Car #8255 is a Diesel-Electric from 1951.

Car #999060 is the red caboose there and it’s from 1967.

Note: I didn’t design the website (although it looks great!) The main site is behind a password system, but here are a few screenshots of the slideshow in action.

You can see some other photos from a past photoshoot that I did for Fossick here.

Click the photo to see a larger version of the image (you may need to click it once more to blow it up within your browser window).

I was looking for an excuse to try Photoshop’s photomerge function and was pretty impressed with the job it did. Not flawless by any means, but it found and blended the content as well as I ever could by hand. My only complaint was that it was a 360 panorama, but I wasn’t able to tell it where I wanted the center point to be. This is probably a better tool to use for compositing 2-3 photos together within a smaller viewing angle.

I rarely do product/studio photography, mostly because I prefer a most candid style of shooting, but I recently was asked to do a shoot for a jewelry retailer so I gave it a try. It was really interesting to work in such a controlled environment and be able to focus so much on composition and color (as opposed to the “shoot what you can get” approach in street photography). The client was pleased and I really liked how they turned out!

I just got back from a trip to Chicago last week, so I thought I’d do a quick recap of what all I did, mostly as a log of the trip for myself. It was my first time to Chicago and I had a great time seeing some of what the city has to offer. I didn’t shoot a ton of photos, but got a few I thought I’d share here.

These are two of the fellas who I went to visit and who showed me around while I was there! Lots of crazy fun, so thanks, guys! I started out the trip by arriving at Midway airport (smart move) in the evening. We went right over the the Green Mill for some great gypsy jazz by Alfonso Ponticelli and Swing Gitan. I guess it was Al Capone’s hang for a while, so the vibe inside was straight out of the 30s.

The next day we ate lunch at Cosy Noodles and Rice which was amazing! Then we headed over to see the Chicago Lyric Opera perform Carmen. Tragic stuff, but beautifully done and the set design was incredible! Sadly, I didn’t get a photo, but it was like watching a moving painting.

From there, I headed over to the Chicago Art Institute since it was free admission that day! Anyone who’s been there knows what an amazing place it is and I could go on all day, so I’ll just say, if you can only make it to one place in Chicago, go there!

After that, I went and saw the Chicago Symphony perform Petrushka (1911 version). There’s a reason it’s known as one of the best orchestras in the world and they completely nailed it.

The next day was spent downtown being a little more touristy. We started off at the Field Museum where we spent a lot of time at the Jade collection, Tibet and Pacific Island exhibits, and of course, the dinosaurs! Then we walked up Michigan Ave. and checked out Millennium Park complete with the crazy mirrored “bean” which really is an amazing thing to see in person. Right across the street was the Chicago Cultural Museum where we saw Finding Vivian Maier: Chicago Street Photographer, an exhibition of New York and Chicago street photos taken by a self-taught nanny, Vivian Maier, over the course of her life. It’s an amazing story and the photos are the real deal. I thought they were some of the best street photos I’ve ever seen!

We then walked up further and checked out some of the amazing architecture of downtown Chicago, ending up at the Hancock Tower. With NO line and a quick elevator trip up, we were able to see 360 degrees of Chicago from 94 floors up! Very impressive.

We watched the KU game that night at a bar with a $10 all-you-can-drink special. Enough said about that . . .

The next day we were gearing up for a big taco party that night, so we only had time for one destination, but it was one of my favorites of the trip. We drove out to Garfield Park Conservatory which is an enormous greenhouse that has several different rooms that mirror various climates from tropical to desert. The conservatory is run by the city and has free admission. It was a real feast for the senses with lots of warm, moist air, lots of oxygen and as many colors as you can imagine! I couldn’t help but shoot some photos there:

The morning that I left, we had an incredible brunch at The Chicago Diner, which is an all vegetarian/vegan place that had about the best brunch I’ve ever had. Even if you’re a carnivore, I highly recommend it. We also stopped by the Robot City Workshop, which is an all toy robot store! You can even build your own there and they have a great collection of vintage robots from the 1980s, too.

I can now add Chicago to my list of great cities that I’ve visited. It’s a very cool place with easy mass transit, big city attractions with a more laid-back, Midwestern feel to it. I definitely hope to head back soon!

From a couple of shots at last year’s county fair…

Hello everyone! Happy 2011!

Now, I’m not usually one to make New Year’s resolutions (or write really wordy blog posts!), but one thing I’ve been working hard at so far this year is improving my organization. This included a good old fashioned office cleaning and purging of old documents and books, but I also a digital rearrangement as well. After reading Frank Chimero’s great post about his workflow, I thought that I might share a few of the new things I’ve tried in case someone else finds them useful. It’s likely boring, technical reading, but I’ll try to be brief!

