As luck would have it I'm moving again. Yesterday it seemed as though nothing with this move was going right. Enterprise called to tell me that due to an IT glitch with their database, the cargo van I'd rented was overbooked. The apartment complex called to tell me the cabinets weren't quite done yet. My parents called to say they could only pick up the extra bedroom suite they wanted Saturday afternoon - a full-day before the boxes are scheduled to be cleared out of the way of the furniture. A friend pulled a muscle in his upper back so he'll be supporting me emotionally but not physically. On the way to dinner with Thomas I was lamenting about this move. I realized at that point, none of my moves have gone "smoothly." This past move the movers called to tell me their truck broke down and had to reschedule. I also only had 4 day notice that my apartment would be unavailable. The move before I had to pack up and move a 4-bedroom house in less than a day. Movin...

My desire to have at least one latest and greatest Tech Gadget has once again been fueled. The iPhone (a device I craved from initial announcement) was easily dismissed - you have to get service from AT&T. After AT&T's disconnection of my local phone/Internet service upon "my" request which I never made and they don't have a record of, I don't think I'll signing up with them voluntarily any time soon. (I'm in the process of finding an alternative to my Cingular (not yet AT&T service).) Enter the Helio Ocean... http://www.helio.com/#devices_ocean (They even have a page comparing it to the iPhone - http://compare.helio.com/ - how cool is that?) I think I'm going to have to go by the local store and check it out.

A year (actually 13 months) has passed since I moved into Domizzle (image is a recolorized and filtered photograph of the complex) last July. With the housing market the way it is in the Bay Area and rental occupancy rates at 97% and rising, I decided to snap up a fully renovated 1 bedroom/1 bath apartment that just became available. This will be the first time (not counting the house I built in Austin) where I've moved into a place with new carpet, new appliances, new fixtures, and all new kitchen and bathroom cabinets and countertops. I'd considered a couple of places before chosing Bristol Commons. The main selling points for me were 1) the open kitchen 2) full-size washer and dryer in unit and 3) the rent.

For our final project, we had to submit 6 images (if unmatted) that represented our best work from the semester. For a C, the requirement was that you could submit a combination of images you submitted for Assignments or Exercises previously in the semester. For a B or above, the requirement was that you improved upon submitted images in those that you chose. I chose one image that I'd submitted for a Recolor exercise as one of my best images. I had been inspired by Cristina Arce (a Costa Rican artist) to take this image further. In one of her images of a barrio she'd recolored and filtered a buiding. A classmate had taken a photograph in Europe and applied stripes of filters to change the vision. I leveraged each of their approaches to create my final image (the bottom image). I'd started with an image of the condominium complex I live in. I took the photo as part of an assignment in the Spring involving shapes and patterns. I converted the image to black and white and the...

Tonight I turn in my CDs of all work from this summer and then start trying to wrap up the coursework for my second class. While this class has been anything but fun - stressful, frustrating, you name it, I have learned more about Photoshop and my post-image processing skills have improved. I'm still going to go back through the exercises on my own at a slower pace - five weeks is too short a time to truly absorb the material. Three images that I'm especially pleased with are: The recolored and resharpened composite of Livewire Rocking The Blackthorn Pub . The revised Livewire Summer 2007 Tour Brochure (image at the bottom of this post). (The original version suffered from out of gamut issues and did not print true to my vision.) My final self-portrait (image at the top of this post).

This time last semester I was sad my classes were ending. This semester the story's different; I can't wait for one of them to end. Some advice: be sure to devote an entire semester to a Photoshop-intensive class, there's just too much to learn and practice. With that said, it's been awhile since I posted my recent work. At the end of last semester, you might remember the book cover I created for Livewire. One of the photos had a distinct reddish cast. For a Retouch assignment, I chose that picture along with two others taken less than seconds a part. As all images suffer the same color issue (I decided to correct them in batch in Camera Raw – something I didn’t know I could do until I took this class), I selected them all in Bridge and opened them in Camera Raw 4. The first change I made was selecting Tungsten for white balance. The images were taken in low light so I employed Recovery (from 0 to 22), Fill Light (from 0 to 30) and Blacks (from 5 to 21) to recapture det...