photojunkie

Chris Frampton from Flyweightfilms created this promo video for Pikto. I used them all the time, so I have no qualms sharing this here with you.

Fellow photographers Sean Galbraith and Mathew Merrett from the DK photo group appeared on Bravo’s Behind the Camera. In the clip they talk about photography and urban exploration.

So for years now, I’ve done most of my photo editing via Adobe Photoshop which I simply adore. It has all the functionality I want and supports RAW formats. These days most of this happens on my desktop computer at home and recently I have started moving non-essential files off my powerbook and onto the desktop. With only 40 gigs of hard drive space on the powerbook, space is limited. So basically, I’m planning on removing my Creative Suites installation from the Powerbook.

The question which remains is what can I use on my Mac Powerbook to do some basic photo editing, supports RAW formats and won’t take up a lot of room on my hard drive?

Bonus points if it’s free or inexpensive. And I’m hoping to find a solution before the end of next week, so I can have it loaded on the Powerbook for my trip to SXSW in Austin.

Another week and another list of cool links. There are quite a few this week. I hope you emjoy them all. And of course, feel free to send me links over the week.

One Image – 17 Amazing Interpretations – It just goes to show that different people see different things, even in post processing.

Flash: Polaroid waves good-bye to instant film – It’s a sad day when polaroid says they aren’t making instant films anymore. Start stock piling now.

The DIY Gorilla Pod – Clever, but seriously, a real gorillapod is not that expensive.

Blockposters – Print big on the cheap. It’s basically like the rasterbator, but not obviously pixelized.

Police views on Street Photography – Yet another story about getting harassed by police for taking photos.

Why the Web Still Lacks as a Method to Display, Evaluate, or Enjoy Detailed Photographs… – An interesting piece regarding the lack of details.

Canon Repair Estimates:What to Expect – This sounds like your “textbook” experience. I’ve had better, but I’ve also heard of worse.

Photowalking Tips – I’ve been doing this for longer than I remember. The tips are fine and dandy, but most of all have fun, keep your eyes open and even backtrack, because streets look different depending on which way you are walking them.

Street Tips – While we are on the topic, here are some more awesome tips.

9 Pet Photography Tips – Because we all love our pets, but often don’t know how to shoot them.

Baker Beach from photojunkie on Vimeo.

Back in October, I visited San Francisco for the very first time. Of course, one of the things I wanted to see was the Golden Gate Bridge, but specifically from Baker Beach.

I think this was my second last day in SF and it was raining on and off through the day. Despite that, the view was wonderful and the sun was peaking through the clouds and hitting the bridge while I was at the beach.

This is the little video clip I shot while on the beach. I posted it up on Vimeo, which I totally love more than YouTube. For four reasons; 1) you don’t lose as much quality of picture on Vimeo, 2) you can customize the size of your embedded video, 3) the controls and tracking bar disappears when watching videos, 4) you can add photos from flickr to each individual Vimeo video. That being said, expect more video on here this year.

Growing up on film cameras, you always have a special place in your heart for them. So coming across a digital product like this Pocket Camera Classic, you can’t help but hold a romantic notion. Apitek USA has designed this miniature digital camera with this awesome retro design for a mere $9.99.

Despite not being able to use this on my Mac, I’d gladly use it as a decorative paperweight.

This past week I was on assignment in Keswick, Ontario, which is about an hour north of Toronto. I had to take pictures of a gas station owner and his son, but took the opportunity to take some other shots around the station including this one.
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I’m subscribed to a Nintendo emailed newsletter and recently I got this one regarding the new game Endless Ocean for the Nintendo Wii. I suppose what peaked my interest was the romanticized notion that I could become a freelance photographer for travel and science magazines, as noted in the screenshot above. Personally, I think it sounds pretty amazing, as I doubt I would ever find myself doing this in real life.

Check out the hands on review over at gamespot, which gives you a mellow breakdown on the gameplay. It’s in stores now, and is value priced at around $29.99. I think I may pick this one up.

