Exhibit 5a | Creative Disobedience

As a proud and mostly satisfied owner of an Apple TV, I was pretty excited about being able to order movie rentals directly through my Apple TV. It’s like having cable on demand without actually having to pay a monthly fee for cable. The system is pretty simple to use and relatively inexpensive. Movies run from $3.99 to $4.99 depending on whether you get regular quality or HD quality.

The system is set up to work like this: First you browse through the available movies - and it should be noted that this list continues to grow. It doesn’t contain every title, but usually when I rent I’ve found something that I want to watch, including new releases. So you choose your movie, hit the “Rent” button, and the fee is charged to your iTunes account. The movie is then added to the Rented Movies option in your menu and the download begins. A few minutes later, once the video has started downloading, you get a notification that the movie is ready to be watched. You have the option of watching it immediately (streaming while you watch), or you can watch it any time within a 30 day window. Once you start watching it, you have 24 hours to complete watching it before it expires.

In theory, this system is pretty sweet, when it works, like say, nine in the morning on a Sunday. Works like a charm. Want to know when this system is broken? Sunday night, at, say 7pm. Apple does not have the bandwidth to handle all of the people renting movies on a Sunday night. Period. Instead of the system working, here’s what happens:

You choose a movie, hit the rent button, you wait a few minutes, you get the notification that your movie is ready to watch, so you hit play (and so start your 24 hour expiration period). Works great for about 10 minutes, then the movie freezes for a minute or two, and the you are rewarded for that wait with another 30 seconds of the movie before it freezes again. The Apple servers simply cannot keep up with the download rate. And for the record, I checked my internet connection to make sure that it isn’t on my end. While this was happening I was pulling down nearly 9mb per second, which is as fast, if not faster than most cable hookups.

Here’s why this sucks: Despite it’s inability to serve up the data fast enough during high traffic hours, the ATV tells you that it’s ok to start watching your movie. Because you’re told it’s ok to start, you press play and your 24 hour expiration timer clicks on. But here’s the kicker: the movie doesn’t download enough to even watch half of it over the course of several hours. You can’t stay up all night waiting for the movie to download, and you can’t skip work to watch it the next day. If you unsuccessfully try to watch your movie at, say, 7pm on a Sunday, it will expire on Monday night at 7pm whether you’ve watched it or not. If you get home from work at 6:30 you’re pretty much screwed. You’ve lost your $4.99 rental price and now you’re all pissed up because you’ve watched just enough of a movie to want to know what happens, but you’ll have to wait for it to come on Netflix to see how it ends.

What really burns me is that, ok, your servers can’t handle it. That sucks, but ok. So why does the system say that it’s ok to watch your video, when in reality the servers can’t deal. If the system said that there wasn’t enough bandwidth, then fine, I wait until it’s fully downloaded and watch it at my leisure sometime in the next month, no harm done. But because I’ve pressed Play, I’ve activated the 24 hour expiration period for a product that I don’t even have yet. By my estimation, 3:10 to Yuma will be downloaded somewhere around 2am tonight, which is obviously a little late in the day to start watching a movie.

Apple needs to fix this problem and fix it soon. I’m going to harass their customer service department for a refund. What the hell am I going to do with my Sunday night now?

“We keep talking as if it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter that Obama gets 92 percent of the black vote, because since he only got 35 percent of the white vote, he’s in trouble,” Clyburn said. “Well, Hillary Clinton only got 8 percent of the black vote. . . . It’s almost saying black people don’t matter. The only thing that matters is how white people respond. And that’s what bothered me. I think I matter.”

From the Wall Street Journal.

I came across iPhlog yesterday, which is a photoblog by Ryan Donnell from my home-state of PA. I love the soft-focus Polariod-eque atmospheric quality of the photos he’s making with his iPhone:

iPhone + Photos + Blog = The iPhlog. No cropping, no High Pass Filter, no Levels. Just think of it like a sketch pad…a really expensive sketch pad.

