When something is advertised as ‘Free’ it often comes with strings attached and is rarely, really, free. The good folks over at creativeLIVEare offering something for nothing, well almost, but the something they ask back is a little bit of word-of-mouth promotion and it is well worth it for what you get in return.
I have enrolled on several of their Photography courses in the past and the talent they have brought in has been considerable, including Chase Jarvis (who was instrumental in setting this project up), Scott Bourne (Aperture master), Zack Arias (Rock photographer/Lighting guru) and that’s just the Photographers! There are many more talented people who have lent their talents to the creativeLIVE courses and who have shared their knowledge for free.
If you can’t tune in at the time the course is going out live, you can catch up later, sometimes they stream the event on a loop for a few days afterwards and then video courses are available for purchase afterwards, at a fairly reasonable rate for the number of hours tuition you get from the professionals involved, usually around $79-$129 depending on the amount of content.
They even streamed a whole weekend workshop live (actually 3 days) with the awesome Vincent Laforet on HD DSLR Video Production, which was very detailed and fascinating for the bits I was able to tune in for.
To top that, starting this Wednesday 25th creativeLIVE are running a Jasmine Star (super adulated Wedding Photographer with the best looking blog I have ever seen) workshop for 5 days, to include live streaming of the Photographer as she covers a real wedding.
That’s 5 days! What these guys and girls are providing for free is really, really impressive.
The only downside is that the time difference can be a bit of a pain for us in the UK, with some courses, such as the one I have just enrolled on Web Design Boot Camp running very late, in this case from 11pm – 1am GMT. So unless they stream that one for free afterwards I would have to pay to see it probably.
If you are at all curious about the Photography, Web Design, Photoshop, CS5, even Water Colour world, you should definitely check out the creativeLIVE calendar and see what is coming up, you can’t beat the price!
Well, that’s the hope anyway. This post is a test to see if it is true that embeds from the wonderful and much-classier-than-YouTube video sharing site Vimeo, actually do work on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.
Let me know in the comments if it doesn’t work for you:
*Update* Had to change the video as it looks like there has to be a mobile version created especially, or at least, the original video by my friend James Burland (see the original here) didn’t work on my iPhone.
Part of my job is to explain why we need to backup our data, and whilst it is very hard to appreciate why you should go to all the effort when the chances of data loss are relatively small, the chance is there, and ever present with the increased amount of digital data that we are storing nowadays.
Chase Jarvis is a really amazing visual artist. As well as being a top notch Photographer/Media producer, he is also a great Teacher/Instructor and, unlike many professional photographers in days gone by, he loves to share the secrets behind what he does to get the results. I have learnt a lot from Chase and his team and been inspired in the past by their practical approach to Photography, but also the artistic side too.
In the video below Chase, and his (very professional) team, show us how their workflow has been setup, from capturing the shot/video through to final storage and output via backup processes for servers and individual machines. It is something to aspire to and is based on a full-on professional studio, but the principles of redundant backups, off-site backups and individual machines with Time Machine running (giving hourly versions of files), are useful to anybody.
If you have ever been unfortunate enough to lose cherished photos of moments that can never be repeated (I have) then you will know how painful and time consuming, (not to mention expensive!) data recovery can be.
It is vitally important to have a solid backup policy in place. At the very least it should include an on-site daily backup, copied to an off-site/online location of your key data.
Please, take the time to watch this very stylish and informative video, even if you have just a passing interest. One day you might be very thankful you did. And if you have any data loss horror stories feel free to leave a comment and share the pain.
Remember: With data loss, it is not if it is WHEN!
Apple yesterday announced that the new iPhone OS 4.0 will be hitting the ubiquitous mobile phone/device/mini-computer in the Summer, but the iPad would have to wait a few more months until Autumn (the Fall as they would call it). Call it paranoia, but I have a theory why this might be.
The iPhone traditionally sees a new model around the end of June. So that would tie in nicely to the release of iPhone for OS 4.0. Many features, most notably multi-tasking, will not be available to older models except the most recent iPhone 3GS. So to get all the new shiny goodness of OS 4.0 on their device, many iPhone users will have to upgrade. This will generate a ‘need’ in consumers minds so that they end up buying new hardware to run the ‘must-have’ features of the new iPhone OS.
