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My son Ryan, age 11, had a school assignment to do a book report in the form of a commercial for the book. There were a variety of constraints, including on the length (35 to 45 seconds) and the content (include a brief synopsis, appeal to 6th graders). He had the option of either acting it out in front of the class or creating a video and sharing it with the class. Of course, with a father trying to break into the film industry, it would have been a crime to not do it as a video.

So he gave it some thought for a week or two, and came up with what I thought was a pretty good idea. Namely, show someone who just can’t put the book down, no matter what else he is trying to do at the same time. Then he worked out a bunch of specific examples, including a few that were a little beyond the small crew (him, me, and his 8 year old sister) and zero dollar budget. And he wrote up a little voice over narration.

Today we went about shooting it. My kids have been on a film set with me often enough to know the ropes and the positions, even for a micro crew like ours. I acted as director of photography, giving some advice on framing and camera movement, and generally handling the camera and the lighting, but waiting for him to call the shots. Megan acted as first assistant director, keeping things moving along. At 8, she is already remarkably good at that. Shot in the morning, edited and sound designed in the afternoon, here is what we came up with.

Normal fathers pass the football around with their kids. But I think this is much more fun.

One thing I think Ryan really took away from the experience was how important sound design is. We spent much more time layering in sounds than we did in film editing, and used no production sound at all. With some good ambience, foley, and effects, it really helps to convey things that you never have to even show. Plus, good sound just makes a thing like this feel polished.

On my end, I wanted to play a little with camera movement, rather than relying on cuts all the time. In each of the little segments, we were trying to reveal the book only after showing Ryan doing the activity, but we wanted to avoid lots of edit points, which would make it harder to connect the pieces in this already short video. So we spent time together designing camera movements that would let us get the activity in close, followed by a clear shot of the book, and especially Ryan reading the book. It was a little tough handling all the movement while also trying to pull focus, but we got it done.

So it was a productive experience for everyone!

Having missed out on a family vacation this summer, we decided spur of the moment to take a quick trip to the Grand Canyon for Thanksgiving with the kids. And what a trip it was!

It started out really well. It was a bit cold for us Southern California types at 7000 feet in the winter in the high desert, but no matter. The kids got to play in snow for the first time when we stopped for a meal in Williams, AZ on Wednesday.

We hiked on Bright Angel trail on Thanksgiving Day, as far down as we figured the kids could manage to walk back up hill. We had a nice turkey dinner with all the trimmings that night in the cafeteria. Between the cold and the walking, we all ate ravenously and enjoyed it.

Friday we set as our day to to get up to watch sunrise over the Canyon, which is normally quite beautiful. We got what I felt was a late start, and it was cold. I thought about staying in bed. I also forgot we had to scrape ice off the car and warm it up to make the short trek from our hotel to the rim.

But we managed to make it over there, with all my camera gear in tow, expecting a pleasant view of sun peaking over the rim.

What we saw as we came up to the edge, however, took our breath away.

We were lucky enough to be in the park for a rare temperature inversion. Now I am not a climate scientist, but my understanding is that once or twice a year, the air at the bottom of the canyon is colder than the air at the top, creating fog inside the canyon. Usually, this results in so much fog that you cannot see much from the rim. But once every 10 years or so, the inversion is just right so that the skies above the Canyon remain blue, while rolling fog fills the canyon. We happened to be there for this event.

I knew it was special when a park ranger came by gawking and taking pictures like a tourist, telling anyone in earshot how lucky they were to see this.

So I snapped away in every direction with my camera. Happily, at some point it occurred to me that the slowly moving fog might make a good video. Eventually I realized it would make even better time lapse. I had not planned for moving pictures, but fortunately, I had all my gear, and I have done enough video that I was able to capture the feeling of the event. I spent a good three or four hours taking footage and making still photos. And when we got home I processed it all into a little video. I put it up thinking I’d share it with my Facebook friends. I also added a link to it on the Grand Canyon’s Facebook page in a comment, thinking anyone going there might get a kick out of it.

I definitely underestimated the interest. It got embedded in a blog called Colossal, garnering thousands of views and getting picked up by numerous other outlets world wide, mostly newspaper and magazine blogs. I will compile a list at some point, but now I have also seen it linked in the Huffington Post. I even got pirated! Someone re-uploaded it as their own content to YouTube. Does that mean I have arrived?

Probably not. I don’t know how long the interest will last, but it has been quite gratifying to share my vacation snapshots with so many people.