Since I started shoot professionally about a year and a half ago, I pretty much stopped carrying a small format point and shoot around with me. When I felt like making photos, I’d lug out my SLR, and for the most part, it would stay in the bag anyway, so I eventually stopped doing that too. After a while I found myself being disappointed when I’d see something I wanted to shoot without having any camera on me at all, so I decided to invest in a new model point and shoot. After some research I ended up choosing the Canon G9.

I should start up front by saying that I had high expectations about the G9, having read dozens of very thorough reviews by both standard camera geeks and pros who use it as a handy tool. The next thing I should say is that despite it’s popularity with pro-shooters, this is obviously not a pro-shooting tool. It is merely a small, full featured camera that is great for having in your pocket when you don’t want to drag around a large SLR.

The camera itself is amazing - it’s small, yet very dense giving it the feel of a old fashioned film camera and it’s brick styling has often been compared to old Leica range-finders (in a very roundabout fashion). Unlike the Canon G3 which I used when I first moved to New York, the G9 fits handily in a coat pocket and despite the weight is very easy to carry around. And even though it has a number of exterior knobs and buttons I found that they didn’t protrude enough to get get caught when taking the camera in and out of pockets. Additionally, unlike the earlier model I had, the G9 has a proper neck strap, as opposed to a wrist strap and can be easily hung from the neck while shooting.

As for using the camera itself, it should be noted that knowledge of how a camera works is key - this isn’t a simple to use point and shoot: to get the most out of the camera, you need to know about shutter speed, aperture and ISO settings. One of the most lauded features of this camera is the fact that the ISO can be changed manually via a knob on top of the body (although it could be argued that the camera’s poor performance at higher ISOs makes this point moot).

The interface is excellent, and the scroll wheel on the back allows for easy changes when in manual modes and once you learn the ins and outs of what everything does, it’s fairly fast and easy to change your settings. I love the onscreen options on the big LCD, including a live histogram, which comes in handy when trying to capture the correct exposure. Additionally, the startup speed is excellent on the camera which makes it easy to power up and start shooting. Beware though, that the autofocus is slow and the shutterlag is very long, so if you’re trying to shoot action, be ready well in advance.

Overall the image quality is decent for a point and shoot, and I imagine that I’ll be getting better at it once I learn more how to tweak the settings for this particular model. The images are very noisy even in lots of light at ISO 400, although to be fair I’ve been spoiled by near-flawless images on my high end SLRs. As you can see from my samples, I’ll be depending on the RAW mode to allow me to manipulate images, and I think that I will be primarily using my G9 for black and white street photography - the noise turns into a nice, gentle grain when converted to grayscale. Which is completely fine for me.

When I was out shooting over the weekend, I found myself being going back to a more loose style when I was just a hobbyist and not a “professional.” With nothing on the line but having fun and making good photography, I had a great time. Plus, it’s much more important to focus and frame your images when using a small format camera since you don’t have the latitude for cropping etc. While the G9 isn’t going to replace an SLR obviously, I’m pleased to finally have a small format camera that I can have with me most of the time, so when I get the bug to shoot I’ll always be prepared for something, anways.

Photo by Bianca de Blok

Dentists suck, orthodontists suck, and my teeth in particular, suck. I had a second appointment today in the ongoing saga of my mouth and the news was not great. In simple terms, the shoddy work of a variety of past dentists and my forgetful orthodontists has doomed me to potential financial failure.

Turns out, while my brushing technique could improve, apparently the series of cavities that I have managed to culture over the last couple years is not entirely my fault. Sure, I could have gone for more regular cleanings and sure, I could floss more, but it seems that my last few dentists could have done a better job.

