Yosemite in a warm winter

Taken back in November, these night shots of the valley were made by moonlight.

Backyard Birds

The mourning doves are at it again. Here they are during what we refer to as “the changing of the guard” and dinnertime for the young ones!

To get these shots I set the camera up on a tripod using an SMDV RFNe (low price remote trigger, check amazon). 1/5 of a second with an f6.3 and auto iso. I used auto iso in case it started getting dark while I waited, I figured I would rather have noise then darkness. It might have been nice to go with a bigger aperture to get an even shallower depth of field but I did not want to end up with a bunch of just out of focus shots since I would not get to make adjustments once the action started.

Michael Frye talks about Lightroom 4 tone controls

Head on over to Michael Frye’s site and check out his video on Lightroom 4 : the new tone controls. If you are not reading Michael’s blog on a regular basis you are missing out on some great landscape photography imagery and tips, so add him to your RSS feed and stay tuned.

New Icons for an Antique Touch Interface

Back in 2005, long before the iphone and ipads, I built a CarPC that ran some front end software called RoadRunner. This software allowed anyone to make their own screens as jpegs and map the functions of the computer to those screens. After copying several of the available layouts and simply recoloring them to match the car lighting I decided they needed a usability upgrade. The key the usability was two fold:

• I tried to make every screen similar and place the same icons in the same place. As simple and obvious as this sounds, it was not common at the time.
• I used edges of the screen for common buttons so I could rest my unused fingers on the screen frame. This not only allows me to press the touch buttons without looking at the screen, it helps targeting over rough roads.

 So the common theme here is the flat, shiny cornered button. Certainly this is a pre-iphone look. It gets the job done and while it does not clash with the interior, it is not inspiring. This old example was made in Paint Shop Pro and there are over a hundred icons for the full interface that include navigation, application and music controls.

 

 

 

 The Illustrator assignment for this week was to create iphone style icons. To come up with this set I started out with this tutorial on YouTube here that was part of the lesson set. This video is excellent, the instructor goes fast and I had to rewind numerous times but it was well worth it. His use of the Illustrator interface panels made more sense to me than what I have been doing and it led me to move things around and save my work space. At first I made a rounded play button like everybody has but then realized, I wanted sharper edges to match the sharp edges of the car they are going in. This small sample is from left to right: navigation, music, music folder, play and fast forward, a handful of the needed to transform the CarPC interface into a new look.

If you are interested in CarPCs, head on over to mp3car.com for more information but understand this is for the hobbyist, it takes work even when buying fully assembled kits and it will cost more than if you just buy something outright from a regular car audio manufacturer.

Gil Elvgren – An American Illustrator