I have a few more Hawai’i posts in the works (see the previous posts), but I wanted to step aside for a moment and talk about my new iPhone App HourTracker, which is now available on the App Store.

The Pitch

First, the obligatory self-promotion (feel free to skip ahead to the next section).

Keep yourself on track with HourTracker! At just $0.99, it’s a steal! Track your time across numerous projects and clients using an intuitive punch clock and time card interface. Visualize your data in new and interesting ways. Export your data for further analysis. If you have questions, take a look at our handy-dandy FAQ and if you cannot find what you need there, please join the discussion in the forums.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

The Design Process

Since this blog is meant to be a record of my creative endeavors, and with the app now in the wild, I thought I might blog odds and ends about my design process, both up to now and moving into the future. I’ll focus especially on things like the user interface (UI), iconography, and graphic design. Though I hail from a primarily technical background, I will steer fairly wide of programming minutia here. And as I (hopefully) collect new users, I will report back about what seems to be working for folks and what does not. Hopefully we can learn something together as we go.

My Initial Approach

Today I will start with a quick overview of what the app does and how that informed the first big picture UI decision.

As often works best when designing a piece of software, I was solving a problem for myself, which is that as a recent entrant into the world of freelancing, I wanted a good time keeping app. I was trying to use Excel and later Apple’s Numbers to record my hours, but I did not always have my personal machine with me when I needed to record my time, and it was just a cumbersome way to do things. So I looked around to see what time keeping apps existed for iPhone, and I found that there were indeed some, but none that looked exactly like what I thought a timekeeping app should look like, or did exactly what I wanted.

Apple pushes the idea, and I agree with it, that an app should be simple and streamlined, should perform one task very well, and should look and feel like what it pretends to be. Take their Voice Recorder app as an example. It looks like a giant microphone with a record button and a level indicator. No question what to do with that. It does one thing — record your voice. Yes, there are a few views besides the main one, for example to sort through your previous recordings, but this is kept to a minimum. And you dwell mostly on that central view.

I wanted to do a time keeping app like that, except in my case, based around a punch clock and time card. I’d seen apps composed entirely of tables jammed with text, and I could not tell how to punch in. Tap around a bit, and I guess you eventually figure it out. But it should be obvious. Big fat clock and big fat punch button, just inviting you to tap it, right in the middle of the screen. My solution looks thus (as of the 1.0 release):

I designed my app around this central interface. Yes, there are other views that support other activities, such as modifying individual entries, exporting, etc., but they all hang off this main view. You start on this view and you dwell on this view. Everything else orbits around it. I felt this was a critical design decision and it colored much of what came after.

Furthermore, it was important to me that it have the feel of a traditional punch clock and time card, to the extent that I was able to mimic that in my graphic design. I think I captured that reasonably well.

The challenge, of course, is to make the UI appealing and clean, but also to give the user enough information when they want it. As you can see, the time card in this view is rather small, with half the screen given over to the clock. So in 1.1, which is now in development, I have added a feature which allows you to pull the time card up over the clock, revealing more entries. More on that later.

One last thing to mention up front is that something I really want out of my time keeping app is quick and easy data visualization. I want to be able to see what my hours look like over various time scales, where the time is going (which projects, which categories within a project), and so on. Toward that end, in 1.0 I have implemented a bar chart that shows the last week of activity.

You swipe the time card aside to reveal this graphical view, something like what you find in the native Stock App. For now, it is fairly simple, but in upcoming updates, I will be adding significantly to this feature, with lots of new ways to visualize your data without substantially disrupting this main view.

Well, there is a lot more going on here, but that is enough for now. I will post additional bits and pieces as I continue to develop the app.

Continuing from my last post, where I discussed a short snorkeling video I made in Hawai’i late last month, here we look at a few images of the Waimea Pier that I made early the next morning.

While we were in Po’ipu, on the south side of Kaua’i, we had browsed through the galleries of a few resident photographers. There were many great images, but one that stood out to me was of a pier (not sure which one) with smooth, ghostly water in the foreground. I decided to try to make an image like that myself.

I realized that given the equipment I had, in particular lacking a strong neutral density filter, I was going to need to do this in relatively low light conditions. To get the effect I wanted with the water, I needed an exposure of at least a few seconds. Even with a very small aperture, to avoid over-exposure, that was going to require the sun to be below the horizon.

