Today I stumbled onto a post from FStoppers featuring Aaron Nace speed-editing a portait for an editorial audience. The original image was shot by Aleksandar Jaredic.

Aleksandar Jaredic Before After by Aaron Nace of Phlearn.com

It reminded me of a photo shoot I did last year. I originally was commissioned to shoot 5-10 executive head shots. When I got to their headquarters the plan changed to an incredible 45 head shots and an event shoot. In my head I was totally overwhelmed but I couldn’t let the client know this. I was working solo and given 8 hours to shoot 45 people and an event. Impossible right?

I then had three days to edit all the photos including some really heavy Photoshopping of the portraits as well as the building itself. Somehow I managed to get it all done and my client was pleased, to say the least, with my work. A few of the executives asked me for copies of the finished images for personal use.

My workflow for editing the photos was nothing like Aaron’s mostly because the context and intended use of my photos was totally different from Aleksandar’s. However, this video taught me some tricks I’d not thought of and is a great example of how a little goes a long way.

Today we’re editing this image by Aleksandar Jaredic, and we only have five minutes to do so! Sometimes you need to be able to edit quickly for clients. We start by correcting blown out highlights using a combination of curves adjustment layers and Apply Image. Next we move onto the skin, eyes and sharpening parts of the image we want to stand out. After that, all that needs to be done is some quick cleanup and darkening around the edges!

A great way to become faster at editing is to learn keyboard shortcuts religiously. Check out our guide to Photoshop keyboard shortcuts HERE, you can even download a desktop wallpaper so they’re there at your fingertips whenever you need them!

So there you go. Were you impressed? I love studying other photographers and videographers workflows. How about you? Videos like this make me curious about photographing humans again. For the last few years I’ve been almost exclusively an architectural and landscape photographer.

In fact, that executive portrait session I wrote about earlier was originally supposed to be me shooting their new headquarters. The “human element” wasn’t added until a few days before the shoot was to take place.

Really quickly I’d like let you know about a great deal. Keith and the Girl, the podcast I’ve done some work with and have been a dedicated fan of for the last eight plus years, is giving my friends, readers, followers and stalkers (yeah you too…) a free download of their HILARIOUS Stand-Up-Athon.

Use code: KATGJUSTIN and get a free download at this link. Then click here to vote.

The first ten people to use the link promo code can get it for free! But hurry, the contest ends today!

It’s a long list of some of the best comics in the business doing 2 minutes of standup in hopes to win the $500 prize.

Comics in order of appearance:

• Trey Galyon
• Myka Fox
• Mike Lawrence
• Jess Wood
• Danny Hatch
• Lauren Hennessy
• Jonnie Flatbush
• Big Jim Levesque
• Tim Dimond
• Chase Random
• Victor Varnado
• Ray DeVito
• Andrea Allan
• Ben Lerman
• Michael Carrino
• Chris Laker
• Myq Kaplan
• John F. O’Donnell

I brought new friends to Keith and the Girl shows every night I was in New York City and every one of them had an amazing time and none of them had listened to the show before! This is your chance to get a taste of the action!

“Two Chips” / An Animated Short from Adam Patch on Vimeo.

Here’s what Gawker had to say about it.

Guy’s Drunk Wife Tells Him a Lame Joke; He Animates the Result

Remember the other day when you were saying how much you loved the sketch series “Drunk History” but that you wished how instead of history it was a corny joke about tortilla chips that Morgan Patch told her husband Adam while sauced off her ass on a bottle of wine, which he then turned into an animated short?

San Francisco and Northern California are so different. I’ve lived here for a total of four years and I feel like I’ve only skimmed the surface. I am regularly thanking my friends Jimmy and Aaron for helping me discover new and often inspiring features of this part of the country. Whether it’s a mountain to be climbed or a fantastic restaurant at which to be dined.

So when friends visit me here in California, the list of things to do is almost certainly longer than the days they will be here. Such was the case with Alex and Joey. I picked them up from the airport a Wednesday afternoon and drove them straight to wine country for tastings at J Vineyards, Seghesio Family Vineyards and Preston of Dry Creek. 

Alex and Joey at Sbragia Vineyards

We had such a fun and relaxing time in wine country, despite having such a short time out there. Ordinarily we’d have hit up five or more wineries but this slower approached proved to be a nice change of pace. Especially considering the significant flight times from Chicago and Orlando!

Alex and Joey smell the flowers at Preston of Dry Creek

After our time in wine country we made our way back down towards San Francisco, stopping at the Marin Headlands for a shot of them in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. If you’re ever in San Francisco this is a must stop. Normally we’d take a few pictures and then head into the city. However, since we were making such good time with no traffic slowing us down, we were able to spend a little extra time in the area.

We took a side road further into the Headlands, a one-way, cliff-side drive with some of the most beautiful views any of us had ever seen.

Sunset in California at the Marin Headlands at Rodeo Cove.

