I have been listening to WNYC radio podcasts with Jad Abumrad and his friend for some time. Today I saw in my iTunes subscription this gem of a video which is really very creative and I enjoyed it immensely. So here it is for you to enjoy too.

I love the Magritte references in the video

I love my iPhone but the results I get from the camera in it are not that good. I only have the 3G version and I think they may have increased the resolution with the 3GS model. Apple added video capability with the 3GS anyway. Even if the best camera is the one you have with you I don’t think I will be up loading many pictures to any of the microstock sites that come from the iPhone.
I suppose there is still possibility of getting a good shot when you have all the necessary things in place like good light and an interesting or exciting subject. It just depends on what you want to do with it afterwards.

There are loads of photography applications for the iPhone, some that are for reference when you are using other photography equipment and some that are to help you get the best from the camera on the iPhone. Then there are the applications that are to do things like post your photos to the internet and geo tag them etc. On such appp could be the iPhone application “Sekai Camera,” a social, Augmented Reality service for browsing and sharing user-generated text, photo, voice, and other location-linked information.

Tell me what iPhone applications you have and what you do with them. Leave a message in the comments section. You just need be on the page for the post by itself and scroll down to enter your comment

This information is from Strobist which is an excellent site I highly recommend.

Sometimes you need a little extra power when there is nary a monobloc in sight. For one quick solution, follow the bouncing ball bungee as Paul Morton and Darren Stevenson show you how to mount three SB-800′s into a softbox.

This is 3x better than the cheater, which will mount suspend a single SB in a speedring with the CLS window showing, a la the Strobies XS setup.

But remember, three strobes only buys you a stop and a half more power. The first additional flash doubles your power, which adds one more stop. The second one goes halfway to doubling it again, adding another half stop. But put them on 24mm zoom for good coverage and lose the internal baffle and you can definitely get up to full sun-balancing levels at close range.

Steve Carty as in Party but with a C. I had a great talk with Steve about how he uses his Macs and about photography, seeing as he is a photographer. He is well know in Canada and has spent time working other places such as New York. Obviously more detail in the podcast.

Steve is running a Mac with 2 GB of memory and from what he tells me about the applications he uses, he needs to get 4GB in there. Photoshop along with a good few other apps all at once means that he will notice a huge difference when he has the 4GB.

Sponsor for the Show is Go To Meeting

Using the social media networks such as Twitter, Flickr and the video network of Qik to get the word out there about his photographic work Steve is branding himself and his business, which is a vital thing to do if you are aiming for world domination of your industry. He will let his followers know when he is going to do a shoot through Twitter and then film some of the process and broadcast it directly through Quick. Steve also gets videos up on YouTube of course.

Steve recommends looking at the work of Jalani Morgan photographer, and Javier Lovera.

Also, Buy the book “POSITIVES” 140 page full colour coffee table book. produced using FSC certified ethically produced paper. printed in Canada. Download the pdf
getpositives@stevecarty.com for details.

CS3 is the preferred software for the photography and he says he may upgrade to CS4 at some point. I was surprised that he doesn’t use either Aperture or Lightroom for sorting out his images, preferring to use Bridge which comes with CS3.

I talk with Steve about the photography business and how it is changing, the effects of events such as the World Trade Center event and the effects of the Micro Stock photography model on traditional photographers. He tells me about the Speck model of selling photos to magazines. I kind of wonder how it is all going to turn out with the down turn in the advertising due to the Worldwide financial crisis. Surely anyone that can keep a business going in these trying times deserves to be successful.

Steve Carty will be amongst the winners as evidenced by his ebullience and go get ‘em attitude to making his photography business work. Personally I really enjoyed my conversation with him and I know you will too. Enjoy the podcast.

Please leave me a comment in the comment section of the post. I am really looking forward to hearing from you. I want to know what you have to say about Photography and the Mac.

Make faces merge into a tree – Here is a tutorial which show you how.

Talking about 2d and 3d Illustration applications, and more.

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In this podcast I look at the idea of selling illustrations online through micro stock photography sites. One of the things that you really have to look out for is closed path and open paths.

With open paths in an image submitted to sell it will without a doubt be rejected in all of the microstock sites. When I was a CorelDraw user there was a setting with the pencil and with the brush too that actually automatically joined an open path if you took the end of the line close enough to the start of the line. Don’t think it is possible to do that with Adobe Illustrator.

There are times when you want to concentrate on the drawing and not have to think about the technical aspect of joining the ends of a closed shape. So what you do is to just draw away and when you are ready use a couple of plug ins to join all of the open paths in one foul swoop. I tried a few different ways of achieving this but one I found this set of plug ins I haver not looked back. One plug in to find all of the open paths and one to close them all, although that part of the job is done with a script. Just another plug in really with a different  name.

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Here is Podcast number 5 and we are featuring Lee Torrens of the Blog Microstock Diaries. Lee is very knowledgeable about the industry although modest of his achievements. Have a listen and you will find some gems of information in there that will help you with working as a microstock contributor.

In it he mentions  Andres Rodriguez who is among the world’s top microstock contributors and has been a full-time microstocker since May 2006. His portfolio contains over 6,000 images, specializing in business, fashion, lifestyle, outdoors, 3D renders and sport.

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The Sponsor for the show is SkypeOut – A service from Skype that allows you to call ordinary phone very cheaply from your computer. I have used it and it does work very well.

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I just bought a monopod last week so it was interesting to see what views Yuri Arcurs has about monopods. I have the ball head to use if I want to although I actually bought it for another purpose. Perhaps I will buy another to use on the monopod.

A favour please.

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