Using a Gray Card [photography]

Using a gray-card is pretty simple:

1. Set up your lighting
2. Place your ‘gray card’ in the shot
3. De-focus your camera a little and take a photo. This ensures that you capture the colour, and not the texture, of your gray card
4. Remove the gray card, and take photos as usual. Every time you change the lighting, go back to step 2.
5. When you’ve imported your photos into your favourite software package, use the gray card as a ‘sample’ to set a custom white balance.
6. Copy the white balance across to all the other photos in the set – or until the next time you’ve photographed your gray card.

You can now sit back in the knowledge that all your photos have the same white balance. If it turns out that it is still slightly off, you could adjust it further, and then copy that white balance profile across to the other photos in the shoot. [source]

Options from B&H • 3 Penguins Photography on Flickr

How To Get A Job In America

Job boards and Craigslist don’t work because everybody’s already there. Here’s where to look, and how to look good, in the (still incredibly rough) job market.

President Obama wants to spend $447 billion to boost the economy. The American Jobs Act will cut taxes for employers and most families, build roads and renovate schools, and provide unnamed assistance for the unemployed. But it remains uncertain if any of that is going to lead the jobless to rewarding gigs that make full use of their talents. [read]

Sly Stone is Homeless in Los Angeles

Troubled funk legend Sly Stone has been living out of a white van in Los Angeles following a long downward spiral of drug abuse and financial mismanagement. “I like my small camper,” Stone told the New York Post. “I just do not want to return to a fixed home. I cannot stand being in one place. I must keep moving.” [read]

Facebook’s new Timeline layout: A getting-started guide

Timeline won’t officially launch for a few weeks, but if you want to try it right now, check out David Daw’s how-to guide on activating Facebook Timeline right now. If you decide to take the plunge, keep in mind this is a developer beta so expect to see bugs. There are also no guarantees that an accident won’t happen that briefly makes all your profile information public. So the risk is yours if you try Timeline. [read]

October 4th Media Event to Be Held at Apple’s Headquarters?

AllThingsD reportsthat Apple’s iPhone media event apparently scheduled for October 4th will be held at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California rather than the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco as has been typical for their iPad and iPod events.

Sources close to the company say the demonstration — currently scheduled for Tuesday October 4, a date first reported by AllThingsD — will be held at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California.

The report notes that it is unknown why Apple has chosen its own Town Hall Auditorium for the event, but offers a couple of theories including the possibility of uncertainty in locking down a date preventing Apple from booking an outside venue or a desire to give new CEO Tim Cook a more intimate venue for the first major product introduction under his official watch. [read]

Now, Where Was I? 6 Strategies For Dealing With Workplace Distractions

Distractions at work are nothing new. Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) wrote about strategies for dealing with work distractions way back in the 1300s. In his Life of Solitude, Petrarch offers the following advice for the medieval scholar: “Close the doors of your senses in order to achieve solitude in the presence of other people.” Today, you will find many people doing exactly that in coffee shops and other public places.

Yet distractions have gotten worse, much worse, in fact, and technology is largely to blame. As late as the 1960s, the only piece of technology on a worker’s desk was a telephone (and maybe a typewriter). Contrast that with today’s collage of desktop computer, notebook computer, voice over IP (video) phone, smartphone, iPod, iPad, and other devices. Each one of these electronic “servants” vie for the attention of its master with beeping alerts, trendy ringtones, and flashing screens. This army of devices is overloading us with information, and we battle to keep up. [read]

Facebook is Scaring Me

Yesterday I wrote that Twitter should be scared of Facebook. Today it’s worse. I, as a mere user of Facebook, am seriously scared of them.

Every time they make a change, people get angry. I’ve never myself been angry because I have always assumed everything I post to Facebook is public. That the act of putting something there, a link, picture, mini-essay, is itself a public act.

This time, however, they’re doing something that I think is really scary, and virus-like. The kind of behavior deserves a bad name, like phishing, or spam, or cyber-stalking. [read]

Apple Blocking Out Vacations for October 14th iPhone 5 Retail Launch?

AppleInsider reports that Apple has started denying vacation requests for employees during the 2nd week of October.

Apple is quietly denying requests for employee vacations during the second week of October, hinting that the company currently anticipates an influx of customers to its stores around that time related to availability of its new iOS 5 and fifth-generation iPhone products.

Specifically, dates from October 9th through 12th and October 14th through 15th are said to be restricted, suggesting Apple plans on launching new products during that time. [read]

OktavaMod Rode NT1A Review

For this review I used the the RODE NT1a (Michael Joly Mod) microphone on voice and acoustic guitar.

Test equipment included a Neumann TLM 103 and a Blue Baby Bottle (as comparison microphones), along with a Focusrite Liquid Saffire 56 (the Liquid Pre channels were not used) and Canare microphone cables. All files were recorded at 24-bit/48kHz with no EQ or compression. I did do some very slight gain adjustment, just to be sure that the volume of the reference files played back as closely as possible. [read]

Studio Note: The Ins & Outs Of Mix Bus Compression

Generally you’ll find that most renowned mixers use the bus compressor to add a sort of “glue” to the track so the instruments fit together better, but that also means that they’ll actually use very little compression.

In fact, sometimes only a dB or two of gain reduction at the most is added for the final mix. That being said, many mixers will also offer their clients (artists, band members, producers and label execs) a more compressed version to simulate what it will sound like after it’s mastered. [read]