Light Painting

Well, it's been a long time ("It's been such a long time, I think I should be goin' yeah.  And time doesn't wait for me, it keeps on rollin'") since I posted something... I've been crazy busy with school and work. I have photos from the Rangers/Islanders game I went to earlier in the month but those will come soon.

For now, just a little experimentation with light painting.

Earlier today I found a flashlight keychain in my kitchen after just coming back in from shooting in my yard (photos not guns).  Now, it's been a while since I last played with light painting so I was excited to give this a shot.

My bathroom has no windows so it was perfect.  I used a 15" shutter with a very tight (I don't remember the exact f-stop) aperture, pushed that little button that's always on the right, and went to town with the flash light.  The result... the above image of me and my name.  Expect more of this in the future.  I almost forgot how fun this is.

Rangers @ Islanders 10-11-2010 (pre-post)

So I drove down to the Nassau Coliseum early this afternoon to pick these up:

I'm excited!  Even though it's at The Coliseum, it's still a Rangers/Islanders game... and being a Long Island resident, games at The Coliseum are just a little bit easier (not to mention cheaper).  And no, this won't be the first game I attend this season as I went to a preseason game at The Garden thanks to my buddy Phil.  But, it will be my first regular season game.  And what a way to kick off the regular season with a Rangers/Islanders matinee!?


If you didn't notice... the seats are in section 333 so I'm not sitting what would be considered "close" (even though there's not one bad seat at The Coliseum) so I don't know what type of photography options I'll have other than whatever I can get during warmups, but I'll do my best to get some shots worth posting.

PhotoPal and Digital Image Post-Processing

I've had my iPad for a few months now and I'm still finding more and more uses for it.  So far it's been a great mobile way for me to socially network, browse the internet, watch movies, shop, do homework, and of course play games.  I don't have that many apps for it as I'm trying to keep it pretty clean... I only really have apps that I use daily.


One app, however, that's gotten neglected is PhotoPal (developed by MacPhun LLC)... mostly because I haven't bought the camera adapter for the iPad yet.  If I were to say I wasn't using it because of its functionality, I'd be lying through my teeth.  PhotoPal is well worth the $2.99 price tag.  It's a fully functioned digital photography post-processing tool.


It has functions for controlling; brightness & contrast, color balance, temperature, exposure, gamma, hue/saturation, and even levels (which some other post-processors for iPad seem to be missing).  Some other convenient features are the ability to; denoise, sharpen, add shadows, add highlights, flip & rotate, and crop.  It also has "filter" effects; posterize, bloom (like a dream effect), black & white, color invert, pencil drawing, and vintage (sepia tone).  Lastly it supports undo/redo/revert, saving (of course), and sharing through email, facebook, twitter, and the iPad clipboard.


To convey to you the true power of this app, here's an example of something I did literally in a matter of minutes.  This could not have been done any faster or better (in my opinion) on a desktop version of Photoshop.


I took this from my iPhone 3G through the dirty window of the 9:43 from Penn to Port Washington after the Rangers/Red Wings game on 9/29/2010.  I don't remember which train is in the shot, but I think it's an east bound train.

Penn Station, 2010

I liked the composition of the shot, but as we all know, the iPhone 3G camera is mediocre at best.  Just for fun, I saved the pic onto my iPad and opened it in PhotoPal.  I did some normal tweaking (brightness, contrast, levels... the usual) and then decided to see how it would look in black and white.  I did some more tweaking of the levels and such, played with the exposure a little as well, and what I wound 
up with was this.

Penn Station, 1945?

I worked with the levels and the exposure to make the blacks very rich and the whites very bright.  Along with the grain that the iPhone 3G camera quality caused, what I was left with was a dynamic black and white image that looks like it shot on film in the 40's or 50's.  The novelty factor of the image left me no choice but to fall 

in love with it.

Now, could you have done this in Photoshop on your PC or Laptop?  Of course, but the purpose of this post was to also review the PhotoPal app for iPad and to express the amazing functionality of the device through the developers and their apps.

Logo - Digital Camera Manufacturer; ISO (fictional)

Class: Corporate Identity
Project: Create a logo for a fictional company of our choice.
Date Assigned: 8/30/2010

Basically what I'm going to do here is lead you through my creative process. The assignment was to come up with any fictional company of our choice and then design a logo for said company. I knew I wanted to do a digital camera manufacturer so I ran from there.

As part of my research, I looked up different camera terms (such as lens, light, image, photograph, etc.) and then looked up those terms in the thesaurus as to have other words to play around with. I liked the idea of the company name being an acronym for ISO because that so closely relates to digital cameras rather than film cameras. With this set in my mind, I looked for words beginning with "I", "S", and "O"... for obvious reasons.

I had my mind set on using something vision related like optics or optical for the letter "O" as I liked the idea of having camera technology in the name. I eventually settled with "Image Style Optics". Image, because that's what a camera creates. Style, in the sense of creation. And Optics, because that's what literally writes the image. So what I was left with was a company name that basically means, optically created images. Well there's two things that optically creates images: your eyes and a camera (The two often work hand in hand don't they?). So now I had a premise to base my logo on.


Here are my rough thumbnail sketches:

I chose to disregard any thumbnail that used film because as I stated previously,
ISO is digital only. I had strong intentions of using an eye in the logo. I had originally intended on using it as the O, but eventually through my research, I came to the idea of using the eye as a lens.

With that in mind, I digitally rendered a lens that resembles an eye in a sort of stylized way. However, it was round and eyes are oblong. I decided that the lens looked more like an iris and pupil rather than an eye. To solve this problem I used shapes around the lens to give the whole package a look of an eye. As well, the shapes give you the feel of turning, which is what the hand must do to the lens to zoom.

With a finished image logo, I didn't want to be without a text logo. Though the project was just to create a logo, I have no clue where it's going from here... Package design maybe? I know it sounds cliché, but I really do love Helvetica... well Helvetica Neue more than Helvetica. I worked in the image logo as the O for the word optics as I had thought of originally. Just for the sake of it, I developed an alternate logo that removed the eye shapes and stamped the name into the lens image (almost like the BMW roundel) and a quick logo that used just the eye shapes.


So what does this whole process lead to? Take a look.

And that's my finished product. I'm very satisfied with the results.

So that's a little insight in my creative process. I hope you enjoyed this, I will be going through my creative process for almost all of my own design that I post.

Thank you for reading. If you like this post feel free to share it.

An Introduction

Well school is back in session... which means projects galore.  Sounds like a good time to finally get this blog off and running.  I've finally entered what plans to be my last semester before getting my bachelors degree.  From there... well who the hell knows in this day and age?  What I do know however, and you're all about to find out;

• My name is Gregory Manno
• I'm a Graphic Designer and Photographer from Long Island, NY
• I study at Farmingdale State College
• I'm avid Apple Product user
• I'm very proud of my heritage (I'm a mutt but I'm mostly Italian)
• I love to cook (specifically Asian and Mexican)

Feel free to follow me on twitter @gmannoart and remember to check back often as I'll be doing my best to update with art news, tech news, and of course, my own design and photography.

By the way; 

I wasn't kidding when I said avid Apple Product user.