CRDESIGNLAB

Well, today was Valhalla’s 36th birthday, and during lunch we (ASB) hosted a birthday celebration, with cake and all. Last week Mr. Owens asked Skocko to create a Birthday Poster for the celebration, and he handed the task off to me. Since the poster needed a picture of Valhalla pen tooled into a birthday cake, I turned to Fadi to do the deed. He has worked on the pen tooling all week, and wasn’t able to finish due to the time crunch. Unfortunately, yesterday I informed Mr. Owens of the progress and he decided to cancel the poster. I felt very badly having to tell Fadi that we wouldn’t we using his work (for now). When I came in and told him, he was about half way done, so either way, the poster would not have been done in time. For what he did have though, it looked great. We will definitely be using it for something in the future.

Anyway, I hope that everyone was able to get out  to the stage during lunch to get a piece of cake and enjoy a few lunch time activities (ie. breaking open a piñata).

Oh, one more thing. Today, after school, Christopher and I are going to Michael’s to look at frames for the pictures that we plan on printing next week (or tomorrow during MLSS™). We’ve been planning on doing so for the past two weeks, and are finally going to be able to. (Christopher mentioned this yesterday, but it’s now a definite plan)

Have a great three-day weekend!

This post is not devoted to any one thing, so I couldn’t find a suitable title other than “Today’s Stuff,” which is what it is.

During 7th period today, Kyle and I continued our attack on the cabinet in the Mac Lab, and made a small amount of progress. Also, we figured out how to use the two Lens Babies and the Wide Angle Convertor lens that Mr. Skocko has. Both of these devices could prove to be useful for photographers, maybe.

Kyle had spent all of 6th period working on the CRDESIGNLAB logo, so we reviewed his progress. Unfortunately, I didn’t like any of his designs.

At home, I did some more print prep, and put together a panel of images that we might print. Opinions are greatly appreciated!!!!

Lastly, I continued messing with the blog header CSS. I made the font for the title (DISCO) work whether or not the computer viewing it has the font and Kyle suggested that I change the size of the tagline beneath the title, so I did. I also remade the header image, boosting the saturation and rounding the corners more. Once we have a finished logo for CRDESIGNLAB, I will put that there instead of just a random image.

It was a busy day, and I still have a lot more work to do. I plan to go through Mr. Skocko’s tutorials on print layout back from the days of CS3 and finish going through the chapter on printing in The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby in order to produce the best prints possible. Wish me luck!

Tomorrow after school, Kyle and I will go to Michael’s to look at frames for our images. We want to frame our work, and so we can’t print until we know the size of the frames we want. If all goes as planned, (which it never does) we may be able to print during Mac Lab Saturday School™. We will be there from 8 to 10am to inventory all of Skocko’s equipment (all the stuff in that cabinet) (fun fun fun!!!!!). See you there!

(P.S.: People with focusing problems (Christian) should try to prefect their methods during MLSS™.)

Today, Mr. Skocko told me that he liked our photos and will be putting them on the Mac Lab Photo Gallery.

In the Mac Lab tomorrow at lunch, Kyle and I will be hosting a light painting tutorial for those who are interested. Fadi George was the one who asked, so be sure to thank him. Everyone who wants to learn to light paint is invited. We will be using the Canon EOS Rebel 5D Mark II and the Canon EOS Rebel XTi, in case you want to know. Also, we will be using the Mac Lab’s wide-angle lenses (1 and 2). I hope people come!

P.S.: CRDESIGNLAB is at 1,955 hits!!!!! Please help us get to 2,000 by the end of the day!!!!!

Well, here I sit at 10pm Monday night, doing something I should have done over the weekend; preparing our work for the Mac Lab Photo Gallery and the beautiful Epson that sits in front of Mr. Skocko’s desk. Kyle and I have been questioning why our work is not featured on the photo gallery ever since it was created and have been talking about printing something since the middle of last week.

