I have a backlog of photos from 2009 that I need to finish processing. I’ve just been too mentally drained the past couple of months to gain the motivation to process any photos. Now that I’ve had a nice relaxing vacation, I’m starting to get the urge to sit down and look through a huge pile of photos. I’ll probably update my flickr, deviantART, and photoblog in the near future.

I guess that’s all for now, be sure to check out my photoblog and subscribe to it’s RSS feed.

Happy new year everyone, I hope you all have a great 2010.

Now that I’ve started down a road, walking hand-in-hand with a design I like, I’m going to need spend nine thousand more hours days years trying to get it to work in older browsers (and all future versions of Internet Explorer).

My current pet-peeve is that both the Mozilla and Safari rendering engines support some proposed CSS3 features in with their own syntax.  It’s bad enough that these features need to be prefixed with “-moz” or “-webkit” (depending on the browser),  but Mozilla seems to be completely diverging from any standards when it comes to the “border-radius” property names.   Mozilla decided somewhere along the line to name these properties without conforming to any of the naming standards that have been in CSS for YEARS.

I could keep ranting about the way Firefox has implemented border radius but at least they implement it.  (I’m really hoping they fix their syntax deviation from the CSS3 working draft in Firefox 3.1).

I should probably cut this post short and go to bed, its 5am and tomorrow is going to be a long day of laundry mixed with me either doing more web-design or going to work.

Goodnight.

This past weekend I finally managed to get out with all of my camera gear and shoot some photos for a friend. With camera in hand and pack on back I set out for adventure. Dan, my friend and model for the day, drove myself and my friend/assistant Chris to northern Burnaby where we spent the afternoon shooting. Dan wanted some photos of him and his swords as a way to document of his journey though sword training/life. I just wanted to take some pictures of a dude with some friggin’ swords.

In other news (but still related to photography)…. I finally purchased a point-and-shoot(ish) camera, the Canon G10. So far I’ve been impressed with the quality of the photos and video. It has almost everything I could want in a point-and-shoot (except for a time lapse mode). With that being said, I still haven’t sat down to try and push the G10 to it’s limits. Now that I have more free time I plan on seeing what it can really do.

Thats all I have to say for now, I have a lot more photos from yesterday’s shoot to go through and it’s starting to get late.

Until next time. Stay alert, Stay safe.

UPDATE
I almost forgot… here is a little “behind the scenes” photo I took with my iPhone.

That thumbnail picture was one of the photos I took during my two week trip to Ontario (for my friend’s wedding and to visit the family). It is also available as a print… you see where I’m going with this :P

One more thing, if there are any photos of mine that you would like a print of just drop me a line on my deviantART, flickr, or in the comments section.

It appears that there is going to be a connectivity bug with the iPhone in Canada that will prevent me from buying one. Due to the cost of the data plans provided by Rogers and FIDO I will be required to sell at least one arm as well as one leg to be able to afford data usage with the iPhone in Canada. I am well aware that I would only need one arm to operate the iPhone (which is a GREAT design feature of the iPhone, your designs never cease to amaze me). Unfortunately my current lifestyle system requires that I have a have a minimum of two arms and two legs (that’s the minimum requirements). I was looking forward to upgrading my lifestyle with an iPhone (as well as MobileMe to complement it and my MacBook), unfortunately the hardware conflicts between my appendages and the cost the Rogers/FIDO data plans will prevent me from buying an iPhone.

If you could please work with Rogers Wireless in Canada to provide a patch that fixes the current pricing model bug of the iPhone in Canada I would be extremely happy and will buy an iPhone once the issues are taken care of.

Thank you for your time and if there is any other information I can provide to help address these bugs please let me know.

That’s all for now.

I was so excited about the iPhone finally coming to Canada, to top it off Bell Mobility is about to breach my 3 year contract so I was going to leave Bell for either Rogers and Fido. Looks like I might have to start a new contract with Bell and get the new Samsung Instinct with UNLIMITED data for around $40 a month…. Take that Rogers (Bell has excellent timing, way to capitalize on Rogers trying to stick it to their customers).

It almost seems like a good idea to take next Friday off and spend the day infront of a Rogers store letting potential customers just how much Rogers is trying to rip them off.

So after downloading the new Lightroom 2 beta i went out shooting looking to shoot some photos to try out the new “Merge multiple exposures into an HDR image” feature, so far it seems pretty nifty. It doesn’t really get you anything extra that you cant already do in CS3, it just eliminates the step of having to search your hard drive for all your files when doing the “Merge to HDR” automation in Photoshop CS3. Check out the photo to the right, its a Black and White HDR image I threw together in Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3.

A few weeks ago I mentioned a small piece of software I was working on that I want to release. I didn’t give out any information at the time because I had to deal with some paperwork at my current employer before I can release my little app. I wont give away too many details but i’ll let you know a couple things… Its for Mac OS X Leopard, It will be FREE, If your a photographer you’ll probably find it useful. And I’m looking for some beta testers. So if you or someone you know uses OS X Leopard and does any type of digital photography and/or has accidentally deleted some photos they want back, drop me a comment in the comment section.

So earlier this week I was informed by a photographer on Flickr, Stephen Macken, that one of my images on flickr with an “All Rights Reserved’ license was being used on another website. This came as a shock to me, it turns out the image was being used on an HDR wallpaper website without my permission and without even telling me. This rubbed me the wrong way because the website did not ask permission, they did not tell me, and they are trying to generate a profit through ad sales. To top it of, the Terms of Usage of their page state that all the images on their site are the sole property of them. It turns out a large number of images on the site (which I’m not naming because I don’t want to generate any more traffic for them) were stolen from flickr and used without the artist’s permission. There were some discussion’s on flickr’s forums and the offending site’s owner has sense shut down the site for “reconstruction”. Its good to see photographers look out for one another, there are a large number of people that think flickr is a huge pool of free images that they can use for their own purposes and to gain money….. well its not…. “All Rights Reserved” isn’t just there for decoration.

Anyways, I should go to bed, I’ve got worka in the morning. Bye!

• Merge multiple images into a panorama
• Merge multiple exposures into an HRD image
• Merge multiple files into a single PSD image with each on their own layer

All of these are pretty cool and should help speed up my workflow when doing HDR or composite shots. (The Selective Image Editing sounds pretty cool too).
I’m looking forward to trying this out tonight, I’ll post my thoughts after I spend some time with Lightroom 2.

So today was pretty interesting, I just finished a photoshoot a few hours ago for a student run newspaper. One of my friends has been working for the Nanaimo Navigator for a while now, the last issue of the year is coming out next Wednesday and he wanted a “sexy” photo of himself to use for a two page spread. The shoot went pretty well and I’ll upload some of the shots after the publication date.

One last thing before I call it a night, I’ve updated the photography section of my website to include a new slideshow. Go check it out, there are a few photos in the slideshow that I’ve never posted anywhere.

Oh, one last thing…. I promise… My XBox 360 red-ringed last thursday, After shutting it down and looking for the prices of Elites online (don’t want to wait the 6-8 weeks for repair). After mentally preparing myself to fork over $450 for another XBox, I decided to to try turning on my XBox again…. ITS BACK TO LIFE!!! I’m so glad!

Thats all I have to say for now.