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MacBook Pro 2010 September Wallpaper
In honor of being at the 2010 SCCA National Solo Championships this week, we'll go with some worn out, texture-rich, corded racing tire goodness.
Grab a MacBook nice size above, or jump to a cinema display or old school 4:3 flavor if that's your thing.
That was fun to set up, fun to shoot and the house smelled like Chinese temple for day or two.
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DSPRATTE MacBook Pro August Wallpaper
Yes, August wallpaper (as pointed out by several of you) was running late. In honor of that, it's also rusty and beat all to hell.
This was taken here in Raleigh actually back at Pilot Mill. It's a detail from a found art display in their parking lot. I haven't gotten anything better than a guess: Reclaimed from a building-wide pneumatic system. You know for delivering messages like at a drive-up teller window. Or, say Brazil.
Get a tetanus shot and the MacBook friendly size above. A cinema display sized one is available as is an old school 4:3 aspect ratio as well.
The spread of American culture is like kudzu. Lots of countries have, in the past looked, to us. For better or for worse. Mere days after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the gulf is mostly, kind-of-sort-of contained, China has it's own to contend with. Amazing images via The Big Picture.
So inspired by David duChemin's "wallpaper as calendar plan" I'm going to crank out one every month this year. I'm sure it'll be a mix of old and new. Hopefully more new than old. See, the plan is to use this in a complicated series of carrots and sticks to make sure I pick up the camera a bit more this year.
To get things going we're going to jump back into an image from the last post actually. As soon as I composed this shot, I knew it was a candidate for wallpaper.
Grab a MacBook Pro friendly size (1140 x 900) by clicking on the image here. Or download the Apple Cinema display friendly size (1920 x 1200) for your less mobile computing needs.
During the lost week—between Christmas and New Year's—I'll be wrapping my head around Lightroom, only allowing myself to shoot with a prime lens and drinking Knob Creek by the fire with friends and family. Before we go, I've got an avalanche of product shots to get working through.
For forty years our neighborhood, Brentwood, has displayed luminarias on Christmas Eve. For the entire time we've lived here, the Brentwood Exchange Club has taken on the task of raising the money, securing donations and the logistics of that morning. Brentwood is not a small neighborhood so this is no trivial matter. This year though they announced that atrophying membership meant they'd be unable to pull it off this year. With word of that, the neighborhood association (led by Sean Kosofsky) pulled together to keep the tradition going. In what has to be a record amount of time (less then two months) everything came together this morning and all the bags, sand and candles are in place.
These are photos from this morning's assembly and distribution.
J.D. Platt and his K9 Kings arrived in the Triangle last Friday for a Halloween Halftime show at Campbell University. Despite getting ready for the thirteenth annual Halloween party, we snuck out to Buies Creek to catch the show. When J.D. told me he could round up a Media Pass for me I grabbed the cameras, a handful of lenses and piled them into a bag and we were off. Shooting flying dogs is hard. I'll be the first to say that what I have here doesn't convey how fun the show actually is. But for a first time effort? I'll take it.
Room cleaned up. 2.
Room cleaned up.
So, back in September I spent the day covering a Rebuilding Together project. It was a solid day of shooting, but the project wasn't entirely finished.
It is now. And since I hate leaving things undone, we went back and shot a few portraits of the daughter settled into the renovated space.
This was also the first time in the field with the new Pocket Wizard set up.
I knew the room was going to be dark and while I favor natural light, this shot wouldn't have been possible without some help from my speedlites.
One on camera with a pop and another behind the subject to bring the background up a bit.
We left St. John yesterday. Back to the grind of the real world. The good news is that I've got a 147 frames to edit through, so I can sort of relive things for a little while.
I snapped these two shots with the iPhone on the ferry and had posted them to my Flickr account, Twitter and Facebook before we set foot on St. Thomas. (There's still some issues with the Wordpress iPhone app that need to be worked out a bit.)
I've gotten some questions about how I've processed some of these. So here's the scoop:
A few weeks ago, I apparently drank some of the Chase Jarvis Kool-Aid. The flavor being the Best Camera concept. The Reader's Digest version of that concept is that the best camera is the one that you have with you. For Jarvis that came to be the iPhone's built-in camera.
If I don't have my Canon 5DMk2 with me, I have the G9. In fact, around town it's almost always in my bag. It's easily the best point and shoot I've had. Don't get me wrong, it still has some weak points. Chiefly the shutter lag. If it had a shutter response that was more akin to the 5D or any of my old film cameras I'd have no complaints with the camera.
Still, there's a few times, when the G9 is just out of reach or it's still in the bag in the office. But, I'm never without my iPhone. And the camera is decent if not spectacular. I think it has the same issues that most small sensor digital cameras have and that's chiefly contrast. But for a 2MB camera phone it works. (Especially if you remember that "shutter" doesn't release until you remove your finger from the "button.") Being part of my "always with me" iPhone certainly has it qualify as the Best Camera on more than one occasion.
This is where software enters the picture. Like I said, the iPhone camera has it's issues and can use a little help. I think software like Best Camera and Adobe's Photoshop.com is much like the Lomography folks shooting with Lomos, Dianas and Holgas. For the record: There's a taped up Holga gathering dusk in the equipment locker behind me.
Where was I? Right. The same way those analog equivalents embraced the inexpensively, plastic-lensed cameras and the random color shifts, light leaks and whatever else happened through processing, I see the tweaking of the soft, flat images off the iPhone as a related idea. And there's a certain irony to using all this technology to render images that remind me of family pictures taken with a 110mm camera.
The difference being that it's much quicker to get these images out—to share them. Before, with film, you had to make an effort. You had to really work to get an image out. Film or slides needed to be processed, then printed—or scanned. Then you could get to sharing them. The process itself encouraged editing. Required it.
With digital? It's on the photographer to really think about the editing process. Instead of simply uploading the contents of a card.
After a very long day we made it to St. John just as the sun set behind us.
Shot this with iPhone and tweaked it with Ps.com's mobile app. I've definitely started drinking the Chase Jarvis Kool-Aid. Of course, I took some with the G9 too but without a laptop this is the only way to post for this trip.
