www.jstuartj.com

I was re-working my business cards and couldn’t find my copy of Avant Garde. I owned it once, but for the life of me can’t remember what application it installed with. It’s been years since I used it, so perhaps it came with an old version Adobe PageMaker, some design mag CD or maybe Freehand studio; who knows.

Oh well.

I checked Fonts.com and found the ITC version a bit pricey. I guess $29.00 for one style was ok. But I decided to look for an alternative. Searching Font Squirrel, I notice the link to fontspring.com, having just read an article on @font-face, I decide it was time to give web fonts a try and purchased “Urbano” – with and unlimited site licence. A little cut and paste and a quick FTP transfer and Ta Da! I have fancy new headlines for my site.

An added bonus: fontspring.com also includes the OTF fonts. So I can use the same fonts for my business cards and website, as-well as use them for mock-up sites in Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator.

I also picked up “Super Strong”, a nicely done handwritten “comic” style font. I’m always looking for a nice handwritten font, and this one fit the bill. I might give it try on aardvarktopia.com, once I find time to work on it.

Two years ago the city made me cut down a monster elm tree in my backyard. Now I have a really cool mushroom garden. The shot below was taken with my Canon G6, since it has a nice super-micro feature and a rotatable LCD making it easier to shoot lower to the ground.

I just upgraded to SwishVideoHQ this weekend. So I though I would give it test run using video I took of my dad fly fishing on Father’s day. The video below was taken with with a Canon T1i and kit lens (18-55.) I tweeked the brightness slightly in Sony Vegas, then scaled it down to 400×276 and ran it through SwishVideoHQ using the new h.246 encoding and custom path mapping features. It doesn’t really do the Canon T1i HD video justice at this low resolution, but the h.246 encoding appears to work well and custom paths makes it so much easier to integrate video into a WordPress blog.

Good old Elmers never should have put “Flammable” on the label. This is what happens when you leave a photographer alone with a some dice, rubber cement, hot glue gun, a sheet of glass and some black construction paper? Oh toss in a fire extinguisher just to be on the safe side.

Safety first kiddies.

I’m working on an idea for a short film. So on the way home I shot some test footage in the parking garage. This brief shot was captured using my Nikon S210. It was then color graded and edited in Sony Vegas 8.0c, where I added the emergency red and blue flash and sound effects.

I’m also testing the latest build of SwishVideo – v3.5 Pre-Release build 20090218 which now supports h.264 along with a few other minor player enhancements.

This Saturday, I made my way to Wisconsin, for the 2009 Hudson Hot Air Affair. While high winds prevented the Day’s balloon flight. The Moon Glow or “Field of Fire” in this case took place as schedule at sun down. The Hudson Elementary school yard was filled with 35 or so Balloonist all firing their burners into the air. A spectacular sight and one that warmed the frozen air.

The Moon Glow was a new experience in photography. I do a lot of firework and existing light photography, but this was very different from anything I’ve done before. The burners vary in temperature vastly over their burn cycle. Set your exposure too short you get a light blue light which is very dim. Wait too long the oxygen increases the burn and much more light emitted. Exposure control was difficult to say least using my old Canon G6.

I ran across a nice fireworks shot while doing my September archiving. It was taken during the 2008 Aquatennial fireworks, in Minneapolis along the Mississippi river front.

Each year I try to find a new location. This year I fought the crowds on the Stone Arch Bridge, I arrived around three hours early to beat the crowds and as a result had to put up with a drunken nut who fancied himself a “Photography Expert”. He insisted that I had to use a cable release and a wide angle lens to take “Proper” fireworks photos, and preceded to say so over and over and over again… Even after I politely explained for the sixth time, that I was using a wide angle lens and wireless remote. Agggh!

Just fooling around with Google Video and some video off my old Sony HI-8 camera. Shot on New Years Day. This is the remains of my old upright piano after we tossed it on the bonfire. It took forever to light, and about half a gallon of waste oil. But once it caught fire, oh boy did that baby burn.

Click Here

I tired several bandwidths when uploading the video to Google but it appears to make very little difference to the final quality. And I’m still not sure how to get a good static frame for the preview.

The Taste of Minnesota started this weekend, so I headed to Saint Paul this Saturday to photograph the fireworks. I arrived early and wondered for hours, but the crowds were just to… well crowed. The only spot I found to set-up had an uninteresting background. So I headed a mile or so down river. No surprise that the fireworks disappointing, hardly worth the five dollars for parking and four bucks for a bottle of pop. Oh well, once the brief display was over, I turned my camera on the Saint Paul skyline and was treated to this shot.

It’s been a long time between posts, I haven’t event had time to get out and take some photos. I grabbed my camera on the way to St. Paul this morning, and I ran across this city water park. Risking frostbite, I stops to get a few shots not realizing that the fence was 12 feet high locked, and with too many people around to climb over. Being the resourceful type, I considered breaking and entering until I remembered the Timer!

Holding the camera high above my head on mono pod, I tried to hold the camera strait and steady as I shivered in the below zero temp. Luckily the Canon G6 has a swivel LCD panel so It was a little easier to compose the shot. This was the best of the lot, and I still had to crop it, edit, and rotate it slightly.