BurntPhotons

I totally forgot about this. I put together a audio slide show for the photographs from 2007 from the photographers at where I work. Please check it out. I work with some awesome photographers!

Here is the Link

A new year and a whole bunch of new stuff to look forward to!

And to start it off right is this little announcement from Nick Bradbury the creator of Feed Demon, the greatest RSS reader of them all.

He's announced that FeedDemon as well as NetNewsWire, NewsGator Inbox and NewsGator are all free. I paid for the product over a year ago because it was the best RSS reader I could find. He's constantly improved it and he intends to keep doing it after going FREE!

So go get your free software on!

Copyright Tim Norman

The Village Cleaners sign sports a couple of images of what looks like Elvis on the square in downtown Sunbury recently.

During a recent wildart scramble in Sunbury, I was passing by a sign when a couple images caught my attention. Is this good for a wildart photo? Probably not, but it made me wonder why it appears that Elvis is on the sign at the Village Cleaners.

Was it vandalism or by design? I think by design. They weren't open at the time or I might have wandered in out of curiosity.

Copyright Tim Norman

A collection of items in front of an antique store in Sunbury is covered with the warm glow of the morning sun recently.

This is the third photo in a group from a recent wildart assignment in Sunbury. The Ohio State University Buckeyes will be playing LSU for the national championship in college football on January 7. I decided to photograph this scene because of that and also because of the interesting items found outside the store. The sun's morning yellow rays helped sell the shot. My editor initially liked this shot but the newspaper editor wanted a person in the photograph so we went with another shot instead.

I hope this collection of outtakes from the wildart assignment shows some insight into the job. Sometimes when you have nothing to photograph, you still have to come back with something.

Copyright Tim Norman

Keeping watch for holiday shoppers a metal rooster sits out front an antique store in Sunbury.

This is one of a series of photos I took while hunting for wildart in Sunbury recently. The first of the photos was put up on December 26 and I go into more detail about the day on that day's entry. On the town square there are several antique stores with items out front and one of the items caught my eye.

This rooster just seemed like an oddity to me with the fact that it stands about 4 feet tall and looked to be guarding the square. The sculpture has a bit of a patina from weathering and would probably be great for someones rooster collection.

As a photographer looking for wildart on a day when people are staying inside I tend to look for anything that might just be an oddity or something that you don't see. In truth that is most of our jobs as staff photographers. We look for something that the average person wouldn't see or hasn't seen. I guessed that most people haven't seen a 4 foot tall rooster unless they've visited the town square and even then they may have not seen it among the other stuff sitting in front of this store.

The only thing I would have liked is for the rooster and the ground to have more snow covering them. I think it would have added to the oddity.

Copyright Tim Norman

A frosted wreath sits in front the columns of markers at the Ohio Fallen Heroes memorial in Sunbury.

Over the next couple of days I will be showing a series of photographs I recently took in Sunbury, Ohio. I was assigned to find a photograph for the front page of the newspaper for ThisWeek Community Newspapers' Sunbury edition. As a staff photographer being sent out for wildart, also known as feature hunting, happens occasionally and when I get this type of assignment I try to look at it as a time to challenge myself and think more artistically.

On this occasion I was sent out in the morning with a photograph needed by noon. My plan of attack was to go somewhere where I thought I would find people doing something visual, so I went to the town square in Sunbury in hopes of finding someone shopping for Christmas or maybe working or enjoying the cold weather.

Generally our newspapers like to highlight the people that make up our communities but Sunbury seemed pretty deserted in the morning, so I started wandering and looking for anything that interested me. I figured if I couldn't comeback with a person I could at least find a visually interesting photograph or find something to make the reader think.

Eventually I made my way to the Ohio Fallen Heroes memorial where the memorial markers, morning frost and snow on the ground caught my interest. This visual made me think about some of my relatives who are serving in the armed forces and I thought that it would be nice to remember those heroes who are currently serving as well as those who have fallen and their families during this holiday season.

I spent about 20 minutes photographing different parts of the memorial and liked the image of the Christmas wreath in front of the markers. In the end this photograph was not selected to go into the paper. It was probably not the best image and the editor ran a photograph I took of a 90-year-old woman getting her hair cut for Christmas.

I do want to note that I manipulated this image. I desaturated everything but the wreath in the image to enhance the visual of the colorful wreath. This would break my personal ethical guidelines for photographs for the newspaper because it no longer shows reality. I chose to do it here (and make note of it here) as burntphotons.com is a weblog more for showing my personal vision than my newspaper skills. If you would like to see my newspaper work you can go to TimNormanPhoto.com.

I will always make note of any manipulation I have done to a photograph that misrepresents reality. (Excluding minor brightening and darkening to a photograph that is done to enhance portions of the image.) If you have questions about the ethics of photo manipulation for newspapers and what is and isn't acceptable please ask or check out the guidelines for photojournalists at the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA).

The subject of photo manipulation can be a murky area for photographers, and I believe the public does not understand what is and is not acceptable in getting a photograph ready for the newspaper industry. It is up to the newspaper industry to properly inform people what is and is not acceptable in this age of digital photography where it is simple to remove or add items to photographs. (Both of which are unacceptable.)

