Wet roads at night and a really wide aperture make special things happen.
Fuji X100S, processed with Mextures on iPhone.
Inside-out Selfie
Wallpaper Wednesday: Midnight Taxi
On the way home late one night after working on presentation materials for a pitch. (I don't remember who we were pitching, or if we won.)
The city becomes serene and peaceful, and there's something about observing it through the scratched, streaked glass of a taxi windows that is romantic, mysterious, ethereal. Or maybe I've just watched too many movies.
Here's another Brooklyn-ish wallpaper for your desktop pleasure. Grab it in iPhone, iPad and widescreen desktop sizes below.
As before, usage rights are don't be a jerk.
Wallpaper Wednesday: Brooklyn, USA
Modeled after a cross-section of the ocean's surface. This is one cool-looking table.
(Via Boing Boing)
Abyss Table
Robot Sketches #1
Robot #1. Trying to bang out a quickie robot model on a regular basis in Cinema 4D. Maybe even once a week...
*Yes, I know I posted this out of order with Robot #2.
Robot Sketches #2
Playing with Greyscale Gorilla's HDRI Studio Pack.
A blobby Manhattan Bridge. | Fujifilm X100S | f/2.0 | 1/8s | ISO250
Dilated
A routine eye exam resulted in dilated pupils and blurry vision for a few hours yesterday. I'm quite proud to say I have 20/20 vision, so not being able to see clearly is always an alien sensation for me. As an excercise, I decided to shoot a few images to illustrate how it felt.
I think my biggest takeaway from this exercise was that it forced me to re-focus (bam!) on some of the basics of composition - if you can't really see your subject, you have to pull back and compose the scene based on abstract attributes, like light and dark, color, and where the blobs of light are.
Anyway, it was a fun little exericise, but I'm always glad to return to clarity.
For Sale: Plywerk Prints
Please visit my brand new print gallery on Square Market, where you can purchase prints from my Hello Brooklyn series (requires Flash).
These unique prints were made for my photo exhibit at K-Dog & Dune Buggy, coffee shop and late lamented Prospect-Lefferts Gardens institution.
The photos are printed on gorgeous bamboo panels from Plywerk, and are color-fast so they'll resist fading. They're all matte prints, except for one metallic print of the rooftops of King's County.
Hopefully you find something there that will spiff up your home or office, or that will make a nice gift for someone you care about.
iPad Art - Morgan Freeman Finger Painting
I'm genuinely surprised that there are still people who bring out the "iPads are for consuming content" trope.
On another note, this got me remembering something from my old art school days. The abstract expressionists, if I remember right, were all about boiling down a medium to the essence of that medium. The things unique to painting that make it essentially painting are paint and a canvas (and maybe a brush). They weren't keen on one medium emulating another, and as such, weren't into photorealistic painting. But here's Kyle Lambert taking it a step further, using a virtual canvas on a digital thing to emulate photography. Interesting stuff.
"How do you like your eggs?"
How Do You Like Your Eggs?
A little 3D work-in-progress based on a sketch by my pal Vic, of Happy Tuna Creative.
FlySi!
Here’s a logo I made for my online moniker, using nothing but Illustrator and Photoshop. Maybe I’ll blog a little bit about how I made it another time, as I think a lot of people aren’t fully aware of Photoshop’s impressive 3D capabilities.
Colbert's Stephensed Manhattan Clam Chowder
Spotted a few of these on W.14th St. last week. I’m sure Andy would have been proud.
Project 365
Elias [8/365]It’s been a minute since my last post (or 146,044 minutes, according to Wolfram Alpha), but I just wanted to make a quick update to point you to my latest personal photographic endeavor. It’s called Project 365, and the basic premise is that you take a photograph every day for a year. There’s a dedicated site and community built around the idea, but I opted to go the Flickr route, where I created a set and joined a Project 365 group.
I’ve been having a ton of fun with this exercise, and I’ve also been learning about myself as a photographer. It forces discipline by making me shoot every day. Yes, I’ve often been caught at 11:50pm running to go and shoot a picture of my cat before midnight, but I still think that the quality of my photographs has gone up overall, simply because I don’t want to include crappy images in this project.
Wood Shingles - iPhone Wallpaper
Shingles
I spent the weekend up in the Catskills with my wife this weekend, and found myself snapping tons of pictures of all the wonderful country textures. This one of the wooden shingles that covered the side of the converted carriage house that our room was in, is my current iPhone wallpaper. I shot it with the iPhone 4’s camera, and tweaked it slightly with Tiffen’s Photo fx iPhone app. Feel free to grab it from my Flickr feed if you like.
Pro-tip: if doing a web search for images of shingles for comparison, be specific and search for “wood shingles”, not just “shingles” - unfortunately, Google’s fancy new image search doesn’t come with an “un-see” button.
Goodnight Brooklyn
Robot Joe: One of 50 Awesome Robots on Abduzeedo
Robot Joe, 2006
Wow - this made my day: I discovered (rather late, I might add) that a 3D rendering of a robot that I did back in 2006 for a Maya class at SVA was featured on abduzeedo in a collection called 50 Awesome Robots. I consider this extremely high praise, because the caliber of artists featured on the site is always top-notch, and it’s humbling to be grouped among them.
Some fun facts about Robot Joe:
- Robot Joe originated as vague idea I had for a video game back in the ’90s. See some early sketches here and here.
- His current incarnation — and the name “Robot Joe” — is largely inspired by my friend and co-worker Joe (who happens to love robots)
- Robot Joe is by far my most favorited and viewed image in my Flickr stream (13K views and counting)
- He’s been widely used across the Internets (under Creative Commons licensing) for various purposes, including as a mascot for benderjab.org, as a desktop image in an eMINTS classroom, and on a website for a robotics conference workshop.