Parabolic Umbrella

parabolic Umbrella
Originally uploaded by www.ian.ca

One of the shots from my test of the parabolic umbrella I just bought. Works well!

Parabolic Umbrella

Parabolic Umbrella
Originally uploaded by www.ian.ca

Just testing out the new parabolic umbrella I bought. This parabolic umbrella produces some sweet light. Examples to come.

Warehouse One behind the scenes of Spring

Video from the LX3

Obama Comic book Coloured by Winnipeger

Chris Chuckry over at Frogrocket talks about getting the job to colour the cover of the Obama meets Spiderman comicbook

Below Zero Minus 1

Its been part of my Macworld tradition to hang out on the listening posts at Virgin and pick up some cool mix CD's. This one was a real bargin at $10. Nice chilled beats.

Last Macworld

You can read Kev's preamble to the Macworld presentation on Jan 27th here
Hope to see you there!

SHOW Studio Fashion Dj's

The event is well over, it happened in July.Check out the video You can't help but want to watch. Very cool.

On location Banville & Jones

On location Banville & Jones
Originally uploaded by www.ian.ca

shooting the Test Kitchen article for the next issue of the Cellar Door.
www.banvilleandjones.com/cellar.aspx

Liam Skates for the first time

Quick clips using my LX3. I tried tweaking the contrast a bit in iMovie. I should have left well enough alone. Oh well. Liam had fun!

All the current DSLR's in one image

State of the DSLR market: Nikon vs. Canon vs. Sony/Minolta vs. Olympus vs. Panasonic/Leica vs. Pentax vs. Samsung vs. Sigma vs. Fujifilm digital SLR cameras, as of January 2009
Originally uploaded by penmachine

Follow the links to this guy who put it together and the discussions around these. I think of this picture when someone innocently asks "So what camera should I buy?" It's just not that easy!

Smule Ocarina

Dymanic B&W

Macworld 2009
Originally uploaded by www.ian.ca

If you've looked at my snaps from Macworld, you might have noticed I picked up the Panasonic LX3. Several people, at least 6 different people onthe expo floor, told me without any prompting that they LOVE their LX3. So far, I do too!
Commonly compared to Canon's G10 it's typically a P&S for someone who has a bigger camera and just wants to do something small and light. The options on this camera are pretty deep, and I haven't even read the thick manual on how it all works. The one thing I have seen that immediately attracted me to it, is the amazing quality of the B&W images that come straight out f the camera. This grab shot of Kev on the walk home from the Expo is an example of that. Nothing else done to it, nothing, nada, when it comes to B&W thats kinda rare. I hope to put the camera through it's paces more in the weeks to com.

Magazine cover shoot at -30C

Out this week is a feature article on Gordon Kirkwood the CEO of Entegra Credit Union, in Enterprise magazine, published out of BC.

We shot the feature back in mid December when the first real cold snap came into town.
the art director talked about getting a portrait of Mr Kirkwood outside, at Portage & Main. While Portage & Main might well be the second most famous street corner in all of Canada (Bay & Bloor, as financial centre would be first place) it's too wide, boxed in by those barriers and is generally uninspiring to photograph. (I'll save my thoughts on P&M for another rant.) Not to mention at the time we discussed shooting this, it was -42C with a windchill warning. He wanted Mr Kirkwood to wear "One of those really big parkas".Fortunately I have a Canada Goose parka and it was decided to put him in this parka.

The day of the shoot it actually warmed up a bit to a reasonable -27C, but there again with the wind, it felt like -32C. I wanted to use studio style lighting to overpower the existing sunshine. For readers not from Winnipeg, most parking lots traditionally have electrical outlets to allow staff to plug in block heaters so their cars will start. Over the years this has been a great way to power lights since even in summer you could find an outlet in parking lots. Entegra was no exception, with a row of plugs lining their lot. The difference in these days of conservation is there are new ways of regulating and saving the power. While it appeared we had power and set up all the studio lights, the system controlling these parking lot plugs wouldn't allow a quick draw of amperage. The models lamps would come on but not the flashes.

Faced with no other way of lighting I resorted to using Nikon Speedlights and the CLS system. The low afternoon sun was shining right at me so I need a couple speedlights to over power the ambient. The extreme cold played havoc with recharge times, and at times exposure. We were at a loss as to why things were working fine one moment and not, the other.

