There’s just one problem with blogs. They’re famously difficult to wrap.Dozens of Sarah’s friends and family pitched in to help create a special blog for Sarah’s birthday. Each person described “why I love Sarah” then posted their response here.

I wish everyone who contributed could have seen Sarah’s reaction as she read each message during dinner at her favorite restaurant from an iPad. She was surprised and encouraged. And that’s about all you can hope for.

High fives all around!

So, here’s how to wrap a blog, in pictures.

Photos are great, but they’re also flat. Two dimensional. And sometimes 2 “Ds” just aren’t enough. That’s when you need 3D. Today I stumbled on a powerful Photoshop tool that can transform photos into 3 dimensional spaces inside After Effects. It’s called “Vanishing Point.”

Basically, you use Vanishing Point to set the edges of the visual elements inside your photos. Then, let Photoshop auto-magically export the photo in a format AE can open as a 3D object. Then, set up your AE cameras to move through the 3D environment to your heart’s content.

I slapped together a quick test using a photo I had on hand of the Ft. Worth Stockyards. In the clip below, I first show you the photo, then the 3D version. Even my novice effort landed some promising results. Since photography is my first love, you can bet I’ll be working this tool into future video projects!

Vanishing Point will work best on images with flat planes — like buildings, landscapes, and roadways.

Rather than me try to confuse you with a walk through, here’s a very good tutorial from Video Copilot to get you started. Vanishing Point is a simple way to make 2D…disappear.

Brushes is an art creation app that lets you craft multi-layered paintings or drawings on your iphone. Everything from quick diagrams to print-ready art — and even a blog illustration — is possible on the Brushes canvas. Brushes has even been used to draw the cover art for an edition of The New Yorker. 

I’m finding Brushes useful for sketching out a quick storyboard…and for trying to improve my artistic eye…and for doodling in meetings.

Art Klutz Fun

If you’re an art klutz like me, you’ll have fun using Brushes to make blobs of color on your iphone. The interface is simple and in drawing mode, menus and settings disappear to leave full access to the drawing area.

The creative possibilities are endless with several brushes, a desktop-quality color wheel, and full transparency control. Brushes allows up to six layers and layers can be merged for more complex work.

Sharing is simple with Brushes. When you’re finished with your masterpiece, you can save it to the camera roll or send it via email. Better yet, use the built-in sever to access your Brushes gallery over wifi and save directly to your computer.

Pairing is Caring

Why save to  your computer, you ask? Because, with Brushes, pairing is caring. You’ll want take advantage of the feature that sets Brushes apart from the other iphone drawing apps: The simple and powerful desktop software you can download for free from brushesapp.com.

The desktop software greatly expands what you can do with your final art piece. You can up-sample your image to higher resolution — up to 6x the original size — and export a high quality tiff.

My favorite is the drawing playback feature that lets you watch your drawing take shape stroke by stroke and export it as a quick time movie. That’s an interesting way to teach drawing techniques — or to use a drawing as a storytelling tool. Here’s my example:

For the best in drawing fun, pair Brushes with a good quality stylus and you’ll be amazed at how well the iphone doubles as a sketch pad. It’s work a look in the Apple App Store.

What’s Wild

• Simple interface gives screen real estate to drawing
• Multiple layers allow blending and merging
• Realistic brushes offer creative flexibility
• Download images via wifi
• Free desktop software
  • up-rez images upto 6x iphone resolution
  • play back the drawing as a movie
  • export high quality quicktime movie up to 1920×2880
• Works great with a stylus

What’s Mild

Plastic forever!

(mobile readers, click here to view on vimeo)

When Canon’s t3i hit the market, we were interested in the new digital zoom feature offered on the entry-level DSLR.

Any good photographer knows that the usefulness of digital zoom for stills is limited…but what about video?

Since even full HD images are roughly 2 megapixels (or about 6mp on a non-3CCD sensor), there’s been buzz about using the new digital zoom for video to extend the t3i’s optical reach.

We use a quick and dirty test to see if this theory is fact…or a digital dream.

Thanks, @seancom for the testing idea…

Honor, cow protein, and old wooden ships. If you have to ask, then you don’t understand why  The Ron Swanson Pyramid of Greatness is triangular embodiment of greatness itself. Now you can be the triangular embodiment of greatness yourself.

When you first saw the Greatness on an episode of this season’s NBC comedy Parks and Recreation you knew you had to have Ron Swanson’s wisdom for yourself. How else will you know not to eat fish? Or the only two events where crying is acceptable? Or the true purpose of capitalism?

