Last week we finished up quite a bit of work for one particular project that is exciting to us for a lot of reasons. Our Ithaca friend, client and professional photographer Shai Eynav has invented a very cool photo/camera accessory! It is called the Spider Camera Holster and was made as an alternative camera carrying method (notice there isn’t a strap on the camera, or the model in the photo above). I don’t need to say more than that because the video on the Spider website that we made really does explain everything (not that it needs explaining, you’ll get it when you see it).

As psyched as I was to develop the brand and put the video and microsite together with Shai and the AWP team I’m even more anxious and excited to actually own this product. No joke, I had it on for 5 seconds and that’s all it took for me to want one. We’ll be expanding the website in the future when the product becomes available (and adding a ton of videos).

Production side-note: we shot the hi-def video with Shai’s gorgeous Canon 5d mkII, which was wonderful to work with in Final Cut Studio. We’re serving the video up on Facebook (?!) because it looks/sounds/responds better than Vimeo and YouTube (we were shocked to realize that Facebook knows video)! Become a fan and watch this beauty unfold…

is tons of fun.

We were all blown away after seeing a “best of” over at Smashing Magazine. Since I had the chance to try this analog style with a Calumet large format camera (during my IC days)  I thought I’d try to re-create the effect in Photoshop, which proved tricky at first.

But, I re-creating it in photoshop is the easy part: getting a decent source photo is what will make a tilt shift beautiful. I’d recommend you:

1) get some altitude
2) zoom in as far as your lens will allow or
3) pop a wide-angle lens on (nothing in between)

If any other tilt shift fans out there have advice, we’d love to read about it: just leave a comment below.

See that guy up there, his name is Casey. He’s been our lead programmer at work for over two years now. He started a month or so before I did at here and no one had any idea how awesome he’d be, and how much he’d revolutionize what we do with our websites and business. (more…)

We love our tiny, shiny Apple Keyboards (aside from the ridiculous USB placement/depth). We also love eating lunch at our desks. Today happened to be one of those days where lunch somehow ended up on my glorious keyboard. It could have been worse (soup). It could have been better (soft dinner rolls). But it was a bagel with cream cheese. Face down.

It wasn’t pretty, and rather than taking photos of the incident (depressing and poorly lit) I’ll walk you through how to remove a slightly messy substance from a slightly ridiculous keyboard. (more…)

Alright designers and Photoshop friends, come and get it.

We haven’t posted in so long that we felt compelled to give away freebies which can surely be of use to some of you. Here’s a preview of some large grunge/wood background images you can use (download after the jump):

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