The Cinematography of Avatar

A really fascinating article that examines the challenges facing modern cinematographers through Mauro Fiore’s experience as the DP on Avatar. Some of the solutions his team devised for dealing with the large amount of green screen components are brilliant. Most interesting to me was how Fiore dealt with the limitations of smaller sensor sizes and thus decreased depth of field on the Sony HDCAM gear he used to shoot the live action sequences.

“Instead of working with circles-of-confusion, I had to create depth-of-field through contrast and lighting levels, which was a really fun challenge.”

As someone who has to deal with these sorts of limitations on a regular basis, it was yet another poignant reminder that it’s not the gear that matters, but the person behind it all.

Apple releases Aperture 3

Looks like a fantastic update to my favorite photo management and RAW processing application. Especially excited about the Lightroom-style nondestructive brush editing.

URL ABC

Following in the footsteps of Tim Van Damme and others:

A simple game: Go to the address bar in your favorite browser, and type one letter. Start with “a”, end with “z”.

A: http://amazon.com/
B: http://bighugelabs.com/
C: http://www.carvinguitars.com/
D: http://danielmccullum.com/
E: http://www.ebay.com/
F: http://facebook.com/
G: http://www.google.com/
H: http://harvestnorfolk.com/
I: http://imdb.com/
J: http://jasonsantamaria.com/
K: http://kuler.adobe.com/
L: http://last.fm/
M: http://my.regent.edu/
N: http://netflix.com/
O: http://owltastic.com/
P: http://panic.com/
Q: http://quicksynergy.sourceforge.net/
R: http://regent.edu/
S: http://simpledesktops.com/
T: http://twitter.com/
U: http://urbanfonts.com/
V: http://vimeo.com/
W: http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
X: http://xkcd.com/
Y: http://youtube.com/
Z: http://zzounds.com/

Creative Sense: Gorgeous CS4 Replacement Icons

I love the look of these new replacement icons for several Adobe CS4 apps, and I only hope that a Fireworks icon will be added in the future (despite it’s mindblowingly awful bugs, I still prefer it to Photoshop for website mockups/graphics)