How Internet Addicted are you?

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I am back in Winnipeg (will be in Minneapolis in another day) after spending almost all of the last two weeks at a cabin on Lester Beach (near Grand Beach) on Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba. We had no land lines, cable or phone, so no Internet. Sort of. I added a Canada phone plan so I could make cheap calls at 59 cents a minute? ?!#$%?? I also added a data plan to my iPhone, but was paranoid about using it, going over, and paying $5.99 a meg. So I really just checked email headers, and responded to a couple of them. I tried out TweetDeck a couple of times, and it even said I was lame and it wanted a high speed connection. Turns out after looking at my usage numbers that the iPhone doesn’t use quite as much as I thought. At least using those apps. I am sure that regular browsing and google maps would have used a ton.

I couldn’t believe the number of times I thought I would just check out some fact or location or some such thing by googling, but couldn’t. Couldn’t put up pictures, or blog, read other blogs, look for Lightroom plugins, or any other number of thinks I thought about doing. My name is Chris Ward, and I am addicted to the Internet. And I have no interest in a cure. It’s good to be back in the land of the Internet.

Lightroom vs Aperture Comparison

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aperture

Aperture Screen Shot

I did a trial of Lightroom and Aperture a couple of years ago. They were both pre 2.0, but I don’t remember the exact versions. I picked Aperture. The need to switch modules in Lightroom was giving me frustrations, and the library function seemed to be stronger in Aperture. At the time, I hadn’t used Photoshop much, and had no experience with Camera Raw. These things had me leaning to Aperture. In the time since I have been fairly happy with it, but there hasn’t been an update in quite some time.

Since I last used Lightroom there have been several updates to the develop module that is backed by Camera Raw. The ability to paint adjustments and graduated filter effects sounded really cool. Also, my favorite technical camera book writer, Scott Kelby, has a Lightroom 2 book. This brings up my other beef with Aperture. Not really Apples fault, but because of the smaller audience, there are far fewer people blogging and writing books about it. Maybe Aperture is so much more intuitive that no one needs to explain anything. But then again, I just found out a couple of weeks ago that you could save individual book pages as jpegs. Continue reading →

Whitney Dancing

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I headed out with Kristen to take some senior photos. We were shooting on Nicollet Island. We were in pretty bright sun, but with the help of a SB900, a umbrella and a reflector, we got some pretty good shots. After that we wanted to get some pictures of Whitney dancing. Somehow before this shoot I had no idea what an incredible dancer Whitney was. We got some great pictures. Here is a poster of three of my favorite poses (moves?).

Dancer

Continue reading →

Consequences of Creativity

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Chase Jarvis CURRENT: The Consequences of Creativity from Chase Jarvis on Vimeo.

This is from a little while back, on July 1 Chase Jarvis posted this video on his blog. It was a talk he gave in denver to some creative types. In it he really pushes how we are living in a time where anyone can publish their own work. How anyone can and should push their own creativity in ways that energize them, and then publish it. He talks about doing whatever it takes to sustain your self, whether that is some form of photography, or waiting tables, and once you have that, then get creative on your own time.

It is a great watch, at a little over an hour, it isn’t something you can slip in between something else, but I watched it in three different sessions. It does make you think, just what is it that brings out the creative in you?

Jen and Cody’s Wedding

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I had the great pleasure to be the photographer at Jen and Cody’s wedding last weekend. They had their wedding at a pretty great outdoor location, the Riedel Mansion in Fridley. There was a gazebo outside where the ceremony was held, and the Mansion could have been used if the weather was poor, but fortunately it was wonderful, and everything took place outdoors.

Here are just a few of the pictures from the event. There will be more later, and families will have a gallery in the Clients section next week where they can see many more.

Riedel Mansion

The Entrance

Gazebo

Thanks again Jen and Cody for letting me share your day, and thanks Barb for thinking of me. It was a lot of fun. More pictures soon!

Busy Weekend

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Just a quick note, then need to get going. I was at two photowalks yesterday: Stillwater and North Minneapolis. They were both great. I missed the social get together part of both, but I just couldn’t stop taking pictures. I will have pictures later. Unlikely today.

Today I shoot a wedding in the afternoon. I need to go get packed up for that.

New Photography Site Up

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I finally have the Christopher Ward Photography site up and running. I feel like I have been working on this new site for ever. Off and on for a couple of months anyway. This was a new site for me in several ways. First is that I designed it based on a business card, and I started by putting it together in Photoshop.

New Christopher Ward Photography Site

This site is much better representation of where I am at, and where I am trying to get to. Some of the other landscape pictures and city shots I really liked, and maybe I will find a place for them on this site somehow.

Some of the cool things about this site…

The menu at the top with the rollover images is one big image and some CSS tricks. I plan to blog about that later. The index page, and the galleries page have slide shows that use jQuery and the cross slide plugin. It does the Ken Burns effect on the galleries page. Not sure if I should keep it. It seems like it is jerky and pixelated in versions 6 and 7 of IE. Works great on Firefox and Safari.

Clicking on an image in a gallery brings up a larger image and allows you to move between the images using the Thickbox jQuery plugin.

The text on the galleries thumbnails is done with a transparent PNG overlay. I forgot that IE6 doesn’t handle it very well, and that IE6 could be used as much as 30% still. I might need to just redo those images with the overlay put on in Photoshop. I did have plans to change the thumbnails dynamically, but I might not bother now.