Inspired

So after the insanity of last week and the ridiculousness of running around doing hanging out type stuff this weekend, I crashed last night.

It helps that it's cold out right now. So when I got home at 6 last night I just hid under blankets, saw that Return of the Jedi was on tv, hunkered down and promptly passed out for a few hours. Sorry Mr Lukas, no offence to your work. It was obviously much needed rest.

I also caught up on most of my blog reading (who knew you could get that many feed upates in the span of four days!) and then opened up Photoshop and started creating some of my own actions and droplets.

Got my retouching action down solid with stops and all (so proud of myself!) and then started working on the action and the droplet for my Photography by Kat logo. Saw a cool idea a few days ago that I'm wanting to use so that it's not just this K thingie in the corner but more of a band that goes across the picture.

I'm having some trouble though with getting the plain white version of the logo to load in the action and so the resultant droplet doesn't really want to co-operate either. I also have to figure out how to have the action/droplet work for images that are landscape. Thought I saw some information somewhere on the web last night about how to allow for different picture sizes, perhaps it's just a setting I have to give it when I create the action? Not sure, but will check again tonight.

Pondered doing two separate droplets, but then that would defeat the point in having a droplet if I had to sort out my portrait and landscape orientations. It would be a major pain.

I am liking these actions and droplets. DEFINITELY makes life a lot easier. Thanks MC.

Today I finally uncovered an open source sound editing software called Audacity and even managed to stumble upon the right tune to sample from.

As a rule I HATE music on websites...maybe this is because it's not music I've chosen to use on the site, and I think that the music you do like is very personal and so everyone's selections are gonna be vastly different.

There's also the annoyance factor. I tried very carefully to not pick something that had a TERRIBLY repetitive core to it...you know like running thirds. Seriously, looping running thirds is enough for even the most sane person to shoot themselves (think constantly hearing The Twilight Zone tune while you're trying to look at pictures).

So while I'm flipping through my music library I come across this intro section of a song that's awesome (well at least to me). Except it's an 8 minute song...yeah, even considering using the whole song wouldn't be a good idea. So opened the thing up in Audacity, saw that the intro part lasted around a minute, cut, chop, paste, export as wave file and then...oh...can't upload a wave file.... crap. So found an open source music file converter (Switch Sound File Converter) and TADA, properly sized MP3! I hope the thing dosen't annoy too many people who are also like me about sound on sites but I was finding it was missing something. Hopefully it actually adds to the site and doesn't force people to flee.

At work I'm starting to receive those promotional e-mails from photographers trying to get me to hire them for freelance work. I hate to say it, but they're wasting their time emailing those to that inbox...I mean good on them for doing the speculative emails, but our company has never had the budget for photographers (I know, talk about hypocrisy. I'd have it differently if I could). The upside to this is that you can glean some awesome ideas from their work.

Inspiration sometimes comes in the form of spam :)

More soon...