CRDESIGNLAB

Well, Christopher and I are sitting at his house working on Mac Lab stuff, finalizing for print. He is currently working on “pool_02,” and I just put the finishing touches on the current “red_flower.” Both of which we plan on printing tomorrow during Mac Lab Saturday School™. We’ll probably spend the next half hour of so working, before we go out to light paint. As many of you have already read, on the Mac Lab Blog, this coming up Monday, March 1,  is the deadline for all light painting work to be considered for the “Paint The World With Light” book.

We plan on printing the newer version of this (which is much improved), tomorrow morning.

Do you think anything needs to be adjusted or changed? (Before it’s too late.)

I felt that I should give this new image its own post. I mentioned it at the end of the previous post, but didn’t go in depth. I took this photo last Friday near the USS Midway and the Star of India in Downtown. I took it into Photoshop today and am rather pleased with the result. Sometime this weekend I will add a Gaussian Blur to clear up the noise in the sky and the distortion in the streetlight.

Update: Passed the 3,500 hit and 400 comment marks last night. I never thought CRDESIGNLAB would be so successful.

I am in a 3D class. I have yet to put anything but placeholders in my 3D gallery. That changes today.

During Honors Pre-Calculus today, while I was waiting for Mr. Andersen to start going over the homework, I wrote out a seven item list of the things that I need to do for CRDESIGNLAB. Counting all the sub-items, I have about fifteen tasks in my mental queue. The first of these items is populate the 3D galleries on this site. I tackled that task during seventh period today.

Kyle has been reluctant to work in Cinema 4D because he is not in a 3D class (he is in 6th period Digital Art) and so I have been tossing around the idea of scrapping the 3D galleries altogether. That would make my life a lot easier. I don’t own Cinema 4D so I can’t work on 3D stuff at home, whereas I own CS4 Design Premium so I I can spend an unlimited amount of time in Ps, Fl, Ai, In, Fw, Dw, Br, and Lr.

I was almost to the point of deleting those galleries when I had a change of opinion. Sometime during lunch today, I came to the realization that the lack of 3D content on CRDESIGNLAB was not a shortcoming, but represented a fantastic chance to learn something new and explore a different region of the digital universe.I decided to shoulder the extra task of learning more about C4D when I could have just stayed with photography and light painting, which seem to be my niches in the Mac Lab world. Instead of saying no and just giving up, I decided to learn more, learn new skills, and develop a new, drastically different, section of CRDESIGNLAB. I am very confident that I made the right choice, but only time will tell. The next few days will be very hectic as I scramble to finish old light paintings, start new ones, and then finish those in time for the Paint the World With Light deadline, which comes Monday. If all goes as planned (which it never does), I will start working more with Cinema 4D next week.

The good part about learning something new in the Mac Lab is that there is always someone willing to help you. Today during lunch, I saw Philip helping another student through a C4D tutorial and Fadi helped me figure out a way to save a file such that it can be used as a dock icon. I am thankful to be in a class with such talented people who are willing to use their skills to help others.

After school, I updated my 3D galleries, both of them, with miscellaneous stuff that I created a long time ago. I took my two logos into Photoshop and improved them a little, but they still need more work, especially the second one. I made the poster a long time ago, working off Kyle’s “Creative Freedom” poster that is on the Mac Lab Poster Gallery.

Diversification is good, even if it is difficult. That’s it for now.

Update: New image on the light painting gallery.

I have been at my computer for five hours now, copying 30GB to two places and working on two images, one of which is done (for now).

As soon as I got home today, I began the long and arduous task of updating my files. Over the past six months, Kyle and I have accumulated just under 30GB of Mac Lab content, and have been trying our best to keep these 1,423 files synced across six computers. We upgraded to the 50GB version of DropBox, but that is limited by the speed of the internet connection and requires that the computer be turned on and logged into the specific account for an extended length of time, which is a problem because we are each only in the Mac Lab for one period a day. I have started storing all my files on my 1 terabyte external HDD, which I have lugged to school the past two days and have been trying to use to keep the computers undated, but DropBox just keeps messing things up. I have decided to suspend DropBox from the computers that are not updated and manually load the files onto them. Unfortunately, that all six computer needed updating, so the process has taken a while. So far, four are done. When I got home today, I updated my MacBook Pro and my iMac, and am letting my iMac sync up to the DropBox server. The iMac as school are also finished.

