A new level of Bokeh in film/video…nice application of the Canon 5D MkII

When I first started watching this video, my immediate thought on seeing the head shots of the little girl were,

‘what lens is that?!? It looks like the 50mm 1.2 L series on my 5D, only this is video I’m watching!’ (I might be wrong about the lens, but yeah, that is seriously what went through my head)

Hannah & Leonard

Hannah & Leonard

Sure enough, on the right margin of the web page, it says ‘production tools: Canon 5D MkII, Adobe After Effects’

This has GOT to change the playing field in the flim industry.

Adobe MAX ‘08 Sneak Peaks on Flickr

Adobe MAX '08 Sneak Peeks I just posted my photos of the Sneak Peeks session from San Francisco to Flickr from Lightroom 2 using Jeffrey Friedl’s plug-in again (how useful it is!). The sneak peeks (and other general sessions) opened with a video DJ performance by Mike Relm. While the news of the massive layoffs at Adobe after MAX Milan may seem on the surface as bad news, the fact is that the RIA market and the potential for the Flash platform is stronger than ever. I am sure that most of the folks leaving Adobe will have exciting ventures to move on to, while Adobe itself will be leaner, meaner, and more primed to deliver some of the most exciting technology to the world.

Adobe MAX Awards on Flickr

MAX AwardsI used Jeffrey Friedl’s plugin for Adobe Lightroom 2 to export my photos of the MAX Awards to Flickr rather than outputting yet another Lightroom web gallery. While the metadata is included in the images, I don’t have time to link and/or comment each image to the appropriate descriptions which I am sure lots of folks have already written. So hopefully by using flickr not only will they be searchable but also perhaps folks can annotate them. In case anyone is curious these were shot with a Canon 5D with a EF35mm f/1.4 fixed length lens. I should be posting the photos from the Sneak Peeks presentation shortly.

Macromedia Man

A week since Adobe MAX NA ‘08 closed with its last sessions, and yet I am nowhere near caught up with work, email, leads, etc. I was just doing the post on my pics from the MAX Awards / Sneak Peeks session when, like one of those darkroom scenes in an old detective movie, guess who popped up in the foreground a couple of rows in front of me? Macromedia ManIt was Macromedia Man! I saw this guy from the back everywhere at MAX – across the lunch room, in my sessions, in the hall, at the party…and now in Adobe Lightroom. Who are you, Macromedia Man? Catchy shirt.

Pictures of Adobe MAX ‘08 Customer Appreciation Event

Here’s the slideshow, done in LR2

MAX Sneak Peeks

Check my twitter (@abunur) for up to minute updates on the Sneak Peeks. I will post the images here later.

Truly deleting images from Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom 2Hitting the ‘delete’ key in Adobe Bridge and Lightroom used to bring up a dialog offering options like whether I wanted to remove the image from the collection or permanently delete the image from my hard drive. Since upgrading to Lightroom 2 I no longer get this dialogue, and I couldn’t find a setting in the preferences to make it come up. After a bit of searching on the web I found this page that says “To remove a photo from a collection as well as from the catalog, select the photo and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Delete (Windows) or Command+Option+Shift+Delete (Mac OS).” Now to me, removing from a collection and dumping something in the trash are two totally different things, yet when I used this shortcut it did give me a prompt offering to move the image to the trash.

So there you have it, if you want to actually delete an image from your drive from Lightroom, you need to use the above key combination.

BattleSpace

These are the pictures the media has refused to print. This is the real face of what is going on around us, while they prefer we live with our eyes glued to the tv sets and their euphoric version of reality.

http://www.battlespaceonline.org/

To quote my friend Omar in NY:

“…a dear friend of mine set up this exhibit in
NY. He lives in the apartment downstairs and called me
to the basement to show me the rough edit before he
took it to the gallery. And so in my own rush to pack
and get going on my own trip the next day, I was the
first person to see these images together, for
whatever that is worth.

It brought tears to my eyes (the Luke Wolagewiecz
picture in particular) Also the picture of the boy
with the blood on his face and staring straight in to
the lens of the camera struck me as an omen too of
foreboding of the real upshot of the ‘winning the
hearts of minds’ that we hear about. A teenager injured as his house is searched by US forces. Iraq 2006.  By Peter van AgtmaelThat is what is
coming back at us. And coming back at us with a
vengeance.

The whole project was born out of his and other conflict
photographers frustrations that newspapers and
magazines would not print the photographs in the
exhibit or worse yet recaption the images to to other
ends. I kid you not.”

Sunrises over Doha

…so I did more than drop my phone in the gulf…

shot with a Canon Powershot Pro in Doha, Qatar.