Crossposted to ButtonMashThis.

With the PMA’s around the corner, Canon Canada announced their spring line up yesterday including a new digital SLR to the popular Rebel series. Their announcement also included two new printers, four compact point and shoot digital cameras as well as 2 new L series lenses. To my dismay, there was no news of any sort of upgrade to the very popular Canon EOS 5D, which means we will likely have to wait until August for their fall line up announcements.

For this post I’m focusing on the Canon Digital Rebel XSi. This newest addition to Canon’s digital SLR line up touts 12.2 megapixels and a large 3 inch LCD monitor. One of the things I first noticed when I saw the images was the camera’s sleek rounded edges which are very reminescent of it’s 5D older brother. Functionality such as Live View, Self cleaning sensor and Canon’s DIGIC III Image Processor are now standard on this entry level SLR. A big change in this camera is Canon’s move to SD / SDHC media abandoning Compact Flash as their previous standard for storage. Another notable feature is the inclusion of two kit lens choices which both are IS equipped (That’s image stabilization baby!). The EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS or the new EF-S55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS are included in the kit. (UPDATED) Estimated retail prices of $879.99 for body only and $999.99 for the kit with the 18-55 kit lens. Expect this in stores by April 2008.

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Is there anyone out there that has some power tools? I have this idea stuck in my head to build a table top backdrop. Basically, it would be a contraption that would accommodate standard size poster boards, that you can bend and slide into place, so you could take pictures of small items on it. The great thing about it would be it’s ability to switch out various coloured boards for a variety of backgrounds. Ideally, it would be hinged so that you could fold up the equipment and put it away for easy storage. I don’t think it would be a difficult build, but having proper tools would definitely help.

You might want to take a look over at the sidebar, where I added a whole section of photography related links this evening. Hopefully some of these links will provide you with a little bit of inspiration. There is a little bit of everything here.

If you know of any other photo-related blog links that I should add, post them here.

It was almost a year ago, when I went to visit the Radiant Core offices in Toronto to take pictures of Jay Goldman, Michael Glenn (pictured above) and David Crow. The offices have since been expanded and renovated, David has since moved on to Microsoft and I’m still talking about building a portfolio site. Here’s a draft I put together for my site, which happens to feature the photo of Michael.

Before the renovation, their office space used to be one huge room with large, lofty, south facing windows. The eastern wall was painted a crimsom red which reflect the company’s colours and sudden I found Michael positioned perfectly between me and the wall his body dividing the wall from the curtains. The light from the window washing down the one side of his face, the other side casted in a slight shadow. It simply worked. Now if coding a website was just as simple. That would be a dream.

The snow is all gone and it’s strangely warm for January. And over the holidays I’ve started to consume vasts amounts of media, in the form of music, movies and video games. Part of me wants to write and review ever last bit of it and the other part of me is trying to figure out how to convert this creative onslaught into my own work. It’s definitely inspirational how creative we are as humans and it always sends my head spinning in different directions. The problem is that I find myself impeded by my own equipment, but I know that’s simply my mind working against me, becasue a true artist should be able to create great images regardless of what camera he is shooting with.

Every night, my mind fills with ideas and concepts, which make it difficult for me to settle into bed, until I reach the point of exhaustion in the wee hours of the morning. I lay in bed, thinking of amazing series which I should shoot, yet when I wake in the morning, or lately, midday I do nothing to act upon these seeds of inspiration.

Perhaps, I should write these ideas down, to get them out of my head and to give them physical on paper or digitally as 1 and 0 on my computer.

Where do you find inspiration? And what do you do about it when inspiration hits?

My leftovers from the Whippersnapper show and the left overs from my summer show are all hanging at Starbucks for the next little while, at least for the next month. If you are in the area, go and check them out. It’s the Starbucks at Yonge and Avondale (between the 401 and Sheppard). And yes they are all for sale, $150 a piece or 2 for $250. If you are not in the city and are interested, drop me a line and we can see what we can do about shipping youone of these canvases.

