The Milwaukee Strobist group on Flickr met at Z2 Photo on June, 23rd 2009… Here’s a time-lapse video of the event.

(This video is also available at blip.tv and at Vimeo and is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.)

I’ve been interested in the strobist technique of photography for a while now, but just haven’t found the time to really get into it… and the fact that my flash died at PhotoCamp certainly didn’t help things…

So when I heard about the Milwaukee Strobist group on Flickr I had this cunning idea… Invite them all out to Z2 Photo for the meetup! This was one way to ensure I’d be able to make it. :)

And come they did! We had at least one guy from Chicago, and I think a few from Madison… We had RSVP’s for about 15, and I’d guess we had about 30+ photographers there, as well as 5 models. (Here’s a group shot we did quickly at the end, some people had already left, but we got a good majority of the group.)

And hey, I even got a few shots that I was happy with… (Thanks to everyone who loaned me equipment. Someone gave me a SB-600 to use, and at least once there was a lens on my camera that weighed 3 times as the body itself, and probably cost 4 times what my camera did!)

I sort of felt like “well done lighting” plus “experienced models” made it easy to get above average shots… I know that when I’ve been left alone with lights and someone who needs a portrait, it’s a lot tougher, and good product photographer can be even more difficult. Walking into a situation where it’s all set and you just snap the shutter takes about 90% of the work out of it. :) (But hey, I’m not complaining, this was still a great experience, even if all you did was watch how other photographers do things, and I did ask a number of questions, and get some really good information in the process.)

I’m hoping at the next meetup there’s a bit more talk of “why” the lights are set up a specific way, and the many factors involved in getting a good portrait shot. Still, this was a really good experience, and a lot of fun.

No, it’s not Pete I Sold.info, it’s PeteIsOld.info and it’s a web site that Gabe registered just for me, and it’ll show media created at the crazy party the wife threw for me at Bucketworks (back before it flooded… the second time.)

Here is a video of my old pal Milt talking about how he got to know me…

Neat-O!

And hey, there’s also this cool “Sketchnote” card from world-famous Sketchnoter Mike Rohde, how cool is that!?

Anyway, I’ll try not to write too many more posts about the fact that I am totally ancient now. I mean, Dave Winer is way older than I am!

Wow Howza! It’s a crazy-time! Somehow my wife (aka “The Doctor”) secretly gathered up my friends and family and tricked me into going to Bucketworks (even though I was already there just an hour earlier) and confused me by standing around near a big statement of fact declaring it to be my birthday…

Yes, despite my own best efforts to completely ruin everything (unknowingly) things all worked out. Don’t worry folks, I had no idea… I mean, James came close to blowing things once or twice, but still, I had no idea. The award goes to The Doctor for the amazing acting she did throughout the whole thing.

And a big Thank You goes out to all of my friends and family that were there, making it the Best Birthday Ever, which is quite a change from last year’s Worst Birthday Ever.

I’ve been told that media from the event may start showing up at PeteIsOld.info

I find myself on a quest to do some time lapse video… and this one was done with the built-in camera on the Eee PC running Ubuntu (Netbook Remix) and the application UCView.

There seems to be a bug in UCView that prevents it from creating more than 150 still images. I’ll need to dig into that a bit more… It can also create video files, but I prefer stills. With the stills I typically use mencoder to combine them into a video file.

The Eee PC is a nice small solution for time lapse photography. It’s one device, and does everything. Quality? Well, not that great… and bugs? Hopefully I can get more than 150 images in the future…

This will be the first post of many exploring time lapse photography/video. It can be difficult. Just ask this guy.

We recently had to create a jump drive with promotional content on it that we wanted to be reasonably sure people could open. For the HTML pages, this was pretty simple. We kept the design very easy, and used just a single file, with the CSS in the head of the document. Any web browser created in the last 10 years should have been able to read it. (Even IE6 did fine with it!)

We also put video content onto the jump drive. I had a sample someone had given me from a company they used to do business with, and while it worked fine on my Mac, Windows was a no-go. Windows XP was the test platform, without QuickTime installed. Now, granted, lots of Windows machines would have QuickTime if iTunes were installed, and iTunes is installed on a lot of Windows machines, but locked-down corporate PC’s may not fit in that category.

So, we wanted to create a video that would be playable on Windows without QuickTime installed. And, we’re a Mac shop, so we wanted to do this all on a Mac. We ended up exporting the video from Final Cut Pro, and then using MPEG Streamclip to create an AVI file, using the settings you see in the screen shot below.

It worked well, and testing with various Windows VM’s seemed successful, with the videos playing fine where QuickTime was not installed.

So for now, this is my solutions. Unless someone has a better one.

