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First Friday in Las Vegas

November 9, 2008
Break Dance

Yesterday was another first for our family. We headed on down to Downtown Las Vegas to check out First Friday, an art & music festival that takes place on the… wait for it… First Friday of every month.

From the First Friday website:

First Friday is produced by Whirlygig, Inc., a Nevada non-profit arts organization founded in October 2002. First Friday has grown from 300 attendees in 2002 to today’s monthly attendance of 5-10,000. The event now encompasses more than 20 city blocks with five blocks closed to vehicular traffic to create a pedestrian area for the outdoor festivities. This grassroots community festival has become “Las Vegas’ favorite community art event” with gallery hopping, free exhibition spaces for artists, live entertainment, street entertainers, shopping food, beverages, and more. More than 80 galleries, restaurants and retail businesses work together to make the First Friday experience unique to the Las Vegas downtown arts district. Volunteers currently jury the art, work the information tables, set up and tear down parts of the event, place the trolley signs, coordinate the trolley guides, and sell soda and water to benefit First Friday. As Mayor Oscar Goodman says, “First Friday is the best thing that has ever happened to Las Vegas.”

Since we had never been, we thought there was a possibility that there were many others who had never been as well. So, we scheduled a last minute meetup for our Tweetup Las Vegas group. Big thanks to Jake & Nate from Black Diamond Digital for letting us use their office as a meeting place. They are only a block and a half from the festivities, so it worked out really well.

We met at BDD around 5:15 and had a chat with a couple people who had heard of Twitter, but had never used it. I gave them a quick tutorial and they both seemed very interested in using it. A few more from our group showed up and we hung out and talked about photography, social networking and hockey until around 6:15. We then headed down to First Friday and walked around checking out the different artists. There were painters, jewelry makers, musicians and even some break dancers. I had a great time taking a bunch of photos, especially of the break dancers.

As we were heading back to BDD we stopped by the Art Factory. This place was absolutely awesome. It’s a two story building with SEVERAL room inside. Each room was taken up by a different artist showing off there work. All types, all genres, all styles and all of them cool. Even though the place looked pretty busy to us, we were told that this was one of the slower nights. Yikes, makes me wonder what it’s like when it’s busy!

The event was really cool and I’m glad we finally made it out. Hopefully I can talk Jake and Nate in to letting us use that as a starting point each month for our twitter meetups. That would be very cool.

See you there next month.

Filed Under: Entertainment, Music, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Alien Bees vs. Cactus V2 trigger & receivers

November 6, 2008
Alien Bee 100 Feet

You may remember the crazybooth project I wrote about last month. While at that photo shoot, I learned a very valuable lesson; You get what you pay for. I know what you are saying, that’s not exactly a new lesson. True as that may be, when it comes to wireless flash triggers, I had no idea how apparent it would be.

During the crazybooth shoot, I’d say we had an optimal shooting setup to allow the Cactus V2 remote trigger & receivers to work perfectly. The trigger and receivers were no more than 7 feet away from each other and they were in direct line-of-sight. Unfortunately, we learned quickly that they were going to fire the flash roughly 1 out of every 3 or 4 times we clicked a shot. If we were doing product photography with a stationary, unchanging item, this wouldn’t have been a big deal. But, in a crazybooth setting, missing a shot with real emotion, a funny face, a great smile, etc… well, it can ruin your whole shoot.

After the crazybooth incident, I went out and purchased a set of Alien Bees triggers (1) & receivers (2). When they first arrived we did a very non-scientific test to test their range. I sat in one office with the receiver while a friend walked around snapping photos around the other offices, even going inside and shutting the doors. No matter what elements we threw at it, they performed more than 95% of the time. This brought up it’s own questions, though. Exactly how far away can you be from the remote and still have it flash? I had to find out for myself.

This evening I grabbed a tripod, flash and umbrella and set them up on the sidewalk in front of my house. I then grabbed a tape measure and some chalk. I started off by making 13 chalk marks, 10 feet apart, starting 10 feet away from the flash. I then put on the Cactus V2 trigger and receiver and started snapping.

I’m using a prime 20mm lens at f/4.0 with a 1/60 shutter speed.

The first 5 shots (50 feet away on the last one) worked fine, as I expected they would. At 60 feet away, my first shot showed a dark umbrella. I thought it didn’t fire. I then held the camera away from my eye and fired the trigger. I saw the flash go off, but chimping showed a dark umbrella again. A few more tests and at 1/60, I was not able to get the flash to sync with the trigger. However, it was still firing. I moved back to 70 and 80 feet and it took 3 tries at each location to get a flash. At 90 feet, I was officially out of range.

