Last month I entered a photo (below) into the Sony Panoramic Photography Contest on Deviantart and it became one of the 20 semifinalist out of 1000+ entries. I didn’t end up being one of the three winners, but I’m still damn proud of myself. It really pumped me up to do more photography, something that, before this photo, I hadn’t done a lot of the past year.
Downtown Louisville is beautiful, especially at night with the lights making her glow. I’ve wanted to catch one of these moments for the longest time. Finally, one night in early June I set out on a journey to create this photo.
My second ever true panorama photo. For this one I had to take a small trip to the other side of the Ohio River into Indiana and find a way to get down to the river for the spot I wanted. I won’t go into detail how I got there, because then I may implicate myself for something.
The night was hot and very humid and the ground where I stood was, for the most part, uneven and I was surrounded by brush. This made things challenging, because I wanted to hurry up and get things done since I was miserable, but I forced myself to take the time I need to get things right.
I took four photos to use for the pano, but only used three of them and then cropped out about half of the third one to even things up. I had to use a long exposure and after messing around with different times I finally settled on 3.6 seconds. Editing was done in both Lightroom (pre-pano stitching) and Photoshop (post-pano stitching) and all together I put about 2.5 hrs of work into this one.
Overall I’m very happy with the way it turned out, although I do wish I had done more to prepare myself, instead of just jumping right into it that night.
Another month another flier for the Damaged Goods Improv group here in Louisville, KY. This months theme is a line that many Americans yell out during the Fourth of July holidays, “Let’s Move to Canada!” Normally I would create a post shortly after I finished the flier, but job searching has been taking up most of my time (which as of now has been successful) and most of my free time has been spent working on projects or with a special someone. Also, have been trying out new blogging desktop software that hasn’t been working out.
Moving on, this month the group decided to let me go with my own thing 100%, unlike with the first few fliers I wasn’t given any sort of photo or artwork that they wanted incorporated into the design. So, I decided right away that I was going to do something with the USA and Canadian flag and some sort of map. I initially was going to do a 3D effect with the shapes but quickly found that to be tacky decided to stick with 2D, which I think worked out much better. Then from their, I incorporated the moving van (which starts where Kentucky would be on the map and goes to the middle of nowhere Canada) and the giant Damaged Goods flag planted in the middle of Canada.
For the colors I wanted to keep everything consistent with country colors. So, used USA blue (at least that is what I’m calling it) for the title of the show and Canadian Red (once again my own name for the color) for all the info. Also with the title I decided to go with some juxtaposition and chose to used the font called Patriot, a font I’ve had in my collection for sometime and never found a way to incorporate into any design until now.
I think this may actually be my best Damaged Goods flier to date and have actually found out that many people have given it high praise more then any of the other fliers. Hell, even one person wanted to buy a print of it.
I have more writings planned for more then just my own work. But, a lot is changing for me right now, so who knows when it may come to the few eyes that will pass through here.
Another month another flier for the Damaged Goods Improv group here in Louisville, KY. This months theme is a quote from a random quote from someone’s mother in church, “Shut it up or shoot it!.” I would go into detail has to how that came about, but I’m not the one to be telling that story, you’ll just have to go to the show to find out. So, this flier was interesting for me because what I ended up doing wasn’t what I initially set out to do. I had set out to do a fully illustrated piece using the image of the man with the gun that I was given. But, when I found out that I didn’t have nearly as long to complete the project as I thought I was going to have I found myself having to make a decision. Either rush to finish what I wanted to do and risk the work not meeting anyone’s standards or come up with a new idea that was both viable to complete in the given time and creating a great flier.
I ended up coming up with what you see above and finishing the project by the deadline. Personally I’m really pleased with how it ended up turning out and it may have been even better then what I was initially going to do. I ended up doing some quick painting work over the image given to me and a stock photo of a baby to give them a bit of a unique look and gave them fat white borders to make them look almost like large stickers. I created a textured background to make the solid colored background more interesting. And for the font I used the best font type out there, Helvetica.
Feel free to offer up any critique you may as I love to see what other people think of my work, no matter your knowledge level of design.
If you are in the Louisville, KY area and would like more information about the show click this link to the event information on Facebook.
Every year, when Spring begins, white flowers bloom all over Dogwood trees. Now, I’m usually not one to love flowers and even more so I find taking photos of flowers to be very boring.
But, these flowers are one of the few that I really enjoy seeing, possible because they are only around for a couple of weeks every year.
So, when me and my girlfriend came across some Dogwoods at the Louisville Zoo a couple months ago and I looked up I was inspired. The way that the flowers contrasted with the perfectly blue sky, the one branch sticking out from the rest allowing for some great bokeh, the way the light danced around the flowers made me instantly put my camera to my eye.
I also decided to use this photo as one of my first wallpaper creations. I’ve been wanting to take the time to create wallpapers, not only from scratch but also from photos that I take. So expect more wallpapers, both original designs and those from my personal photography. The wallpaper is set for widescreen monitors and can be downloaded either from Deviantart and my Facebook page.