When I asked Skocko about the gallery, he said that he was too busy to update it but that we could help by selecting the best images and preparing them, so that is what I have been doing. Today, I went through the edited versions of all our images and narrowed them down to four, based on the guidelines that he gave; four images that fit the guidelines of technically correct photography (I hope!). I have decided to submit the “orange flower,” “seed pod,” “yellow flower 02,” and “red flower” images to Skocko. I took these four back through Photoshop, to catch anything that I missed, and actually ended up improving them a great deal, in my opinion at least. I saved them as JPEG files and firmly believe that they deserve to be on the blog. I know that all of them don’t meet all the requirements, but they are the best we have, and I think they are good enough.

On the other hand, I narrowed the choices for printing down to these four photos also, then looked at their sizes to make sure they are large enough, and unfortunately the “orange flower” and “yellow flower 02″ are not. The remaining two will hopefully grace the massive Epson sometime tomorrow, if Mr. Skocko likes them.

Well, that is all I can think to write at this late hour. Wish me luck on getting our images on the photo gallery!

This post was written Monday night, but was not posted until Tuesday morning due to problems with WordPress.

Today, Kyle and I stayed two hours after school and prepped the Mac Lab for a much-needed update.

It all started three weeks ago, when Kyle offered to organize Mr. Skocko’s cabinet. For extra minutes, he offered to come in during MLSS™ and revamp Mr. Skocko’s organization system. I tagged along. That Saturday, we spent four hours going through the camera cabinet and completely reorganized it. We also vowed to do the same to the adjacent tables and the corner with the projector.

Three weeks later, we have made a small amount of progress, but we have also accepted another task. Tomorrow, we will arrive at the Mac Lab at 8am and install Mac OS X v10.6.2 Snow Leopard on all the computers. For those of you who have been living under a rock, Snow Leopard is the newest and greatest operating system for Mac. Mr. Skocko has the software disks, he just needs to install them. That is where we come in. We will spend many hours updating each computer to the latest and greatest software from Apple.

Back to today. We spent two hours after school installing all the software updates for the current operating system, Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard,which are required before installing Snow Leopard. We also ran a test install to see how long it would take (1 hour 20 minutes). We took all the pen tablets from the computers and packed them in a box for us to organize tomorrow. Also, we took all the headphones from the computers and are going to sort through them as well.

Lastly, we found two Mac Pros and two old G4′s. We plan to set these computers up into a high-end work station with even more professional tools. With any luck, we will be able to salvage parts from the old G4′s to make the newer Mac Pro that is missing a hard drive work. The other Mac Pro works just fine. With any luck, by Monday, there will be an extra high-end station or two for people to work at.

And so, tomorrow we will update the Mac Lab to the latest and greatest operating system from Apple. After that, we will install some extra software including new fonts, which will definitely come in handy. Hopefully, we will also make good progress on our reorganization of the clutter that is literally piled throughout the Lab.

As for my other plans this weekend, I hope to do some more light painting, but without Kyle (he is going to Orange County) it will be less fun. I borrowed two lenses (10-22mm wide-angle and 18-200 telephoto), a remote shutter release, a gorillapod, and a 58mm Circular Polarizing filter from the Mac Lab, and will try to put them to good use. I own a Rebel T1i, so I didn’t need to take a camera, although I was tempted to take a 5D Mark II anyway. Also, I bought a tripod for myself today, so I don’t have to fight with anyone for the only remaining Mac Lab tripod with a mount piece. Last week, I bought the 50GB expansion for Dropbox, so I will have plenty of room to keep my photos updated across five computers.

On another note, we hope to print some of our images tomorrow. Whether or not they will go on the wall or will just be for our own enjoyment is yet to be determined.

Everyone in the Mac Lab should appreciate what we will do tomorrow.

Well, that’s it for now. I don’t have any image for today, as I have spent so much time studying for AP Chemistry, that I haven’t had time to edit anything new.