Happy Halloween! Time to carve your seams!

I know you were expecting a nice shiny shot of some fantasticaly plastic do-dad. Hey, so was I, but alas, it was not to be. I'm a little behind. But on the upside, you get to see me go full force nerd.

By now you've probably heard about a little upgrade called Photoshop CS4. You may also have seen their content aware scaling (there are plenty of Youtube videos out there in case you haven't). I'll admit, when I saw it, I wasn't terribly impressed. Being more of a photojournalist than I like to admit, I didn't see any real application to it. It really screws with the old adage of capturing in camera. But, being the dork I am I became more interested in how it worked.

I once learned that elevators worked because giants used to push the building down or pull it up and the elevator stayed in the same place. Content aware scaling doesn't work like that. In the simplest terms, it literally removes (or adds) a "pathway" or "seam" of pixels from parallel edges (top/bottom, left right). Through this method, "seam carving" is able to rescale an image without distorting the content. What's even more impressive that it is able to do it in a non-uniform manner. Taking the seams in a uniform manner likely wouldn't generate too many artifacts, but the insertion would likely create essentially a poorly cloned portion of the image.

In short, the science behind the application is pretty impressive. I don't know if Adobe is using the same algorithms as is demonstrated here, but it can't be too far off. I'm sure they've upped the effeciency. I mean, it's what they do. So, to all of my computer science friends: you should consider applying to Adobe. I'm not just looking to score some free swag (stuff we all get), I'm looking out for you!

Anyhow, after seeing that little explanation, the whole application made more sense for use on webpages. And I suppose that it would apply to a lot of advertising projects. My only concern, remember that I haven't actually tried it yet, is how much artifacting is visible on a print resolution image that magazines, catalogs, etc would use. I'm sure it's minimal and results in little additional retouching, but if I don't ask the questions, I will not get a gold star.

And to close out, I did download and read the journal paper, but I also picked up The Ting Tings on vinyl. So far I'm liking it and I think it will grow on me, but it's not one that I would have rushed out to get. But who can say no to records on sale? Yep, I am surprisingly analog.

The Toybox Challenge

I never had a real toy box growing up. Sure, I had a cardboard box large enough to hide in and it happened to have a toys in it, but it was never what one would call a “toy box” in the traditional sense. I still don’t have a toy box, a couple of shoe boxes and some postal boxes filled with toys, spray paint, and other accellerants maybe, but nothing that truly says “toy box.” That’s probably not going to change, but the Toybox Challenge will still be the Toybox Challenge. “Why?” you read silently to yourself. Well, because that will be the concept.

Lately I have been busy with other commitments and haven’t been able to shoot as much as I would like. Being primarily an event shooter also means that my schedule is really reliant on somebody else’s schedule. Also, my Heroes and Villains toy shoots have been slow going because of the amount of preproduction that seems to continually increase and the latest shot went through a concept change in the last couple of days.

So in order to keep my trigger finger itchy, I will figuratively be “reaching into the toy box” and pulling out something random and unexpected to shoot. I say figurative because as I mentioned I don’t have a toy box, but also as a part of this I want the shoots to push my creativity. Why random toys? For starters, I shoot a very small subset of product. Secondly, I don’t want to know what I’m shooting until I have to shoot it. If I walk into a toy shop and just look around, I’ll pick something that interests me, which at the same time will influence what I’m shooting and how I do it. Yes, it’s still creative, but does it really push the boundaries of what I’m able to do? Maybe, maybe not. So the next question is how do I make this into a challenge, especially in selecting my subjects?

Today I went to Twist & Shout because I know they carry vinyl collector figurines that come in blind packaging (they also have an excellent selection of vinyl records. I nearly walked out with six Sinatra albums). For those of you that collect baseball cards, it’s the exact same concept: you don’t know what’s coming in the box. This is only a first step solution, because even though I don’t know what toy I’ll be shooting, I was still able to choose styles that I found interesting (Zoomies and Bamboo Zoo, respectively). We’ll work out all of the kinks out later, but for now I think I’m ready for the challenge to begin. What’s the challenge in shooting toys, even randomly? Well, I’m glad I asked. If you’ve seen some of my earlier toy shots, I don’t shoot them as straight product. I shoot them with more of an editorial style, trying to capture what makes these toys whatever they are. You do that with all photography, using the camera to show who and what your subject is all about and not just the subject.

So I guess we should have some guidelines:

Prescript the first: as much as possible, get a random toy.

Prescript the second: Shoot it within two weeks.

Two weeks?! Hey, I’m doing this for fun and making it stressful would be not fun. And I figure that that’s a good enough time frame that I’ll keep on top of it.


So here it is, Toybox Challenge: Round one:
Subject: Zoomies and Bamboo Zoo (shouldn’t have gotten two)
Start date: June 7, 2008
End date: June 21, 2008

So that’s the challenge. Let the madness begin.

(If you happen to come across something, let me know. If I can get my hands on it, I’ll shoot it. Let’s see what hi-jinks we can get into.)