we do a lot of work here at the visual mercenary group and many times it’s of a corporate nature. we really don’t mind, because we try to put creativity into everything we do. actually this past year we’ve been pretty busy but haven’t put up any of our new work on our online portfolio, nor have we written any blurbs about the project here on our blog. so i’m setting myself the task of writing a post a week on our past projects before, as we all know, the speed of the internet makes them defunct. there are already a couple of promotional micro sites we’ve done that are offline. but i digress…

ferndance

there are times that some of our projects are of a purely creative nature. through our association with the wesport academy of dance - whose website & blog we’ve designed and programmed - we have been introduced to many individuals and groups in the dance world. one of them is ferndance run by choreographer david fernandez. last month we put our two newly purchased sony ex1-r hd cameras (yes our credit card company was thrilled that day) to good use by shooting a short promo piece for david at the rehearsal studio at the mark morris center in brooklyn. we’re editing the video and will post it soon, but i just needed something to write about and thought i’d tease you with a couple of photos.now i know you’ll come back because you really should see these beautiful and talented ladies dance.

ferndance

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.

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…