I got my Xbox 360 back from Microsoft last Thursday. I would have noted it sooner but I've just been busy with Christmas shopping and working. It feels like as I get older I get busier. Maybe it is just that I get slower.

Anyway, the system came back and it is working fine. A card for 1 month free of Xbox Live gold was included along with a survey. So far it seems to be working just fine. I've played Half Life 2 from The Orange Box and played some videos with it. All seems to be good.

I should probably be in bed sleeping because I've got a cold. It started hitting me a day or two ago and is in full on cold mode today/tonight, but before I go to bed I wanted to update some stuff.

It appears Microsoft is already sending me back my Xbox 360. I checked the status Sunday on my repair and saw the status included a UPS tracking number. I would have appreciated an email about the change, but oh well.

Saturday I freaked out a bit when I checked the status and saw that my account no longer showed any machine in for repair at all. I was imaging the headaches I was going to have to go through but hoped I had just caught them during an update cycle which appears to be what happened.

The Xbox really could have helped me out today. I would have loved to veg out and play a little with the way I feel. Tired, runny nose, sneezing, and tired.

Instead I have been catching up on a whole bunch of This Week in Tech podcasts and videos as I veg out today. Actually I have to mention the strange trip to using my RSS feed reader as my podcast downloader.

About a week ago, I started using Feeddemon as my podcast downloader. It has a program called Feed Station which downloads attachments in RSS newsfeeds.

A year or two ago when I started listening to podcasts I was using the Ipodder Lemon later known as Juice Receiver. After a few months, I found that every now and then Juice would just start downloading tons of old podcasts. It was often a headache, but after trying several pod catching programs it was the only program that seemed to do a good job overall.

A few months ago I started using the Democracy Player, which is now known as Miro, to download my video podcasts and kept Juice for just the audio podcasts. This created a convenient way to separate audio and video podcasts since I interact with the two differently.

Weeks before this I had started using FeedDemon to download a new video podcast called Mahalo Daily with Veronica Belmont because Miro wouldn't recognize the feed while FeedDemon would. I have to give props to the FeedDemon author Nick Bradbury for creating such a solid program which he has been updating a lot recently.

Anyway to make a long story shorter, after a few hiccups with FeedDemon everything seems to be running smoothly and I've dropped my memory usage a bit with FeedDemon only taking about 35 megs of memory. The only thing I miss is using Miro's interface which exposed me to new video podcasts, but then again I waist enough time watching and listening to the stuff I'm already downloading.

I saw this video on Amber Mac's weblog today and couldn't help adding it here. I love the song (it was the reason I wanted to buy the game Gears of War for the Xbox 360), and the video is interesting too. You can find the original video here. I won't get into the politics of the whole thing but it states some very interesting information about the world if it were only made up of 100 people.

I just realized how odd that the song was used for both Gears of War advertising and this video. Strange world.

So I received the box to ship the Xbox 360 back to Microsoft on Thursday. I called about the Xbox last Wednesday so it took 8 days for a box to get to me which really isn't that bad considering that last Thursday was Thanksgiving.

I wasn't surprised by how long it took to get the packaging to me. Thanksgiving in the US usually means a four day weekend. I was more surprised by what was inside the box.

Besides the packaging and mailer was a long piece of three inch wide tape to reseal the box, a short questionnaire and instructions on how to prepare the box. The tape was unexpected. The instructions were expected but are printed on some really heavy paper and therefore was probably more expensive to print than the cheaper paper used for the questionnaire. And I wasn't expecting the instructions to be so detailed or in color.

The survey was a little unexpected espesically since it asked me to describe what the problem was with the Xbox 360 as well as fill in the serial number, both of which should have be known already since I made the call, but maybe it is a standard box for repairs and helps out in the process.

I went to the UPS store on Friday morning and waited in line behind an older woman who remarked how cheap it would be to send her package overnight via UPS instead of the post office. I don't know about you but I don't consider the 60 dollar quote cheap. She decided to just ship it by ground though because, "Good Heavens the gift inside doesn't even cost that much."

The funny thing was as soon as the UPS guy turned to help me out he remarked, "Returning an Xbox 360, huh?" I realized then that maybe Microsoft really does have a severe problem with the machine when the UPS guy recognizes the plain looking box. Maybe he saw the prepaid address, but I don't think so.

I asked for a receipt as the packaging instructions say, but was told that even though Microsoft puts that on their instructions UPS doesn't give out receipts. He asked if I had written down the tracking number which I had.

Before my red ring of death experience I wondered if all the press I've heard about the Xbox 360 having problems was being blown out of proportion as I've heard many people who haven't had problems and others who had. Having a machine die within the first year and having numerous problems with games just stopping in the middle of play because it can't read the disk.

Hey Microsoft, a game should die gracefully if that is the problem. You shouldn't lose all of of you game time up to that point. In addition, when I pull out the disc there isn't a scratch or smudge on them when I see this problem. I wonder if the machine was just getting too hot and the disc warping too much at high spin speeds to be readable. But I'm rambling now.