At nine months, Logan can’t quite crawl yet…he does the worm though, and is getting quite good at it -I like to call it the WORMINATOR because he drags himself along using only his upper body, just like the Terminator did when it had it’s lower torso crushed. I digress…boy does Logan love to walk with help! About three weeks ago he was taking some tiny steps, and when I shot this video yesterday, he’s practically running…
Author: Jason Dunn
Japan 2008 Photo Book Completed: View it All Online
Yes, it took me about two years to get this project finished, but I’ve been pretty busy over the past nine months figuring out the whole dad thing! 🙂 I’m man enough to say publicly that I’ve always had a fondness for collecting memories in scrapbook form; not the frilly scrapbooks that come to mind when you hear the word, but collecting photos and objects from a time or place and putting them in book form. I have a dozen or so cheap and ugly scrapbooks from my teenage years that contain a lot of great (and not so great) memories.
I’ve been wanting to use FotoFusion to create a truly killer vacation book for years, but didn’t manage to get around to it until now. Creating Logan’s baby book was my first attempt at using FotoFusion to create a book that combined photos, text, and my green screen scanning technique for objects. FotoFusion isn’t the easiest program in the world to use, so creating Logan’s book was great practice – I managed to fly through the creation of the Japan photo book in about a week using the skills I picked up creating the baby book. That was after, of course, the months it took to edit all the photos I took, and scan all the objects I collected on the trip.
Below are a few of the pages I created for the book; the final result is 85 pages long, and by next week I should have the book back from Photobook Canada. As you can tell, I created square pages; I opted for the 11 inch by 11 inch book from Photobook Canada. Even after using a coupon code for a discount, after the $15 premium paper upgrade and $15 shipping charge, the book cost me around $120. Ouch! Yeah, kind of a pricey book; the good news is that I only need one copy, unlike Logan’s baby book where I needed several.
Comments welcome – you can check out the full gallery here (it’s easiest to view it in slideshow mode, or full-screen browser mode).
The Future of Print Journalism
No front page news; only a big ad…
(to be fair of course, Metro is a freebie paper in Calgary, but the writing is on the wall for all newspapers…the iPad isn’t going to reverse the course they’re on).
Sixth Grader Performs Killer Cover of Lady Gaga Song
“Greyson Michael Chance stupefied his classmates and stole at least one girl’s heart (check out the blonde in the black top, especially during the big finish) when he performed a rousing piano cover of Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” at a recent school festival.” – Yahoo
Try to ignore the vomit-inducing camera work at the beginning (yeeesh!). The kid has some serious chops – maybe we’ll see him on American Idol in a few years…
I’ve Implemented the DISQUS Commenting System
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll notice that for comments, I’m now using DISQUS. It’s a system that makes it much easier for people to comment, because rather than registering with this blog to comment, people can post a comment using a variety of credentials; Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, OpenID, or DISQUS. I’ve managed to get the old comments imported into DISQUS, but as far as I can tell, you can’t log in to the old WordPress commenting system any more – to post a comment, you’ll need to log in with one of the authentication methods offered. Your old comments aren’t associated with your DISQUS comments unfortunately; they stand alone. I’m not happy with that, but ultimately I think this new system will make it easier for people to comment, which is the goal.
Tiny Apartment Transforms into 24 Rooms
You’ve got to admire the innovation here – with my North American mentality, I find it almost impossible to conceive of living in such a tiny amount of space, but I really admire the clever way in which this guys has re-imagined his living environment. Slick!
Our Little Super Logan!
Favourite Songs: “Come On Get Higher” by Sugarland
Before hearing Sugarland cover this song, I’d never heard the original by Matt Nathanson. Between the two, I prefer the Sugarland version – there’s something about hearing a female voice sing lead – and a male voice accompanying her – that makes it even more powerful. It’s such a beautiful song; the melody, the emotion, the mood of it – Matt Nathanson wrote an incredible song. I can listen to this song for hours on end; I’ve literally had it on loop for an entire day. It’s incredibly fun to harmonize along with as well. Unlike my two previous picks, When You Call My Name by Paul Brandt, and World’s Apart by Jars of Clay, the lyrics of this song don’t speak to me in a particularly powerful way…but it’s still a beautiful love song worth having in your collection.
[click here to listen to a 30 second sample of the song]
“Come On Get Higher”, Sugarland/Matt Nathanson
I miss the sound of your voice
And I miss the rush of your skin
And I miss the still of the silence
As you breathe out and I breathe in
Continue reading Favourite Songs: “Come On Get Higher” by Sugarland
Darth Vader’s Recording for TomTom GPS: Behind The Scenes
via @jonwestfall
Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo 2010 Photos
On Saturday the 24th I attended the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo 2010 – I’d been to the event a few years ago, and back then it was much smaller. This time around, it was huge! It was also a little expensive – $25 at the door per person, and that didn’t get you anything more than in the door. It was a fun event, though it seems like they had too many people for the amount of space they had – it was crazy busy! It was really cool to see all the comics, action figures, graphic novels, famous people, and people dressed up as any number of different characters from comics, fantasy, and sci-fi. Lots of photographic opportunities if you were courageous enough to ask the people to stop so you could take their picture (sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t).
I took my Panasonic GF-1 to the event, but I really should have brought my Nikon D300. I thought I could get away with the nice and small GF-1 – especially after I stopped on the way to the show and purchased a 14-45mm lens (which is 28 to 90mm on the GF-1) – but ultimately I was really disappointed with the quality of the images from it. The GF-1’s images turn to crap noise-wise at anything past ISO 800, and I’m so used to shooting with the 20mm f/1.7 lens on the GF-1, it was an ugly transition for me to start shooting with an f/3.5 to f/5.6 lens. Picking up a new lens and having no practice with it is never a good idea, but at the time I thought I’d stand out too much if I brought my big iron (Nikon D300 + f/2.8 24-70mm lens)…there were plenty of others with big DSLRs there, so I should have just brought the damn thing. The lighting was predictably awful, so more often than not my shots were ISO 1200 or ISO 1600 (since I abhor flash photography). Here are a few of the shots I took…
(Yeah, that’s Brent Spiner, AKA Mr. Data, above)