However, the iPad will still only be about three months old by the end of June, and Apple may well be planning to upgrade the iPad’s specs, but not that soon for fear of really, really, upsetting their early iPad adopters.
So I think that Apple will revamp the iPad in 6 Months time, about September-time, and coincidentally will release OS 4.0 for the iPad at the same time. This will drive many who had been critical of the iPad’s first incarnation to think again about purchasing now it has better specs and a shiny new OS. This will also give consumers time to get used to having OS 4.0 and its enhanced features, and they will be gagging to get this same functionality on their iPads too.
I don’t know about you, but when I am online, specifically when I am on Twitter I see numerous links every day to articles or blog posts or just sites and services that I want to check out, and usually I don’t have time to look at them. So I have become an avid user of the Read it Later service. But it is just about to get better!
I recently purchased the Macheist 2 nano-bundle which, amongst other apps, included MacJournal 5. This application has a lot of writing resources but most of all, for me at least, it allows the authoring and uploading of blog posts, complete with multi-media elements.
Here is a picture from my iPhoto library, added via the media browser in MacJournal, scaled down to 25%:
Not too extensive a test, but this is just a quick look at it in a five minute break, a more detailed look at it will follow soon.
For now, go and have a look at the MacHeist nano-bundle. For around £13 it is a real steal, and includes the wonderful RipIt DVD Disc ‘backup’ software too.
This is the second of a two part post about the Pro HDR app for the iPhone. In this post I include some examples of what the app can do, and talk about why I like it and bought it.
In the first part of this two-parter I talked about how the Pro HDR iPhone app by eyeappsllc looks and works. In this second part I wanted to include a few examples and show what the app could do with the photos fed into it. More
This post looks at the new Orb Bluetooth headset which converts from a ring, worn on the finger, to a Bluetooth earpiece and back again; and why I want one!
I think I may have mentioned before that I consider myself a Geek and I am really not afraid to admit it. However, if I were a soon-to-be-married Geek, this is the ring I would be asking for (it is too late for our 10 year Anniversary, what’s the next one I can ask for a ring as a present?).
It has been developed by a company called Hybra Advance Technology and it all sounds a bit futuristic and fanciful, but it might just be real because it won the 2010 Best of Innovations Award at CES last month with a promised launch date of ‘Spring 2010′ for the OLED version and later in the year for the very nice looking full colour FOLED (Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diode – in case you were wondering) version.
I don’t know about you, but I have seen quite a lot of sites recently using little pop-up icons to represent the different ‘social-sharing’ services, allowing people to let others quickly know how much they enjoyed the post they have just read (hopefully).
I have been using the great ShareThis service which I thought was nice looking, iconic and subtle. You do not see anything until you click on the nice green ShareThis icon. However, this does mean you have to click on the icon, assuming that you know what it might do I suppose.
I did wonder how these other bloggers had got these little icons on their posts that popped up when you hover the mouse over them. So, on one site, I viewed the source for the page and found a reference to SexyBookmarks. Checking out the site I found it was another free (or donationware) WordPress plugin, giving you quite a few options for which services to include icons for. Nice!
I bought my first generation iPhone almost a year after the original launch, only when I could afford to because O2 had drastically reduced the price without contract. Selling my old iPod 30Gb and my old mobile meant I could just about afford it.
Now, I have desperate geek-lust towards the iPhone 3GS, but there is no way that I can afford to get one at the moment. So I am resigned to using my old original iPhone for the foreseeable future.
This isn’t such a bad thing really, I love the iPhone as a device, and the OS3 software update went a long way towards making my iPhone more of a pleasure to use.
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When something is advertised as ‘Free’ it often comes with strings attached and is rarely, really, free. The good folks over at creativeLIVE are offering something for nothing, well almost, but the something they ask back is a little bit of word-of-mouth promotion and it is well worth it for what you get in return.
I bought my first generation iPhone almost a year after the original launch, only when I could afford to because O2 had drastically reduced the price without contract. Selling my old iPod 30Gb and my old mobile meant I could just about afford it.