Next came the Alien Bees. The first 5 shots were fine, as expected. When I moved to shot 6 (60 feet), I was curious to see if I was going to run in to the syncing issue I had with the Cactus V2s. As I had hoped, there was no sync issue. I made may with rough the next few shots until I was standing on #13, 130 feet away. The flash went off as expected and still, no sync issues. Back, back, back I went. 150, 180, 200, 240, 260, 280 feet away. Every shot was perfect. No sync issue and the flash fired on the first try time and time again. At 290 feet was the first miss-fire. It took 3 shots for the flash to go off. Still I moved back. In my final shot, I was 325 feet away from the flash. It fired on the first try and still had no sync issues. I could have tried moving back further, but I would have been trespassing on a neighbor’s lawn.

To sum up, as far as I can tell, the Alien Bees are completely worth the investment. Each shot taken within a “normal” distance fired the flash every time. I didn’t have a miss-fire until I was almost 300 feet away. The fact that I don’t have a lens that would make shooting from 300 feet away all that useful anyway leads me to believe this isn’t going to be a problem I’m going to run in to any time soon.

Here are a couple shots to give you an idea of the Alien Bee’s range.

Filed Under: Photography Tagged With: , ,

Messing around with WordPress 2.7 Beta

November 5, 2008
WP Dashboard

As I’m getting ready for our WordPress Meetup tomorrow night, I’ve installed the latest build of the WordPress 2.7 Beta. I have to say that the new admin section is a really big step in the right direction.

Before I go on, remember that this is still a Beta version of the software. The screenshots to follow may not match exactly that of the final release version.

For starters, here’s the new dashboard
(click images for a larger view)

It’s hard for me to decide which features of the new dashboard I like the most.
- Left-side collapsible navigation that allows you to get to the feature you want without having to load a secondary page first. For example, no need to click settings, wait for the page to load and then click “permalinks”. Just click the dropdown arrow next to settings and click the permalinks link. Depending on your server speed, this can be a 30-60 second time savings.
- “Right Now” stats showing you number of posts, pages, categories, tags, comments (approved, spam and awaiting moderation)
- Quick Press which lets you write a post directly from the dashboard (or save as a draft)
- Screen options (not shown in photo) where you can decide which elements of the dashboard are shown/hidden.

There is a lot more information being shown, but yet it doesn’t feel cluttered. It seems way better suited to getting the information you need and getting on with your day.

The Plugin Installer

This may be my favorite feature. No longer do you need to go to wordpress.org, download the plugin, FTP it to your server, go to the plugin page and activate it. Instead, simply go to the install plugins page, find the plugin you want and click the install button. It will do the rest for you. When done you only need to click the activate button. This is a HUGE time saver and is amazingly convenient when you don’t always have your FTP username/password with you. You could now install plugins while sitting at the airport or in Starbucks. I’ll bet you could even do it from your iphone without much trouble.

Media Library

The library itself hasn’t changed a lot, but, from the left-side menu you can now go add images to the library rather than needing to be in the write window. This is a big plus for me as I have had many instances where I wanted to store an image for use in a post later, but may not want to start the post and create a draft. Now I can just upload whatever and get to it when I get to it.

Custom Characters

Want to add a copyright, infinity or Yen symbol but don’t know the HTML code for it? In the post writing form there’s a link for custom characters that brings up a fly-out menu with 200 symbols that you can click on to instantly add to your post. I can now add that funky upside down question mark to my posts whenever I want! ¿ Ha!

I’m probably just scratching the surface of the cool features yet to be found in the new version of WordPress, but these are the features that jumped out at my after my first quick glance. I’m looking forward to the final release so I can upgrade my blogs to it right away.

Filed Under: Blogging, WordPress Tagged With: , ,

Neoncon 2008

November 3, 2008
Neoncon

This past weekend I spent some time at Neoncon 2008. Neoncon is a roll playing game convention that was held at Palace Station. It mainly focuses on roll playing games along the lines of Dungeons and Dragons. There is far more to it than just D&D, of course. There were dozens of tables with a couple hundred people playing all sorts of games that I have never heard of. For as much of a geek as I am, RPGs just never caught on with me. Honestly, I have no idea why not.