The pinnacle of greatness is only two steps away:

1. Visit the NBC website to view each of the building blocks on the Ron Swanson Pyramid of Greatness.
2. Print a massive, poster-sized Pyramid to scupt your flabby will into a muscular mass of can-do-because-I-already-did spirit! Click to download the hi-res pdf.

A mashup of three short time lapse attempts
taken within the span of a few hours.
Plus a little original music.

After learning some lessons from my first time lapse attempt, I took to the field again with my 5D Mk II, tripod, and intervalometer. You can watch the results above, or click here to view in HD on vimeo.

Over all, this was a much better result.

In my first try, I experienced camera shake and image flicker problems. My hunch was that these were caused by my mid-shooting adjustments to the camera’s exposure settings. As the sky darkened, I didn’t want to miss the beautiful colors, so I tried to push the exposure.

On this second attempted, I was resolved to jam my hands in my pockets and resist the urge to fiddle with the controls. My self control was rewarded by a steady shot with much less flicker. In the video, you’ll notice that the first and third time lapse shots are smooth and nearly flicker free. As a test of my theory, I made some mid-shot corrections in the second capture, and the flicker and shake returns.

Lesson learned: Keep your hands off the camera, dummy! It’s much more difficult to set a single exposure that will capture both the fully lit early sky and the final fade of sunset color…but that’s what you’ve got to do. Set the camera on manual, over-expose a bit for full sun, then let it roll. The uncertainty of what you’ll get in the final minutes of light adds to the excitement, don’t you think?

The other adjustment I wanted to make after my first try was to run each of my captured frames through Lightroom to pre-process before editing. Lightroom gives much finer control that FCP or even AE, so you can really play with the color and feel of the shots. I applied this technique to the first time lapse sequence in the video above, and was able to pull some more color out of the sky and boost the cloud contrast.

Time lapse photography is quickly becoming an addiction… Can’t wait to see what’s next….

From now on, you’ll never miss a witty comment, charming anecdote, frustrating question, or reality-altering photo from yours truly. Every blog, photo and video. Every random tale of woe, nerdy tech tip, and random feat of human ability. Now available in one mother-of-all RSS feed.

SuperFeed.

I’m really not all that conceited. I just wanted to try out combining the powers of Yahoo Pipes and feedburner to make one grand mashup of all things Wildman to be able to download and store for posterity’s sake. Your ability to stalk me in a silent, creepy way is just an extra bonus.

Grab your fork and dive in to SuperFeed….http://feeds.feedburner.com/wildthoughts/superfeed

Shot with 5D MKII
Still have some things to learn, but a good experience.
Music: Stone Jack Jones, “Hey Love”
Click here to watch on vimeo in HD

My first run at shooting still frame time lapses and experimenting with time lapse camera movement was a learning experience. Some lines from my shooter’s notebook:

• Getting consistent exposure with the classic sunset shot is difficult. Next time, if the job requires going from full light to full darkness, I’ll choose exposure settings that split the difference between the light extremes and fine-tune in post.
• A remote timer is essential. Don’t touch the camera, humans!
• I set the timer to 10 second intervals, and was pleased with the speed of the cloud movement.
• Shooting traffic at night was much easier. Once the exposure’s set, you’re good to go.
• Shorter intervals are a must for fast-moving subjects. Any interval longer than 2 seconds results in jumps as cars fly by. In editing, I wasn’t initially happy with the fluidity of the cars’ movement. I wanted more light streak. So, I layered the video, used the add composition mode and offset the layers by a few frames. That worked well for fluidity.
• Pans and zooms are very possible…UNLESS post will involve layering the video (as I did above). In that case, you’ll end up with some ghosting. And that can be ok, if you’re into that kind of thing. In this case, the imperfections add some charm.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the technique for the traffic shots, but I have a long way to go on the sunsets. And that is the intrigue of video — small successes tempered by greater challenges.

Har, har.

Well, now he has another reason to make fun of me. Thanks to an app called Thumbjam, I’m making CD quality “iloops” on my iphone.

With Thumbjam, you can use their extensive library of real instrument samples or record your own right to the app via external or on-board mic. Either way, once you select a sample, tap record and jam away. Layer multiple loops, play them back and add more layers.

What’s making this app really fun is the unique interface that lets your move your finger across the screen to play up to 5 notes at once. And, you can select from dozens of musical scales so that every note you tap on the screen sounds great.

Everything recorded exports as 32 bit wavs.

Click here for a crazy clip from my phone…

It’s like playing air guitar. With your self. With your phone. Awesome