Applications
First, I’ve gone through and taken a close look at the applications that I have on my machine. I had a lot of small apps that I had downloaded at one time or another thinking things like “some day when I need to pretend to mix records like a DJ, this will be AWESOME!” Sadly, my DJ dream may never come to fruition, so that went into the garbage along with several other useless programs, slimming down my Applications folder considerably. It’s like shoes, if you won’t wear them, ditch them!

Documents
I then did a scan of my documents folder to make sure that everything has a place (not just a running list of 400+ random documents). If not . . . into the garbage as well. I’ve been nesting a lot of folders within folders to keep things organized and I find that helpful. Another tool that has been helpful in organizing documents and text snippets is a free tool called Evernote which I just started using a week ago. Evernote is a cloud-syncing application that stores text, photos, audio, and even PDF files and can be synced between multiple computers and even iOS devices. A lot of the files I had as documents on my computer got moved to Evernote. I initially wasn’t sure if I would have a need for it, but 130 notes (in 5 days) later, I clearly do! You can set up folders and nest them as well as use tags, so it’s easy to search for what you’re needing. I’m thinking it will be a good tool to draft some blog writing in the future. In addition, some of the many things that it could be used for are:

• recipes (awesome!)
• lists of local service vendors
• grocery lists
• design inspiration clippings
• to-do/wish lists
• books to read/movies to watch

Fonts and Photos
I also am taking charge of other files on my machine including fonts and photos. On the font front, I found that when I upgraded to Snow Leopard on the Mac, my fonts all went to hell. Many didn’t show up or wouldn’t load and I think FontBook on the Mac is completely worthless. SO, I purchased a copy of Fontcase and it has worked amazingly well! I highly recommend it if you are a hoarder of fonts like I am. I really should just go through and eliminate what I won’t ever use, but in the mean time, FontCase is great.

I’ve been using a flat folder structure to organize my photos for years and up until this point, it’s worked OK. Lately, I’m finding that there are folders all over the place and I can’t always find things (and this includes client work!), so I wanted to get a photo organization system in place. After asking a few people, it came down to Apple’s Aperture vs. Picasa (although I considered iPhoto, Adobe Lightroom and blueMarine as well). Aperture came highly recommended, so I went with it. I’m still in the very beginning stages of figuring it out, but so far, I think I like it a lot. The biggest hurdle for me has been to figure out how I want to structure my storage. I think I have too many images to store all on my hard drive, so I may need another external drive to handle it. I think it will allow me to scan my photos faster and eliminate the blatantly bad ones (out of focus, etc), saving me disk space. Once the photos are imported, the organization, geo-location, and face recognition are all really useful tools. The photo editing is supposed to be it’s strong suit, but I haven’t gotten that far yet, so more to come . . .

As a side note: I did play around with the face recognition in Picasa as well and I think it actually does a better job in that area. If that feature is a big deal for you, it’s worth giving Picasa a try first (since it’s free!) Organizationally, it seems that Picasa and Aperture are quite similar, so give them both a look before spending any money.

Design resources
I’ve also found that I have accumulated a large quantity of design resources over the past several years of working. These include vector images, scanned patterns and drawings, tutorial files, eBooks, icon sets, and Photoshop brushes. While none of these things are central to my work, really, I still have the feeling that SOMEDAY I might need something like that in a bind. So, I’ve set up a nested folder system for each of those categories so I can at least have a place to toss things and forget about them with some hope of finding them down the road if I need them.

Online Presence
I’ve also been looking at the ever growing amount of online accounts that I’ve been accruing and wanted to try and cut that list down as well. So, I went through the list of accounts I have and anything that I haven’t used in the past 3 months (and didn’t want to lock in the username) I deleted my account. In some cases, I had to contact the support people to have it deleted for me, but I ran into no resistance. I still have a lot of accounts, but I think they’re all useful now and serve a certain purpose.

For the sites that survived the cut, I wanted to keep a list of passwords and login info in one place so I could have a reference point in case my mind slips any further! A coworker of mine wrote an overview of KeePassX for Mac and so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s a free piece of software that uses a master password to safeguard all of your other private information. It even syncs over Dropbox (one of my favorite online services) so you can access your information on multiple computers. 1Password is another program I looked into, but KeePassX seems to be what I need right now.

