Cheerleading practice with Shawn Wright

Digital Anarchy recently added a great photographer to our Primatte Chromakey gallery. His name is Shawn Wright and he runs Wright Studios out of Indiana, USA with his wife Betsy.

Shawn is a photographer of all talents and trades. Not only does he specialize in many subjects — high school seniors, industrial product shots and sports teams, to name a few — but he also runs photography seminars. More info on his company site, www.wrightstudio.us.

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Continue reading Cheerleading practice with Shawn Wright

Celebrities of LENNON the Photographer, Part II.

LENNON the Photographer has given us terrific celebrity images that he creates, in part, with our Adobe Photoshop greenscreen plugin, Primatte Chromakey. A year after we first talked to LENNON about his work, he contacted us with more high-profile photography. There is a **gorgeous** shot of Gilles Marini from Dancing with the Stars, as shown below.

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Something that I really enjoy about LENNON is that his personality seems as colorful as the celebrities that he photographs. That’s why his first name is always written in CAPS; very Hollywood, yes?

Continue reading Celebrities of LENNON the Photographer, Part II.

Filling orders is like eating cheesecake.

Last week, we received an order for our Backdrop Designer plugin. On that same day, we received a request to resend a previous purchase of the Backdrop Designer plugin. Since I am Digital Anarchy’s customer service person and our order fulfillment department — as well as blogger extraordinaire — I recognized the name in both emails. The customer already owned Backdrop Designer but was purchasing it again.

This is one of the reasons we hand fill orders. It’s not uncommon for someone to forget he already owns a product. It’s also not uncommon for someone to think she bought the product when really she only downloaded the demo. This was the basis of two different support calls last week.

(By the way, I feel this theory should extend to cheesecake. I should be able taste its sweetness just thinking about eating cake, and therefore save myself the calories.)

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Royalty-free cheesecake served up from www.freefoto.com. Cool stuff on that site.

Continue reading Filling orders is like eating cheesecake.

Outback art with Chrissie Campbell.

Digital Anarchy recently added an interesting artist to our ToonIt! Photo gallery. Her name is Chrissie Campbell and she is truly a woman of many mediums and skills. I love the main image on her website’s About page. It seems to pull in all of her talents: painting, photography and digital manipulation. Very contemporary and strong but with a delicate stylization.

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It’s fun becoming friendly with someone online, then discovering details like where she lives. Chrissie’s business name is ‘Kakadu Design’ and it didn’t occur to me what that indicated until I visited her website and looked at the promo images. Kakadu National Park is located in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Continue reading Outback art with Chrissie Campbell.

Photowalkin’ (and camera lenses)

Yesterday, I joined Photoshop product manager Bryan O’neil-Hughes for his Photowalk. This was part of the effort by NAPP to get folks out and taking pictures. There were photowalks all over the nation because of this.

It’s a pretty cool idea and was great fun. Adobe rockstar Julieanne Kost joined us along with a few other Adobe folks. The walk itself was fairly short in length and mostly went a few blocks around the Adobe campus in San Jose. You’d be surprised at how long it takes for 50 photographers to go a few blocks. In any event, this led to many photos of the Adobe building (there also seemed to be a good deal of photographers taking pictures of photographers).

Adobe through the leaves

When you go on walks like this, it’s interesting what your choice of lens does to your photos.

Continue reading Photowalkin’ (and camera lenses)

PC vs. Mac, and PC wins a round

So according to a story in todays Wall Street Journal, Apple is feeling stung by the recent Microsoft ads that show regular folks shopping for laptops and trying to buy one under $1000. Here’s one of the Laptop Hunter ads:

Clever commercials, not quite as clever as the Mac vs. PC ads, but obviously effective. Apple apparently had lawyers call Microsoft and request they stop running the ads.

Only Apple would have the balls to call a competitor and ask them to stop running ads that make them look bad. “Those ads are true! How dare you run them!” Poor Apple.  It’s kind of hilarious.

