Of all the places I’ve spent my time. No place has as many fond memories for me as Yankee Stadium.

I shot this image almost exactly two years ago at the 2008 MLB All Star Home Run Derby. This would be the second to last game I would spend with her.

I only just now finally getting the chance to assemble it in Photoshop and Aperture. This is my tribute to the most important stadium in all of baseball and my one true home.

May she rest in piece.

Also I finally dove into my Paris photos on Tuesday night, bits and pieces are starting to show up on Flickr but I won’t post an entry about it until the set is complete which will likely be a few days, but now that Aperture 3 has finally been released I’ll likely be posting a LOT more photos soon.

Hope all is well, this year alright is amazing. I’m excited to step up my blogging game a bit.

Also something that’s been a long time coming, I’m finally getting a handle on my Google Reader account. I unsubscribed from a lot and I’m now more focused around reading people I care about and shared items from people I respect. You can find my shared feed here. (I promise it won’t all just be Signal vs Noise.) Let me know if you’re on there I’m always looking for new shared items to read!

Also, can someone please explain to me why I should care about Google Buzz?

Hey friends, sorry it’s been a while since I’ve updated routinely. Back in December my apartment got robbed and it’s taken me until just now to finally replace everything. Unfortunately this has prevented me from having access to my full Aperture library for some time and has made doing photo work a chore.

Hopefully now this will be a thing of the past, I just got a brand new iMac and I’ve been reunited with my library and workflow. I’ve gone ahead and posted a bunch of new photos on my Flickr account and plan to post many more in the coming days.

So what have I been up to in the last few months? Well…

In March I went to Austin for the South By Southwest Interactive conference with a bunch of friends, had a blast, learned a ton and made lots of new contacts.

In April I took a trip home to visit friends and family, while there I caught the opening of the new Yankee Stadium.

A few weeks ago I went to the Chicago Red Stars home opener with the Chicago Local 134 in support of the team and my friend CEO Peter Wilt.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to go with Aki and Mark to play “Journey To The End of The Night”, a city wide street game akin to manhunt/tag/hide and go seek.

I’ve also taken over PR / Marketing and Brand Identity for Long Pork and we’re having a blast with it. Right now we’ve got a show running every Saturday at the Apollo Studio Theater at 8pm through the 23rd. You should check us out.

Some of my photography is now part of a local collective called NMA Artists an unofficial group of artists, writers and photographers who happen to work at a certain major retail store on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

Lastly I’ve had the pleasure of consulting on the Chicago Tribune‘s new ChicagoNow project. I can’t wait for the site to launch, it’s going to be big.

That’s all for now, life is pretty good, I hope to get the chance to update more often. Thanks for reading!

I’ve just put the finishing touches on a set of photos I did a few weeks back for Sketch Comedy group Long Pork.  Working with these guys was a ton of fun and we’re already floating around ideas for future shoots. 

Long Pork was founded just earlier this year but the guys themselves are very experienced in the Chicago Improv scene with groups like Battery Mouth and the now defunct Kittyhawk. They ran their first show entitled “Soda” at the Apollo Theater to much success.

They are currently in rehearsal for their next set of shows and entering sketch competitions.  More information should be available soon. I highly suggest checking them out at longporkcomedy.com which should be updated soon with new photos from yours truly. Until then you can check out the photos on my Flickr.

HDR or High Dynamic Range is a photography post production technique that seems to be very trendy these days. It’s known for yielding striking images full of color and detail not attainable through a single shot. I’ve been fascinated by the idea since I first heard about it a few years ago.

Basically, for those of you who are not photographers the idea is pretty simple. A digital image can only contain a certain amount of light / color information so tones above and below the acceptable range get clipped out, either appearing as pure black or pure white. What HDR seeks to do is to bring back that information by working with multiple exposures.

In short: you take three shots, one too dark, one too light and one even. Each one of those images will have information the others won’t. For example, one image might highlight the color in the sky and another might bring out the details in the shadows. By combining these three shots we can create one composite image with more color and detail than any of the originals.

For my first attempt I worked with a combination of tools from shot to upload. The first of which is my Canon Digital Rebel XTi and my trusty Canon 28mm f2.8 lens. I’m a big fan of this lens for it’s wide angle and relatively high aperture (the f2.8). The allows my camera to take in a lot of light very quickly with a lot of sharpness and crisp color. This is absolutely one of my favorite lenses.  Every Canon shooter should have something similar.

From there I loaded my images into Apple’s Aperture 2.1 software where I picked my three shots and did some conservative adjustments to bring out more detail in the images. From there I went into Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Now anyone who knows my photography most likely knows that I do everything I can to avoid working in Photoshop. These days I try to accomplish everything I possibly can inside Aperture. However I have not been impressed by what I’ve seen from the Hydra HDR plugin that is available for Aperture, so I decided to give Photoshop’s built in one a chance.

