JonECat

Did a shoot for my wife’s dance studio today, SAS Dance Studio. Here is one of the shots from that shoot.

Was out at a photo shoot for my wife’s dance studio and saw this tractor.

This is not a complex preset by any stretch, but sometimes your pics straight out the camera can look a little flat. Use this preset to punch your photos color palette in the face!

Download Color Punch

This is a twist on your typical black and white treatment. This preset assumes that your photo is correctly exposed, so if it is not you may have to adjust it a bit.

This preset bumps up the exposure by 2 stops, crushes the black a lot, and adds a slight yellow tint amongst some other things. Notice the area between the bottom of the tank and the ground to see how much it crushes the blacks. Enjoy!

Download Titanium Crush

I have a lot of people ask me how I get the colors in my photos. For the most I use Adobe Photoshop LightRoom available here. Well I have decided that I will start sharing some of my presets that I make. I hope you enjoy them.

For my first preset I decided to share what I like to call “Antique Magenta”. I use this to give an older 1960’s look to the photo that a lot of cheap film cameras had back in the day. This basically changes the red tones to more of a magenta hue and changes the blues to a teal color.

Download Antique Magenta

I am just testing out WP for Android. It seems to work quite nice.

I was really impressed by the speeds of Verizon’s network yesterday. Normally I don’t use my phone for viewing a lot of video online other than Youtube videos, but after my experience yesterday I may use it more.

I am a big fan of the website Engadget. They have recently started a web show that I enjoy watching. I had not watched the latest episode yet, so I thought I would try to watch it from my phone on the Verizon data network. I was pleasantly surprised, I clicked on the MP4 podcast link from their site and it played somewhat smoothly.

From Blog Images

So I decided to see how fast the Verizon data speeds were on my phone, needless to say, I am pretty impressed. Good job VZW!

From Blog Images

Here is my first impressions of the Motorola Droid:

Pros:

• Incredibly screen!!! I have not seen any device, handheld or otherwise that matches the clarity and vibrance of this screen. The iPhone looks pitiful next to it.
• I use a ton of Google products, so this phone feels like it is made for me. Gmail, Contacts, Youtube, and just about any other Google product has seamless integration with the OS.
• Facebook is totally integrated with the contacts, a nice feature.
• Fast, I have an iPod touch and my previous phone was a Blackberry Curve 8330, but this thing is so much faster. The device has the same proc. as the iPhone 3Gs and Palm Pre.
• Lots of decent applications compared to Blackberry, don’t worry, I address this in the cons also iPhone owners. I don’t have to have Google bless an app to install it. I can install apps from anywhere I want and not have to worry if it is going to get pulled from the app store.
• Sound quality is unrivaled, I have never had a phone sound so clear before, zero distortion on the speaker phone also.
• Navigation is so nice, it is smooth. I did a voice search for my wife’s dance studio as I was going there, had zero issues and it was spot on.
• Video recording quality is pretty dang good, look at the Youtube video below, that was sent directly to Youtube from the phone.

Cons:

• While the touchscreen is incredible it is not as good as the iPhone from a user interaction perspective, i.e. No multitouch. I understand that this can be easily added later in software because the hardware supports it, but not implementing it in the launch is an extreme fail.
• While the Android Marketplace is a good start, it does not have the quality of apps that the iPhone has. More specifically in games, iPhone dominates the mobile phone gaming market.
• The still cameras autofocus is just flat broken, they need to seriously address this and soon. It makes no sense because the video focus seems just fine but the still pics are just not there yet.
• Physical keyboard, who cares, I have only used it a couple times, it is more effort than it is worth. I like the soft keyboard of the phone so I will rarely use it. I would rather the phone be thinner and not have the keyboard. I hear this is actually in development now.

Conclusion:

The Droid is in my mind the first phone to actually take a swing at Apple and give them a run for their money. While they both have pros and cons to each, it is hard to say who is the clear winner. If the iPhone had the same screen as the Droid, I believe it would be alot easier to judge. The screen is so awesome it is hard to overlook it, it literally makes the iPhone seem low resolution. Web pages are so much more viewable over the iPhone and it still remains clear. I don’t even really need to zoom into sites that much due to the high resolution. So I guess it comes down to personal preference, but as for me, I know I would not choose an iPhone even if it was on Verizon with this phone available.

Here is a video I took earlier today and sent it directly to Youtube from the phone, as previously stated it took about 5 minutes from the time I shot the vid to the time it was viewable on Youtube. Make sure and click the high quality button (HQ).

Just got my invite, thanks Todd! Here are a couple of screen shots I just took.