the worst banner ad i have ever seen

this must be a joke. i don’t have any idea why anyone would click on this ad. this is even worst that those stock dancing flash movies used in other crappy banners. first of all, the NYS driver’s license looks nothing like that. second, could they have used a worst image? this guy looks like he was born in 1884 not 1984 and drives a mule, not a car.

it only takes 3 dollars to buy an image from istock.com folks.  the ad agency responsible for this should be fired - along with the client’s marketing department. c’mon people…all this money spent on media buys and this is the best creative you could get. the only thing they can probably say in their defense is that they save you money cause they don’t spend it on creative.

anybody have any worst banners…send them over.

http://jpgmag.com

ok, i haven’t written any posts in a LONG time but i figure i better get one in during december, before the new year is upon us. the reason for this absence is that for the past couple of months i have been totally addicted to jpgmag.com - and because of this, jpgmag.com gets my favorite time suck and social network of the year for 2009. woot woot!

in case you don’t know about it, jpgmag.com is a photo sharing social network site. the thing that makes it different from flickr or any other photo site is that the most popular and well accepted photos by vote make it to an actual printed magazine. in some old school analog way, that is way cool! the other difference is that jpgmag.com doesn’t want all your photos; they just want your best photos. of course flickr has some great photos and jpgmag also has some crappy ones, but when you’re asked to upload your best, it really makes one (and in this particular case, photographers) really think about what they will show the public. after all, we all want to get our best work published.

Sister mine. by edd carlile

so to make a long story short, i have spent hundreds of hours looking at and uploading photos -  and the truth is that i have spent most of that time looking at great work from some awesome professional and amateur photographers. i have probably viewed thousands of photos -  from amazing portraits by edd carlile to stunning abstracts by ina k to amazing landscapes by marc krutiak. but i could go on and on… anyway, you can find me here so sign up and vote for my photos (wink). i even got chris sofe to start posting there again. now to get dave schiliro to put up his abstracts.

maybe it’s me, but one thing that i have not seen or heard covered in the local new york news is the rising homeless rate. now i don’t have any real numbers to back this up, just casual observation. i’ve been in this city for 37 years and i’ve pretty much seen it all. i can definitely tell you that in the 80’s and early/mid 90’s the homeless problem was rampant. and although i was not a huge guiliani fan, he did at least clean up the visible aspect of the homeless (no, bussing them to the outer boroughs does not count as help). anyone remember the tent cities under the manhattan bridge (which just turned 100 years old) or in thompkins square park?

well, in the last year - probably due to the economy and the lack of funds for public services - the homeless are everywhere and it’s definitely a saddening sight. you don’t have to look too hard to see them in the street, but the one thing that really got to me was seeing the amount of people sleeping in penn station. the weather is getting colder and people need to be indoors, but it was really shocking to see all hallways lined with sleeping bodies. where are the human services professionals? where are the city agencies to help these people? surely the police know that they’re out on the street. are there no reports filed?

as for our newly re-elected mayor who personally spent $100 million on his campaign and has risen to be one the wealthiest men in the world during his last two terms in new york, where is his compassion in all of this? mr mayor, if you love your city so much i’m sure you could find some way to help these poor people. it doesn’t take billions to be a philanthropist. and in case you don’t see them from your limo, take a walk with me on my route to work, they’re impossible to miss.

chromacircuit

we’re finally developing our first iphone app at visual mercenary group and that’s what led to the current favorite time suck. we’ve been talking about apps for a couple of years and have been part of the iphone developers group, but we just never really got around to it until now, when our friends at 4corners (see shca post) asked us to help them develop an app for one of their clients.

to make a long story short, i finally opened up xcode and started playing with the developers kit. apple really makes it easy, but still…not being an objective c developer has it’s drawbacks (and i don’t want to hear stories on 11 year olds programming iapps). so with my head exploding with code and model/view/controller logic i was bitching to my social network and vincent higgins pointed me to adobe.com, and the demos of CS5 which is slated for release next year. one of they key components of cs5 is that developers will be able to program in flash using actionscript3 and compile their work into an iphone app. well sign me up!

one of the lower chromacircuit levels

so while checking out the demo, i was led to the game chromacircuit by bowler hat games. bowler hat coded the game using flash cs5 and as3 from a pre-release of the software. so while that’s pretty cool in itself, the game is also great. and although us iphoners get to take it along with us, everyone else can still play on the web.

the object of the game is to rotate the elements in order to match the colors on all the sides. very simple yet very addicting. as the levels progress in difficulty, the elements also gain sides. it’s a really cool experiment in pattern recognition and gets addicting in trying to best the amount of moves required to finish. remembering which way to swipe on the iphone is a bit tricky and adds extra moves but it’s still great nonetheless. chromacircuit gets 4 out 5 stars for time suckiness. oh…and even cooler, you can download the source code and embed it on your own site for free!

photoshop mobile on iphone

photoshop mobile came out a few days ago at the iphone app store and although there was anticipation for a mobile app from adobe, this one doesn’t really satisfy. the paltry set of effects is actually quite disappointing, considering the amazing breadth of photoshop. my own personal bummer was that there were no layers - imagine something as cool as a single type layer where you can type a name (or phrase) and position it on a photo wherever you want.

the app allows you to open or take a photo via the camera. then gives you the choice of the crop/flip/rotate tool or 3 main sets of effects you can run. the choices are a little more than canned color overlays and a couple of blur effects - the blurs which I actually like a bit. I just wish that I could layer something over the blurry images. and c’mon adobe, do we really need the ’sketch’ effect? it doesn’t even look good. just for that alone i can’t really give it more than 2 out of 5 stars.

