I must have watched this time-lapse video at least 2 two or three times before posting it. From the music to the composition and locations, everything gives you a very relaxing feel about it. Fine-art landscape & time-lapse photographer Joe Louw, who’s based in South Africa, travels around to shoot this video below with his wife, who helped him with carrying the equipment, planning the shots, and documenting the whole trip. In my opinion, that is the best wife any photographer could ever ask for.

As soon as we decided where to shoot first, we didn’t waste any time to unpack our equipment. I don’t think we realized just how much gear we had until we started hiking up these rocky hills, solar panel and all! It took several hikes to get everything up to the spot where we wanted to shoot. And once the shooting started, it didn’t stop.

We had two cameras firing away, mostly one on a Shukuma DOLLY and one on a Shukuma MINI. Much planning is required for any timelapse shots, keeping various factors in consideration and this was no different. I always try to set up at least one dolly for nighttime shooting while there is still sufficient light. It can be quite challenging to set up in the dark, especially when working in uneven terrain and with one camera already exposing. And now try to make your way back to camp.

Music:
Journey – by Michael Montes - itunes.apple.com/us/album/filmscores/id378986556

Equipment:
Shukuma DOLLY - timelapsesa.co.za/dolly/shukuma-dolly
Shukuma MINI - timelapsesa.co.za/dolly/shukuma-mini
Merlin telescope head

Software:
Adobe Lightroom
LRTimelapse - lrtimelapse.com

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Check out the time-lapse video below called “Heart of Vancity” shot by Canada-based photographer Joel Schat. The video is one of the cleanest I’ve seen. The composition is top notch, the music is epic, the movements are so smooth, and there is virtually none of light flickering. What you’ll notice is that is Joel Schat focuses on shots that involve a lot of change in terms of lighting. How did Joel achieve such looks? It’s a technique called “bulb ramping“, which is done when your camera is in bulb mode, and controlled by an external intervalometer, which will make transitions smooth as silk.

The Heart of Vancity is a portrait of downtown Vancouver. I am always inspired by the city lights at night and tried to find new ways to show off the city’s beauty. This entire film was shot during the winter months which made it very difficult to shoot because of all the rain! I am hoping to explore more of this fantastic city in the future as there are many locations left that I would love to shoot!

Bulb Ramping Tutorial

In case you were wondering how bulb ramping is done, watch the video below for an explanation. Joel has also posted a detailed write-up on his blog.

Here’s another video that Joel shot while travelling in South-east Asia about a year ago.

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I work in the Financial District area of Manhattan, New York; namely, at the corner of Water St and John St. There are at least 20-30 food trucks, on top of multiple restaurants, within the 700-yard radius. At lunchtime everyday, my coworkers and I walk around the blocks trying different places to eat. A few months ago, we discovered GRK Fresh Greek, and it’d proven to be a good spot to visit at least once a month or. The food is delicious, the customer service is good, and the price is affordable. Sometimes I’d even make a stop there after work to grab a bite for dinner. Everything was excellent, until one day, I found that my credit card was overcharged by GRK Fresh Greek.

It was a Thursday night, 4/18/2013, when my brother and his wife decided that they wanted Greek food for dinner. Per usual, I swung by GRK Fresh Greek at around 6:15pm and placed an order for takeout. My order consisted of 3 plates:

- Lamb/beef, Grk, brown rice
- Chicken, prassino, Aegean slaw
- Lamb/beef, Katero, brown rice

With each plate being priced at $9.78, the total came out to be $31.94 with tax included. Generally, I never keep any receipts, so I tossed it the minute I walked out of the store. Upon checking my statement a few days later, I saw that my account was charged $34.94.

Curious to know what happened, I use their contact form and send an email. About 24 hours later, I was contacted by Christopher Potter, GRK Director of Strategic Development. Chris said that he’d found the transaction, but the information I’d provided didn’t match, so I replied with the last 4 digits of my card and its expiration date. Chris responded that a tip had been added to my transaction, which brought the total amount to be $3 more than what it should have been.

What?

I generally don’t leave any tip for takeouts, especially a place that looks somewhat like a fast food joint. I sent an email back to Chris, stating my situation, and that I thought someone in his staff took the liberty to add the tip in for me. Great. That’s awesome. I’m generally known for over-tipping, but this time was without my consent. It is the principle that I had a problem with. Here’s Chris’ next response:

Dear Tam Nguyen,

Rather than go back and forth, I’ll simply give you the $3 dollars from my pocket. Unfortunately, you don’t have the receipt and the information you’ve provided does not match but I don’t want you to feel slighted.

Is that acceptable?

No, Chris, that is NOT acceptable. Clearly, the information matched enough to overcharge me $3. Instead of investigating his store to see which of the employee it was who did the deed, he made it sound like I was sweating over $3. I was not. I simply wanted to find out what happened, and had Chris apologized and told me he’d look into it, I’d be more than happy to walk away from the incident.