I don’t review many films here (maybe I should!) but I recently saw Persepolis, which was adapted from a graphic novel into an full-length animated film. I really liked the style of the animation, which actually looked like a graphic novel translated to film, rather than a graphic novel make into a live-action film, which probably works fine for most superhero genre films, but probably not so much for this sort of story. (The film’s animation was done the old fashioned was, hand drawn!)

I also learned a lot about Iran which I hadn’t know, though honestly, my knowledge of Iran was pretty minimal, as I’ve lived in the U.S. my entire life, and well, you get a tainted view of other countries from here.

If you get a chance to see it, watch the DVD extras, as there’s some great stuff in there about the story behind, and the making of the film. I mean, if you’re into filmmaking that is…

Yes, I am still working on Balancing Act, my documentary about the work we do…

In this clip Davey von Bohlen talks about being a musician, and how that may change (or not change) in the future.

Davey is an old friend of mine, and probably the most (commercially) successful musician that I personally know. It was great to sit down with him and get an insight into his career thus far. Enjoy the clip!

During the Open Everything event I attended in April, we watched part of the file RiP!: A Remix Manifesto which featured “Girl Talk” who is labeled a “musician” by, well, lots of people.

Me? I’m not convinced he’s really a musician.

I mean, I guess I consider a musician to be someone who can play and instrument (or maybe sings) and who (may) writes songs. Perhaps I should say “original” songs.

From what I can tell, Girl Talk doesn’t play any instruments, and doesn’t sing, but just creates this audio collage out of other people’s work, with no original bits except how they are arranged.

I feel like my argument could be seen as thin, and could honestly go either way, but in seeing (part of) the film, and seeing people go nuts for Girl Talk, which bases (I believe) all of his work on the work of others, creating no original pieces of sound/music on his own, only taking from others… I’m conflicted on this.

And I know he claims “fair use” on his use of the material (that he does not compensate the original artists for) but hey, that’s the same claim the media outlet that stole my photo used. Fair use is only determined in court of law, but in my opinion, what he is doing is not fair use. Add to the fact he is making money off of the work of others, and not compensating them, and now I really don’t like it.

Don’t get me wrong, as far as music goes, it’s some cool shit, but how cool would it be if it used none of the original bits from others, and we just gave Girl Talk a room full of instruments and said “go nuts”? I get the feeling it wouldn’t be the same.

Maybe I’m just old, and this new digital world scares me. I mean, when I started playing music, you had to use actual guitars, not the sound of a guitar that some legendary musician recorded 20 years ago. You had to learn how to play, and you had to practice… a lot.

A few years ago when I started to get into making music again, I played with GarageBand, and it was fun to make songs, but it didn’t feel real. I mean, clicking and dragging samples around was easy, butI didn’t get the same satisfaction I did from actually playing a guitar.

On my most recent album, I ended up using drum loops, and it was my biggest disappointment. I wish I could have played the drums on every track. If I had, I think my sense of accomplishment would have been even higher. I did manage to record all the guitars, bass, vocals, and some of the cymbals, but being able to avoid canned drum tracks would have been huge for me.

But why bother when you can click a mouse and make music, and by make, I mean arrange the music other people have created into something new.

I want to compare it to someone who calls themselves a “photographer” but doesn’t shoot photos, and only arranges the photos other people have taken (in something like Photoshop) into a collage and then calls themselves a photographer. “Digital Artist” maybe, but photographer?

But wait! I’m supposed to be some big supporter of open culture, open everything, and Creative Commons, etc… Yeah, I am, but I’m also a strong believer in the rights of the creators. Those who make art/music/whatever should be able to decide how they are used (if they haven’t given up those rights.) While so much of the old depended on artists signing away their rights to corporations, I think we can get past that. Some believe the way to do so is to break down all those old ways, and open everything up (even if the owners of the old stuff don’t want it opened up) while other believe that we should move forward, and reward those who fully support being open, and do everything in their power to be open, yet still survive as artists…

And collage? I’m a big fan of collage. I used to do a lot of collage art years and years ago, and yes, I used sources I probably shouldn’t have (”fair use” right?) but I also didn’t publish to a worldwide audience, and didn’t make any money from my artwork. So I’m fine with collage being legitimate art, be it remix/mashup, whatever.

So going back to the question of “Is Girl Talk a musician?” My vote is no. I can’t even say Girl Talk is a composer, so maybe the term would be “re-composer” or “re-arranger” or something.

But he’s still taking the work of others without proper permission, building upon it, and not compensating them, all while profiting from them, and that my friends, is a load of crap…

Did you know I’m still working on Balancing Act, my documentary about the work we do? Well, I am…

In this short clip James Carlson talks about how the concept of Bucketworks evolved.

I’m not even sure this will make it into the final film, but I found it compelling enough to put it out there.

Had a bit of fun today…. one of our users ran the Mac OS X 10.5.7 update, and all was well, except that which was not, and “that which was not” was the fonts.