for now though, i think i’ll still use some of the other graphics apps - like doodle buddy - that i like (and my kid loves!) and then bring those images into ps mobile. but really, i’m already ready for the update. of course this is probably just adobe signaling the beginning of their cloud apps along with their online service at photoshop.com, but more on that later…

the russian version of shca.com

we love wordpress, we really do. we love working with the platform and all the things it can do. we just finished a pretty complex build that required a lot of customization. about a year ago our friends at 4corners, designed and built a site for their client Swanke Hayden Connell Architects at shca.com.

they also love wordpress  - as you can tell by their cool site too -  and they did a great job of pushing all the data into a flash front end using the WP cms.  this year they asked us to help them translate shca.com to russian. the task was pretty daunting as the request was to use a single admin login to update both russian and english versions simultaneously. since the site is graphics heavy - with images shown in multiple places and in multiple sizes we had to make sure that all relations were kept AND doubled to display in both version.

the english and russian input fields

first chris implemented qtranslate and had to go through and make sure all the tags were compatible with wp2.5 of the original build. qtranslate is a great plug in and we highly recommend it for anyone looking to do a multi-language build.  we then had to enable russian text fields for every variable entry and hand code whatever wasn’t. the media upload area was particularly difficult, but with some custom plug-ins and general hacks it all came together.

overall radian said that once he learned ‘all the hooks in wordpress’ it wasn’t that bad. we think it came out really good. but if any of our russian friends find any mistakes let us know. and now, if only shca can resolve their dns and have their web address show up in the url bar instead of their ip address, it’ll be even better.

ruth's tree as it stood after 90 years

initially they had called a tree cutter from PA who was a total maniac. he just climb up the tree and started cutting huge branches and dropping them right onto the street. there was no way we were going to let him cut down the upper branches as they were over our house. we quickly put an end to his day or he would’ve really made a mess.

the crazy pennsylvanian

note the branch about to hit the ground. each branch probably weighed 500 lbs.

a week later came the tree pro with his cherry picker. using a series of pulleys he cut and lowered all the branches within two hours the tree was almost gone. i couldn’t stay and document the whole thing, and so by the time i got back from work all that remained was a pile of sawed off trunk pieces.

half the tree is gone

this whole week i’ve been watching ken burns’ documentary on the national parks and reading the latest national geographic magazine that focuses on the preservation of the california redwoods. ironically, right next door, a living being was killed because of our dependence to fossil fuels. now we wait while they dig a huge ditch and begin the clean up that is slated to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and will involve the federal government if it reaches the water table. goodbye tree.

goodbye tree

step 1: choose the right photograph
even though you can do this to every photo, not all photographs work the same way. find a photo that you can isolate a specific object in the foreground or middle ground. this will greatly accentuate the effect. i chose a shot i took in athens of the temple of hephaestus from the areopagus.

temple of hephaestus

step 2: duplicate the background: self explanatory

tilt shift 2

step 3: add blur filters to upper layer
here comes the good part. tilt shift is all about specific focus and particularly how the lens and film plane would line up in large format view cameras (a great explanation of both the camera and the technique here). to that end i like to add two and maybe 3 blur filters to tilt shift tests. first i start with a ‘lens blur’ filter. this filter allows me to mimic a lens iris and even control specualar highlight for the bokeh effect. i may then add a radial blur of 1 or 2 % depending on the strength/look of the effect i want.

tilt shift 3

step 4: mask out the ‘focus’ area
i then make a layer mask on the upper blurred area and horizontally select with the rectangular marquee the object of focus from one end of the canvas to the other. i usually blur the selection around 40 pixels before filling it with black thus exposing the bottom ‘focused’ layer. from here you can change opacity to any of the elements. try playing around with all these filters and setting to find your own sweet spot. now let’s see if i can make an action to batch the entire process.

tilt shift 4

the final image:

temple of hephaestus_ts_final

LoveNY

as is usually the case i’m always running late and sept 11, 2001 was no different. by the time i was getting ready to leave park slope for my job on 11th st. and university in manhattan, the towers were hit and getting into manhattan was pointless. gina and i went up on our rooftop to videotape our view. we saw tower one fall a few minutes after we got up top. the plume of dust and debris expanded so fast that we could not see tower two fall. we walked around park slope and everyone was in a speechless daze. by early afternoon dust and ash fell from the sky coating everything in a light gray dust. later that day we saw people who had walked from downtown manhattan back to brooklyn. they were completely covered in gray dust. it was a very surreal sight

love

we finally got into manhattan a couple of days later to check on my apartment on attormey and stanton. manhattan was very solemn and eerie those first few nights. at the vigils in union square park gina and i shot a lot of video and photographs, partly to help us deal with it ourselves. we edited a small piece which was shown on a few cable channels. i’ll have to dig that up. the photographs shown here were featured in the ‘here is new york‘ exhibition and have traveled the globe. they are also in madame tussaud’s permanent exhibit as well as the planned permanent exhibit of the new WTC 9/11 memorial and have been re-printed in many magazines.

hope

we were in athens on the day the fires started. we took this panoramic shot from the areopagus, the hill opposite the acropolis (right side). in the center of the photo is the hill of lycavitos (literally, hill of wolves, although the wolves were killed to extinction ages ago). the view is facing northeast and you can see the plume of smoke rising from behind the hill and the sprawl of athens. in the bottom left of the photograph is the ancient agora. remains have been found there dating to 2800 BC. the large building of the stoa was rebuilt by the rockefeller foundation and is now a museum of antiquities.

the fires spread quickly, due to the high winds of the following two days, burning thousands of acres. one of the many areas that were affected was the city of Marathon, historic home of the famous race. unfortunately, the fire has been attributed to arson. truly sad.

you can view a high-rez version of the photo here
©2009 visualmerc.com. the image AthensFire_2009_sm2.jpg may be reproduced with permission. please let us know if you use it.