I’m a person of principle, and I no longer feel like walking into a restaurant where I know I have to watch my receipt for any funny businesses. GRK Fresh Greek can keep the $3, but they have lost me as a customer. Maybe they don’t care, but as a Director of Strategic Development, I would have assumed he did.

Update: here’s Chris’ email that was sent to me at 3:36am:

Tam,

I’m really shocked. I was simply trying to help you. Why didn’t you just say that you had an issue with this?

I honestly just didn’t want you to feel ripped off.

In perspective, do you think that if you sent that email to Bloomingdales, they would just offer to refund you the money? We are new and every dollar counts. If I thought that an employee was stealing, I would fire them immediately.

We just can’t afford that.

Even for a cashier to do this, which was not the case, means that they would get about $0.35 after the tips are pooled and then paid out to the staff as a whole

I was honestly trying to make you happy with no headache. If you’re not happy, just tell me and we would talk about it. I thought you would appreciate.

Would you like to meet or do a call? Let me know what works for you.

A friend of mine suggested on Facebook that I contact my credit card company and let them resolve the situation. I’ll do this soon.

Update 4/27/13: I called my Chase credit company and spoke with 2 agents, one named Steve and one named Mary. The agents were very courteous and helpful; they were able to put the $3 back to my account. I doubt they would revert that amount from the original transaction that was made by GRK, which would have been my preferred end result. Either way, I’m never coming back to GRK.

Principle matters.

Update 4/28/13: George Nikas, the founder of GRK, has reached out to me via personal email. Here’s his message:

Dear mr Nguyen,

I am the founder of GRK and i take the liberty to email you as I was made aware of the unfortunate incident that has transpired over the last week at our Flagship store in the financial district.

I want to assure you that i will do anything within my power to get to the bottom of this. Not only because i think you are right but because if something like this is happening right behind our back it could hurt our reputation really bad just because we have abysmal control over our employees.

Also I want to apologize for the way our representative handled the whole matter. He clearly handled the whole matter wrong and again i am deeply apologetic on behalf of all of GRK.

If there is anything at all i can do at all to “heal our relationship” i would definitely go out of my way to achieve that.

I’ve asked that George update me with his findings after he gets to the bottom of this.

Update 4/28/13: As promised, George has updated me with what he found out as to what happened to my bill, which was in fact a human error from one of his employees. I hate to be “that guy” who’s a pain in the neck to deal with, but I’d figured something must have been said for it to come to light. I have much respect for George, who was courteous enough to listen and resolve the problem. I have no doubt that incidents like this will no longer happen in the future.

George has done more than enough to gain back my trust for GRK. I’m a happy camper again, and I’ll maybe visit the restaurant sooner than later.

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Here’s another Jasmine Star’s installment on how to pose a bride for a photoshoot. When you are photographing a bride, it is as important to make her feel comfortable as it is to have the pictures look good. One of the tricks is to give the bride something to hold, because it will create natural lines and curves where they are supposed to be. This can be easily done since there’s always the bouquet. You can also give specific directions by demonstrations, for when words cannot describe what you have pictured in your head.

For more posing tips, check out the rest of Jasmine Star posts in my blog.

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Coco Rocha has got to be one of the coolest models I’ve seen. Born in Toronto, Ontario, and grew up in Richmond, British Columbia, Coco Rocha started her modeling career in New York in 2004. Ever since, we have seen her face all over big named ads and commercials. I like her because she seems to be a hard working individual with a lot of self-respect and integrity. In fact, she ran into a bit of a problem last year when Elle Brazil magazine went a tad overboard with photoshopping her cover.

Check out this video below for some behind-the-scene footage of James Houston’s photoshoot with Coco Rocha covers the high-profile model, and the entire studio, in an intense array of colorful powders commonly used during the Hindu Holi festival in India to celebrate the colors of Spring.

Here’s Coco showcasing her modeling skills, striking 50 poses in 30 seconds. Impressive.

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NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, more commonly known as SDO, has spent the last three years taking pictures of the sun, showing off its steady increase in activity as its latest 11-year cycle nears its peak. As part of the project, NASA has taken some of the images and compiled them into a single 3-minute video, which makes it easy to see the gradual increase in solar activity.

SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. The images shown here are based on a wavelength of 171 Angstroms, which is in the extreme ultraviolet range and shows solar material at around 600,000 Kelvin. In this wavelength it is easy to see the sun’s 25-day rotation as well as how solar activity has increased over three years.

During the course of the video, the sun subtly increases and decreases in apparent size. This is because the distance between the SDO spacecraft and the sun varies over time. The image is, however, remarkably consistent and stable despite the fact that SDO orbits the Earth at 6,876 miles per hour and the Earth orbits the sun at 67,062 miles per hour.