I was pleasantly surprised to have people coming into the gallery on such a wintery Saturday afternoon. Basically, there was someone visiting the gallery the entire time I was there. Including these three high school students from Richmond Hill. When I was in highschool, I don’t think I was culture enough to ever visit a gallery, at least not intentionally. But the three came in and spent a good chunk of time really looking at the work. In the end, they even bought some prints from Sam and Adam, which I thought was quite surprising. But what really impressed me was the fact that two of them, Sarah and Myles were both toting around 35mm SLRs around their neck. Seriously, who does that now a days.

I asked them if either had a photoblog or account on flickr, and Myles admitted, he has been meaning to start a flickr account for quite some time now. So it was even more of a surprise to find an email in my inbox this evening from Myles, telling me about his newly started stream, which already has almost 100 images.

Around the same time, my friend Stefan showed up with his awesome new polaroid pinhole camera. Basically it was made from this retro Niagara Falls tin. I had always been fascinated by pinhole, but after talking with Stefan, I think I might be prepared to finally try one on my own. Pictured above is the one minute exposure we took of me at the gallery. It was handheld, so it was far from being crisp. I’m hoping, he’ll help me make one in the new year. Check out his polaroid pinhole set on flickr.

I’ll be minding the Whippersnapper Gallery, tomorrow (Saturday, December 15th, 2007) from noon to 4pm. Hopefully the forecast for snow won’t keep me away.

If you haven’t checked out the show yet, and you have time, come on down.

Otherwise, the gallery is open at the following times.
6-9 Monday-Friday, 12-4 Saturday-Sunday, or by appointment.

The exhibit will continue to run until December 21st. On December 22nd, any sold piece can be pick up, as well, the gallery is having a full day craft sale and year end party. So it might be the perfect place to be to do some last minute shopping.

So for years now, I’ve had chats with folks like Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress and Anil Dash of Six Apart about photography and the perfect CMS (Content Management System) to showcase images. There are obviously some great products out there aside from those two, but none that totally suit my needs as a photographer, to showcase my work, right out of the box. Sure there are some great plugins and such to add onto these CMS monsters, but as a creative person, we don’t always have the means or knowledge to code these things together to do everything we want. And of course there is flickr, which is an amazing site to share your images, but what it thrives on is community, instead of individual ownership. Sure I like sharing images and viewing images, but I want to be able to do it on my own domain, with it’s own home.

So what does it mean to have the perfect photography CMS? I know for me the wishlist is long and a lot of the features I want, aren’t necessarily new ideas or items, but the main thing is being able to install something on my server and be up and running with it, without the hassles of installing and customizing a million other plugins. Ideally, the main user would be photobloggers, a community of people online who like to share their images online on a daily basis. But in reality, I’d also like to have something that would appeal to photographers in general, both pro and amateur alike. Something that they will be able to use to build their one portfolio on regardless if they are updating every day, or just adding in new content every few months.

So over the next little while I’m gonna flesh out my ideas right here, out in the open. And perhaps you’ll want to throw in your two cents, tell me I’m totally on the ball, or tell me I’m out of my mind. In the end, I hope to have some sort of proposal or product spec. which hopefully someone will want to pick up and run with.

For now, I’ll leave you with a couple of questions.

a) What CMS do you use now?
b) What do you like or dislike about the CMS you are using?
c) What would you like to see built in to an all in one, photography based CMS

So Antony and Pauline invited me to their tree trimming party this past weekend. Tis the season. My initial thought was to find and bring a tree ornament which would feature a photo of our hosts. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find something in time, that didn’t look cheap or cheesy. Instead, I stocked up on some polaroid cartridges and brought over a polaroid camera to capture some pictures of the various guests at the party. It was a quick and easy way to instantly personalize the tree and a great conversation starter.

