Michael Paul Young

Check out the amazing portfolio of Michael Paul Young full of motion and static compositions. I think this is the guy who runs You Work For Them, a great site to buy any sort of design books/videos/prints and stock art or fonts. Look at the freebies every once in a while.

Review: Fujifilm Finepix J-10 & WD Elements 640GB

Right before graduation I decided to buy a small cheap point & shoot and an external hard-drive. Here are some of my early conclusions.

Fujifilm Finepix J-10: Bought on Newegg refurbished for 70$, came with a free case and 2 gig card. Overall what I expected from a cheap camera. Best shots are in well lit outdoor areas, the white balance tends to be kinda bluish indoors and the auto-focus is a little strange sometimes. The styling & build are better than what I expected and the scene selection mode is helpful. In terms of manual controls, you can only change the ISO and white balance, there is also exposure compensation and video. It's a decent camera and good for only 70$.

UPDATE: The shutter got randomly stuck on me today (or at least I think that's what happened), was just taking pictures and it all of a sudden stopped showing anything on the screen and the photos were black. I freed the little guy by setting the shooting mode on "firework" and setting a really long exposure, then when the photo was being taken it froze up and I turned the camera off. When I turned it back on it was fine again. I am not sure if this is a good reason to return it, I'll see if it happens again.

Western Digital Elements 640 GB USB 2.0: Also bought from Newegg for 70$. This hard-drive is probably the simplest you can buy, no fan and no power switch, just plug and play (it stops spinning after a little bit of idle time). I've used it a couple of times to back-up school files and so far works well, got a little hot, but that was after it was continuously working for maybe 5 minutes or more.

As for Newegg, it was my first time ordering anything from them and I am satisfied. They have free shipping and everything arrived on time and uninjured.

Murat Pak

Recently posted in the Motionographer quickies Murat Pak has some really nice and unmistakable work, worth to check out. If you like it look at Korb's work as well.

English Russia

English Russia is a great site. A lot of quirky, strange and interesting things from Russia or the Soviet Union, both old and new. This is a recent post about Russian appetizers.

This is studen (the "n" is soft). It is usually made in a casserole type dish and is basically aspic (meat jelly) eaten during the holidays such as new years. The article should have mentioned bread as a separate item since it is I would say the core of any Russian meal.

Quench Your Aural Desires

A while ago I realized that there is absolutely no reason for us to illegally download music when there is so much great stuff out there. Below are some sites I regularly visit for music.

Brooklyn Radio: A ton of amazingly well put together shows crossing a lot of various genres (old & new, hip-hop, reggae, and whatever other obscure terms people amuse themselves with). I recommend in no particular order, Mandean Radio, Wake The Town & Tell The People and the newly added I Love My Wife. The Rub, High Heels, Bastard Jazz, and the Shake Up have some good ones too.

Mad Decent Blog: A lot of crazy stuff. Mostly electronic or rap kinda stuff. Fun & energetic music.

Unpiano: Rock and some hip-hop. A variety of music, all good and interesting.

Disco Belle: Basically club music, electronic & rap.

As you can see most of the above is on the up-beat side. That is because during the last year or so the only time I listen to music is pretty much when I am working (which is always) and the only music I can listen to when I work cannot be relaxing, it distracts me for some strange reason.

Pandora is always good too.

The Very First

I suppose today everyone has a blog so I decided to create one as well (also, a teacher of mine made it my last assignment). After a couple of days trying to pick a name and all that stuff here it is. Hopefully, it will all go fairly well. I will try to post fairly often. As a preview, the post will likely vary greatly, but will all have a general focus. Whatever it is I will try to make it as interesting as possible, most will probably focus on different kinds of design and/or art.

Writing this kind of reminds me of working at the RIT radio station, WITR 89.7. Sitting a small enclosed space and talking to no one, most times there probably wasn't anybody listening anyways.

Finally, for my first image I am just posting my profile image and another from that series. It is piece created with code, specifically with Processing. The initial inspiration was nature. I wanted to create something that would show repetition. At first, I looked at fractals in nature, but then went into recursion. To me these images represent the ceaselessly random yet structured nature of the organisms that we can position within the category of "nature". In addition, images of outer space come to mind, this can open up a whole new range of infinite possibilities of interpretation. The colors of the circles are sampled from a photograph I took. The sectioning and color change was created by opening the file in a text editor, instinctively deleting some portions and re-saving the file. The results differ each time, from time to time producing something completely dissimilar. This final action ties into the seemingly random yet structured aspect of the code and visual result.





Enjoy & feedback is always welcome!