Wednesday Desktop Background Freebie

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Who doesn't love free things!? I personally like to change my desktop backgrounds often. Sometimes I make my own, other times I really like having another artists work to look at.

A week or so ago, I was playing around with the photo that I used in the processing tutorial and created a simple desktop background with it. I got to thinking that if I love free high-quality desktop backgrounds made by other artists, maybe I should contribute one of my own to the community. So here it is! Take it if you want it! Totally on the house.

Precise Path Robotics Site is Live!

We at The Basement Design + Motion have been working with a local robotics company, Precise Path Robotics, for the past several months to create promotional and educational materials for their product the RG3, the worlds first robotic greens mower. It's been really neat to work on a project for such a ground breaking product!

Today they're unveiling the mower at a trade show down in New Orleans. We produced video's that will play in their booth to help them explain what the mower can do and how it can benefit greens keepers. The mower is so new they needed to show it's capabilities through 3D animations. (Photos of the booth yet to come.)

In addition to the videos, we produced an online experience where greens keepers can learn about the mower, get detailed spec information, and sign up for the newsletter and road show.

We're very proud of the entire campaign! My role involved art directing the website from the ground up. I had a lot of fun. Each part of the process was an opportunity to learn, from the first meeting talking to the client about the image he'd like to project to working with a team of 3D artists, compositors, designers, and interactive developers to create the final product. Having access to such a talented and diverse pool of talent made my job a joy!

So here it is, the unveiling of our latest project www.precisepath.com.

Playing with the mood of a photo

After looking through the images I took during my antique camera photo shoot, I thought it might be fun to pick one and try to play with the tone of the image. I wanted to keep the effect subtle, but still give it a bit of a mood. For this tone I chose to draw from the look of film developed in the 70's. Here's a tutorial of the techniques I used to achieve these results.

Here's the original photo

New 50 mm Prime Lens

I can't believe what a HUGE difference this new 50 mm prime lens makes! I did a photo shoot of a couple antique cameras we have in the house today and was really excited to see the results. The cameras are so beautiful! I think I'm going to have to print out the series and hang them all together somewhere. It might even be cool to see if there's a coffee shop or something that would be interested in the series as part of a local artist gallery of some sort. I'll have to look around. Thanks for the extra inspiration to make the purchase, Steph! I love it!

Honored to be a guest blogger

Today I'm very honored for the opportunity to be guest blogging over at Shutter Sisters as a Friday Featured Resource. Thank you for allowing me to contribute a thought to such an inspirational and talented community of women, Tracey. Happy Friday everyone!

Shutter Sisters Inspiration

I enjoy the daily bits of inspiration from Shutter Sisters. Today's bit revolved around the clean slate of the new year.

Sometimes it's tough for me to follow through with various creative assignments depending on what's going on in my life and whatnot but I just really liked this one so I thought I'd give it a shot. With all the chilly gray brown and white around us these days I felt like this would be a great opportunity to look a little closer for the colorful, the cheery, and the cozy. Here's the assignment:
January Homework Assignment (Starting Monday):

1) Take one photo everyday until Jan. 31st that is colorful, cozy, cheerful or just makes yousmile.

2) Do something creative with your hands 5 days a week. It could be drawing, painting, origami, scribbling, doodling, writing, or anything else. But it may not involve a camera or a computer.

I've decided that I'm going to count culinary exploits as 'something creative with my hands' as well. I'll be keeping a log of my photos, and photos of the things I make by hand up on my flickr page. Let me know if you decide to join. I'd love to see your photos.


PS: The diptych above is of some awesome eggnog cupcakes. I got the recipe from Annie's Eats. The cupcakes had a great flavor, were super moist and the icing was REALLY sweet. I don't prefer the sugar icings as much as cream cheese variety, so I think next time I'll experiment with a different icing.

New Lights and Some Color

Here is my new and improved light box photo. I found that my little desk lights weren't quite bright enough to show off my subject matter, so I got some clip lights and put in a daylight bulb so that all the colors were as true as could be. I also made sure to white balance my camera before shooting my subject and I added a nice patterned fabric beneath to make it pop.

The angle wasn't quite right when I clipped my lights to the sides of the box, but I didn't have any special light stands to fasten my lights to. To serve as stands, I tried clipping the lights to a couple bookends and it worked perfectly. They were easy to maneuver to get the lighting just right.