LonelyStreets.com

Day 7 - 7/11

Our second (and last) day of digital photography with Dylan today. We spent the first part of class in the building’s lighting studio where we talked through the basics of photographic lighting. Most of it was review for me, having learned these things as a teenager helping my mother out at photo shoots. One juicy bit of advice I hadn’t heard before was to put some sort of reflector over your on-camera flash (e.g., taping some scoth tape across the face of the flash), thereby reducing the otherwise horribly harsh light of the standard camera flash.

We then spent the second half of class looking at everyones series’ of photographs that we did for homework. Lots of neat stuff. In general, everyone had a few great shots and a few mediocre ones (myself included), but then we’re designers not photographers, right? For my series, I was thinking about how being in school again kind of makes me feel like a kid, and so I tried to take shots from a child’s perspective, and which had something of the dreamy qualities of old memories. Click here to take a look at my slide show.

For the afternoon we began working with Adobe Illustrator. I’ve played with Illustrator before, and feel that it’s one of the most frustrating programs I’ve ever used. My classmates say it’ll get better when I get used to it, but I think any software that angers me so much is simply badly designed. Why can’t I select a point by clicking on it? Why?! I think Flashes (cut-down) vector editing spoiled me, as I find it much simpler. I put together the following humorous image using illustrator:

July 11th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Photography | No Comments »

Day 6 - July 10th

We had our first class with Dylan today. Dylan is a fine arts photographer who also acts as the CMU Design digital media expert (read: has access to every bit of technology in the building). Dylan proved to be another fine teacher - fast talking but clear, full of nervous energy but engaging. He gave us a nice long lecture on the basics of digital photography and an interesting slide show covering trends in contemporary photography. While all my recent notes have basically been my notes, today’s will be even more so.

Vocabulary

ISO - Film (or sensor) sensitivity to light. Faster ISO’s need less light to do the job, but also tend to produce more digital noise. Slower ISO’s produce a smoother tonal range but tend to get blurry.
F-Stop/Aperture - How open the camera’s shutter gets (think maximum diameter). The higher this number, the smaller the aperture. Higher F-stops need more light, but give broader depth of field (can focus on closer and farther objects simultaneously).
Shutter Speed - The amount of time that the shutter stays open. This ranges from as long as you like, to thousandths of a second (the numbers are quoted in fractions of a second). Shutter speed numbers basically act opposite F-stops: higher shutter speeds need more light, slower one’s can get decent pictures in low light. If you move up in shutter speed, you generally want to go down with your F-stop to keep things balanced (though most digital cameras do all this for you).
Focal Length - How wide your lens is. A 28mm lens is considered wide-angle, and will tend to stretch things out a bit. 50mm is normal, and 85mm is a telephoto lens, which will tend to compact space.
White Balance - Different light sources have different temperatures, and thus produce differently colored ambient light that we generally want to adjust for. Dylan told us to get in the habit of not using auto-white balance on our cameras, as it tends to not work well.
Resolution - the whole mega-pixel thing, not news to anyone. One thing to note here is that with film, resolution degrades smoothly as print size increases, with digital, you simply hit a threshold afterwards things just fall apart.

And a few other notes from the lecture:

If your camera supports it, you should always shoot RAW format, which records all the data the camera takes in at the time of the photo (as opposed to JPEG, which loses data in the compression).
It’s better to adjust for color/saturation etc. during the RAW to Photoshop conversion, than afterwards (as I have always done… oops).

For homework we’ve been asked to take a series of 10 to 12 photos that tell some sort of story or express a mood. I’m excited about doing this: I think I’m going to take some photos that try to evoke how being a student again makes me feel younger and brings back some of that ’sense of wonder’ that children are so prone to. I’ll post the photos tomorrow.

For the afternoon software class we were asked to make a poster advertising our cell phone. I think the idea was that this would get us working in both inDesign and Photoshop at the same time. I decided to take this a rather humorous route and came up with the following (which is secretly the reason I chose my phone):

Not my best typography work, but funny, eh?

