All Mac Office Set Up is Complete!

Where have I been?

Busy!

Since I started work last Monday, I’ve been glued firmly to my chair working like a maniac. My new posing work is pretty challenging! This is the first time in a long while that I have worked on something that has realistic and traditional looking character that it takes me time to complete the poses. The show also has a loose style of outline so I had to work on that too.

So it’s been pretty wild, my first week of work. What made it even wilder was when my new 8-Core Mac Pro and 30″ Apple Cinema Display got delivered last Friday:

I was not expecting them to arrive that early. I placed an order last Monday just before I started work. I chose to lease it so as not to break the bank and use up all my capital.

When it got delivered Friday morning, I was pretty stoked! I had to restrain my desire to set them right up, otherwise I would not be able to get any work done.

When evening arrived, I was finally able to set them them up:

Set up was a breeze! I said before that the reason I go for Macs is because they are ready out of the box. The Mac Pro is no exception. I was up and running in roughly ten minutes! Try doing that with a Windows PC!

One thing I can say about the Mac Pro: it’s one hell of a sexy beast! It has an all aluminum casing which makes it ultra-sleek. It’s one heavy machine too!

The only thing that is more sexier than the Mac Pro was the 30″ Apple Cinema Display. I’ve read how this LCD monitor was described as something stunning, and it is!

When I finally fired up my new workstation, I was very, very impressed. It is wickedly fast! I ordered the stock configuration and only have the standard 2 GB of RAM. It’s enough for me to see the difference between this and my iMac.

And the Mac Pro is very quiet too, quite the opposite of my loud, noisy old PC. I can barely hear the fans running. With the Mac Pro and the iMac running at the same time, it’s very quiet indeed!

The 30″ Apple Cinema Display is awesome. With all that real estate I can really, really see what I am working on! You can tell from this shot of my new set up how huge it is and how it dwarfs my 20″ iMac:

And so here you go: my all Mac set up:

People might think that these Macs are expensive. Actually, they are. But configure a similar spec Windows machine to what I have right now and the cost will almost be the same. In fact, my Mac Pro cost almost the same as my old PC when I bought that one two years ago!

I had to work overtime during this weekend so I had the chance to run my new set up through its paces. Everything worked flawlessly and smoothly.

The Mac Pro now becomes my regular workstation. All posing and animation work will all be done on this machine.

The iMac is my back-up machine. I use it to back-up all my work. I have a network running at my home office, so sharing files between these two Macs is a breeze.

I also have Windows XP running on VMWare running on it so I can use Internet Explorer to access my client’s intranet page and download and submit all my scenes.

All the rest that I need to do such as sending and receiving emails, sending and receiving instant messages, internet surfing, word processing and the like, I do on the iMac.

And there you have it. I might add a “Gear” page on my blog so I can list all my equipment and give everyone an idea what I use to run my animation business. That might come much, much later as I have to get ready for work once again!

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Official 2008 First Day of Work.

Today is my official first day of work for the year 2008.

I am very excited.  The posing work that I signed on is very challenging.  It may be done in Flash, but the look is very traditional 2D.  The outlines are very loose.  The characters have distinct highlights.  I am having a great time reviewing all the character builds.   Suffice to say, I have never worked on a production like this before.  I welcome the challenge and the new techniques and tricks that I am bound to learn from it.

I have to dive in now, so see you all later!

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Photos of the Day: Portraiture.

Most of us who flew back to the Philippines to attend a couple of weddings are back in Calgary. Since most of them have not reported back to work yet, Liza and I decided to pay them a visit last night.

My brother-in-law just bought a house so we asked him to show it to us. It was a great opportunity for me to take pictures using my new lens.

The house looks bare right now; the newlyweds have not even moved in yet:

We had to sit on the floor, but nobody seemed to mind that there were no couches to sit on at all:

No photo shoot of mine will be complete without my wife Liza:

It was a great chance for me to practice some portraiture. Here is my newly married brother-in-law, Leo:

Leo’s wife, Serene:

Serene’s sibling, Becky:

One of my brother-in-laws, Sandy:

Sandy’s wife, Marie:

Sandy and Marie’s first born, the ever precocious Ezekiel:

I just love taking pictures of this child. And he equally loves to pose for me! He appears to be having a bad hair day here:

I always get a treat when I shoot Ezekiel’s dad, Sandy. I usually gets rewarded with candid shots like this:

I get the same candid shot reward with Leo. Here he is checking the specs of their new home:

What a treat! I could have focused the lens better on my portrait shots. I would loved it if I had focused on their eyes better, but that’s the way it goes for a beginner like me. I’ve read in some photography forums that the only way one can hone one’s skill is to just shoot, shoot and shoot. So that is what I’ve been doing.

