Yesterday's Strobist meetup went great! We had 9 of 10 photographers and 5 of 7 models show. We all got some great shots and we learned a lot about working with models. We ran the gammut again with models and photographers experience levels so we all got some new experiences. We also had a wide variety of equipment from Alien Bee ringlights to discontinued speedlights. All in all, it was a great time.

I did get reminded that I should always leave my equipment out until I'm really ready to leave. After about 5 hours of shooting, I decided to pack up and just watch what other folks were doing and I missed a couple of opportunities for behind-the-scenes shots. Oh well, that would have ruined the mystique anyway, right?

Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | Stumble

Well, tomorrow is another strobist meetup. We've got a big group this time and are actually having to turn away both photographers and models. I'm not too happy about that, but it's winter and we have to do what we have to do. Summer time should be a bit better for the big meetups so it's a little odd for me, but that's two reasons I'm looking forward to summer.

I identify myself as a hardcore Minnesotan. I was born here, I've always lived here, and I love the cold and snow we get every year. It's nine degrees below zero outside right now and I'm just starting to think it feels like winter again. On the other hand, with the limited daylight hours and the icy trails, it's not so good for bycicling lately. I've had to hang out in the third floor bedroom where I've set up my bike on a trainer and my iBook on an end table. It's not the same as biking 35 miles from home before walking to work, but I am catching up on The Batman.

Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | Stumble

I have no idea how many people from the science fiction convention circuit read this blog. I know I do, so there's at least one and all of them are familiar with Annalee Newitz.

A few months ago Gawker media latched onto this little piece of talent by making her a contributor to lifehacker.com and I just read today about something that the science fiction folks in my audience will be thrilled about. io9.com, the latest entry to the Gawker media juggernaut is a blog entirely about science fiction. I've been a reader of Lifehacker and Gizmodo for quite some time and I make the occasional forays into reading Gridskipper, Consumerist, Jalopnik and even Fleshbot, so I'm not exactly neutral when it comes to their websites, but io9 definitely has a place in my bookmarks bar.

Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | Stumble

I was out doing some shopping the other day in a liquor store and found one of the stupidest gift packs ever. I've seen the gin with two martini glasses and the tequila with two margarita glasses and even the whiskey with two rocks glasses. While I have no problem putting Drambuie in my coffee and would, in fact, encourage the behavior, I think that putting it in a travel mug is just a bad idea. Even if the travel mug never sees Drambuie, I can just imaging the conversation with the nice police officer after getting pulled over with an open container of coffee in the car.

Pardon the crappy cellphone camera image, please.

Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | Stumble

I picked up the demo for Burnout Paradise yesterday. I'm not really sure what to think and how to compare it to the rest of the Burnout series, because there's no real comparison. My first impression is that they stripped out what made it Burnout in an attempt to appeal to a consumer that they never knew. Of course, I suppose I could have seen that coming.

Burnout 2: This was one of the first PS2 games I ever had. It was part of a gift package I received on my birthday several years ago when I never thought I'd be part of the console generation. When I was a kid, we never had a Nintendo or an Atari. My exposure to video games was first through text adventure games on the IBM PC (xyzzyx 4 ever!) then through the Apple ][ and on into the Macintosh. Anyway, Burnout 2 with it's impressive particle generators and ever-present bouncing tire was an addictive guilty-pleasure of a game. For me, racing mode was a method of unlocking more of the crash mode and, through that, became a compelling challenge of its own.

Crash mode found the player a short distance from a busy intersection sitting in a junker car. When the pleasant Japanese announcer said "Go!" you put the petal to the metal and slammed into the intersection, hoping to cause the most mayhem you could. Points were calculated by multiplying the cost of each insurance claim by the number of insurance claims. You could knock a bus off a cliff and cause it total and complete damage while earning fewer points than nudging the same bus into the middle of oncoming traffic. A simple but strangely complex formula drove your success or failure.