Working with gear in the cold over the years, I know that being warm is key to being creative. I couldn't have done anything with David assisting me and acting as the VAL(voice activated lightstand)

HP, printing and home servers

It seems every show I get interested in inkjet printing. Don't know why, could be all the cool stuff on display, and the printers cranking out all sorts of images on stunning substrates. David the admin of Aperture Users Network was showing off an amazing HP printer designed for fine art prints. He was cranking out some stuff on some matte paper that made me nostalgic for those old matte papers of yester-year.

HP also held the buzz on their media server. Think of it as the black box you will run in your laundry room that serves up your music, photos and movies to any device in the house. That they offer a slick server with integrated Mac support, including Time Machine, makes it all the more attractive. With Apple not releasing anything to answer to it, HP is poised to be the market leader in this area, which will only get bigger in the next year. All those big screen TV's where we want to spend some time, they need content.

So all in all HP made a great showing at Macworld, IMHO

More Macworld: More "Celeb" spotting

The word celebrity means something completely different at a show like Macworld.

I bumped into or walked by popular bloggers like Merlin Mann.

Chris Pirillo was jostling for interview time with some booths, he's shorter than Kev, but seems to have some pull.

On the Monday, while register for our credentials, I made a fool of myself. I was staring at this guy, and the light bulb when off just as I walked by this guy. "Hey your that guy on the Apple site who shows off the stuff!!" I gushed that I've watched his tutorials and that he did a good job, I asked if he had seen the parody of him on You tube. He had not. He was very gracious and hinted at that time we'd seen more of him.

Sadly I did NOT see Herbie Hancock for the third time :-(

First time bowling

First time bowling
Originally uploaded by www.ian.ca

Macworld, The last days

We watched a performance of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra. About 15 laptops all strung together and conducted by the leader,a prof at Stanford. Neat stuff. You can watch some  video of it in my Flickr set.
 
   

We spent the rest of  the afternoon on the show floor looking for last minute deals. Can't say we found that many. But it was nice to see the floor without constantly considering things for video.
 

Apple says their done with Macworld, and when I first heard this I thought it was a negative decision. But we've found this show to be much less focused on the Mac and more fascinated with the iPod  and iPhone and all the products, cases, speakers etc, associated with those items. As well some gadgets that have nothing to do with any of the Apple line up had booths, giving the show floor almost a flea market feel at times.

So having spent time on the floor, I can understand why Apple see Macworld as something who's time has come and gone. I think some sort of show will continue, but in what form, who's to say. If there was one theme I heard in the few presentations we saw it's that our old notions of community, and how we relate to each other, share stuff, is changing as we speak.We saw everyone constantly twittering, blogging, photographing, videoing, their experience on the show floor. Macworld exists in the cloud as much as it does in the Moscone Centre.

These two shots were taken hours part, but ended up being of the same kid! He's not really into listening to Apple, he's into his colouring and then his software. An apt metaphor for the  changing times.

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Kev talks to Woz

iPhoto 09

With all the running around on the floor, I haven't really had a chance to talk about the cool bits about iPhoto 09. The biggest feature is face detection. You tag one person in your library with a name then iPhoto will go through and tag all the photos with that person in it, and then make a thumbnail of that collection in a place called Faces. It looks really cool, easy to use and pretty smart.

The other feature called Places uses the geotagging that some cameras are offering and allow you to create maps of your images. It's using Google Map technology. You can also geotag your existing images very easily.

They've add simple buttons to upload to Flickr and Facebook. Your Faces tags transfer to facebook and if someone tags a face on Facebook it syncs with the original in iPhoto.

There are a whole bunch of little things, new themes slidehows, travel maps using your places info to use in books, more editing capabilities. iPhoto is reason enough to upgrade your iLife suite to the 09 version.

It takes free stuff to create a rowdy crowd

Macworld 2009- It takes free stuff to create a rowdy crowd
Originally uploaded by www.ian.ca

One brief moment it felt like an old Macworld. A very vocal and intense gathering of people were vying for the free G Drive external drives.

But otherwise it feels very light this year. The world's media has also shuffled off to CES which starts today, so we can find a seat in the media room a lot easier.

Cool Wacom tablet

Macworld 2009- cool Wacom tablet
Originally uploaded by www.ian.ca

I still find these these cool Wacom tablets you draw directly on, very cool.