Doing the below will help you keep your facebook account safe from hackers. By turning on this option you will be notified via email by facebook whenever your account is accessed via a device (be it computer or mobile) that you haven’t used before. Of course, this won’t matter to those of you concerned about your privacy, but I don’t think there is anything I can do to make you feel any better.
Keep your Facebook SAFE = Go to Account~~>Account Settings~~>Account Security~~>select ‘yes’ box. This will make sure you are notified if someone tries to access your account from a computer or mobile device that you haven’t used before.–BEFORE they start sending out bogus messages using your name.
Thanks to my friend Adriana Contreras for writing the above text.
However, very very soon this is going to be even more fleshed out. You can find out more about these new security features at Read Write Web. Just goto http://digg.com/d31R2bE.
This past weekend me and my girlfriend went to the Raven Run Nature Sanctuary just outside of Lexington, KY. There we kept seeing all these random stone walls. This particular one stretched along a long portion of the trail we were on. I decided that I wanted to take a shot at creating a panorama.
So, handheld, I fired off five shots from my camera. Each time taking a mental not of a certain point of the wall to use as a reference for the next. Then later on I let Merge to Panorama in Photoshop CS3 work it’s magic.
For the first time ever the feature really impressed me. I now have an urge to find more scenes for panorama photography.
In other news, this is the first photo I’ve uploaded in quite awhile. Last year my photography went down as I decided to put more time into my design skills. So I took a break from photography for the most part. This year, however, I’ve been getting the photography urge back and now I’m letting it become a bigger part of my life once again.
To follow more of my photography check out Mathew’s Photolog on Posterous.
Another month another flier for the Damaged Goods Improv group here in Louisville, KY. This months theme is a quote from Bill Murray during an interview on the Late Show with David Letterman. For the colors and texture of the design I drew inspiration from Bill Murray’s outfit during the interview. Looking at his outfit I thought of colors from nature, rugged/rough textures and even the old school TV.
Speaking of the TV, one of the request I had from the group was to incorporate a screen shot from the interview. I thought for awhile how I was going to do this with out throwing off the overall design. I thought of doing some sort of Illustrator design with Bill Murray or even just embedding the screenshot into the background with some blending. In the end I decided to go with the old school TV. If you look close (hard to do on the above image) you can even see lines like you would see in an old analog TV.
Overall I’m very happy with the design of the flier. Hopefully next month, along with a new flier, I’ll have a new logo for the group to show you as well.
If you are in the Louisville, KY area and would like more information about the show click this link to the event information on Facebook.
Today is Earth Day, a day where many do something, this one day, to show that they care about the Earth and are green. But, most don’t try to do something that will have a lasting impact. They turn off the lights for a bit and thats it. Personally, I like to try to find something to do that will have an impact for days or even years to come.
That is why when I discovered a little JQuery plugin called OnlineLeaf I was happy to see that I could do something with my personal website to get one step closer to being CO2 Neutral. All I had to do was add a little bit of code to all the pages of my website and when someone visits my website (for my blog I downloaded the wordpress plugin from the website), if they don’t move the mouse for one minute a black screen covers my website. Also heavy animations are hidden and heavily running background processes are paused.
All this together makes the person’s computer use less power, therefore reducing the CO2 footprint of that computer. Now, my website doesn’t get that many hits, so my impact is small. But, could you imagine if facebook, CNN, ESPN, etc used this plugin. The impact, while not visible, would be huge.
We all want to do something to help this planet. Why not do something with the thing that is constantly running on a server somewhere and increasing your CO2 footprint every second?
Last month I completed and launched a new website for a local dental office, DeVries Family Dentistry. The website, devriesdental.com, is their first real website, they had something through Yellow Pages before. They wanted a place were people could get access to info easily, request an appointment online and even give some feedback.
The design is more on the conservative side, fitting the overall persona of this region. However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t give the website some personality. Dr. DeVries happens to be a legend of sorts for his success as a sports star in the area at the local high school, Meade County High School. The school’s mascot is the Greenwave and their colors are various shades of green. So, I wanted to give a little bit of local touch to the website with the wavy header and in my color choices.
After working on this website I now definitely think that every dentist out there should have one. Not only for people to learn more about the doctor’s practice, but also to allow them to easily do things like request an appointment or learn about a procedure that they are soon going to have performed. That goes for doctors in other medical fields as well.
Yesterday evening me and a friend stopped by the local Apple Store to get our grubby hands on the iPad. As I was making my way around the web in Safari I decided to visit my own website to see if it was fully compatible with the iPad. It is, but then I got another idea, what if I set the home page for each iPad to my website? Well, that isn’t possible, but what I could do was create a link/”app” on the homescreen for MathewBallard.com.
I did and I was on some iPads in the Apple Store until the nightly data wipe of all the demo iPads. So sadly it isn’t something that can be permanent unless I went in every single morning. And well, while I love being in an Apple Store there is just no way that is going to happen.
Oh yea, video below that I put together last night (Youtube version below, Vimeo coming soon).
