The official launch date is Monday, but lucky readers of thedude.com can take a look at the new site deign now. It’s a huge improvement over the old site, both aesthetically and performance-wise. I’m very proud to have been a part of this effort. Yay!
After focus groups revealed that my company’s current corporate image reminded them of a “dull forty-something white male”, they decided it was time to make a change. So, Affymetrix hired a design team to help freshen our brand.
I think the new branding looks great! This is the video used to kick off the effort. In my opinion, it’s too long, and feels too much like a PowerPoint presentation, but it does convey key design elements of the “New Affymetrix”. Nicely done!
This topic of cubicles vs. open floor plans has been debated to death, so I won’t bore you with my thoughts on the subject. I’ll let the pictures do the talking.
I was lucky enough to have an amazing seat at today’s Giant’s game. I was in row one directly behind the batter at AT & T park. I think I was closer to the batter than the pitcher was! If you look closely in the very center of the shot, you’ll see a Plexiglas window. My seat was just to the left of it - next to the guy in the blue ball cap facing the camera. :)
Being that close meant that I was too close to the field to shoot a decent panorama. So, to get the shot above, I moved about half way back in the stands. And yes, the Giant’s beat the Marlins, 4-3.
Today is an important day in the life of thedude - System Administrator Appreciation Day.
I made a group shot at our IT picnic last week.
I often do not get to be in group shots, as I’m stuck behind the camera. I really wanted to be a part of this one, so I asked my boss to shoot a picture of me after I shot the group, and I PhotoShop’ed myself into the scene.
Scientific American published an article claiming that Blogging is Good for You! It seems that working on a blog “activates a cluster of neurological pathways”. Whoa - so that’s how I got hooked. Of course, it is possible to take this blogging thing to extremes. Not to worry. I’ll never work that hard at it.
Some of the brightest (and best-looking!) people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Elise, Adam, Brant, Ron, Steve, Shannon, Guoying and Harley.
A coworker recently asked for photo advice after seeing the pictures I shot at our company Christmas party. I took the time compose a lengthy response, and figure I might as well share it with my regular readers too!
Hi thedude,
I was looking at the pictures you took at the party. They are amazing. How in the world do you get pictures with the color, contrast, and clarity that you captured?
I’m using a D70, as opposed to the D2x, but figure there is more to it than that. Is it in the lens? Post processing?
I’m looking to upgrade soon, and was hoping you had a minute to offer some advice as to why my pictures have a slightly washed out / less life-like look - regardless of the level of flash.
Thanks!
Where to begin? Well, first - thanks for the very kind words.
There are many pieces to this. Briefly:
ALWAYS shoot RAW. This is not just for the added sharpness, but most importantly, so that you can make tweaks to the color temperature and exposure.
UNDEREXPOSE. In a situation like this where the majority of the image is almost black, the camera needs to know that this is what you want. I underexpose flash shots by .3 or even .7 stops. All of the Affy party images were underexposed by .7 stops. This prevents blown out highlights.
Use a MANUAL setting. Shoot some test shots with the camera. Find an ISO/shutter speed combination that will capture some of the room light. Choose the slowest shutter speed possible and stop down the lens a couple stops from it’s max. The idea is to get the best sharpness and depth of focus while capturing as much ambient light as possible. The Affy party images were shot at f4 at 1/25th of a second with a Nikkor 24-85mm f2.8 lens.
Use the most powerful flash you can find and attach the Gary Fong Lightsphere with an AmberDome. This will warm things up a bit so that the color of the light from the flash is close to the color of the ambient (incandescent) light.
Compose quickly, get in close, push the shutter release at exactly the right moment. :)
Post-processing:
Open a few of the best-looking images in the PhotoShop RAW converter. Adjust the color temperature until they look just right. I like my images to be a bit on the warm side. For the Affy images, 3700 degrees produced the results I liked best. Apply the same color temp to all flash images.
Adjust exposure individually in the RAW converter. Underexposing has its drawbacks, but blown out highlights are really bad. Nothing worse than super-shiny reflections on faces. If highlights are blown out, there is no easy way to repair them.
Create a PhotoShop Action to reduce the image size in steps and apply a tiny bit of smart sharpening filter as you go. In this case the original ~4200 pixel wide images were reduced to ~1800 pixels. Done properly, this will greatly enhance sharpness.
Practice, practice…
Good luck!
This entry probably won’t be of interest to most of you, but I went to so much trouble getting the images posted on our blog at work that I figured I’d get a little extra mileage out of them by posting them here too.
Rumor has it that the people in this photo album are coworkers of mine, although I know almost none of them. They seem like a good group though. :)
We decided to get a room in the city last night at the Clift Hotel, which turned out to be pretty darn nice. That’ll be the topic of a future post, but right now we have to go back to San Francisco and make some pictures of a baby and her proud new Mama.
I have heard from other folks how much they love Gmail, but I had been a skeptic - until this week. Now, I’m a true believer. Gmail and Google Apps are the two best things that have happened to me in a long time. They have decreased both my workload and the amount of time I spend with e-mail.
I never thought I could be satisfied with a browser-based e-mail client. I need keyboard shortcuts, speed, IMAP, spell-checking, an LDAP connector, etc. Gmail does not allow me to connect to my LDAP server, or to create server-side folders like IMAP, but after using Gmail with Firefox for a few days, my old trusty mail client seems antiquated. Gmail in a browser is absolutely fantastic. It offers everything my old client (Thunderbird) did and much more. You just have to see how Conversations work to appreciate them. Then there’s the built-in Chat feature, the ability to use Google search against your e-mail, tons of free storage, ease-of-use, compatibility, world-class spam filtering and more…
I’ll keep Thunderbird around for a while, because it’s easier and quicker to send a large number of attachments with it. But for everything else e-mail related, I’ll use Gmail.
So, now I plan to move all of the e-mail domains currently hosted on my servers to a Google Apps account. This will reduce my workload and stress level while providing a greatly enhanced user experience for my friends. A true win-win!
While checking my server logs, I came across this network dicovery tool with an awesome name. Naturally, I downoaded and installed The Dude, (version 2.2) and it did a decent job of finding every single machine on my network. Would you expect anything less from The Dude?!
The fact is, there are quiet a few other “the dude’s” out there. At least one even lives in the Bay Area! As far as I can tell, these other Dudes came after The Big Lebowski, which was released in 1998 - two years after the thedude.com was registered by the original “thedude”.
So there. :)
