power of my Mac Pro when using these programs, but it also provides great solutions to improve performance. I'm planning on going to a Striped Raid, dedicating more space to the scratch disk and updating RAM so hopefully I'll be cruising along soon enough. If any of this sounds like Martian to you, be sure to read the site as it will quickly get you up to speed.

Best of luck!

Back...sort of

I apologize to all for the long delay in posting here. I have some legitimate excuses though, as I got married, went on our honeymoon and am now getting back focused on some interesting work projects.

Please be patient, I'l be posting again soon!