So early the next morning, around 5am, well before the sun was up, I pushed myself out of bed, hopped in the car, and drove to the Waimea Pier, about a mile up the road from our cottage. I wandered up and down the beach with my camera and tripod, trying different vantage points of the pier, including both facing (almost) into the sunrise and away from it, as well as directly under and over the pier. Some of these shots are shown below.

You can see as the shots progress, dawn is breaking and ambient light is increasing. By the end, the sun is up, and the water is completely resolved, destroying the illusion of a smooth ghostly surface. At this point, it was no longer interesting to photograph the water, so I tried a shot of the top of the pier, using the lines formed by the railing to converge on the picnic table. In hindsight, I should have tried to get the picnic table above the level of the horizon, fitting in that bit of sky inside the covering, perhaps by getting down lower, or moving in closer to the table.

As for the early shots, which are what I really went to collect that morning, I am fondest of the third one, although I never really did get the angle I wanted on the pier. I would have had to have gone further out, perhaps if the beach had curved around, to get the angle I was really looking for, putting the sunrise behind the pier. Still, I like the way the rocks in the foreground provide a nice sharp contrast to the smooth water, and balance the mass at the end of the pier in the opposite corner of the image. It isn’t too far off from my pre-visualization.

In the future, to collect a shot like this, a heavy ND filter would be useful, just to give me more options on exposure, especially as the sun begins to rise. But despite the pain of getting up so early, especially while on vacation, there is no way to beat being on the scene well before sunrise.

I went to Hawai’i, and in particular to the very photogenic Garden Island of Kaua’i, at the end of March and came back with a boatload of photos and video. I processed a lot of the data on my laptop while I was there, publishing the odd item on my Facebook page. So if you follow me there, the next few posts may be familiar. Still, I wanted to get it up here for the record, along with some additional information you might find interesting.

To begin with, here is a short video I put together from footage I took of myself snorkeling in Po’ipu using my GoPro camera in its water-proof housing.

I had finished my Post Production class at UCLA Extension just before we left for the trip, and one thing I learned is that most production sound is junk. Except for dialog, virtually none of the audio you hear in a typical show or movie was recorded on the set. Even some of the dialog will have been re-recorded after the fact using Automated Dialog Replacement (ADR, or looping), with the actor on a sound stage lip syncing to his or her own image on the screen. Certainly a car door, screeching tires, birds chirping, city sounds, whatever, would be added in post. Along, obviously, with music.

Anyway, when I recorded the snorkeling in the video above, the audio was a total loss. You would not expect much from the tiny little microphone on the GoPro, and then in a water tight housing, getting bumped around, and so on: all junk.

Not to fear. After locking the video, which is largely just a montage of shots I took while having fun in the water, nothing really planned, I located the stock sound effects that come standard on a Mac, looking for things like ocean sounds, beach sounds, scuba breathing, bubbles, and so on. I had fun mixing it all together in Final Cut (not exactly Pro Tools, but good enough for this little project), and the end result is not too bad I think, considering I did it in a couple of hours the same day I shot the footage while sitting in our rustic little cottage by the sea.

I was particularly proud of the last part, where the music stops abruptly as the camera exits the water, and then you hear a brief drop in the sound when the camera dips under for a moment. You might almost be fooled into believing that the sounds you are hearing are from the nearby beach, when in fact, there is zero production audio involved here. But there are also numerous other subtle sounds here and there that add to the texture of the video without rising to the level of consciousness, yet which add an important layer to the overall video, without which it is very flat.

The moral for today: audio, usually added in post, is extremely important. But you probably knew that.

Over the weekend, Ryan and I went to the Mission San Luis Rey, a short drive down the freeway from our house. Ryan is in the midst of his 4th grade Mission report, a standard state of California curriculum item. He chose to study San Luis Rey, since it was close enough to visit easily, but one we had never been to before.

Ryan learned about the “King of the Missions”, which at its peak apparently ministered to some 3,000 Native Americans, while managing a ranch that spanned up into what is now the vast Camp Pendleton Marine Base, and which owned more than 50,000 head of cattle.

Meanwhile, I had fun taking pictures.

Going back and forth between the very bright white stucco exteriors under summer-like midday conditions with all the harsh shadows, and the rather dim church interior proved a fun challenge. In addition to the usual adjustments of shutter speed and aperture, I aggressively manipulated ISO and kept close eye on my histograms. Also, while I normally shoot JPG, which tends to be fine if the exposure is relatively even, and which keeps the file sizes to manageable levels, here I shot both RAW and JPG, and indeed I was glad I did. In a few cases, in post processing, I was able to extract quite a bit of detail that was lost in the JPG, both in the dark interiors and in the bright stucco textures.

