Essays on robotics, startups, artwork.
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Pain for Gain
A very eclectic group of friends stayed at my house this past weekend. My friend Andreas was visiting from Denmark and my roommate Neil had a bunch of friends over from all kinds of different backgrounds: Ireland, Australia, Panama, etc. Neil’s friend Simon Davis runs a non-profit group called Pain for Gain, formerly known as…
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Snoot Portrait
Andrew Rosenthal lately has me shooting for happier.com. It’s really nice to have shoots coming in regularly. They say the only way to get good at photography is practice, practice, practice and having someone call me on a regular basis holds me accountable to keep pushing that button with my finger. Thanks Andrew! This time…
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makin’ it
I’ve been wondering lately what it takes to become a great photographer. I’m not talking about what it takes to do good photography. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with ordinary good photography and there are plenty of good stock, wedding, nightlife photographers out there, but I’m talking about great photography. Work that is significant.…
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Paul Vernaza
Today I single-handedly started Paul’s professional photography career. Okay, maybe not really. All I did was buy a print of one of his photos see below. But technically this is the start of his professional photography career. Here’s a link to his flickr feed. I like the composition as well as the way the light…
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Saturation Mask
In this one I created a separate layer and used a mask to selectively saturate the colors of the jewelry and the colors around Dijana’s eyes. Using a mask allows me to alter the jewelry without modifying the other parts of the image. I also used a screen layer to lighten those parts as well.
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Lens Flare
I know lens flare is cheesy, but I couldn’t resist. In Photoshop look under Filter -> Render -> Lens Flare -> awesomeness. Note the vignetting in this picture is not a lens artifact or photoshop magic, rather it is caused by the flash, a one point light source coming from the top right. Since there…
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Smooth Creamy Skin
This picture is one of the first where I really went all out on every step in the hierarchy of making a professional photo from two point lighting to lots of photoshop. In addition Karen added to this hierarchy with her jewelry, selecting the clothes and William for make up (hence those crazy eye lashes).…
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A modular robot that is in the New York Times
This is old news (no pun intended) but I never got the times (pun intended) to write a proper blog post about it. Anyways, CKbot got written up in the New York Times on July 28! Yes I know, that is almost three weeks ago. My buddy from college Graham Roberts is one of the…
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Happier Happy Hour
Happier organized a post positive psychology conference happy hour. Apparently all the hot shots of positive psychology had attended this conference. I met some interesting people for example, Robert Biswas-Diener. He’s described as the “Indiana Jones of positive psychology” because he has studied subjects in remote places such as Bangladesh and Kenya. I’ve covered a…