So I was out window shopping this weekend and i came across these 3 photo related items designed to sell for the holiday season.

Photo Phone P-300 Amplified Telephone

Probably the worst of all the products. It’s basically a regular phone that you can program and customize with photos of the people you call most. Upon a bit of online research, the photo is designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Definitely, not on my wishlist. a) do people still have landlines? b) And if you do, isn’t cordless the way to go?

Photo Share 7

This is a 7 inch digital photo album which also doubles as a digital frame. It touts it’s portability as an asset. Personally, I can’t picture myself carrying such a large item around to showcase my photos. And I’m totally not sold on the idea of digital photo frames just yet. Although for under $100 it’s one of the cheaper ones out there on the Canadian market. If I were to carry around my images, I’d probably settle on using an iPod or even perhaps a PSP, but definitely not anything larger then that.

Picture This Digital Ornament

Of all the products, this would be the most practical and is the most inexpensive at under $30. Basically, it’s you traditional round Christmas tree ornament with a technological twist. It contains a 1.5 inch screen which can store and display up to 50 different images. It might make a nice sentimental gift for someone in your family. But I can’t really picture myself staring at it on my tree as it cycles through 50 images on a 1.5 inch screen. Also, this item is only PC compatible, so for you Mac lovers out there, you are out of luck. That being said, it’s definitely the best buy of all the photo related items I saw while shopping.

Personally, if I were to decorate my tree with sentiment, I’d probably do it in a more analog way. But that my friend will be for a later post.

The canvas prints in the show are being sold for $150 a piece.

photo by Alexa

The opening last night at Whippersnapper went really well. We had a good crowd at the gallery, we all sold things, which is a nice bonus and all the work looked amazing. Thanks to everyone who came out. Bigger thanks to those that bought pieces. If you missed out. The show will be running till December 21st.

I picked up my canvases today, for the show next week. They look amazing and I’m very excited to see what everyone else thinks.

I started using a local shop, Tricera, to get these printed up. And you can’t beat next day service, especially when you are printing off 30 pieces. Highly recommended. Thanks to Graham and Natalie for the tip.

Now I just need to get them all stretched out and installed. Hmm, I really should confirm when installation is taking place.

Big thanks goes out to Valerie Cochran, who spent an entire day, touring me around Berkeley California while I was visiting the Bay area last month.

Always tip your waitress well, if she is a good one, she’ll treat you like royalty.

PS: you can see Valerie’s pic over here.

So I’m going to be a part of this group show happening at the Whippersnapper Gallery (587A College Street) through a good chunk of December. The opening event is next Thursday night (December 6th). The show will also feature the work of Sam Javanrouh @ ddoi.ca, Adam Krawesky @ inconduit.com, Jessica Hayes and Chris Altorf @ istoica.com

Let’s just say, it will be a good opportunity to pick something special up for the holidays for those hard to buy for special people in your life. I hope to see you there.

Gee. Does anyone remember when my site used to look like this? I need to get my ass of the floor and get a new site up at rannieturingan.com. This is a cry for help.

I left my job at DICO back in August. Prior to leaving I dumped all my personal files into a folder on the main server, but I never got around to picking up those files until now.

Among the files, were main scans that I had of older pictures, as well as images from my blog over the years as well as other images people had sent me, or things that I had swiped off of fellow bloggers sites.

Let me say this is a throwback. There’s even pictures on here from my first digital camera, which was this Fuji point and shoot.

This photo has been edited for the web

So I’m currently playing around with an LG 8700 (LG Shine) cellphone. Basically, I wanted to see how acceptable the camera was on the phone, it’s not connected to my provider, so I have no idea what the reception is like.

In any case, I’ve uploaded some of the pictures to a set on flickr.

I figured since we all take liberties editing our photos before we post them online. I figured I would give this device the same liberties. The photo in this post has been adjusted for colour and perspective. The photos in the flickr set however were not editted.