July 10th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Photography | 2 Comments »

Day 5 - July 9th

I think that we were all a little disappointed that today would be our last day with Karen Moyer. Between her deep and broad design knowledge, unstoppable exuberance, and impish grin she has made us all very happy to be studying at CMU.

The day began with a critique of our last two typographical hierarchy exercises: composition and ‘final.’ For the composition exercise we were to take our favorite version of the poster we’ve been working on for the last week and set it into a rectangular field of up to 11″x17″. We had to print on 11″x17″ paper and then go at it with an Exacto knife, which I hadn’t done since 2D Design in high school, but it was fun. I think the main point of this exercise (besides the obvious), was to get us thinking about how we use and perceive negative/white space. I was actually pretty happy with my compositions, but made a stupid mistake, leaving one line in a slightly larger stroke width than I should have (or was allowed within the assignment’s parameters). Karen at first started to talk well of my efforts, but then noticed my error and essentially gave them a “blech.” I think this may prove to be my most important design lesson today: careless errors can quickly get an otherwise fine design solution thrown to the wayside.

For the second exercise of the day, in which we were finally allowed to edit the text we were working on a bit and utilize as many typographic variables as we felt necessary, I had fortunately not made the same mistake. I was happy to see that most of the class had come up with fine solutions to our problem, and all of my classmates have come a very long way in the past week (myself included). I couldn’t help but be even more happy that Karen seemed to consider my solution the best in the class. I’d post the finished product here, but for two issues. First, it really wouldn’t look very special to anyone who doesn’t understand the amount of work and iterative design that went into it; and second because Karen has apparently been using this assignment for many years, and I can’t help but think of it as her proprietary thing.

After critiquing our work, Karen went on to explain how all of the exercises we’ve been using are useful for real projects. Simple as the exercises were, they can be a great way to arrive at typographical design solutions in the future. She also explained how different solutions will generally fall into two different categories: majorly different alternatives and variations (subtler changes within a given alternative). She pointed out that it is always important to try both of these to find the best solution.

I asked Karen how to know when you are done working on a solution. The question was in my mind because last night I was on version 14 of my final piece and not stopping, when I asked one of my classmates for advice on what to do next, to which he responded “You’re done.” Karen responded with “Thank God for deadlines.” She said that you’re never done, that there’s always one more thing you can do or try. You simply need to take the reflective knowledge you gain and apply it to your next project. In this way I think design is a lot like music. When I work on a song I always know I can keep going back and hammering at it some more, but most of the time I’d rather move on. When I go to the next piece however, I always have some new insight I’ve gained from the last.

Karen finished the day with a lecture on typography; more specifically readability and legibility, from which I pulled the following tidbits:

Never use serif and sans-serif fonts together.
Auto-tracking is pretty good - you may find that you rarely have to make manual adjustments here.
Kerning takes a very long time, and is usually only really important with display size fonts and larger (14+ pts).
Kerning is done where ‘counterform’ appears large. ‘Form’ is the space underneath a letter, and counterform is the space above and around it.
The idea behind manual kerning is that we want to preserve the regular visual rhythm of letters, and so may need to pull some closer together.
To decide where to kern, find the optical gray and adjust for maximum evenness.
Temporarily tracking out text a bit can make it easier to know where to kern.
When designers use tracking, it is generally done quite purposefully - it is not a normal adjustment.
Readability refers to how a text appears when skimmed or glanced at. Do the important parts stand out? Does the text look enticing enough to make the reader look deeper?
Legbility refers to the little issues of deciphering individual bits of text.
Normal flush-left, rag-right text is generally the most legible.
Justified text requires longer lines with more characters to avoid ‘rivers.’
Conversely, if line length is too long, it becomes difficult for readers to keep track of what line they are on.
Rivers impede legibility.
Full line spaces (blank lines) are ok in text-sizes, but tend to look too big in display sizes.
The minimum number of characters/spaces/punctuation required to justify a line is about 40, and 55-70 is optimal.
If you want to justify but have only 40 or so characters/spaces/punctuation per line, it’s better to move to a smaller font to allow more characters/line (or use a condensed font).
When you have more than about 70 characters/line, you need to add additional line space to preserve legibility (regardless of justification).
2 points of leading is normal for text.
Normal stroke weights for text are 45 to 55 (in Univers anyway - this depends on the font).
When putting something together, start with the body copy, and build hierarchy out from there.
If all else is equal, justified and rag-right are of equal legibility - but justified text is rarely done well, and so rag-right tends to be easier to read.
Caption text, due to its small size, often requires a little extra leading (even though line lengths tend to be small).
Title text doesn’t necessarily require a larger type size, as long as there is some signal of its importance.