As soon as I got the file transfers started, I turned to Photoshop. A few posts ago, I said how I had spent an evening light painting with my lightsabers and that four good images were produced. Well,today I took one of those images back through Photoshop and attempted to improve upon the version that is on the Mac Lab Light Painting Gallery. One of the best features of this image is that you can see star lines in the background, and so I endeavored to improve this quality. I applied a “Deep Blue” “Photo Filter” set to 95% to the images and painstakingly masked everything expect the sky back in. Then I applied a “Cooling Filet (80)” set to 35% and copied the mask to that layer. The result was astounding. Where I once had a brownish-yellow haze, I now have a navy blue abyss streaked with starlight. It is a little hard to tell just how dramatic the change is from looking at the image to the left, but it makes all the difference. One of my favorite features of this image is the fact that I managed to capture the stars, and now to accent those with a clear blue sky, it completely makes the photo.  I also removed the hard light effect I added before, so now there is a smooth rather than harsh feel. The power of adjustment layers and the mask still astound me, even after three years.

After that, I played around with a similar image, but the masking was taking way too much time. I was forced to move on to more urgent tasks, like writing this post.

I officially dub Street 01 done for now. It goes back into my maze of a file system to await a day when I learn something new and can make it better.

Update: The power of QuickTime!!!!!!

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.”

—Mark Twain

I have had this quote hung on my wall for years, along with a picture of Mark Twain, and have just recently taken meaning to it. Some interpret it differently than others, but I believe I have found its true meaning (No, it’s not just about books, well at least I don’t think so).

Life is full of opportunities and adventures. Take them! The only way to live life, is by living it. When an opportunity arrises, you don’t want to regret, in the future, that you didn’t take advantage of it. Even if the opportunity is something that doesn’t completely strike your attention, do it anyway. It won’t hurt you, I promise. If it does turn out to be a bust, you will still gain something from the experience. These experiences are usually what we look back to, as the good times of our lives.

All I’m trying to say is, don’t be afraid! You will only hurt yourself by not trying. So, go out and ‘read a book.’

*I hope everyone had a great time at Sweethearts!

Because SnapzProX is just so cool, I had to make an early morning update.

To my disappointment, I learned on Friday that there was to be no Mac Lab Saturday School™ today. Too bad. Well, at least I got to sleep in. As I mentioned before, I plan to make this weekend very productive, so I wasted no time getting to work. From the time I woke up, which was a little before noon, I have been sitting in front of my 27 inch iMac, burning my retinas out. I started by unloading the pictures that Kyle, Cameron, and I took yesterday.

My friend and fellow Mac Lab student Cameron Rabell accompanied Kyle and I on our trip downtown yesterday, where we took about 40 pictures of the sites located between the Star of India and the USS Midway. As I unloaded the images early this afternoon, I was mildly disappointed. Most of them didn’t turn out, as we had been taking long exposures and the wind was blowing, so things (like boats) moved (and were therefore blurry). Also, we intended the images to be light paintings, but they turned out more like regular photographs, just at night. A couple did turn out interesting, and I took one into Photoshop today and edited it a little. The result is featured on this post.

After that, or maybe before, I can’t remember, I did the rounds on all my favorite sites, including the blogs of Christian Lim, Fadi George, and Philip Behnam. I decided to make a new “Inspiration” widget in the right sidebar, which I populate with some of the links from the Inspiration page. I also added links to the sites of five Mac Lab students to the Inspiration page and widget: Christian Lim, Danny Owens, Diana I, Fadi George, and Philip Behnam.

After that, I did a little bit of file management on my iMac and took an hour break for lunch. (CRDESIGNLAB has over 25GB of files so far. Luckily we have the 50GB version of DropBox and luckily my iMac has 1.55 terabytes of space left. At this rate, I will have to buy the 100GB upgrade for DropBox in a few weeks.)

When I returned, I saw that there was a comment by Mr. Skocko (ix625) on the post I wrote earlier today. I added that task to my mental queue.

Next, I went through the five images Kyle and I have ready to print and did some resizing and finishing. We hope to print these images next week, but that is what we have been saying for the last two weeks. Mr. Skocko, if you are reading this, please don’t let Kyle and I leave school on Monday without talking to you about printing. Basically, I completely remade the print layout for all five images so that they are the same width, have the same size borders, titles, and subtitles, and have text of the same color. I think the result is a good improvement. I still have to decide if one more of my images is good enough for print. Diana I. has told me on many occasions that she thinks the Shoe picture is one of my best, and I agree. It is has not been included in the original list of photos to be printed because Kyle doesn’t like it. Well, I will definitely try to print a copy for myself.

