Budget Conscious Royalty Free Music For Your Multimedia Projects

When you are producing your next video, multimedia project or slideshow and you want to have some nice music to accompany it, you just can't use the latest Katy Perry tune that you may have purchased. If an artist creates it, then it's copyright. Buying music on sites like iTunes only gives you right to listen to it, not use it in your work. Sites like YouTube often remove copyrighted music, along with whatever audio you might have had in your project.

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Working in Style

Had to pleasure to produce this multimedia piece for The Chronicle-Herald on Jon Gray, a local shoemaker. Reporter Bill Spurr and I were lucky to grab a few hours of Jon's time so he could walk us through the shoemaking process.

The video was a true collaborative effort....Bill did all the interviewing and weaved the narrative - I concentrated on the visuals and the editing. Our multimedia developer, Jayson Taylor, also helped with some editing suggestions. I love working in a team like this - your work only gets better the more people that you have to bounce ideas off of.

RAW vs JPEG (The Basics)

This image, with it's mixed lighting, would have been tough to shoot if the camera was set to record JPEG.

At some point when you are honing your photography skills, you'll ask yourself: is it time to get RAW?

You may have already stumbled upon this menu option sometime when you were out shooting, but maybe were afraid to admit, you just have no clue what it does. You're not alone. You might know that, yes, it is the highest quality your SLR or point and shoot camera can produce, but how is it different from the JPEG file we all know and love. More to the point: should you even care?

Yes and no.

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Funny Friday: Fotoshop by Adobé

This is a brillant video from Jesse Rosten. A funny parody commercial, but it really rouches on an important issue - people as they appear  in magazines and advertisments aren't real (well the are REAL) but a lot of work goes into making them look perfect. As Jesse said on his vimeo page:

This commercial isn't real, neither are society's standards of beauty.

Inspirational Webinar: Ami Vitale

I usually spend a lot of the winter backing up my catalogue and also thinking of bigger projects for the coming year.

I stumbled across this great video from photojournalist Ami Vitale where she talks to Photoshelter about how to get inspiration for projects and how to pitch those projects to editors.

She also talked about ways for photographers to generate original story ideas:

• Read voraciously
• Talk to many different kinds of people
• Localize and humanize bigger issues
• Think visually about an idea
• Write a lot. Put your ideas on paper
• Be an observer of life
• Trust your own instincts!

I hope you have time to watch the entire video and get some inspiration for 2012!