I have no ambition of making a profession out of this hobby; it is just something that is so fun to do and share. I hope that everyone who gets to view these shots will feel the same delight in viewing them as I do now.

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Photo of the Day and Some Updates.

I have been relishing this unexpected time for R & R that I have been getting since returning back to Calgary from my visit to the Philippines. Oh by the way, my version of getting some rest and relaxation is to bum around the house and just do nothing other than to watch TV, surf the internet, and eat as required.

I get that, but most of my idle time is being spent playing around with my camera and the new lens that I just got, a Nikon AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D. It’s a fixed lens, meaning there is no zoom. This means I had to move around with my feet to get my subject properly composed in the viewfinder of the camera. To get a picture of, say, my wife cooking, I had to move way, way back in order to get her and whatever she is cooking in the frame. Quite a challenge considering how small our kitchen is!

This lens had to be manually focused, so I’ve been practicing using it in case I had to cover an event with it attached to my camera. I’ve mentioned at an earlier post how devilishly hard it is to focus. What makes it even more difficult was that I don’t have 20/20 vision. Normally, I would look through the camera’s viewfinder using my right eye. That’s the ergonomically way to do it. But my left eye sees better, so I had to use that to look at the viewfinder. I think that sort of ruins the ergonomics of the whole thing.

Since I shoot mainly indoors and in available light, I had to make sure that I have a steady hand or else the images will come out blurry. I’ve been learning how to lean against the wall to steady my shot and how to improvise a tripod from available objects such as chair backs and tables. I don’t like using the camera’s flash when I take pictures indoors; the white light that comes out of it dims the background and gives people’s skin a ghostly shade.

Here is another self-portrait I took. If you click on the image, it would lead you to my FLICKR page. Clicking on the “all sizes” button at the top of the image will give you a much larger view of the photo. Just how sharp this lens takes pictures will be evident, as dust and smudges on the camera and the mirror are plainly visible when you view the larger version of the photo:

Having this fixed lens on my Nikon D40 and not being able to auto-focus with it makes me wonder how it would perform on a higher camera model, one where the lens can auto-focus. Suddenly, I find myself pining for my present camera’s newer, bigger and more expensive brother, the Nikon D300. Which incidentally became the subject that I used to tease my wife yesterday.

When we visited the Philippines, I brought my other camera, a point and shoot one. That was the camera that my wife, Liza, uses. When we flew back to Calgary, I left the camera with my mom back in the Philippines.

Now that we only have my DSLR as the lone camera in our household, Liza has been clamoring for her own camera. So I sort of teased her that she can have my Nikon D40 and that I would buy a Nikon D300 as my own. She can have a camera that is much more advanced than the old point & shoot model we left behind and I will have the camera that I’ve always wanted. Let me tell you, against Liza my argument sure was not able to hold any weight.

Anyway, enough about photography. I am raring to get back to work. If all things go as planned, I will be starting a new project this coming Monday. It will be a posing work for a 2D Flash series for TV, one that I had to hold off from signing on to last December because of our planned trip to the Philippines. I just can’t wait to get the ball rolling once more.

In the meantime, I will continue to take pleasure in the last remaining days of my R & R practicing more photography.

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Shooting Raw.

I’ve just bought myself a new lens for my Nikon D40. It’s a Nikon AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D. This is a fixed lens; no zooming or anything, what you see is what you get. The aperture of 1.8 allows me to take pictures in low light situations (which I tend to do a lot).

One nasty thing about this lens is I have to focus manually. I cannot auto-focus. My camera only works with AF-S lenses, which this particular lens is not.

It is devilishly hard to focus. I have to use my left eye to look at the viewfinder, my left eye being my “good” eye.

It sometimes takes me several shots before I can get the image I wanted to look absolutely right. That is why I got this lens; I wanted to learn how to shoot with a very steady hand. When you try to shoot in low light, the shutter speed of the camera tends to slow down to allow more light to come in. Any movement on the shooters part makes the picture blurry.