You see, the new dentist has all these cool gadgets to show me exactly what the problems are. Specifically, he’s got a digital x-ray system and a fiber-optic digital camera, along with a nice computer monitor which sits over the chair, so you can get a full color view of how messed up your teeth are. He pointed out a variety of things which were highly disturbing and makes me want to go rampage at my previous dentists’ offices. He told me things like this:

“You see this large spot here? This is an old silver filling you had put in some time ago…and you see this bit here? This is the point where the dentist accidentally carved into the neighboring tooth and formed this jaggy sharp edge. This has caused a spot that you can’t get to with your brush or floss and has now formed a cavity.”

and

“You see this dark area here? This is an area where the enamel on your tooth is completely destroyed…you had braces right? Yeah? Well… [moment's pause] … yeah, that guy sure did a number on you…”

The last is in reference to the forgetful orthodontists who kept my braces on for more than a year after they stopped making adjustments. I showed up for monthly checkups (which were done by the techs) and apparently no one ever questioned when I was supposed to have them off. Eventually, one of the orthodontists who had retired happened to stop by the office, saw me in the chair and asked me how I liked having my braces off. My metal smile surprised him, and after consulting the chart ordered my braces taken off the following week. It was the crappy metal bands around my molars which scoured all the enamel which apparently has compounded over the years to put me in this spot. Bastards.

The upshot is that I’m going to have to start doing a whole lotta freelance work to cover all the upcoming appointments to fix my teeth…at least those that can’t wait until next year’s deductible cycle.

On the upside, it’s pretty damn cool seeing your mouth from the inside with the fiber-optic camera and my teeth aren’t that bad overall. As far as I could tell there was only one tiny cavity that was a result of bad brushing…so I don’t need to feel even worse about that. The anger at my other dentists will help me get through the financial woes though. I did consider going to the NYU practice school (one of my friends had good work done there) but I’m worried that if I do that I’ll have even more problems a few years from now.

Teeth suck.

Noted without comment.

Actually, he was sued for breach of contract AND producing craptastic work. Apparently he misrepresented his skill set, didn’t bring an assistant, and generally dogged the whole thing. I would have guessed that not living up to the contract as far as showing up with agreed up staff etc would be easy to prove in court. The interesting thing, however, is that the actual quality of the photos was used as evidence. Read the full story here.

There are several reasons I don’t do weddings, and this is one of them. Screwing up what will hopefully be the one and only wedding day for the client is a lot of weight to carry. At this point in my career I don’t have the experience or expertise to make the attempt. In most cases, when faced with a new shooting situation that I haven’t covered before, I generally take on the challenge, do the research and take my best shot…while being up front with the client about my experience level. But weddings? There are no do-overs and the whole bridezilla thing scares the crap out of me. I’ll leave that to the wedding professionals.

(Via)

As I’ve mentioned before, a large part of my job is to make portraits of executives at my firm. The new visual identity for the firm which was officially launched today calls for environmental-style portraits rather than studio shots. The more of these that I do, the more I realize how similar all the shots in our office is becoming. There are only so many straight portraits I can make in our building before they all start looking the same.

I had to make a portrait of a new executive last week, and since she was able to give me 45 minutes (as opposed to five or ten minutes) I took the opportunity to explore a few alternative options to the basic conference room table shot.

For one of the shots, I opted to experiment with my home-made snoot which I made a few weeks ago and haven’t had a chance to play with before. Rather than using and old cereal box (which has become the blog-favorite material) I chopped up a silver pocket folder from an old design job that I had laying around. I put the silver-side in, and then taped up the outside with gaffers tape to make it look pretty. Then I added an extra strip of tape to the top with a piece of velcro to hold it snugly onto my 580EXII. The added velcro turned out to be very usefl when I was moving the light around during the shoot -I never had to worry about the snoot sliding off even though it was angled down on the subject.

Initially I thought that the silver would help intensify the light, which would in turn allow me to use a lower setting and increase my recycle time. This turned out to be true. However, I got an interesting added bonus to the silver interior: the light when absolutely bonkers inside the snoot and came bouncing out in a really cool pattern on the wall behind the subject. The main light targeted the subject’s face where I aimed it while the secondary light patterns coming from the reflected interior shown on the wall with less intensity around her.

I love the hard shadow behind her and then the softer light patterns all through the frame. You can see where the direct light is hitting on her face and shoulder and then the lighter reflections all around. All this from just one light on 1/4 power. Obviously, in a situation where it would be more critical to focus the light to a specific area, my silver snoot wouldn’t work as well, but in a case like this it added much more depth to the portrait.