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I am the first to admit that I am lazy when it comes to consuming news. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a newspaper and often feel bombarded by RSS feed notifications, newsletter wrap-ups (delete!), and the overwhelming amount of content provided by a single google search. When co-founder Brad Cross’s wife Petra informed me of the revolutionary new way Prismatic delivers content she told me “say goodbye to your free time”. I was skeptical. Like I said, I gave up on reading much news a long time ago. Life as a pro-photographer is freaking busy. Despite my reservations, I decided I better give Prismatic a try. The result? Within one week of the iphone release it is one of the top 3 apps running on my phone. It has officially made the coveted main menu bar spot – it’s that good.
So how does it work and why is it great?
Sleek, innovative and universally easy-to-use, Prismatic is changing the way we consume and share news. This smart software filters through your networks to deliver personalized news while introducing you to a whole new realm of social news sharing. The Prismatic website packs all the news we want to read into an easy to navigate user interface.
- Customized news delivery: No longer are we bogged down with a multitude of social networks loaded with an excess of unrelated content. Prismatic connects to your Twitter, Facebook or Google reader account to find out what content actually interest you. Once logged in, Prismatic screens all links shared within your social networks, and then sorts through people you follow to create customized news feeds.
- Interest Bubble: Prismatic reins in all of your top interest and add them to your profile interest bubble cloud. The interest bubble is located on user profiles and act as a symbol of what content your actually into.
- Creditable Content: Semantic-filtering algorithms search through thousands of articles to filter out the junk and deliver only high quality content from creditable sources.
- Consistently Relevant Information: In addition to analyzing your social media behavior, simply liking and disliking content will allow the software to better tailor your news feed to reflect your interest.
- Social Sharing: Prismatic is making news consumption social in a way that has never been done before. Connect and share content with friends and followers directly through the sites navigation buttons. Here you can tweet, tag and email articles all without ever leaving the user dashboard.
- Interactive Tags: A series of tags are created to go along with each article. Tags allow for social news discovery, by introducing you to topics that you may have never normally searched for.
- Expand your Interests: One of my favorite features on Prismatic, is how the program offers different reading suggestions. The software creates a list of articles outside of your personal tags to introduce you to new content and news stories.
- The App: As an added bonus Prismatic just created a sick new iPhone app! The touchscreen interface provides easy navigation, allowing you to toggle between personalized news, full stories, interest categories and more.
You can check out and sign up for Prismatic here! And if you are curious….here is a peek at my bubbles :)
Check out my bubbles!!
Being completely selfless and giving for the sake of just giving has not always come naturally for me. When I was younger I even went so far as leaving the price tag on a presents “on accident” just so the recipient knew how much I spent. Am I proud of this? Absolutely not. I was young and dumb and did not realize that truly giving has nothing to do with the giver. In fact, life’s greatest gifts are given with no expectation for return – including recognition.
The gift of a photograph is one that many often take for granted. Some people haven’t had their picture taken in over a decade; some never have had the opportunity. Everyone has a story to tell, a journey to document. A single photograph can allow a person to feel a sense of hope, joy, and importance.
You have the opportunity to use your passion to make a difference in someone else’s life. To transform the way a person sees him or herself, in a way that is truly empowering. Please see details on Help Portrait below:
We are reaching out to our amazing community of followers to get involved! Help-Portrait needs your support to make their passion of helping others truly get the attention it deserves. For those of you unfamiliar with the organization; Help-Portrait is a non-profit group who gives away portraits to less fortunate people around the world. After nearly three years, 25,000 photographers, 56 countries, 700 events, and giving away nearly 170,000 portraits their team is rallying together to spread awareness to their awe-inspiring cause!
Although the reach of Help-Portrait has been undeniably amazing, there are still so many portraits to be fulfilled. The time is now to have our community help make Help-Portrait a household name. The only way Help-Portrait can do this is with your assistance! Currently, there are more than 25,500 people within the Help-Portrait community. {If each of you donated $5US, we could raise enough funds to hire a small team of people while covering some desperately needed developmental costs for our community and donation management systems. }
Check out more on Help-Portrait cause: http://hp.cta.gs/helphp
To Donate: http://hp.cta.gs/donate
Sue Bryce Turned Me Into An Addict!
Blog, Tips + Tricks 
15
Thu 08.23.2012
I once heard that when Sue Bryce photographs you, you become addicted. I wasn’t exactly sure what the meant. I mean – how do you become addicted to having your photograph taken? It is hard work to be a model – I can see it as thrilling, exciting, but addictive? Not so much. I ate my words on this one…
Those of us familiar with Sue Bryce and her stunning work understand that she has a way of transforming her subjects (see before and after). Most assume its Photoshop. I was guilty of this assumption – but, I didn’t care, I just wanted to look fabulous. However, Sue doesn’t use much Photoshop …. she doesn’t have too.
Sue is very meticulous. Hair and makeup have to be flawless – she is there the entire time to make sure there is no room for error. While shooting, she notices every single detail and is constantly coaching you with her soothing, yet oh-so-sexy Australian accent – is your jaw relaxed, is your chin forward & down (her most famous line), is your hand soft, is your collar bone popping just right, is your hair BIG enough, the list goes on. And, I am certain attention to all of these elements make her an astounding portrait photographer….but these are techniques and Sue Bryce’s skill supersedes mere technique.
Which leads us to why I am addicted to Sue Bryce and the greatest lesson she has taught me. It’s really quite simple…..Beauty. She makes you feel like the most beautiful, sexy, desirable, confident person on earth. She went beyond showing me in my best light, she actually allowed me to view myself in a new way. Now this is a gift, which, 10 months later, I am still riding the high of.