My initial plan was to go to the convention for a few hours and take some photos for my friend Doug who was the organizer of the event. Todd, my Son and I showed up around 11:30am. I was a little concerned that my Son would be begging me to leave in just a few minutes because, even though the place has a lot of activity going on, it’s all centered around tables with everybody studying intently on what is going on in their own little world. We walked around for a few minutes, checked some tables out and a few minutes later I realized I had lost my Son to a collectible card game I had never seen before. It would be 3 hours before he even looked up to figure out where I was at.

Todd and I walked around, spoke to several people and then, at Doug’s request, we joined in to a game called Star Fleet Battles. The game was wickedly complicated and thankfully we had the help of an awesome GM to help us through the game. When I say it’s complicated, let me just say it took probably 45 minutes for him to explain it enough for us to even get started, and then it took another hour or so for us to complete 2 turns of the game. This is most likely due to Todd and I knowing NOTHING about the game ahead of time. He was amazingly patient with us and was happy to be introducing the game to us. Apparently they have a group that meets to play here in town twice a month. We may just have to go out to watch how a real game is played…

The convention looked to be a huge success. Everybody was having a good time and there were enough different games going on that it would have been easy to sit in and play most anything you wanted. For fans of RPGs, if you weren’t there, you better mark your calendar for next year. You do not want to miss this event again.

Congratulations Doug on an awesome convention. Get some rest and then start thinking about what you’re going to do next as an encore.

Here are a few photos I took at the event.

Filed Under: General

Rocky Horror Revisited

November 2, 2008

Many years ago my wife and I used to perform in the Rocky Horror Picture Show when we were MUCH younger. On rare occasions when we are in Los Angeles over a weekend and we have Saturday night free, we stop in to the Nuart to see if any of our old pals are still around. We typically show up early to hang out with people in the parking lot before the show, go in to the theater and stay long enough to see the pre-show and then leave within 5 minutes of the movie starting. That’s pretty much been our only involvement with Rocky in the past 10 years or so.

Recently I learned that Todd had NEVER seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show. This came as a HUGE shock to me since Todd is a hard core geek. Well, when I found out that the Onyx Theater here in Vegas was going to be showing Rocky ON Halloween, which conveniently fell on a Friday night this year, well, there was nothing I could do. We were basically FORCED to drag him out to the show.

We put out an invite to a group of friends and found out that two other people we know, Kim & Rob, have also never seen the show. Ahh, this was gonna be fun!

The show was set to start at 8. We all met for drinks around 6 and showed up to the theater around 7:40. The theater is nestled in the back corner of a fetish clothing store called The Rack. We made our way in, got frisked by security (I made a second stop at the cute female security guard so she could pat me down a second time) and went in to find seats. The theater is really small and at first glance it looked to be PERFECT for showing Rocky. There was a nice sized stage area and the screen was low so the actors would be partly in front of the screen. Then, the show started…

The pre-show was decent. Our friends all took part in the Virgin Sacrifice. A healthy dose of embarrassing photos and a video later, they were back in their seats and the movie began. This is when the wheels started to come off the bus.

First, I gotta say that the cast, Divine Decadence, was pretty decent. They had good costumes and decent props. They did a few things differently than I’ve seen at other Rocky shows, so that part was pretty cool.

Now for the list of complaints.
- The Stage. I thought it was going to be cool that the stage was so close to the screen. However, given the size of the screen (it’s small), the actors took up 2/3s of the screen area.
- The lighting. This sorta ties in to the location of the stage/screen. When the cast members are on stage and the lighting crew is shining flashlights on them, it washes out the screen to the point of almost not being able to see it at all.
- The audience participation callbacks. The idea behind a callback is to say a line during the time the actors on screen are not talking. Then, the actor says something that goes along with what you said and hilarity ensues. Unfortunately, the people doing the call backs have horrible timing and would end up saying their line OVER the actor’s response. So, it was not only not funny, it was hard to make out the joke they were trying to make.
- The AMOUNT of audience participation. Rocky is 30+ years old. People have been watching the movie and coming up with new lines for that whole time. Over time you can come up with 2 or 3 (or 10) different jokes for the same callback. That doesn’t mean you need to try and yell them all. There was SO much yelling going on, hardly any of it in unison, so it was again, almost impossible to catch the jokes.

As a long time Rocky goer, it was difficult for me to follow along with most of the callbacks and sight gags. For my 3 virgin friends, it was nearly impossible.

We did all manage to have a good time. And yet, I’m not sure I’ll be rushing out to see Rocky again any time soon.

Here are some photos from our night at Rocky

Filed Under: Entertainment, Movies, Ranting Tagged With: ,