I finally got around to posting the other Star Wars stop motion movies that Rian and I made together. Enjoy.

Logo Design Love Awards is a competition that is going to recognize the best logos in the blogosphere. I was lucky enough to help with the judging, and I thought you guys would enjoy browsing through the logos as much as I did. There are ten categories of blogs and somewhere around 100 logos. Check it out, and cast your vote in the comments of their site.

I wanted to give some link love to my friend Suzanne Holzworth who is having an art show in Omaha on Saturday (April 5, 2008). Here is a little teaser video for her show:

For more samples of her work, check out worthitstudio.com. Don’t miss this intaglio, which I am lucky enough to own a print of. Great stuff, and good luck with the show, Suz!

I probably talk myself out of writing at least one post a day. I guess I don’t think it is worth expanding on an idea that I could sum up in one sentence. So rather than discard those ideas I decided I will just save them and post a handful at a time. Here is the first batch…

I hate bad sportsmanship. Especially when college basketball players have NBA attitudes.

After 4 days of strep throat, it feels really great to be alive again.

Good work always impresses me, but I am never impressed by a degree, title, or the school that someone attended.

The best movies I have seen recently are: No Country For Old Men, The King of Kong, The Assassination of Jesse James, and Rocket Science.

In all the times I have flown on a plane I have never had a conversation with the person sitting next to me.

After losing 15 pounds in two months I have come to the conclusion that losing weight is easy, it’s the willpower that is the hard part.

The longer I am a dad, the fewer risks I take and the more careful I am with my life.

First of all, I wanted to apologize to anyone who may have been on Adrian3.com yesterday (March 9, 2008). I have been playing with a new redesign and that always causes things to be broken and fixed here and there. I find it easier to just do a redesign and all the troubleshooting that goes with it on the live site. It may break things for a little while, but it saves time and gets my new design up before I tire of it. I still have some bugs and additions that I will implement in the coming days, but it is 90% there.

This design has a lot of white space, limited color, minimal decoration, and incorporates some of my more abstract photography into the header. I sometimes get into a habit of wanting to control every pixel of a site and while that is usually a good thing, it can result in a bit of a “heavy” design.

This design has a lot of white space, limited color, minimal decoration, and incorporates some of my more abstract photography into the header. I sometimes get into a habit of wanting to control every pixel of a site and while that is usually a good thing, it can result in a bit of a “heavy” design. For this one I wanted to let things breathe. Web typography is always a challenge and I feel pretty good about how the type looks on the page. The other thing to notice about the redesign that you will notice is that I added links to the social networks I use. If you are on one of those sites add me as a contact.

A couple notes about content management:
I was seriously looking at alternatives to Wordpress for this site’s content management but ultimately decided against it. In my book, Wordpress is firmly in the lead in the battle for best blogging platform. Movable Type slipped into second with there latest version (although I still use it for all my other sites) and it is just slow and clunky. It would be nice to learn Drupal for use on more corporate sites and I may take another look at it in the future, but for now I can’t afford the rumored “learning curve” that comes with it. Textpattern looks good, too, and I will test that one eventually. I also looked at Radiant and Mephisto because they run on Ruby on Rails. I have been teaching myself the basics of Rails and it seemed like a blog would be a good place to start improving my skills. While I was right about it being a good way to learn, it wasn’t the best way for me to run a blog. I liked the simplicity of Radiant’s interface. Mephisto is maybe a little better for blogs. Unfortunately, it took too much work to setup a server with Rails and all the hassle of installing them was too much. Once you finally get them installed they are still a little underdeveloped and lacking the database of user contributed development. Wordpress and MT have been hacked and tweaked by their community of users so much that you can pretty much do anything you want with them. Maybe Radiant or Mephisto will get to that same point, but in the meantime you need to be a Rails whiz to customize it. For use on corporate sites I don’t see the initial setup time being worth the hassle. You can have Wordpress running in under half an hour without any heavy lifting. I don’t usually have the luxury of a development team so the simpler the better.