Do you work with graphic designers? Then you know they love fonts… lots of them!

So after rebooting, running fsck, running repair permissions, trying to verify the disk, trashing preference files, and on and on… I finally ended up disabling all fonts, and then enabling just the core system fonts, and things started working again. By things, I mean Adobe Photoshop CS3. Sure, Mail.app was having some issues getting up and running, but in Photoshop, every time a file with text was opened, it got a “program error” which also happened if you opened a new document in Photoshop and clicked the type tool.

So the culprit is a font. Probably a bad font. We still don’t know which one… but as they are re-enabled, hopefully we’ll find out… and then work on replacing it.

If you’re familiar with HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, you’ll know the results can look otherworldly (good) or cartoon (bad) or somewhere in between. Sure, sometimes you want cartoony, or an image that appears more like a painting or an illustration, but other times you really want a better photo, so that’s what this is about. (I’m calling it HDR+ for now…)

So HDR+ is the combining of an HDR image with the original non-HDR image to get the best of both worlds.

Original Photo(s) by John December.

I asked John December if I could combine this HDR photo with the original photo to see what it would look like… and he agreed.

I layered the two images in Photoshop, with the HDR on top at about 25% transparency, and I added some Gaussian blur to the sky to get rid of some of the pixelation. I also did a bit of dodging and burning here and there.

This shot of some water at Labelle Cemetery in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin is also a combination of an HDR and non-HDR image. I wanted to get rich, vibrant colors, but not have it look like an HDR image. I think it turned out quite well.

For this one, I processed one RAW file into 4 separate (different exposure) TIFF files and combined those into an HDR image, then layered two of the original TIFFs with the final HDR to get the final image.

If you’re doing HDR photography, consider playing around with this technique to get a new perspective on things… HDR plus a little more, if you will.

The following is a proposal for the use of machine tags for content related to Bucketworks. I’d love feedback from people familiar with machine tags, and people involved with Bucketworks.

The idea behind machine tags is adding a sort of namespace and hierarchy to a tagging system, and to assign it to a specific thing.

So for Yahoo’s Upcoming site (which lists events) PhotoCampMilwaukee had a tag like this:

  upcoming:event=1518729

These are used by Upcoming, which uses the Flickr API to gather photos for display on it’s site.

Now, we can assume that every event at Bucketworks would have a unique ID number, and use something like this:

  bucketworks:event=47264

This number could come from Drupal, CivicCRM, SalesForce, whatever… Just needs to be unique, and referenceable.

Now, we can see the same thing with users… on Flickr, if I see that Gabe is in a photo, I could use the tag:

  flickr:user=heygabe

where “flickr” represents Flickr, “user” is the thing we are specifying, and “heygabe” (his username on Flickr) is the value.

So… extended to Bucketworks, if Gabe’s username there is “gwollenburg” we might use:

  bucketworks:member=gwollenburg

Hmmm, maybe Gabe is not a member… and lots of people who come to events at Bucketworks might not be members (yet!) so maybe it is better to use “person” (but then, “user” could be the proper term as well, as the people are “users” of Bucketworks, right?)

  bucketworks:person=gwollenburg

Obviously every person needs a unique (to the Bucketworks network) username we can reference them with. (Note that I used Gabe’s Yammer username “gwollenburg” and not his bucketworks.org username: “heygabe”. (Is there also a username in SalesForce? It would be nice if there was a way to cross-reference all of them, though really, we want the most publically used one, so they are easy to determine.)

Jenn asked about tagging photos at Bucketworks with the room names, so we might use:

  bucketworks:space=greenhouse
  bucketworks:space=flowspace
  bucketworks:space=playspace
  bucketworks:space=cafe
  bucketworks:space=chromatarium
  bucketworks:space=parkinglot
  bucketworks:space=loadingdock
  bucketworks:space=sidewalk
  bucketworks:space=roof
  bucketworks:space=outside

Here are photos on Flickr with the tag bucketworks:space=playspace

(I went with “space” rather than “room” because I think it’s open to a wider interpretation, and luckily, Bucketworks seems to agree…)

(Are you thinking about geotags yet? They are another form of machine tags, and we should be using the coords for Bucketworks as well…)

The thing about machine tags is that you don’t so much just “come up with them” as they are defined by some entity, and then presented, and (hopefully) used.

So, if we did come up with a bunch of these, we would need to make them public, promote the use of them, show why you would use them (what cool things could be done, like, a slideshow with all photos from an event at Bucketworks) and having tools that make these things valuable would also be good…

What’s that? This reminds you of RDF, well, that’s okay :)

See Also: http://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157594497877875/ and http://tagaholic.me/2009/03/26/what-are-machine-tags.html

Thoughts?

As of my writing this post, just a little over 24 hours before PhotoCampMilwaukee starts… we have 170 people registered…

I am officially freaking out.