Arts/Media | Page 3

February 25, 2009 by A.J. Wood

Heard Around the Interwebs

A few quick hits for Wednesday:

Ritz Camera the world’s largest camera retailer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday. Ritz operates some of its stores under the name Wolf Camera, and its creditors include Nikon & Canon. According to a post in DPreview, “Court papers suggest that Ritz Cameras owes over $40 million to its two largest creditors: Nikon’s US subsidiary Nikon Inc. and Canon USA, with a further $8.4 million owed to Fujifilm USA, a subsidiary of which owns around a third of the company. To put the $26.6 million owed to Nikon Inc. into perspective, it would represent somewhere in the region of 20% of Nikon Inc’s expected annual operating income.”

Discovered some great macro photography this morning via Twitter. Paul Burwell snaps snowflakes up close. Really close.

Scott Kelby’s guest blogger today is Syl Arena.

Photoshop CS4 Update AND Plugin. Found via Rufus Deuchler’s blog, get the latest PS update, and for the Mac faithful download the plugin for disabling track pad gestures that rotate your canvas unexpectedly.

Until tomorrow…

February 17, 2009 by A.J. Wood

Quick Links Tuesday

In case you missed it, RC posted a great tutorial that combines Lightroom’s web gallery upload with the Shadowbox plugin for WordPress last Friday. What does it do? Checkout the flash gallery I created of my daughter.

You may be aware of the service called Twitturly that ranks the most frequent URLs tweeted, but did you know you can pull up the links of your favorite Twitterer? Simply add /user/twittername to the end of the Twitturly URL to pull up links by a specific person. For example to see the latest links I tweeted you would enter the following URL: http://twitturly.com/user/aj_wood Great for grabbing links instead of wading through tweets you may have missed.

Erik shot me an email told me that I should come up with a schedule, announce it, then stick to it. Well, I haven’t figured out the schedule, but once I do I’ll be sure to announce it.

Uhm… so this post was finished about two hours ago BEFORE midnight. Then I went to test my shadowbox gallery and discovered it didn’t work. In fact, many items weren’t working on the site as it seems my WP theme was broken. It’s fixed now, and that post will have to wait for another day.

in Arts/Media / Technology 0 comments

February 13, 2009 by A.J. Wood

Your Newest Adobe Community Expert

I am excited to announce that this week I joined the 2009 class of Adobe Community Experts. THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! to Dee Sadler, Stacy Sison & Lynly Schambers-Lenox for nominating me. It is a privilege & honor to be considered worthy of such a great community of talent. I hope I can share as much information as I am certain to learn from my peers in the Adobesphere. This year’s class included my good friend & Lightroom guru Gene McCullagh. Congratulations to you sir! And thanks for taking all the pressure off me in representing Dallas to the global community. *grin*

in Adobe / Arts/Media / News 3 comments

February 7, 2009 by A.J. Wood

Forbes & Crowdspring Fire Up Designers

It may have been lost on the general public, but earlier this week a Forbes article was the shot across the bow for most of the professional design community. In the article, Christoper Steiner interviews CrowdSpring about their “design contest” business model. Based on the comments to the article, the topic is one that is close to the heart of many professional designers. In my opinion, Steph Doyle makes a good point about the lack of balance in the article, how it favors the idea presented by CrowdSpring, and doesn’t present a fair counterpoint. Steph also goes on to mention how inexperienced designers are only hurting themselves and the design industry. You may recall last month I wrote an article asking, “How much are you worth?“, which addressed the issues facing students entering the job market. I agree with Steph that the design community needs to do a better job of educating new designers, students, peers & the general consumer.

So what happens now?

Why You’ll Never Be David Hill or Innovation Will Never Die

If you visited Scott Kelby’s blog you know that yesterday he revisited the “Dave Hill” technique, and today’s post was part II. I was surprised to read the disclaimer on the top of Scott’s blog, yet another reminder that people can be idiots. First of all, it’s disappointing that anyone–let alone a man who devotes his time to educating people–would get insulted and personally attacked for a blog entry. What’s worse, the topic wasn’t even a controversial one. You don’t like the David Hill style? Fine. Is it really necessary to rant incessantly in blog comments about being sick & tired? Frankly, I’m sick & tired of all the whining. On the surface, the arguments appear to be about the widespread use of the “Dave Hill” look, cheating your art by using plugins, or talentless folks taking money away from professionals.

I have to ask, “Why are YOU so angry?”