Sammy

Butterflies: My Random Adventure in Nature Photography

Submitted by deke on 12 June 2009 - 2:40am.

My goodness, I had a good time this week. While the dekeOnline version of me was pimping GridIron Flow (which I quite rightfully love) and celebrating the latest and last dekePod (now officially undead), I was secretly enjoying a few days offline with my young and fabulous boys. During which we immersed ourselves in two of my local area's finest, the Denver Zoo and the Butterfly Pavilion.

I mention this for two reasons. First, I suffer a largely unrequited passion for nature photography. Second, I engaged in the rare exercise of that very passion this week with an Olympus E-30, one of the most responsive cameras I've had the pleasure to use. Witness the cropped sample below. Click on it for the wide shot; zoom in to check out the amazing spiraling proboscis on that sucker.

Read more » 

. Tagged with:

Giving It Up for the Family

Submitted by deke on 9 December 2008 - 4:16am.
My two knights

dekePod Episode 011: Ho ho ho, it's that time of year. When you begin to extract yourself from the professional objectives that have been sucking at your soul and turning your heart into a tiny lump of coal. And instead, you focus your attention to that one thing that gives you solace, The Family. The warm embrace, the smells of the season, the drifting snowflakes, the sounds of home. It does the heart good to know that comfort is waiting when you're finally ready to take a moment and enjoy. Read more » 

. Tagged with:

Illustrator Transparency + Photoshop Resolve, Part 1

Submitted by deke on 29 June 2008 - 1:50am.

In this two-part article, we’ll take a low-quality digital photo of my youngest son, Sammy, banging on a hopelessly busted piano:

And transform it into a work of otherworldly vector-based weirdness (below bottom). The primary instrument of this transformation will be Adobe Illustrator’s Transparency palette. But while Illustrator can belt out a medley, can it carry a tune? The answer is, yes, so long as Photoshop oversees the final production.

Here's the idea: Illustrator allows you to assign varying levels of transparency to vector-based objects. That’s great because, as we’ll see, it makes for a remarkably versatile drawing environment. The problem is, Adobe's original vector-based technology, PostScript, doesn’t accommodate transparency. And given that PostScript has long been and continues to be the professional-level commercial reproduction standard, this conflict seems to raise a red flag: How can Illustrator make art that PostScript can't print? Read more » 

. Tagged with: