Jud Dagnall Photography Blog

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were at Yahoo! yesterday. I got a chance to play paparazzi, and get a few pictures.

Tom armwrestling with Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel:

Tom waves to the crowd:

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes in a sea of Yahoos:

A friend of mine has started a new online referral site called “Mutual Win” – where referrals are golden!

It’s a simple, cool idea– a place where you can take post and/or take advantage of various referral bonuses. If your gym or appartment offers a bonus when you refer someone, you can list it on the site. If you’re looking to join a gym, or find a new appartment, search for it on mutualwin.net. Contact the other party, and arrange to split the bonus. It’s not just limited to gyms and apartments: there are a variety of categories for posting, and you can also create “golden opportunities”, items that don’t fit into the existing breakdown or from which you may not directly benefit.

It’s well worth checking out, and I think there’s a lot of potential here!

The Palo Alto Camera Club has a monthly digital “slides” competition. As part of an ongoing project to automate image submission, I’m creating several scripts to resize/frame and “mat” the images using ImageMagick, a command line utility for windows and linux. It could be also be done via photoshop actions and/or scripting, but since this will eventually be running on a server, I wanted to do outside of photoshop.

The basic requirement is that the final image should be 1024×768 pixels (the resolution of our digital project). If the image is smaller than this, then it should be placed on a black background ‘mat’. The club guidelines require an image that is max1000x750 pixels, and then note that a simple border will be added. So my image magick script does the following:

1. Read an image named input_image.jpg
2. Resize the image to a max of 1000×750 pixels (length x width).
3. Place a 1px white border around the image
4. Place a 1px black border around the image
5. Center the final image on a black background that is 1024×768 pixels.
6. Sharpen the image
7. Save as a quality 85% jpeg with the name “output_image.jpg”

And now, the script:

convert -size 1000x750 input_image.jpg -resize 1000x750 \
-bordercolor black -border 1 \
-bordercolor white -border 1 - \
|\
composite -gravity center - \
-size 1024x768 xc:black \
-sharpen 0x1.0 -quality 85 \
output_image.jpg


I just returned from an incredible five day workshop with Cliff Mautner. It was exactly what I needed! His use of light is outstanding, and he was able to share with us many of his techniques and approaches. I went away feeling like I had a much better understanding of how to use light as the primary tool of photography, both indoors with flash, and outside using available light. His approach to making striking images with backlighting, silhouttes and minimalist is already having an impact on my photography! He kept us laughing and engaged all the way through, and I also had the opportunity to work side by side with some very talented and inspiring photographers from all over the country. I would definitely recommend his workshop to any photographer who wants a better understanding of light. Thanks Cliff!