Racing mode had a few different challenges. Standard racing was what you'd expect. Beat the other cars across the finish line to earn a Gold, Silver or Bronze medal. 1 on 1 gave you the option of racing for pink slips and was one of two ways to unlock new cars. Pursuit mode turned you in to the cop who impounded your next ride if you were quick enough.

Burnout sucked and is barely worth mentioning. After the great enjoyment that Burnout 2 brought, I had to see the beginning of the franchise. I couldn't have been less impressed had this beginning also included Jar-jar Binks.

Burnout 3: Takedown: This one was an interesting change from Burnout 2. With the addition of not only adding the ability to sideswipe and "shunt" your opponents in the race they really improved the mechanics of that side of the game creating a host of new race types to choose from. Now you have additional options aside from being the fastest car on the track. You can crash the other guys to keep them from passing you or shove them into traffic to take their place in the pack. Crash mode suffered a little under this release however. The addition of "pick-ups" was a huge change from the complexity of simpleness that drove Burnout 2. The crashbreaker pickup that caused your car to explode was a nice touch and fun to hit when you're next to a pile of cars and a tanker truck The gameplay was still interesting but the subtlety was overrun by the need to find the 4x multiplier in order to get the top score. I find it ironic that this addition of a complex mechanic actually made the gameplay simpler and more predictable.

Burnout Revenge: Really an enhancement of the changes made in Burnout 3, I found this game to be compelling but it still lacked the charm of Burnout 2. The crashbreaker moved into race mode so you could, if you were taken out by your opponents, explode next to them for the titular revenge takedown. Race mode definitely benefited with the improvements over Burnout 3 and so did crash mode. In removing the pick-ups from crash mode but keeping the crashbreaker available after causing n number of crashes, they moved back toward the simplicity of the Burnout 2 crash mode. But they added a golf-game-style hit-the-button-at-the-top-and-bottom-of-the-thing-on-the-left mechanic that was only really fun when your friends didn't know about it and blew up their car at the starting line. Actually, that part was hysterical. They also added needless button mashing to invoke the crashbreaker that I'm certain caused many controllers to be replaced.

Burnout Paradise: Welcome to the world of open, non-linear gameplay where the player has free reign over a citywide environment and the ability to skip playing the game entirely and just drive around hitting jumps and wrecking their car.

Wait... Didn't I play this already? Wasn't it called Grand Theft Auto? Well, there aren't any pedestrians to run over here and you don't get to fly any helicopters or shoot anyone in the face with an RPG, but I really felt the need to look around for hidden packages. Okay, so no hidden packages, but like the Rockstar billboards in GTA, the Burnout billboards in paradise city are a target for bonuses. Removing the game menu is a common tool for creating a "more immersive game experience" these days and Burnout Paradise has certainly done that. If you want to go to a new race or other type of challenge, take a look at the street map and then drive there. Again, memories of GTA now with a twist of the more recent Tony Hawk games come to the surface.

For game types we now have trick mode which seems to be Tokyo Drift inspired. I haven't seen a race yet, but I'm sure they're in there. There's no evidence of the crashbreaker or even crash mode, but this is a demo after all. The one thing that Burnout 4 added that really appealed to me, the ability to rear-end traffic to cause a pile of mayhem behind you, has been made more realistic by causing you to wreck your car instead of creating a ballistic nightmare. Even handbreak drifting has been made more realistic. The lack of realism in the previous games had been fine-tuned seemingly for me and has completely disapeared in this release.

I remember playing a demo of Need for Speed, I think it was the "Underground" entry into the franchise, where the playing field was open and races happened whenever you challenged another driver on the street. I never got into Need for Speed, and I'm not sure I'll get into Paradise either. If it doesn't come to me as a gift, it's coming to me used.

Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | Stumble

Last Sunday, we had a Strobist meet-up in Northeast Minneapolis. We got a studio from 08:00 to 18:00 and lined up 8 models from ModelMayhem, four in the morning and four in the evening. All of them canceled due to snow. Fortunately one of our fellow Strobists has a son who is in the theater industry and knew some people who knew some people. We got four new models and had quite a time.