Here’s a link to the Journal article if you want to read it for yourself.

btw… It is true that the same laptop will usually be cheaper on the Windows side, especially if you time your purchase with a Dell 30% off sale, which are frequent these days. The fact that Apple’s machines never go on sale makes them more pricey than similar Windows machines which are constantly on sale. The laptops in the Laptop Hunter ads are usually a bit less powerful than the higher priced Apple, but the reality of computers is that many people don’t need the extra power.

fwiw… I’m platform agnostic. I use both Macs and PCs and have a love/hate relationship with both. If I get to a point where I’m thinking about the operating system, it means that said computer has done something that makes me want to drop kick it through a window. I haven’t found either platform to be more or less problematic. Yes, Vista 1.0 sucked… but then, OS X 10.2 was fraught with problems as well. It happens.

Chief Executive Anarchist on Colorburned.com.

Jim Tierney, the President and ‘CEA’ of Digital Anarchy, recently sat down to talk with Grant Friedman of Colorburned.com. This is a terrific blog and info site that I became aware of when Grant contacted us about some of his online contests. Jim and Grant had a lively conversation via email, as many of us do these days. You can read Colorburned’s interview with Jim Tierney here on their site.

071509_colorburnc Continue reading Chief Executive Anarchist on Colorburned.com.

Professional geeks love ToonIt!

A few days ago, I received a great email from a new customer named Mark Edwards. He wrote us a nice note about his purchase of ToonIt! Photo, which is our Adobe Photoshop cartooning plugin, and attached some images to his email.

Mark said, “Thanks for the cool tool. After only a few minutes of playing around with it, I decided to buy it (original and toonit versions of one picture attached). Love it!”

Mark’s ToonIt image:

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Continue reading Professional geeks love ToonIt!

Nick Cattermole: Music, monkeys & monks.

While performing as a musician for the Fashion Week in Delhi, artist Nick Cattermole took a lot of photographs around the McLeod Ganj area of India. Nick’s two primary subjects in this photo series are monkeys and monks. These are subjects whose relationship to each other — in my eyes — is bound only by their English spelling and co-existence in a geographic region. But Nick has put together an interesting body of work that combines the inhabitants of both temples and forests in McLeod Ganj.

I love that Nick uses our ToonIt! Photo plugin to transform his photographs into delicate illustrations. Many people use ToonIt! for more ‘aggressive’ images, which is what cartoons typically look like, all thick black lines and bold heavy color fields. Nick’s illustrations are instead turned into soft, thin lines over a jeweled, geometric pattern of color.

Monk walking in the village, post-ToonIt! treatment:

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Continue reading Nick Cattermole: Music, monkeys & monks.

Technology gets smaller.

While writing a post about how my little iThing takes great digital photos, I did some news surfing about the shrinking size of technology. The two articles listed below caught my eye. Their topics are different but the underlying theme is similar.

First, on Computerworld.com, an article called ‘Future shock: The PC of 2019‘ talks how personal computers will look in a decade: Small.

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Just yesterday, I took this photo of a charming chalk stamp on the pavement. Seems to fit the topic of this post because ‘Thylacine’ is a generally extinct, but still sighted and possibly mythological creature. Just like technology can be. See this Bizzare & Extinct site for images.

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Tiny Toons & more Panos from Perry.

For the July 4th weekend, I went to a friend’s cabin in the Russian River, California area. The town of Guerneville has tons of scenic photo opps and upon arriving, I was dismayed that I had forgotten to pack both my SLR camera and my little point and shoot. Luckily I had my iPhone with me. I couldn’t zoom in or add a perspective blur, but I was still able to get some really nice shots. Certainly any camera-enabled phone would do an equally good job.

When I returned to my Inbox this morning, my favorite roving panographer (if, in fact, there is such a term) had emailed to me his own stunning, low pixel image from a recent nature walk. Here is what Stanton Perry said about his photo, which was also taken with an iPhone, and its subsequent cartoon that uses our ToonIt! Photo plugin.

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Continue reading Tiny Toons & more Panos from Perry.