our wedding (part 1)

Jess and I just got the first round of pictures from our wedding in New Orleans, and I wanted to post them here so you can all check them out as well! Our photographer got some really great pictures, but I just wish these stills could speak. Because they just can’t do justice to how much fun everyone had! Man-o-man do we have some killer stories from the party too.

Andrew and my new brothers-in-law surprising me with a rocking “Surfin’ Bird” (we’ll have some video soon!). Someone bringing a Thai “working girl” as a date. One of our friends getting so drunk that he stripped down to his boxers and went swimming in someone’s pool. The list just goes on and on!

The stories were just too good to not tell so Andrew and I actually just did a new episode of Lingo talking all about it. So just follow the link below to hear all about the craziness that happened at our wedding and on the honeymoon in Italy.

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LINK: Lingo #25 – Baked Alaska!

The 25th episode of ‘Lingo: A Geekly Podcast’, your #1 source for all things geek, is now available!

This week on Lingo: A Geekly Podcast, Andrew and Doug voice their experiences in New Orleans for Andrew’s vacation and Doug’s wedding!

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And now without further ado, check out some of the pictures from the wedding and reception! There’s a bunch more to come and a ton from the honeymoon!

LINK: MQ Photography

Jessica and Doug had a gorgeous wedding in October in New Orleans with their family and friends celebrating with them. Jessica and Doug got dressed at the beautiful Omni Hotel. Jessica was so relaxed on her wedding day and enjoyed it all. She wore her grandmother’s wedding dress that day which made for a very unique “something old” for her wedding. Doug and his groomsmen were having a great time chilling out at the hotel before the wedding, but they were a very entertaining group.

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freakin’ immersive

I’m in kind of a daze this morning after working until around midnight yesterday. But thanks to HDRLabs.com, I found something that jolted me out of it.

Meet…the Immersive Cam.

Now what is the Immersive Cam you ask? Well it’s what you get when you put 11 lenses on a camera, mix in realtime blending equipment, and then throw in some video streaming software.

Yep…panoramic video.

It’s made by a company called Immersive Media and has to be one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while. Can you imagine what a few more years development, replacing the camera with something like the Red Scarlet, and using a high dynamic range image format like Adobe’s RAW would look like? It boggles the mind really. But I can already see a dozen uses for a system like this in the visual effects world.

Anyways, check out the flash demo below. And after your done playing with that, follow the link below for some more examples of this awesome new technology.

LINK: Immersive Media Streaming Demos

planet tozer

Sometimes it’s a good idea to take a break from the digital world and check out what can be made using only film and dishwasher soap. Well that, and also Sony’s new bad ass Alpha 350 D-SLR camera.

This photo set appeared in the UK magazine Creative Review and was taken by photographer Jason Tozer.

LINK: Planet Tozer

They are, in fact, all common-or-garden soap bubbles, shot in-camera. We’ll be revealing more on how Tozer obtained these stunning images later in the week. The full series is shown below and to see them at a larger size simply click on each image.

Creative Review got such huge response from this photo essay that they also wrote up a very interesting ‘How did he do that?’ article.

LINK: Planet Tozer – How He Did It

The shoot came about after Sony approached Creative Review looking for a way in which to demon­strate the capabilities of its new Alpha 350 D-SLR camera. Having seen his wonderful images in last month’s Monograph, we suggested commiss­ioning photographer Jason Tozer to create a suite of images around the theme of bubbles, thus tying in with the overall campaign idea for the camera.

Pretty cool huh?

Ok, break’s over people! Get back to work Render Monkeys!

thanksgiving

Well it looks like I can’t wait until Monday to post some cool new links I found over the weekend! First things first though, we had a great Thanksgiving in Indiana. And I definitely would be all for a few more days off to recover from all the food. Turkey, Sweet Potatoes, Jelly Meat Balls, oh my. Plus I’m starting to like 4 day weekends!

It was an early Christmas too since Jess and I will be down in New Orleans visiting her family. So the rest of my weekend is going to be spent knee deep in Call of Duty 4! I played some last night and it’s just so damn cool. The AI is so good you can practically let your CG squad just do all the work for you.

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We also went to the Children’s Museum for the first time in 10 years. Jess really wanted to see it and it was just as cool as I remembered it. Smaller, but just as cool. We went to a Microsoft Robot exhibit, hung out with some dinosaurs, ate Astronaut Ice cream, and ended the day in the Planetarium. I was kicking myself though for not bring my new DSLR camera. Because there was one of the prettiest glass sculptures I’d ever seen that was done by Dale Chihuly. I still can’t wrap my head around how they actually transported all the glass pieces. It was amazing.

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Alright, onto business.

I found a bunch of really talented artists through this site called…CGUnit.net this weekend.

The guy who runs this blog, Benoit Blouin, posts not only CG artists but also traditional Photographers, Painters, and even Cartoonists. Which I can’t stress enough how important that is for any CG artist to be exposed to many different forms of art.My favorite artist I found through this site is named Marek Denko. He’s an artist over at ImageFX in Prague and has been featured in practically every big name CG site there is. Here are some examples of his work:

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Not only is his 3D work is absolutely beautiful, but so is all the photography he has done. Which just so happens to be my favorite part about his site. This once again shows just how valuable photography is for any CG rebel out there. He’s incredibly talented, and one of my new favorite artists. So do yourself a favor and check out his work.

I’ve also added a bunch of new links in the photo and tutorials sections on the links page of this site. A lot of them I found through Marek Denko’s site and they’re just really helpful. So check those out too when you get a chance. There’s a plant reference site, CG Tutorials, and a really cool Blue prints site I found this weekend as well.

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The last link is from Jess. She reads this site practically every day and she’s now getting me addicted to it. It’s a blog called X-Entertainment. And it’s an entire site dedicated to all the cool stuff from when we were kids. Whether it’s an old tv show, movie, ice cream, drink. You name it, this blog talks about it.

They just did a whole post about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, and went back and did a review of the 1991 parade featuring my favorite…the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! It’s just awesome, and really makes you feel like a kid again.

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Alright, well that’s it for today. I’m going to go and enjoy some Thanksgiving left overs and play some Call of Duty 4. Well scratch that last part. Looks like Jess is playing Super Mario Galaxy. More left overs for me then! Talk to you all soon. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving.