Category: tools

Gear for fear

Tools of the trade for a present day musician.

gear for fear

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Calendar 2013

As a joint project with Carmen, we made a desk calendar for 2013, it features photos from both of us put in some random order (you’ll have to guess who is the author for each).

calendar 2013
The printed version is a premium item, being hand-signed by each of us and is not for sale, but those who like it, can have a copy (sorry for linking this way, is a big ZIP file containing a bunch of high-quality PDFs).
And since a fellow photographer asked for this, I’am also making available my calendar design, as an archive of blank PDFs, with no pictures and no names, ready to receive photos and names. It is made at the size required the the printing shop we used: 220 x 100 mm with 2 mm bleeds at the edges.

Update: here’s a tutorial for making your own Inkscape calendar layout design

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Photographer badge

I made myself a little “freelance photographer” badge, holding this title, my full name, an invented serial name, a photo and, of course, contact data, which I am lately wearing when shooting at public events, hoping will decrease the chance I get asked who am I. Not sure about the target audience, but so far quite a few photographers liked it and asked for one.

photo pass

Since I was asked and because sharing is caring, I decided to share the design freely. As I do almost all my illustration and DTP work with Inkscape, the badge was made with Inkscape too, the canonical source is in SVG format.
photo pass

I understand many photographers are not into illustration and may not know/want to edit a vector file, so I rasterized it and transformed into a GIMP layered (.xcf) file, for those who fancy that (I use GIMP for my photo editing needs):
photo pass

Since I understand most of the photographers are unfortunately still locked in the Adobe world, I went to the extra-mile, used “Save As” from GIMP to produce a Photoshop (.psd) version. This is untested, since I do not have any installed, nor I want to.
photo pass

Feel free to use it in any way you want, but don’t forget to add a photo, and to edit your name and contact info (web and mail). Also, put a random digit string as serial number.

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New glass, so what? Too little, too late. Miss the blue.

newglass I lost faith on many things those days, including in ever getting F64 to ever fix my lens, so in the end I followed my my friend‘s advice and bought a new, better lens – even if I still disagree with her, you can’t buy happiness with money… well, unless is an enormous sum, like 1,000,000€ or such…

And if you know me, you know I’m following the principle “or la bal or la spital” (translation from Romanian: “either at the dance, or at the hospital”) so I went for f/2.8 and a weight that will break my back. Middle way is not an option.

My biggest regret is losing the opportunity to use this gear to capture one of the most beautiful blue eyes I ever saw, every time my gear was incomplete, I missed the opportunity and tried to do the best with what I had available. Not what I wanted. I am sorry.

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Box of eyes tutorial

Still looking for a storage solution, have not published a large amount of photos lately, but I am still alive, doing a little bit different stuff, like writing, like this weird box of eyes with GIMP tutorial or identity design.

box of eyes

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Steampunk photography with GIMP

Liked the comic strip tutorial from the other day? Now here is another one, about what I like to call steampunk photography, I wrote this one last year but until today it was not published properly (now is together with my other graphic tutorials:

steampunk photography

And stop for now with the tutorials, I don’t have other in the pipe for the immediate future.

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Photo comic strip with GIMP and Inkscape

After taking the photos you may want to do some more than just looking at them, like, why not, create a comic strip, so here is a tutorial for doing this with GIMP and Inkscape:

comic strip tutorial

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Fedora promo stuff

Preparing some give-away for an upcoming Fedora presentation in Cluj-Napoca

Homemade Fedora promo stuff

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