Then I went to work on the task Mr. Skocko gave in this comment and decided to submit the Bridge, Cars, Purple Building, and Street_02 images, for now. I resized them in Photoshop and put them in a dedicated folder in DropBox. By then, it was 6:00 pm and I had been working for six hours, with a one hour break. At that point, I started writing this post. Now it is almost 7:30, so I have been working for seven and a half hours with a one hour break. I would change this post’s title, but then it would have less meaning.

Some people might wonder why I would want to spend all this time working on stuff for the Mac Lab on a weekend? I type away right now, when I could be playing XBox or watching TV, or talking to friends, or at a movie, because for me, this is just as fun. I love the Mac Lab. I love working in the Mac Lab. I love working and seeing the beautiful result. I love trying to be brilliant. I sit here and type because for me, there is nothing I would rather be doing. For me, I wish it were 7 am not 7 pm, that way I would have more time to work. I wish I could work like this forever. I wish I could do more.

And so I restart my favorite iTunes playlist for the third time, and get back to work.

Update: I call it a day at 9:30, after eight and a half hours of work.

This post is a week overdue. The main topic of this post is actually what we did last weekend. Between working on Specialties for AP U.S. History and a pre-lab for AP Chemistry, Kyle and I found time to capture some new images as well as return to some old ones.

The New:

On Saturday, after we were done working on Specialties at the SDSU Library, Kyle and I got our camera gear and took a few photos around the campus. So far, we have only had time to edit one of them, which is the photo of a bridge seen to the left. During our numerous breaks from working, we also returned to an image we had taken on January 16, the same day we captured the Dip image that is on the Wall of Fame. Kyle really liked a building that was lit with purple spotlights, so I took a few photos of it. We messed with the best one in Photoshop, cropping it down and adjusting the contrast, among other things. The result will be printed in a few days (hopefully). That’s it for the new images, now on to the improved ones.

And the Improved:

Kyle and I went to Mac Lab Saturday School™ in order to catalog the contents of the camera cabinet, and ended up spending a lot of time working to get the Dip image ready to print. In the two and a half hours we spent going through multiple versions and generating over 4GB on new data, the image was greatly improved.We darkened it a great deal, as well as sharpened the foreground and cleaned up the sky a little with the patch tool. By the time it was printing, Kyle and I were sick of Photoshop, but had a new appreciation of its power. Finally, two copies were coming out of the Epson, one for Kyle and one for the Wall. We didn’t print one for me because I want to frame my copy, and I still need to buy a frame.

During our endless hours at the library, we also improved the Cars, Red Flower, and Seed Pod images, all of which we hope to print eventually. The Cars image, especially, was completely reworked and the result is spectacular when compared to the original. As for the other two, they underwent minor corrections and both are better for it.

Last weekend, we got a lot of work done, and I hope to do the same this weekend.

This explains it all.

(Record for shortest post ever)

Well, I don’t think there’s a unit of time long enough for how overdue this post is!!!!! This is the first of three posts that I started but never finished, so here I am, trying to finish it. I could smash everything into another mega-post like The 3 Part Explosion or Four Days in the Mud, but I think I will just write a few smaller posts. That way more people are likely to read them.

As you might have guessed, the title of this posts references Star Wars. I have been a fan of Star Wars for as long as I can remember, and have become a collector of sorts: I have three very expensive and very realistic lightsaber replicas (one of Mace Windu’s saber, and one of Darth Maul’s, which separates into two to simulate what Qui-Gon does in the movie). I also happen to be an accomplished light painter. When you put those two things together, you get the image that is featured on this post, as well as the three ones like it that are now sitting happily on my light painting gallery.

On Sunday night, after I came home from the SDSU Library, where I had been working on Specialties, I decided to try out an idea that I had had for a while and which Mr. Skocko had suggested: using lightsabers to light paint. I had tried it before, but because I did not know as much about the camera as I do now, the result was a mess. This time, the result was spectacular. My sister, her friend, and I spent two hours outside, perfecting the settings and technique of painting with a three foot beam of light. We took about 40 photos, with exposures as long as four minutes, where I manned the camera as they painted the world with light. By the time we called it a night, I was shaking with excitement. I knew that we had made something spectacular, something that would make Mr. Skocko proud, and something that would make it into that book.

Over the past two days, I have taken the best four of those 40 images into Photoshop and have improved them somewhat. The originals were really good, so there was not much to be done. I leave this post at that: now on to the next one.