NY ComicCon

Dropped by the NY Comic Convention. It has been a few score of years since my comic days, but I enjoyed myself.

Suffered a bit of sticker shock, now current pricing is in the range of paperback books. The industry has expanded greatly with a lot more range and influences.

At least some of the characters I remembered are still around, although the artwork has become more stylized and character development more sophisticated. Character distinctions between right and wrong, hero and villian are a bit more nebulous than I remembered. It creates more character empathy than portraying them on a pedestal, as was done in my hay days.

From a little browsing, it seems some of the characters aged better than I did, even with all their high risk endeavours. :)

btw: honorable mention of some tasty dry rub ribs at Daisy May's with my "geeked out" cronies from ComicCon

NY ComicCon
Daisy May's BBQ

NYC GNU/Linux

Dropped by a meet up of NYC Linux users and developers for a discussion and demo session of "the three top virtualization engines (Xen / VirtualBox / KVM)" with a side demo of video editing under Linux with Cinelerra. They are a savvy and laid back group of people extolling free community developed software.

It was blasphemous of me to run Ubuntu under Vista with VirtualBox for the meeting, but I am learning and not ready to convert my laptop fully yet. I am not sure if I can replace all the software that I use my laptop for under Windows with Linux yet. It should be fun getting to that point.

A good amount of the discussion was over my head, for a first time exposure to these veterans, seems one of the guys does QA for Fedora.

I can see I will be busy.. :)

KVM
Xen
VirtualBox
Cinelerra
Ubuntu
Fedora

B&H Photo - The Science of Photography & Advanced Studio Lighting and Posing

Dropped by the B&H Event Space for the free "The Science of Photography & Advanced Studio Lighting and Posing" seminar parts I & II. The seminar speaker is Frank J. Dispensa.

A few quick notes (and I am not getting any perks to say this :) :

If you ever wanted to get an understanding of the science of lighting based on the numbers from your camera settings (ie: ISO, aperture and shutter speed) this seminar is excellent and highly recommended.

If you ever wanted to get an understanding of the subtleties of studio model / client lighting this seminar is excellent and highly recommended.

If you ever wanted to get an understanding of posing and image psychology this seminar is excellent and highly recommended.

Get the point ? :)

If you want to have fun understanding how to better control your lighting and portrait posing keep an eye out for this seminar to see when it is offered again, as it fills up quickly. Frank is a former IBM engineer turned photographer, and provides a quantitative view and discussion on how to achieve the proper image balance.

FYI: Frank's name above links to his web site where he offers interactive paid web based seminars.