If you can spare 10 mintues...

If you haven't heard of Zack Arias, he's a photographer who started with nothing and shoots really low budget still, but is making a living doing it. He's got some good video's and also an interesting blog. I came across this video today and really like it. Stick with all 10 minutes of it, it's good... well... at least I think so.

~Nate

Frustrated

I have so far to go on this business plan and feel very stuck right now. If it were only for a grade, I'd hand it in as is. However, this is a real patentable product that I actually want to see succeed. My ENTR 301 class project collided with my observations as a dad and the needs of certain baby products and ultimately resulted in the idea I'm hoping to get investors interested in. It's one thing to get other parents excited about my product, but something entirely to get someone to risk their own money on my ideas and ambitions. After a ton of research, I'm convinced it will do well in the market, so I'm not worried about whether or not it can succeed. It's the steps of getting to that point that are steep and slippery. It can go very right or incredible wrong. Tomorrow is a new day and a fresh start at the last half of the business plan. It'll work. Just read a quote tonight. "Good design is good business." Of course it made it into my business plan ;-)

~Nate

I DID make a Logo in Illustrator, I can post that without giving much of the idea away. Well at least not any of the nuts and bolts of it! I'm confident no one will deduce my design from the logo. Maybe the purpose though, which is fine, since there are similar products on the market already... mine's just better.

Lemme know what you think of it and the colors, I don't necessarily love the colors, but it's the best I've come up with so far. I'll admit, I'm not good at colors.

Which Group Photo?

Leave a comment and let me know either A or B.

A Redux (Now Black and White) I like it better this way too Sarah, good call.


B

Securing Absent in a Tree.

More Than Just Sticks in a Tree.

Here's two photos I took of our depiction of "absent". The location actually proved to be very difficult to photograph. The challenge was to make it look like something more than just sticks in a tree. The first photo is a composite of 5 frames, all of which were taken at different exposures. The goal was to get the best darks and the best lights and combine them to create a photo that showed detail in the full range from black to white. After enfusing the 5 photos, I played with it a little in Lightroom and ended up with this final representation. I added a help photo, so if you can't find the word, click on the photo (only in the first one) and the letters will be traced out for you.

The second photo, took a little outside help... in the form of Cody. He was nice enough to stick around afterwards and shed some light on the site. We used a couple of external flashes to illuminate the location and ended up with some pretty decent stuff.

How To Remove the NavBar on Your Blog.

As I've looked around at a lot of the BDS blogs, I've noticed that most (maybe all, I don't remember) still have the unsightly NavBar attached to the top. Personally I don't like them and I always choose to remove mine when I start a blog for a couple of reasons.

1. It Looks More Professional: My wife and I first started doing this with our wedding photography blog when it was all we had for a website. We didn't want to look like every other Mom and Pop wedding photography business that just used a Blogger template for our website, even though that's exactly what we were doing. Why would anyone want to hire us if we didn't even have the money to invest in our own website? So, we did what we could to make it look as good as possible until we could justify spending the money on a domain and hosting our own site.

2. I Never Found It Useful: I haven't used the NavBar while visiting a blog, ever. I'll either use the web browser navigation buttons or the links within the blog. So, why have it there if I'm never going to use it? If I can provide enough navigation internal to my blog, then it makes the NavBar obsolete.

3. It's Distracting: Some users spend a ton of time designing their blog and they end up looking really nice! However, in most cases there's still that pesky blue bar at the top that throws off the page, it just looks a lot better GONE.

If you want to take yours off, here's the link.

Or just watch this video.

~Nate

Remove Blogger Navbar - Funny bloopers R us

Letter Building

Here's some pictures of our letter building over the last few days. I'm not going to bother to write much, because Leslie did such a good job explaining the operation here.

Here's Tuesday, when we found the motherload of sticks. We filled our cars with them, just in case it rained on Thursday and we had to build indoors.























We got lucky though and here's Thursday where construction actually began.

Group Meeting

Hey Leslie, Cody, Mary-Kate, and Sarah. Email me at nate@borozinskiphoto.com and we can discuss meeting on Monday and finalize what we'd like to do with our word. There's an idea I'd like to run by you, and I'd rather not say it on the public forum ;-) Pics of the work today and Tuesday will be up soon!

Free Classes in Art

Take a look at this link. Every month CreativeLive "A Live, Worldwide Creative Classroom" has free online workshops and classes in everything art. They're still growing, but the content they do provide is from professionals who are leading their industry. Such as Jasmine Star, Chase Jarvis, Jeremy Cowart, and more. They're going to be expanding online instruction to everything that involves art pretty soon! It's free, it's online (so you can even Facebook and watch), and it's taught by pro's. What more could you ask for?

Photographer's tune in. Great talk by Chase Jarvis.

This is Chase Jarvis' keynote address at the Photo Plus expo in NYC at the end of October.

More practice with product photography.

I'm diving further into the area of product/commercial photography. I don't want to solely do product photography, but I figure a small motionless object is easiest to practice on. Once, I get the fundamentals down on the smaller scale, I'll simply apply it to larger things and more dynamic situations. It's gonna be a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to the adventure!

Why I take photos.

I take photos because I like to see things from a different perspective. Most of life we view from our normal standing height, usually viewing everything from above. We've grown pretty accustomed to the way things look and many times overlook something extraordinary because we've seen it a thousand times and think we know everything about it. Simply by changing our perspective, we can completely change our environment and reveal what little we actually know about the objects and places we see everyday. Remember as a child when the world seemed endless and full of wonder and amazement? Remember exploring new places and the joy that came from it? As adults we've lost a lot of that passion to discover our world, we don't have time to explore or to try and see things differently. We "know" our world and we walk and drive blindly through it everyday. What if we were to take a minute to explore it? To drive down the road we've seen a million times and have always wondered where it goes, climb the fire escape that is just beckoning us to take a chance and see what happens, walk down an alley we've never been, or just go outside lay in the grass and look up? Our world as we know it would become larger and once again we'd feel free and curious of our surroundings. All that we thought we knew would be replaced by a desire to learn more and to once again challenge our minds to experience a world that we thought we knew but never really see.

~Nate

Searching for absence on a campus full of students.

Cody, Mary Kate, Sarah, Leslie, and I set out after our group critiques to search for the best site on KU's campus to exhibit our word Absent. We checked out a few spots that were so-so, and then... Leslie led us to a location (which is confidential at the moment) that we as a group feel is the best fit for our word. I've omitted some photos, in hopes of keeping it unidentifiable. Included below are some other possible spots and some "genuine" campus wildlife.