Musical Weekend

A while back (months) some friends decided to have a musical weekend. The always wonderful Wine & Spirit played at the Altar Bar once again drawing a crowd. Free Candy also made their Pittsburgh debut the same night. They played two shows that weekend, one following Wine & Spirit at the Altar Bar and again at the Hard Rock Cafe two days later. They celebrated the occasion by giving away free candy as their name suggests they do. But apparently many people at the Hard Rock are not fans of candy, because the night ended with many pieces left.

So while at these small concerts I decided to break out my handy dandy camera and take some pictures. (Who's surprised?) There were many worthy shots and even a few videos. This was my first time trying to capture some videos with my Nikon D3100 and I learned a very important lesson, a tripod helps a ton. Unfortunately I don't have one, so I'll stick with still shots.

One thing that surprised me is the quality of the lighting at the Altar Bar. The stage is pretty evenly lit allowing for me to concentrate more on composition and less on worrying about whether the shot will require extensive post processing. The back of the stage is lit as much as the front even though it is under a quite large overhanging platform. I was even better than the Hard Rock's lighting.

More people from Slippery Rock attended these concerts than usual which isn't hard to do when there are two Slippery Rock bands playing. I even managed to catch up with a few friends. When not taking pictures, there was always someone to talk to. This needs to happen more often.

Focusing

Wow, three months since last time. That can't be good. I have to check facebook and twitter to remember everything since then.

In late October I visited SRU for homecoming. Every year, my photos of homecoming are technically nice but lacking compositionally. This year was no different. The weather is usually overcast giving soft shadows and pleasant textures. But there always seems to be something in the frame which I don't want.



The success of my homecoming photos motivated me to once again participate in Project 365. I loved the first year doing it and learned a lot about photography. This time, I will be trying to do the same, but with more enthusiasm. It's been a lackluster beginning, but I expect to improve shortly. This year's phots can be found in my Take 2 set.

In other news...

I recently began messing around with Unity. For someone who's worked almost exclusively in 2D it is a bit daunting to add the third dimension. Right now I'm still going through tutorials and such. If you know of any good resources please let me know about them in the comments. So far the most difficult part is understanding the choices of the makers of the tutorials. The engine is capable of primarily running two languages, JavaScript and C#. For some odd reason the developers chose to write everything in JavaScript. I understand how it makes the engine more approachable, but JavaScript leaves too many questions unanswered.

If that last paragraph interests you, you will be glad to know I started a new blog focusing exclusively on my software engineering antics. it is very young and my experience with technical writing is limited to the few papers from my computer science classes. Give it time, I very much want to make it succeed. Check it out at brianturner.info.

Time to go prepare for the AFC Championship. GO STEELERS!

Autumn in Slippery Rock

Dang, I sure messed up that more posts thing.

I wasn't quite prepared for how much work school was going to be. This year I have an apartment with one other person. I don't really want to talk about the situation, it's a sore subject. Anyway, I advise anybody looking for a place to live in Slippery Rock to stay away from The Ivy. I strongly doubt their ability to count above three.

This is my first time ever taking a photography class. Results have been mixed. The first critique resulted in my photo being related to dying dreams and the death of Santa Claus. The next one consisted of two photos, one which was basically perfect and the other somewhat mediocre. Since I am not in the beginner's class I feel like I'm doing just fine. The true test will be when I must use film. I began photography when I bought my first digital camera and have never used film. While I'm curious about it, the thought of photos being related to my grade scares me. This isn't the first art class I've taken, but it is the first that I began learning outside of class. One of my photos is used by a website/blog on average once a week, which to me is a testament to my ability. (Flickr also lists me as one of the featured photographers of Slippery Rock) Hopefully I don't end up hating photography because I'm taking a class as has happened with every other hobby I took a class for.

There are lots of topics which I thought about putting in here, but I didn't write them down and I can't remember them. I typically use Evernote for this type of thing. Speaking of Evernote one use I have found for it is making a playlist for my school radio show. Whenever I hear a song which fits into my show I add it to the list to look-up in the station's library.

This Summer

So this summer wasn't an entire loss.

The Starlite Car Cruise, which claims to be the largest car cruise on the east coast, takes place every Friday during the summer at the North Way Christian Community Church. It has been a staple of my summers for the past few years. They have everything from the Model T to Lamborghinis, but mostly classic cars. If you have ever seen a classic car driving around western PA on a Friday chances are that it was heading to/from this event. The best part is that it is sponsored entirely by local businesses so everything is free (except the food). There are even prizes for cars of the weekly theme. The theme when I attended was horsepower but all cars are welcome. The photo above was taken there. Some of my favorite photos over the years have been of cars at the car cruise.

Shifting gears, I have been working on a facebook app for quite some time. When I first started I was quite enthusiastic about it. Unknowingly at the time, I made a poor decision about my hosting provider. Being a cheap college student I went with a free hosting provider. After making a ton of progress and just before release the provider closed down with no warning. Everything which was not backed up was lost, that constitutes everything I made because I hadn't backed up any of it. All the code along with the entire database was lost. That happened a little over a year ago. This story should be a lesson about backing up data and free hosting providers. Since then I have found another free provider (don't say anything) with a better record. Now the application is up and running better than before. The first version did not use any javascript. The new version uses it with plans to use more. The Facebook Javascript (FBJS) sandbox is more capable than I had originally thought. I didn't even have to deal with the nitty-gritty of AJAX. FBJS has a high level AJAX class to handle everything! For those wondering, the application allows one to give nicknames to his/her friends. It's called My Nickname. The next feature to be released is a profile box.

The other major achievement of my summer is the understanding of the impact of people in photographs. If you know my photography habits this goes without saying, but I like candid photos. The problem with that is most people in candid photos don't like them. My habits saw a shift this summer. I now take hardly any photos of people, and when I do they are usually small and far away. Replacing candid shots is macro shots. Macro pictures don't typically work with people. So I have taken drastically fewer photos of people. Looking back at the macro photos I keep thinking, "ok it's cool, but not engrossing." When I go back to school in a few weeks I will be working on photographing people. (Roomies be warned) This was all made possible by the Project 365 which I am participating in. If you have no clue what that is go read my post just before starting it.

Side note: The frequency of these posts is lower than I like, that will be changing.

Summertime

So much has happened since my last post, which was only a week ago. Not all of it pertains primarily to me.

First off, the next major version of Firefox was released. It's now up to 3! There are thousands of improvements over version 2. But the most convincing reason to upgrade is probably the stability and performance enhancements. Firefox 3 will crash less and use less memory all while performing faster.

Firefox's release was mere hours after the release of the Spore Creature Creator. The creature creator is the precursor to the actual game which is scheduled to be released on September 7. I am really anticipating the release because the game just might be the most difficult undertaking by any game producer.

In other news my Chemistry professor told me without looking at his records that I probably have the highest grade in the class. That means that I can relax and possibly worry less this final week.

A few months ago I was participating in the Flickr Project 365. The premise of the project is to take a picture every day for a year. Unfortunately, I was unable to finish due to losing my camera for a few weeks. I plan on trying again sometime soon, hopefully starting on July 1. Regardless, one of my friends was inspired to try the same concept with songs. He has started a MySpace page dedicated to his project known as SongProject365.

It is also now officially summer here. Which means I am officially missing out on summer to take classes.

Blogged with the Flock Browser