Next up will be to tackle my RSS reader! I think I’ve hit the point where looking at a lot of design sites has gone from being inspirational to mostly depressing or at least distracting, so I need to flush out the good ones and let the others go.

Conclusion
As I continue with this cleanup effort, I might write more about it If people are interested. I’ve come to realize that in the physical world, we have to limit our possessions to what we have space for. Even then, I think it’s important to reduce clutter and live with minimal, yet quality, possessions. However, this mindset had not quite followed me to the digital world where space is (nearly) unlimited and most anything can be gotten for free or cheap. I think it’s a good exercise to look at your digital “hoarding” and see what you really need and what you can live without. Again, Frank sums this up beautifully.

Appendix
Some other tools I’ve been using for a while that I really like are:

1. The Autofocus system for a to-do list. Simple, handwritten and really effective, I think.
2. A Google Doc spreadsheet for tracking client work/invoices. It’s a little old school given the billing/invoice software that’s out there, but it’s simple for me to glance at and use. I recently got a copy of Billings, so we’ll see if that’s any better.
3. Inbox Zero. I’ve gotten to be pretty intense about getting rid of or archiving email and this video totally changed my thinking on the subject.
4. Backup plan. I’ve been using Time Machine with a lot of luck (and a few stressful bail out situations!) I probably need to add a level of redundancy in there, too, so that’s on the to-do list.

It’s been a very busy past few weeks with lots of work including a new CD for these ladies and a big brochure for these guys. A few posters, two ongoing identity projects and a couple of fun websites and it’s been a busy time around the studio. No complaints here, though! I should have some images to share here soon.

I’m keeping my inspiration stream alive and kicking over on the Designojek Tumblr site. I’m still feeling out whether or not it’s the best way to go, but it’s fun for now.

I also just nabbed an invite to Dribbble, so you can check out some of the shots I toss up there now and again. It seems like a pretty neat way for designers to share and comment on work.

Colorado Columbine

A view of the Space Needle from out on Puget Sound

A few photos from Pike Place Market.

I recently took a trip to Holland, MI to do some art direction for a short video documentary. I stayed in a cool hotel while I was there, so I thought I’d share a couple of shots I took. The hotel is City Flats and it’s the first hotel in the Midwest to achieve LEED Gold Certification. It’s an eco-minded hotel with really nice interior design including bold colors, clean lines and high ceilings.


Here’s the hallway by the elevator.

A view of the bed which was REALLY comfortable!

I loved the sliding door that covered the bathroom and closet.

It was nice to see some non-typical hotel artwork on the walls!

View of the bathroom…

… and walk-in shower.

I had a great stay there and the environment was really classy!

The city of Holland is a couple of hours outside of Chicago and about 35 minutes from Grand Rapids, MI. Lake Michigan is about a 5 minute drive to the west. The population is about 35,000 people and it was recently named the 2nd happiest city in the U.S.!

Every year, they have the Tulip Time festival which is the largest tulip festival in the U.S.

There are tulips EVERYWHERE and it’s really beautiful.

In my last post on color slide film, I showed a few images that I had shot about 5 years ago. Here are a few more from that series and it’s made me want to go out and buy some more slide film and give it another whirl.

I recently came across a series of photos that I shot about five years ago and used a couple years later for an improvised jazz piece. They were all shot on color slide film (Kodachrome, I believe) and when I pulled out the slides, I was pleasantly surprised with how they looked! They are more along the lines of the type of photography I’ve been wanting to shoot lately. These images are pulled directly from the scanner with no image altering at all. The colors are really amazing and there is definitely a quality there that you can’t get with digital. I’ll post a few here and a some more in the next few days. Enjoy!

Sub-zero wind chills here in Lawrence this morning. I think it’s safe to say that winter has arrived!

There was a lot of buzz yesterday online about a new photo resource, so I thought I’d mention something about it. LIFE magazine has teamed up with Google to archive thousands of photographs taken by LIFE photographers over the past several decades. This amazing collection includes photographs and etchings dating back to the 1750s and by the time everything has been put online, there will be more than 10 million photos available worldwide. The archive includes photographs taken by some of the most well respected photographers in history including Margaret Bourke-White and Robert Capa .

This is a continuation of a trend that gained a lot of motion in early 2008 when the Library of Congress put a section of their collection online and invited Flickr users to help them in the massive task of adding tags to the photos. Shortly thereafter, several other institutions followed suit and helped create the The Commons on Flickr.

UPDATE: Wow! Here’s another great online collection of historic photographs from Tibet from the past 30 years.

Happy browsing!