Early in the morning, before any models showed up. I was screwing around in the studio. It's much larger than my home studio and the wall color is much more neutral. They also have a great table for product shots and it was a simple matter to set up some empty Coke cans and fire away. Using my new 100mm macro lens I was able to get some really tight depth of field shots. I also tried this technique with a dirty coffee pot, three plastic-tipped darts and a black-and-red vase that was sitting on top of a cupboard.

Before lunch (from Pizza Lucé!), I worked with two of the other strobists with support from the rest of the group and went over some of the lighting exercises from Lighting 102, including the most important one, balancing flash with ambient light. I only said f/stop when I meant shutter-speed a few times, honest.

Once the models showed up I learned:

1. How tough it is to work in a stairwell.
2. More experienced models are easier to work with.
3. AI-Servo mode doesn't always focus where you think it should.

Anyway, I've got a flickr set dedicated to the event. Check it out if you want to see what I've been up to.

Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | Stumble

On my Grandmaster's visit this year, I expected to learn much about Tai-Chi. The cane form and 18 Lohan were top on my list when I thought about the upcoming event. There's one thing I didn't expect to learn though, and I use it every day.

We had our picnic at Crosby Farm Park in St. Paul, along the river. The shelter there has a couple of bathrooms with hand dryers rather than paper towels; I suppose that's to cut down on the amount of material that the maintenance crew has to pull out after events and for general maintenance. Anyway...

I was cooking on the grill, so I spent rather a large time in the bathroom washing my hands to keep cross-contamination between raw food, cooked food and food for vegetarians to a minimum. I was a little frustrated with the speed at which I could dry my hands with the drier in there and I was lucky to run into Grandmaster on one of my forays. He said to me "Not fast! Slow; like Tai-Chi." and explained that the drier would work better if I took my time instead of violently rubbing my hands together.

I've tried this technique in many bathrooms since then and it is reliable; hard to remember to do, but reliable. Try it sometime.

Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | Stumble

Watch as I deliver a manifesto for an activity I have not participated in:

I read recently that you Apple Store employees didn't like it when people come in to the stores and jailbreak all the iPhones and start installing applications on them. Apparently, it takes them a few hours to restore all the iPhones to the default, locked state, readying them for the next day's assault.

I can see how this could be a problem. I think this public plea for people to stop doing it is misdirected however. The root of your problem is not the your customers are messing up your demo products by going to a specific, malformed website and hacking into them. It is that a malformed website has the ability to hack your demo products.

So in response to your plea, I give you a plea to complain to Apple about this problem. Tell them that their employees are having their time wasted by the fact that the iPhone platform is closed to development and, more importantly, that the Safari browser on the iPhone has a critical but that allows people to install arbitrary code.

Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | Stumble

Last Saturday, I took some portraits for Steve Mueske. I haven't done much in the way of portraiture, but I'm working on it. Between what I've learned at Strobist and what I already know, I managed to produce some pretty good shots. It was fun experimenting with light and color and Steve was a good sport when I said things like "Let me try this nose-enhancing wide-angle lens for one".

He also showed me to this really cool location at an abandoned munitions plant on the University of Minnesota's Rosemount Research facility. There were rows of these huge concrete structures that must have been either mounts for heavy equipment or blast protection for/from explosives. I'm definitely going to head back there sometime for more pictures and there's a lot more land and ruins to explore.

I heard from a guy at my local coffee shop yesterday that some local groups go down there to do war re-enactment. I suppose all the open land and interesting ruins could be good for that. I think I had my fill of re-enactments in my 11 years at the Rennaissance festival though.

Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | Stumble

I know this is getting blogged in higher places than here, but it needs to be seen. So for my reader, if you haven't seen this, take a look. It sucks that there's no Daily Show for the duration of the writer's strike, but that's a little perspective on why there's a writer's strike.

Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | Stumble