The latest news photo hoax has me thinking about authenticity in photography again. In the most recent case, a chinese man doctors an image of a train and a bunch of antelopes. You can read the article to get the full story, but the image they show explaining how the fake was spotted is pretty interesting. I expected evidence such as cloned animals or something much more obvious. For example, one explanation depends on an antelope that kind of looks pregnant. Another says that the antelope would be more scattered if they were running from a train. One explanation is just flat wrong. It says that the train should be blurred and the antelope should be more in focus because the train is going 60 mph and the antelope are running slower. This explanation doesn’t hold up because the train is several hundred meters away. The antelope may not be going 60 mph but I bet their legs are and they are closer to the camera. I am not saying that the photo is real, but can’t we get an explanation that holds up to scrutiny?

Luckly, there are real professionals working to scientifically disprove the authenticity of photographs. There is an interesting article on wired.com that talks about methods that companies like Adobe are developing to spot altered photos. Adobe seems like the last company you would turn to lead the hunt for photo hoaxers considering they have made a fortune off of convincing everybody how easy/safe/fun it is to enhance and manipulate our photographs. Nevertheless, as the industry leader in photo manipulation they have to address a growing concern about the authenticity of photography. So Adobe finds itself in an interesting conundrum. How do you use a technology that is meant to alter photography to identify the people who are creating hoaxes? Where does harmless photo enhancement end and illegal photo manipulation begin? How do you convince a skeptical population to trust photography as the truth? They have a quote from Kevin Connor, who is senior director of product management at Adobe. He says,

“There’s much more awareness and much more skepticism when (people) are looking at images. That’s why we think that’s something we need to get involved in. It’s not healthy to have people be too skeptical about what they saw.”

Not healthy to question what you see? That is a shocking statement when you consider what he is implying, that it is healthy to accept what you see as real without questioning. Yikes! The article closes without really giving much hope that there will ever be a trustworthy way of telling whether or not a photo has been altered. While that may seem like a tragedy, it is a side effect of an advancing civilization. Think about the past when photos represented the “truth.” That was a more dangerous time because it ignored the editorial nature of photography. Think of all the manipulation that happens to an image in camera. Somebody has to pick the subject matter. The photographer isn’t an emotionless bystander. He composes his shot with an agenda. He choses the exposure and controls the focus. These are editorial decisions. You can make the same old lady look like a saint or a witch just by how you choose to take her picture. To accept an image as “truth” regardless of how it was originated is dangerous. Defense attorneys, law enforcement, news organizations, protective governments, conspiracy theorists, traditionalists and photography purists will continue to find ways authenticate and de-authenticate photos. I can’t blame them, but I firmly believe that a skeptical population is a better alternative to blind unquestioning masses.

Rian and I like to make short stop motion movies with his Star Wars guys. We have half a dozen or so little films now and I thought I would put them on YouTube so I can share them with you. Here are a few of our first attempts at movie making:
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I finally got the camera I have always wanted. No, it wasn’t a Hasselblad or a Mamiya or a Leica. The camera that has been on my wish list longer than any other is the Pentax K1000. Sure, I could pick one up on Ebay for under $100 but I just figured that someday the classic camera would just find its way into my collection. That is pretty much what happened. I love having a story to go along with a camera and now I have one that I will probably be telling quite a few times in the future. Here is how the classic tank of a camera came into my collection…
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I just wanted to make a quick post to make sure that you update your bookmarks and rss feeds because I have been doing some site maintenance today. I ditched the holygears subdomain in favor of going back to my Adrian3.com domain name. I used a handy little Wordpress plugin to handle my redirects and as far as I can tell the transition should be pretty seamless. If you have see anything that isn’t working please drop me a note.

I keep coming across a bunch of live recordings from Iron and Wine and I wanted to share some of them with you in case you are as big of a Sam Beam fan as I am. Here are some live Iron and Wine mp3s for your listenting enjoyment:

House by the Sea
Live at Paradiso, January 27, 2008 (ripped from the FabChannel video)

He Lays In The Reins
This is from a “Mornings Become Eclectic” show on KEXP from November 29, 2007.

Resurrection Fern
This one was broadcast on NPR but I am unsure of the date or location.

Someday the Waves
This was broadcast on KEXP, but I don’t have any more info on it.

Upward Over The Mountain
Live at Messiah College, February 10, 2007

And if you just can’t get enough live Iron and Wine, then you might want to check out PlayedLastNight.com where there are a ton of Iron and Wine concerts that you can purchase. Last but not least is a video from FabChannel that can be viewed after the break.
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