It’s pretty rewarding when you get it right. Here is a self-portrait I took. It’s not perfect, but you can see how sharp the image comes out by using this lens: you can actually see bits of dust and fiber on the lens filter (if you click on the image, it will lead you to my FLICKR page. To view a larger version of the picture, click on the “all sizes” button at the top of the image):

I did some post processing in this picture. I’ve been shooting in Raw format lately, just so that I can what the fuss is all about shooting in Raw and to see how I will be able to manipulate Raw images. I used the trial version of Aperture to open up the Raw file that I shot. I did some white balance adjustment. The original version was too warm because of the incandescent bulbs in our bathroom; I wanted a cooler effect, like it was shot under flourescent lighting.

Oh, and I also flipped the image horizontally so the Nikon brand on the camera would read right.

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Glad to be Back in Calgary.

After almost four weeks of stay in the Philippines to attend two weddings, my wife Liza and I are finally back home in Calgary. We arrived last Friday, January 11, at 10 PM. We experienced some delays in our flights, particularly during our Vancouver to Calgary transit. Our plane had some maintenance problems so we had to wait for a stand-by plane to take us to Calgary. It was a good thing the new plane had first-class seats or the whole trip would have been one huge bummer after the other.

After doing some early spring cleaning, Liza and I were to tired to do anything else so we just bummed around the house. We are experiencing a bit of a jet lag, but I am sure that will be remedied soon. The nights here in Calgary are so long that evenings come in early; it’s not that hard to fall to sleep at night when all is so dark.

I still have some organizing to do before I start hunting for new projects. There are lots of papers to shred and shelves to dust and bills to pay. Hopefully, these minor clean up work will be done in a day or two.

I took hundreds of pictures with my DSLR during my stay in the Philippines. I hope to take out all the crappy shots and just keep the good ones to save hard drive space. I am still contemplating if I should start shooting using the uncompressed RAW format; I currently shoot using the smaller, more compressed JPEG file format. I am not into post processing pictures, but I do notice that pictures in RAW format are slightly sharper than those shot in JPEG. We’ll see in a couple of weeks.

The new Mac Pro has been released and I am seriously thinking of ordering one so I can finally replace my regular PC workstation and complete my all-Mac set-up. I am just waiting for the reviews to come out so I can decide when to get it. I plan on getting just the base configured machine and get my upgrades such as RAM from third party vendors where they are much cheaper.

This is an exciting start to the New Year and I just can’t wait to get rolling again!

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Picture of the Day: Dark Altar.

We were able to visit my wife’s relatives in Sampaloc. The first thing I noticed in the living room was this altar filled with various statues of saints:

We only have a few more days left before we fly back to Calgary. I initially intended to go out and meet up with some friends and visit the studio where I used to work, but unfortunately a cold virus has hit me hard and I could not go out of the house without risking of having it develop into a full blown flu. I have decided to stay home to recuperate and rest so that I will be fine come flight day. I don’t want to be coughing and sniffing and running a fever on the plane!

The weather in Manila sure is had a hand in causing the cold virus. The quality of the air did not help either. I guess I got so used to the clean air of Calgary that the sudden change in environment sort of lowered my resistance to any sickness.

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Two Weddings.

Wow, two weddings within two weeks: my brother-in-law’s wedding last December 23, 2007 and my sister-in-law’s own nuptials on January 5, 2008! What a way to end 2007 and welcome the New Year!

I still have not forgiven myself for leaving behind my camera during my brother-in-law’s wedding, which was held at the historic Manila Cathedral. It was the biggest blunder I have ever done in my young career as a photography hobbyist. There were so many opportunities to shoot pictures that day and I missed them all!

So on my sister-in-law’s wedding day, I made sure I had my camera in tow. I didn’t care if I had to carry all my gear in my camera bag. I didn’t care if I will get all sweaty from all the running around I had to do to get a shot. I didn’t care if my shirt gets un-tucked from all the awkward position I had to do to make sure my camera stays still. I need to redeem myself from my previous mistake!

The wedding was held at a quaint little parish in Dagupan City, roughly thirty minutes away from my wife’s hometown in Pangasinan.

I was shooting without flash for fear of getting the ire of the hired pro photographer. There was enough available light for me to get this shot.

There was a spiral staircase going up to the balcony. I just had to climb up there so I can get a good vantage point of all the guests.

One good thing about having a wedding outside of the city is that you can afford to stay longer in the church and take more pictures!

Another convenience of having the wedding in a parish outside of the city: the bride and groom still looks fresh after the ceremony! There were no one to pester them to hurry along and go away because another wedding is about to take place.

The dinner reception was held at my sister-in-law’s hometown.

When it was all over and I had the chance to review all my pictures, I was so glad I brought my camera with me. It was so fun shooting as a bystander in the wedding. I really wished I could turn back the time and do it all over again for my brother-in-law.

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