I also made judicious use of the on camera flash. While not very powerful or flexible compared to the studio strobes, it is eminently portable, and provides just enough additional light in the foreground in a few cases. The shot of Ryan ringing the bell, in particular, would not have worked without the flash. As bright as the white wall behind him is here, to get his face exposed sufficiently without the flash would have involved completely blowing out the whole background.

I visited San Francisco this President’s Day weekend to meet up with my friend Viktor who was in town for a conference, and we had some spectacular weather which was great for walking and people watching. Here is a bit of what I saw.

I brought only my 35mm prime lens, which is nice and small for carrying around but of course has the disadvantage that unless you are willing to get up in people’s faces, you are not going to get tight portraits. But in this case, the point was to put people in context, to see something of the city as well, and this was a good focal length for that.

Southern California Edison, our local electric utility, was doing some maintenance today in the neighborhood, leaving us in the dark most of the day. Since I could not do anything on the computer, which is where I spend a lot of time these days, I thought I’d play around with my camera a bit, something I have not done enough lately.

Though bright and sunny outside, I thought I’d play on the power outage theme a bit and try some candle light photography. I recently saw an old high speed film shot of a woman’s face lit only by a candle. I wanted to give that a try with my digital equipment. Plus, while it did not work out, I thought I might be able to use this for the latest DPS assignment, which is to make something with the color yellow. I thought either the candle itself or the light it threw could be convincingly yellow.

I started with settings similar to those used in the film shot, including an ISO of 1000, shutter of 1/60 and aperture of f/11, but I found that I wanted a bit more yellow and a bit more light. I decided to add a SB-600 flash to the mix on lowest output power with a yellow gel to supplement the candle light, but ideally placed to appear as if coming from the candle. I also opened up the aperture a bit and slowed down the shutter as well, but edged down the ISO to reduce noise.

A few of the results are below. Unfortunately, I don’t feel they convincingly demonstrate the color yellow, so I am not submitting any of them. But it was still an interesting experiment.

In the first one, which I’ll grant is a little corny, I cleaned up the reflections in my glasses a bit, because you could see the candle, the remote flash, the commander flash atop the camera (which gives insignificant light but is needed to trigger the remote), and the windows and doors of the room, which while blocked up still let in some light around the edges. All you see now is the reflection of the SB-600, which ideally the viewer will take as the reflection of the candle.

The image with the smoke is interesting, although since the candle is now out, the light with its yellow tinge and sideways approach looks more like early morning sun through a window, which I guess might make sense with the candle having been blown out. I am not sure where Ryan’s expression came from.

The other one of Ryan and especially the one of Megan are the most convincing in terms of the light appearing to have come entirely from the candle (which as you can see from the last shot with the exact same setup, is not the case).

While I did not get a DPS entry out of it, I did get a better feel for how to manage candle light, and the light around a candle lit scene.

Been busy with other projects these last few months and haven’t been posting much here, but I plan to be getting back into it again in the coming months. In the meantime, I thought I’d post a few shots I took of our Christmas tree after the presents have made their appearance, but before the kids rip into them. What with the new wood floors and the blazing fireplace, it looks rather festive.

Merry Christmas!

Today was the first game of the season for my son’s AYSO U-10 soccer league. Actually, it was a sort of pre-season game, in that it won’t count toward the standings in determining the playoff schedule (fortunately, since we lost). But it was the first time “The Blitz” met a real opponent as a team, after a few weeks of practices.

The day began with a severe lighting and thunder storm, complete with hail, which cancelled the first game of the day. The storm cleared by the time we were up, but it remained overcast and cool. The latter was good for the kids running around like mad, while the former was good for me, providing even, if a little dim, lighting in which to take photographs. Sunny days are tough — it’s easier to freeze the action, but you are constantly fighting the harsh shadows.

I started with my 85mm prime lens, which is a nice piece of glass and the longest “good lens” I have, but I just could not get in close enough, so I switched over to my 70-300mm zoom. At the 300mm end, it really lets me get in tight from far across the field, but it is a relatively cheap lens, and the image quality reveals this. Among other things, it has lots of chromatic aberration, which is hard to explicitly see unless you have an abrupt white to black transition, in which case you see purple fringing, but which casts the whole image a little blurry. Combined with the slowish shutter speeds that result from relatively low light at that focal length, and without a tripod, the images are not the crispest in the world. Still, there are a few interesting ones below.