More information about this video, as well as full HD version of all four wavelengths and print-resolution stills are public domain and can be viewed and downloaded at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011200/a011255/

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On a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being the worst, and 10 being top notch, I’d rate this video 8 for its music and art, 7 for its creativity, given that the light-painting idea isn’t exactly new. With that said, on a scale from 1 to 10 of how much I’m in love with Kina Grannis, I’d give it ∞ + 1. Yes, that’s infinity+1, meaning it can’t be measured.

Kina Grannis is a singer/songwriter who started her career on Youtube a few years ago. After posting a bunch of “bedroom” and “backyard” videos on Youtube, she gained enough popularity that she went on tours around the globe for a year straight. Once the tours were over, she went on a “songwriting retreat” where she’d go offline for months, and now Kina has officially released yet another video that would make your heart melt.

The song means a lot to her, as I believe it was written for her mom, who recently passed away due to cancer. When I first heard it at one of her concerts in San Francisco, she almost cried singing it.

Get comfortable, press the ‘Play’ button, and enjoy the music video. In case you missed it, here’s that ”In Your Arms” song that was shot with 288,000 jelly beans.

Here’s the “backyard” version of the song.

Kina Grannis on TED Talk

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If you’ve been surfing on the Internet long enough, I’m sure you’ve seen the work of Devin Graham, also better known as “Devin Supertramp“. Thanks to the power of Youtube and social networks, anyone with a camera, a passion for photography/cinematography, and effort, could really make it to be popular. And by effort I mean lots of it. Most people think photographers/videographers live their lives like a rockstar, while in fact it’s the complete opposite. Devin has to wake up at the crack of dawn, travel great lengths for hours, all for just about 4 seconds of footage for one of his videos.

Watch this inspiring video to get a taste of what his days are like.

“The difference between a poor man a rich man is that the poor man plans for the weekend, and the rich man plans for years in advance.”

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The post title is a bit confusing, so I’ll try to explain the purpose here: Let’s say you have a webpage with a top navigation menu. Now, suppose you want to be fancy and have the top navigation stay static with respect to the page as the user scroll down. The effect is seen implemented on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Techcrunch, Woot.com, etc… I’m going to explain how this trick is done using  jQuery. Now, I’m not a huge fan of using Javascript to design a website, but there are things that can only be done using JS. You should know that eyecandy like this should come after the design. The site must work even if JS is disabled.

The logic goes something like this:

- First, your navigation bar should have a name.
- Using jQuery, detect the browser window to see where the user is with respect to the top of the page.
- If the user has scrolled passed a certain point, use jQuery to add in a CSS class, let’s call it “.fancy”, to the navigation element.
- In your CSS, design your “.fancy” class to position the navigation as “fixed”.
- In your jQuery, make sure you remove the “.fancy” class once the user scrolls up passed the “fancy” point.
- And you’re done.

Here’s the example Javascript code, with my “fancy” point at 90px from the top:

<script type="text/javascript">
	jQuery(function () {
		jQuery(document).ready(function () {
			jQuery(window).scroll(function () {
				if (jQuery(this).scrollTop() > 90) {
					jQuery('#menu-area').addClass('fancy');
				} else {
					jQuery('#menu-area').removeClass('fancy');
				}
			});
		});
	});
</script>

Here’s the example CSS code:

.fancy {
	position: fixed !important;
	margin-top: 0 !important;
	top: 0;
	box-shadow: 0 12px 12px -6px #444;
}

One of the problems I ran into with doing this is that when my top navigation was positioned as ‘relative’ and then when the jQuery added the “.fancy” class to make it fixed, the page kind of jumped a little, because now that the element is no longer there relatively, the rest of the page gets pushed up to fill up that space. It’s somewhat important that your navigation start off with absolute position.

Here’s the live demo on Codepen. Feel free to drop me a line below if you have any questions.

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I’ve been on a quest to find the best weather app for quite some time now, and I think I’ve finally found it. I have an iPhone, and the native weather app has been put in my “junk” folder for almost a year now, because it looks so ancient and is so impractical. What I wanted was an app that is clean, elegant, and informative. “How informative” you ask? Well, I want to know how windy it’s going to be, what time the sun rises and sets, and when it’s going to rain. Here in New York city, those little things can really make a difference in how you dress.

Introducing the new Yahoo! Weather app that was just released on the App Store. This app fits the bill perfectly for me. It is simple, intuitive, very navigate, and doesn’t have any ads. The icing on the cake is that it grabs images from Flickr that are posted by users. Here’s the description on the app’s page:

Favorite Features:
- Beautiful photos that match your location, time of day, and current weather condition
- Detailed weather information and forecasts
- Interactive radar, satellite, heat, and wind maps, plus sunrise/sunset times

Tips:
- Swipe vertically for detailed weather information
- Swipe horizontally for favorite locations
- Submit photos to the app at Project Weather on Flickr

Take a moment and give the Yahoo! Weather app a try, I promise you’ll like it.

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