Lets face it. I’m a film geek. I love relaxing while taking in a good movie, and I get really excited about hearing of new movies long before the premiere date even has been announced. (Max Manus would be a prime example of this)
Like many others I’ve been enjoying the beta version of Voddler lately. I’ve previously written a short blurb about Spotify, so It only seems natural to type a little something something up about this as well.
Voddler can pretty much be summed up as Spotify for movies, but to quote voddler themselves:
With Voddler you can watch movies and TV shows the way you want, anytime. Voddler is easy, legal and available around the clock – with great image and sound quality.
After using it for a little while Im not so sure about the quality bit, but it is legal, easy and available around the clock. Right now the selection of movies feels kind of small, but I would expect this to change when they move out of beta.
The very first thing which struck me when first booting up the application was that it was kind of odd that you couldn’t use your mouse to navigate the GUI. But, when you read why Voddler decided to make it this way, it makes a little more sense. Voddler is designed not only to run on your regular computer, but also on your living room media center setup, provided that you have one… which I for one do not have.
So, apparently, the reason for rendering the mouse unusable was to enable the application to be navigated via a regular infrared remote, which I guess would correspond to the arrow keys on your keyboard.
Clever, but I still don’t get why we just couldn’t have our cake and eat it too, just this once.
And then there’s the issue with a constant flow of communication with Voddler’s servers, even when you’re not using the application. Always sitting there, eating bandwidth, unless you deactivate the voddler service of course. I suspect quite a few will find this to be a huge turnoff. Especially if you’re on a bandwidth quota or have one of those mobile broadband deals.
But it’s not all complaints! Let’s take a closer look at the user interface and features after the jump!
(more…)
I’ve wanted to experiment with miniature faking for a little while now, but have only recently gotten around to actually trying. I absolutely love this form of photography as it’s somewhat of a way to put places, no matter how large they may seem in real life, into perspective. It’s almost as if some supreme higher being picked up a camera and started shooting the world we live in.
Like I mentioned in the beginning of this post, I’ve wanted to try this technique for a while now, and at first I was considering springing for a tilt-shift lens, however, said lenses are horribly expensive and therefore instantly out of my budget range, so the next best thing was to mimic the look of tilt-shift miniatyre faking during the post processing of the shots.
At first I was going to use a dedicated website for doing this, however, I was quickly disappointed by the low resolution images the site spat out, so I decided to come up with my own workflow for achieving the same effect, or as close as possible, in Photoshop.
I’m sure there already are quite a few tutorials out there on achieving this effect using different techniques, but I like experimenting so I set out to try and replicate the look without relying on any tutorials.
The workflow turned out to be quite straight forward, actually. The first thing I did was making a new layer, filling it with pure black, and create a series of white gradients on top of this layer, matching the elements of the scene, such as variations in the angle of the terrain and objects such as bushes.
I then merged all these elements together and moved this black and white layer into the alpha channel of the image.
Following this, I proceeded to give the image a pass through Photoshop’s lens blur filter, using the black and white mask I made earlier to control the focus of the filter.
The final step was to tweak the saturation and exposure to add a bit of punch to the image while heightening fake feel I were after.
These images turned out to be quite fun to make, so I bet this won’t be the last time I do this. I guess the biggest problem with these kind of images is to find a location to shoot from, as you need quite a bit of height in order to do this, regardless, you never know when you might find yourself in a position to get shots like these so who knows? There might be a followup on this later.
I recently added yet another Wordpress installation to my websites, this time for the purpose of running a photoblog.
I’ve been playing around with the idea of starting a photoblog of my own for a while now, and I guess I finally gave in.
My current plan for this section of the website is to have a place to showcase some of the images I produce on a daily basis, be it snapshots or planned and carefully executed images. As you can probably tell from a quick glance at my blog, I’m not much of a rapid blogger, but then again, I guess it might be due to me being of the type who doesn’t open my mouth unless I got something to say, at least when it comes to online publication. Updating a site just for the sake of updating it, and in the process putting the content secondary just doesn’t sound right in my ears. Despite this, I’ll try to keep it as updated as I can.
Have a look over at the subdomain pblog.fleistad.com to check it out!
Tags: 