PERSONAL WEBSITE OF DESIGNER + DEVELOPER STEVE MCDONALD
  • Canon T2i HDSLR
  • Depth of Field
  • Canon XH-A1 video camera
  • Letus on an XH-A1
  • Camera lengths
  • Straight on view
  • Rig without camera
  • Top 3/4 angle view
  • 3/4 angle head on
  • Steve Martin talking about his last night doing stand-up
  • Steve Martin singing "Grandpa bought a ... " (google it)
  • Steve Martin in front of his photo in the white suit
HDSLR Video Rig

Canon XH-A1 video cameraMany years ago I invested in a nice video camera, the Canon XH-A1 HD video camera, which I still own and it has about the best built in glass of any video equipment I have used or owned.  With powered dual XLR inputs in addition to an amazing array

Remember what you are celebrating

Ah the beauty and fun of winter holidays!  Festive attitudes, the music, the various family oriented traditions are all enjoyable and undoubtedly conform to mean exactly what we intend: a familial warmth where we share together what is most important to us. But from where do these traditions find their origin, most notably, I am thinking about Chanukah and Christmas?

 

Fisheye Lens Photography

Recently I've had the pleasure of dropping some cash on a new fisheye lens for my digital SLR camera.  Those of you into photography know what fun they can be and might even understand what a nice tool it is especially when shooting large venues outside. I picked up the Bower 8mm fisheye lens from Amazon for $272.

Flash And Compressed Data

zip codeI've had a plan for a while now to create a fun set of tools that allow people with photo editing skills the ability to create fun engaging stories that play music and animate pictures.  The one thing holding me back for a while now was the delivery mechanism.  I have been imagining that I could create the desktop application to author the stories and I could create a player for Android and iPhone tablets so people can e

QR Codes For Print?

Vector QR Codes in CMYK?So there are many reasons to create and use QR Codes. If you don't know what a QR Code is, it is a goofy new kind of barcode that people are scanning with their cell phones to learn more about something ( a piece of realestate, a grocery product, a tv show or commercial, a magazine advert linking to the web site of a product, etc).

Labor Day Weekend 2011

Yellow Cabs on 5th AveThis Labor Day Weekend was packed.  A friend came over from Wisconsin (Genessa Tjader) and we went into the city twice and did the Shore on Labor Day itself.

The weekend threatened to storm the entire time but the weather held off until the drive back to Neward Airport.

For fun we...

Change is Coming (and I am not talking about politics)

"Life is pain, your highness. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something."
-    The Princess Bride

This line could have well been "Life is change." Pain is a part of life and a change agent. Whether I am working out, or reading and learning for work, or dealing with the personal loss of a friend I am dealing with pain.  The question is, does the pain lead to change? But the more important question might be, does the change lead to growth?

Why Did The U.S. Lose It's AAA Credit Rating?

The two perspectives being stated by the White House are, (1) S&P (the group who downgraded the credit rating) is bad at math and we shouldn’t be downgraded, and at the same time (2) the contention over raising debt limits and raising revenues is directly to blame and we should blame the Tea Party for those contentions. At the same time investors tell us that we have been waiting for a downgrade for some time now.  Were investors blindly speculating?

Send eMail In Drupal Development

So you want to test out a local drupal workflow/use-case which culminates in the sending of an email… but by default you aren’t running an SMTP service.  Rather than rushing out your dev product to a live host, here is a little write up on how to setup SMTP under OSX while developing under a localhost LAMP stack.

Setting Up Your Environment

There is a Bug in my InDesign

inDesign breaks smallcaps when publishingMy office recently ran into an unforgivable bug within inDesign.  The problem seems to be that when you package an inDesign project in CS5 any implementation of "smallcaps" gets broken and your printshop begins to use your name as a swearword!