Woz's bodyguard eyes me up

Macworld 2009- Woz's bodyguard eyes me up
Originally uploaded by www.ian.ca

That's Woz on the right. That's his PP (personal protection) on the left. We eventually got to sit down with Woz and do a little interview with him. Very nice guy.

Macworld 2009-Chinatown

Macworld 2009-Chinatown
Originally uploaded by www.ian.ca

shot with my new LX3

Leo Laporte

Leo Laporte
Originally uploaded by www.ian.ca

Just saw Leo Laporte this am before the show. Nothing new to talk about really .We were hoping he was going to do a episode of TWIT ( ttp://twit.tv/)but instead he just danced on the grave of old media. Yawn. He has a following though!

Day two At Macworld

Our second day at Macworld started by attending the very popular show by David Pogue. He interviewed the people behind two very popular viral videos.

Dancing with Matt
Matt actually talked about how his tongue in cheek response to accusations of faking his video backfiring and the story of how he faked it all (which was SO outlandishly fake so no one would take him seriously) taking a life of it's own and suddenly being picked up by mainstream media as true or truthiniess.

You Suck at Photoshop
the guys behind this viral series talked about again how they played with perceptions and urban myths, taking the myth that it the main character was voiced by Dane Cook (which it wasn't, just sounds like him) and stretching so hard that finally Dane Cook himself participated in in all

smule
The guy behind the the software talked about all the innovative ways he used technology with music. Software for the iPhone allows you to BLOW into the mic and play the iPhone like a pan flute. Very very cool.

Then out to the show floor. Gotta tell yah we're feeling the economy. Yeah sure there are 100 ways to hold your iphone, ipod touch, or laptop. SERIOUSLY, 100's of ways! We're on the search for the few different apps that stand out. Delicous Monster once again caught our eye. Very cool way of cataloging all your media, books, even power tools!

Tiffen filters for the iPhone

Infinite iMacs

Infinite iMacs
Originally uploaded by www.ian.ca

Day One round up

The Keynote

Today was the keynote. It was ok. Phill Schiller is no Steve Jobs and new iLife updates is no Mac mini as home entertainment centre. But it was still fun to see.
Here's some snaps. The media lining up to get in and jostle for position

once inside everyone bids the time with a round of self indulgent documenatation. Lots of people photographing the empty stage, or themselves in front of the empty stage. The Bloggers with their cell phone wireless cards (the room is silent of any WIFI signal) all get ready to update things as they happen.
 

I saw the crews from all sorts of blogs, Engadget, Gizmodo, and they really do go hard to doucment events as they happen. I was seated next to someone doing the live updating between their blog and Twitter

After that Kev and I shot our round up (link to come) and spent time scoping things out for our major shooting tomorrow and beyond.

  The show floor feels a bit less crowded this year. The Economy I am sure has something to do with it. The local retail climate was front page news the day we arrived and it wasn't at all postive.
I'd share more snaps from today but my battery on my SLR died on the way home. Talk to you tomorrow!

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Monday in San Fran.

After registering at the conference we dropped into the Apple Store. If you've never been to one, you'll find it interesting. This store is always busy busy  busy. The doors seem to always be open and you can use all the machines. So you see countless people walk in casually and use a machine to check email or whatever. Kev was one of these people.
Tomorrow is Keynote day and willbe a long one. I will report about the reaction to whatever announcment made, tomorrow.
 

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Street Car

Street Car
Originally uploaded by www.ian.ca

This outside our hotel Yes it's 9C at night but very humid so feels much colder. I know I can't complain.

Steve's ok, so can we move forward?

The bogs are all lit up with the statement from Steve Jobs about his health. The fact that he wasn't talking tomorrow had all sorts of tabloid speculation about his current health. He finally put it to rest so we can all move forward.

We're here!

Finally arriving into San Fran, we discover the ice rink in Union Square, across the street from our hotel The Chancellor. Tonight was the last night of it's operation. We watched the crowd of eager novices itching to get out there on the ice while the Zamboni cleans the surface. Finally their allowed on the ice, with the music blaring overhead. The first song? Stomping Tom singing C-A-N-A-D-A!

I'll only mention the weather once, right now. It was +9C tonight, looking at somewhere around 15C tomorrow.

New Music Friday!

Amazon came through just in time to load up the ipod for the trip to San Fran.I found most of these off the various top ten lists you see this time of year. Crazy Dubstep, reggae music form Ethieopia, critically acclaimed duo from Mali, weird electropop from some dude, its a real mixed bag. follow the links to read and hear more.