Ultimate Ears Launches Ad Campaign Featuring Seal Photos

This was a nice surprise in my inbox this evening… Ultimate Ears http://ultimateears.com/ has kicked off an ad campaign featuring Seal (among other artists) and are using a couple of my photos from the European SOUL tour. (If you haven’t seen the tour galleries yet, check ‘em out here, here and here).

Here are the two original images, followed by the ad promos. Maybe you saw these in your email this week, too!

Original photo of Seal from the European SOUL Tour 2009, shot in Vienne, France on July 06Ultimate Ears mailer as it landed in my inbox. Click to open the campaign page on ultimateears.comOriginal photo of Seal from the European SOUL Tour 2009, shot in Vienne, France on July 06The current front page on www.ultimateears.com (this image is on rotation; reload the page if you don’t see it the first time)

Google Voice is Taking Over… But I’m OK With That

I have been trying to find the proverbially perfect “single phone number” service to use for my business. Google Voice has come close, and while it’s not perfect, it recently got a step closer (and we’ll just ignore the craptastic no-app on the iPhone problem). Sadly AT&T service leaves something to be desired at my home, so I broke down and got a landline for the first time in five years. No one has the home phone number, but I set the Google Voice number to ring both iPhone and home phone, and started gingerly giving out my new GV number.

Recently something weird started happening… I was getting calls on my home phone that shouldn’t have been there. People who didn’t have my GV number were getting through on my landline. And today I realized that if I rejected a call on my iPhone, my home phone started ringing. It’s the googlepocalypse! So somehow (and really, HOW is this even possible), Google is intercepting calls to my iPhone and redirecting them to my home phone. Without the GV number ever being involved. Crazy weird.

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Ultimate Photo Pants—Revisited

If you watched the TWiP podcast on Monday, or listen to the audio podcast when it’s released, you may have heard us poking fun at the “Photo Pants” again. I promised to repost the old blog entry, so here it is… Photo vest? Try photo pants!

These things were invaluable on the Seal and John Legend shows. The knee padding alone makes them worthwhile, and all the extra pockets are a fantastic bonus. I can’t recommend them enough!

A Media Browser for Multiple Aperture Libraries

I don’t want to get into software reviews on this site (hmm that’s the second time I’ve said that in as many posts…), but this one is too cool not to share.

I have multiple Aperture libraries, as I keep some client photos in a unique libraries (like the Seal photos, which number over 17,000 on their own), and I have a personal library that spans photos from 1997 through 2009, and this year I decided to start a fresh new library to speed things up a bit, and so now I have my 2009 and later library as well. While this offers several advantages, one of the disadvantages is that utilizing the OS’s built-in media browser is limited to only the last Aperture library launched. And I like using that browser, as it’s dead fast to find a photo and add it to a blog entry, email, etc. So off I went last night to the great land of Google and looked for a media browser that would show multiple libraries. And I found one.

iMedia Browser by Karelia Software does exactly that. On launch (with no configuring required, honestly not sure how it managed that), it showed all my Aperture libraries at once! Which means no more re-launching an Aperture library just to find the one photo I want… now I can access them all at once from this handy little piece of software. It even has an option to add an icon to the menu bar so that with one click, the browser opens instantly to reveal all my photos, and one more click sends it away. Double-clicking on any image opens the full-size JPEG file in Preview. Nice!

The iMedia Browser looking at all my Aperture libraries at once!

I love my E-P1

I’m not gonna get into any kind of big review on the Olympus PEN E-P1, that’s just not my thing. But suffice it to say, I love this camera. The 17mm (35mm equivalent) f/2.8 pancake lens is sharp and has a nice shallow depth of field when I want it. I’ve never been happy with any point-and-shoot camera before, and I’ve gone through a few trying to find “the one”. With the iPhone 3GS camera being so damn good, and all the awesome apps for it making it even more fun to use, any standard point-and-shoot has a lot to compete with. So this camera is the camera I carry when I don’t want to take my dSLR, but the iPhone isn’t enough. It doesn’t fit in my pocket, so I found a cool leather Leica-like strap on eBay and carry the camera messenger-bag style along with my murse (yeah, I said it) and that’s just fine. It’s light-weight, great quality, and it just looks cool. While it shoots RAW (although to-date Aperture doesn’t support the .ORF files), it takes twice as long to write the RAW files so I end up shooting JPEG. And besides, part of the point for me of carrying a camera like this is that I don’t want to spend time fiddling with the images in post. I just want to shoot and share as quickly as possible. So part of that means I shoot with the fun “art” modes quite a bit. I never thought I’d use modes like that, but I really like them. The “Grainy Film”, “Soft Focus” and “Pin Hole” modes are the ones I use the most. Using these also means it takes the camera longer (several seconds) to apply the effect and write the file, but in a way that slows things down and makes you think about the shot more—knowing that it may be the only one you get (especially if you’re asking your four-year old to pose). Here’s two recent shots from it, again really just snaps, but I love the look of them. And that’s what photography is all about anyway, isn’t it?

Alenka, downtown LAYours truly. I don’t know why I like this photo, I just do. Kinda “Hollywood” I guess.