So this is one of the many things I have learned from Sue Bryce: Beauty is beyond the physical and radiates from all of us – sometimes we just need someone to coax it out. As a portrait photographer practice making your subjects feel like a million bucks, – the camera has a funny way of recording the non-physical.
Credits:
The photo shoot was taken at the incredible Jade Studios in San Francisco, California. Clifford Hashimoto is a genius and a true master at hair and makeup, it was a pleasure to be able to be transformed by him! Want to hear more details about the shoot? Check out episode 28 of TWiT PHOTO with Sue Bryce.
My app – Top Model Release – is now 3 months old! To celebrate, we gave it a little cupcake with a candle on it, and then we waved an iPhone over the candle to blow it out. Seriously.
But the bigger event is that you – the community – have helped shape this app into what it is now, and you will continue to help us define what it needs to be in the future. From Day One we have relished community feedback and made many changes to the app, and are continuing to improve the app with each revision to address your needs, concerns and awesome ideas.
Today we are happy to announce version 1.03 has been approved by Apple, and many of the improvements included in this update have come directly from your feedback! For example – on Twitter @vanlamify suggested we remove the Ellipsis from the app title, as the length makes it read “Top…Lease”. Thanks for your Suggestion Van – it now just reads TMR!
Another user named Joshua on our support form asked that the app info be removed from the bottom of the automatically generated PDFs – also done! And one of my favorite improvements – to enable sending incomplete releases suggested by Joseph Linaschke and Teresa!
In addition to the above changes, we’ve also implemented the following improvements to version 1.03, available in stores now:
- Improved iCloud performance.
- PDF naming conventions improved – each release will now automatically be named after the model’s name and date.
- Email screen will automatically appear after a witness signature is acquired.
In addition to these changes there are even more large-scale modifications being planned for future versions, including the universal iPad version. We can’t wait to tell you more about these very soon!
Again, thank you all so much for your feedback, your support, and your notes of inspiration about how much you and your clients love the app! We love reading them, and it makes all the late nights and time spent so, so worth it.
An Exclusive Look Inside Facebook Headquarters
Blog, From The Studio, Out + About 1
Tue 08.14.2012
With 900-million active users worldwide, Facebook’s international social-media stronghold needs no introduction. The company has radically transformed communications and information-sharing. New face-recognition software and the recent purchase of Instagram aren’t the only changes afoot. Just last year, founder and owner Mark Zuckerberg moved the company’s headquarters from Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto to Belle Haven in Menlo Park.
Facebook now occupies Sun Microsystem’s former office compound, and while the building’s incredibly refined, modern exterior still exudes “corporate,” the interior renovations are anything but. Entering Facebook’s campus is like stepping into a wild hotbed of daring, free-form creativity that feels decidedly more “street” than “sleek.” Graffiti and guerilla-art rule the day at Facebook; its walls are literally interactive, with employees encouraged to participate in the process of daily transforming their environment and unleashing their creativity to claim the space as their own. With exposed steel-beam ceilings and stylistically-grungy stairwells to shepherd them throughout the campus, the mood at Facebook crackles with possibility and ever-renewing redefinition. Every last detail is oriented toward worker-inspiration—from the fantastic food, free-for-all cocktail bars, innovative video arcade, and even in-house laundry. It’s a place where employees not only want to be (and stay long hours), but one that feeds their creative drive.
It was an honor to receive a private tour of their new headquarters from one of my favorite clients, Facebook’s Stephen Heise, and Zalman Stern from the photos team. Below are some of my favorite shots from an unforgettable afternoon that left me my head spinning. Come along on the photographic tour!
Facebook generously offered me free reign to explore and document the campus. Their one caveat? No pictures of computer screens. (An obvious prohibition, given their classified work.) But that didn’t stop me from bending the rules just a little bit! I couldn’t resist capturing this neon-light sign, as reflected off a blank computer screen.
Few structures could smack less of ‘Corporate America’ than the grungy, gritty, fantastically urban-style flights of stairs throughout Facebook’s new campus.
Edgy, reality-check signs like this are in heavy rotation around Facebook’s headquarters. The themes that rule the day here include to avoid playing it safe, to push the boundaries of creativity, and in all things to be courageously inventive. Generic ‘inspiration’ posters would never disgrace these walls; Facebook interior décor instead constantly encourages its employees to defy convention.
One of Facebook’s latest ventures is the Open Commute Project Foundation, a global hub of engineers whose mission is to maximize the open sharing of ideas and intellectual property with the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing.
You’re never too old for playing with Legos, and this build-your-own-Lego-art board within Facebook’s halls proves just that.
A nice close-up of my tour guide Zalman Stern’s sick (as in awesome) German-made Leica camera. What a perfect little machine, and what a glorious, too-good-to-be-true host. Thank you, Zalman!
Not your average conference room wall-art, eh?
I originally photographed this motherlode ‘F’ insignia against a white wall, but then in post-processing recreated the sign’s texture and imposed it on the background to further reinforce and enhance the futuristic feel.
Check out FB arcade - the graffiti artist who created the stunning painting you see here opted for Facebook stock instead of cash. That was a smart move, as the worth of this piece increased from an original cash-offer of $60,000 to a stock earning of $200-million. You heard me right. Graffiti, in this case, pays handsomely.
Like everything at Facebook, brilliant design saturates this campus. The sign you see here is far from ordinary, but rather a composite mosaic created with the public profile pics of everybody working for the company at the time the sign was made.
Not the standard courtyard tile.
Not only Facebook’s motto, but increasingly the end-all truth in our globalized, virtual world.
Facebook employees are always encouraged to work in the most comfortable manner possible. It yields higher productivity, maximum creativity, and a perfect suntan. And no...he is not naked.
Beef, it’s what’s for dinner. In this case, BBQ. Lest you be in doubt, Facebook’s employees eat well. Think of it as brain food.