Whew! Quite a list, eh? For the afternoon we just played around in Photoshop, working on learning it’s ins and outs. I threw together the following rather cool image from a pic of a long-haired long-horned bull:

And this one was from a scan of my sunglasses

July 9th, 2007
Posted by Paul in CMU, Design Fundamentals, Photography, Typography | No Comments »

New Photo and a new-old song

First, a self portrait I did that I really like:

Also, the following is actually a song I put together a few months ago, but forgot to post among the others. It’s a fun and happy reggae rock tune - very hippy sounding, but I like it anyway.

Benz Lex Beemers

June 15th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Music and Movies, Photography | No Comments »

Kansas City Sci-Fi and Vacancy

Just wanted to post a couple pictures I was working on today, and like a lot. They are very much opposite images, and so work nicely together. This first one was originally a photo of part of Kansas City at night, though it’s gone a bit sci-fi now…

This second one was originally a photo taken by my mother, Lorie Robare, who is a professional photographer. She kicked me down a damaged print and gave me permission to play with it, so I scanned it in and tweaked it for maximum creepiness, and am thoroughly satisfied:

And because they go together so well and I just can’t help myself:

June 3rd, 2007
Posted by Paul in Photography | No Comments »

Nikon

We bought a new camera last week - a Nikon D-40, currently the cheapest D-SLR on the market. I have to say that it’s really nice, takes amazing photos. Shutter is lightning-fast responsive, and it takes nighttime photos that are bright as day (as long as you can hold it still during long exposures). The following photo was actually taken by my wife while I was driving. The flash went off, so the original was just an ugly bright reflection of the flash in the windshield, but I managed to coax this out of it in Photoshop, and I really like it. Very LonelyStreets.

This one I actually took myself, out of one of my apartment’s front windows on a Friday night:

And finally, the following is not the greatest photo in the world, but I think it does a nice job of illustrating the kind of nonsense that goes on in Des Moines’ “loop” on Friday and Saturday nights. What, exactly, are these silly-looking hip-hoppety-in-the-Iowa-hood dudes doing? Well, waiting for redneck teenagers in cars without mufflers to pull up so they can yell at them of course! This photo was also taken out the window of my apartment and depicts the sidewalk across the street. Now, try to imagine that everywhere down here is like this on the weekends, and you’ll start to get a sense of how exciting downtown Des Moines is. By the way, we normally call these folk “Loop Scoopers” (due to their habit of driving in circles around downtown), but since these poor schmoes are car-less, I think they should be called “Loop-Poopers.” What do you all think?

May 24th, 2007
Posted by Paul in Photography | 14 Comments »

Proficiency

Accompanying my acceptance letter to Carnegie Mellon was an FAQ. One of the questions was something along the lines of ‘what software do students use most often?” The answer was

“Before you join us in late August, please become proficient with:

Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe AfterEffects or Flash
Adobe InDesign
Web authoring software (Dreamweaver for example)”

Dear heavens! If I didn’t have a jump-start on most of those, I think I’d be in a lot of trouble. Regardless, I’m now on a quest for proficiency and have been churning out some fun stuff using Photoshop and thought I’d share:

May 21st, 2007
Posted by Paul in Photography | 3 Comments »

Downtown Des Moines on a Saturday

I wandered around downtown Des Moines on Saturday taking photos. I didn’t realize at the time that I was taking these in black and white, but I think they turned out nicely regardless. Note the near total desolation: no pedestrians, no cars on the streets. Des Moines can be a very creepy place.