Much to my delight the feature worked as advertised. By loading in the three images it was able to create one 32-bit image with a startling range of color. Unfortunately not many programs can handle a 32-bit file so I had to convert it back down to the 16-bit range of the previous files. However, the ultimate goal was still accomplished. My one 16-bit file now contained a lot more color and detail than any of the three. Still the image started to look a little flat so, from there I did some basic curves adjustments to restore some contrast and moved the image back to Aperture.

Inside Aperture I did a little more tweaking of saturation and sharpness to make the image punch some more and there we have it, my first real HDR image is a success. (At least I think so.)

The biggest challenge in this process to me was shooting the photographs themselves. I had to make sure that, without a tripod, I kept my shots steady and without interruption from cars or passers by.

As a whole I’m pleased by the process and the results. I will definitely play with HDR imaging a lot more in the future.

Fair enough I guess I’ll work on that. I’ll try to make this brief. I’ve been busy for the past few months, but things seem to be settling down for the moment which is good.  Work is good, back to school season is just ending so hopefully things might ease up, that’s about all I can say. I’m hoping for new products soon, but have no clue in truth. I plan to pick up a MacBook Pro whenever they put out a new version. My 12″ Powerbook’s AppleCare has just expired, and while it’s still running and treating me well, it’s time to move to something with a little more power, something that can run Aperture or actually interface with a video iPod. (12″ had USB 1.1)

So I’m back playing Halo 2 again, that game will not die for me I still enjoy it every bit as much as I did when I bought it. Oh that reminds me, I officially, after what… 4 months, have decided that my X-Box 360 was a completely worthwhile purchase. 3 reasons:

1. I finally used it as a DVD player and a messaging center at the same time. I have my old wired Apple Keyboard plugged into it. Being able to voice chat as VoIP or text message while watching a movie is incredible.
2. X-Box Live Arcade is finally actually worthwhile. I downloaded Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting and have been getting my butt whupped by strangers on the internet, while listening to music streaming from my PowerMac. (Thank you Connect 360)
3. Dead Rising. Nuff Said.

Other stuff….

So I’ve been keeping busy, not working on any major design projects at the moment, mostly studying new programs and trying to (re?)teach myself how to draw. That said, I have been working at getting MediaRebellion.com back up and running. I’m not sure what we’re going to use it for but I moved all the content over to WordPress and as of yesterday two days ago I installed the Beta of phpBB 3 on the site which actually seems to be running REALLY smoothly, it’s leaps and bounds better than any other free message board system I’ve used.

I’m also now hosting / administrating the official message board for The Epoxies. Incase you havn’t checked them out, they are a new wave / punk band from Portland, Oregon that totally rocks, I highly recommend checking them out.

Canon put out a new version of the Rebel… I want it.

Back in February my friend Lindsay and I did a photo shoot in the mall parking garage. She’s a photographer herself but she’s also an aspiring model. This works out well because I consider myself a designer who is an aspiring photographer. So anyway she’s looking to build a modeling portfolio and I’m looking to build a photo one of my own. I also recently acquired a copy of Apple’s Aperture professional photography software and was itching to try it out.

Overall while we had a great time, but when I looked at the shots I was disapointed. We were limited by the cold weather much of the lighting was awkward, and most of the poses left a lot to be desired. (due both the the weather and Lindsay and I’s comfort levels I’m sure). I ended up letting the photos sit for months after the initial shoot.

It was shortly after that time that I discovered my Flickr addiction. And the other day I decided to take another crack at the photos because I wanted to put something up, just for the sake of it. (I paid for a Pro account, I should use it no?) When I really dove in, I was blown away. I can’t say enough how impressed I am, both by the ease of use of the program and the results I achieved. Aperture made it easy to color correct and retouch a lot of what I viewed were unusable photos.

The more I think about it though the more it’s unbelievable to me. Anyone who has even worked with real professional color photography can tell you how much of a pain in the ass the whole process can be. While it’s a lot of fun, you can spend weeks on single images at times. Not only that but it’s expensive. Retouching can be a nightmare and color correction can have you walking back and forth turning nobs trying to get something just right. Don’t even get me started on the cost / hassle of promoting and sharing your work.

Now-a-days you can get a Digital SLR for under a grand that take images at resolutions higher than film grain, print to a high end printer that does too. Using a program like Aperture or Photoshop, and a Flickr account and you can have a whole ‘roll’ edited and corrected in a matter of minutes. From there it’s easy to share share it on the web for everyone to see or subscribe to, so you know people are checking it out.
As a side note; I remember during my senior year at Pratt i did some of my work digitally for my color photo class. I would print my work on my Epson 2200 and hang it next to my other work. The really amazing part is that people in class were unable to tell. That to me sealed the deal, my film camera sits and collects dust these days. Stuff like iPhoto and Flickr’s are the icing on the cake. I can hardly remember what life was like before digital.

Anyway, I present to you without further ado: Lindsay O’Connor

Out of fairness to my lovely modeling friend I will spare you the before and after comparisons. I’d like to assure you though that the quality was not nearly this nice until I took them into Aperture. That’s not a criticism on her, but on my own skills as a photographer. Luckily… I’m still a designer.
Check out the rest of the shots here.