View of the hills from the Marin Headlands

The next morning we woke up to visit Plow for a classic San Francisco brunch. I went to Plow with Jimmy last year and it proved to be as delicious a second time around as it was the first. I had the breakfast sandwich, Ryan had the French toast, Alexandra had the granola and Joey had the (amazing) ricotta + lemon pancakes.

From Plow we went to Flora Grubb Gardens after which we parted with Ryan to hit up the curviest street in the world, Lombard, Chinatown and it’s Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory and Union Square. We probably didn’t need to buy three bags of cookies but whatever…

 After that Ryan met up with us and we went to my new favorite place, Fort Funston. It’s technically a dog park but humans are welcome as well. The views from here are killer. From the ocean to the sunsets to the coastline north and south, it’s hard to find a better example of the beauty provided but California than this.

We finished that night with sushi at Warakabune, our favorite sushi joint.

Other adventures included the shopping in Union Square, lunch with Anthony, exploring the Mission, a stroll through Dolores Park and gosh, so much more. At this point I’m starting to get lost in our adventures. One thing that does stick out was our accidental venture into Golden Gate Park during a 4/20 rally. That is something none of us will ever soon forget. I’m pretty sure we saw the future Nicki Minaj there… Afterwards we took a Lyft car to El Farolito for the best burritos in San Francisco. The wait might be great but so is the taste.

The next day would be the end of our shenanigans in San Francisco. We had breakfast at Cafe Floré just before Joey flew off to Los Angeles. Afterwards Alexandra and I walked through a cosplay event at Civic Center and into Hayes Valley before she too flew away.

It was one of the best weekends I’ve ever had here in San Francisco. Showing off my city to friends and allowing myself to be spoiled by its food, drink and views is amazing. Saying goodbye to these two amazing people wasn’t fun but you can’t have hellos without a few goodbyes. I can’t wait to see them back here.

Related articles

• Marin Headlands Pacific View (justinmoorescott.com)

This trip to New York is centered around KATG Week. For those who don’t know, KATG stands for Keith and the Girl, a New York based comedy podcast hosted by Keith Malley and Chemda (the girl). They were the second podcast I ever subscribed to and the only one that has lasted in my iTunes library for the eight years since they first started. We’ve also done some work together.

KATG Week is a week long celebration full of comedy shows, drinks, games, live shows, music and general fun times. It ends with Keith’s annual standup show and after party.

My nights will be pretty much taken over by KATG events but I want to see you all if possible! Now I know what it’s like to be both Bruce Wayne and Batman. Here is my schedule:

When I’m not out at night having a blast with Keith and the Girl listeners, n00bs and everyone else, I’ll be staying in Queens and working out of a WeWork in Manhattan. Lunches, coffee and cocktails are all the rage and though I won’t be having my usual New York Tweetup, I hope we can connect.

Apple Nano with FiiO E6 Amplifier

Right now you might be asking, “Justin, why would I buy the a headphone amplifier and line out dock connector?” Basically, everything sounds a little bit better and a lot louder and the benefits can be heard with even cheaper headphones. Here’s why.

Portable audio devices that aren’t aimed at audiophiles like the HiFiMan HM-901($999) are designed to make the highest profit with the lowest cost. Apple spends more time polishing the things people see right off the bat, hence a Retina screen and industrial design. What they aren’t worrying themselves with are features that 90% of the population would never notice, like the quality of the audio amplifier.

Apple used to post iPod amplifier specs but they haven’t done that in ages, for good reason.

The majority of people don’t have nice headphones connected to their iPhone. They are using the ones Apple gave them, either the earbuds (gag) or the Earpods (meh, not too horrible). These headphones, and most after-market headphones you see around, don’t have the ability to show off the nuances of music and especially don’t illustrate the limitations of the iPhone or iPod amplifier. But if you start investing even a little bit of money in something like Grado SR80i ($100) or Audio-Technica ATH-M50S ($129) and you’ll see right away the benefits of an external amplifier.

Audio-Technica ATH-M50S with FiiO E6 and Apple Nano

Specs

FiiO E6 Design

The FiiO E6 is essentially the same size as one of the older Apple iPod Nano players but since it’s made of plastic instead of glass and metal, it’s even lighter. Its high-gloss finish picks up fingerprints and the entire thing feels kind of cheap. Of course it is pretty cheap at just $28 so I suppose that’s expected. What matters is that the Fiio E6 doesn’t sound cheap.

The top of the amp has a headphone output, the bottom has a USB port for charging and line input from your audio source. There is a silver volume toggle bar and a silver sliding bar that turns it on, changes EQ and sets the “Hold” feature. This gets a little confusing at times.

On the back of the FiiO 6 is a tiny LED status light. There are four modes in total, off, red, blue and purple. Sliding up once turns it on, twice goes to red, then blue and on the fourth it’s purple. The four settings control the equalizer (EQ).

• No light – EQ off
• Red light – 3dB bass boost
• Blue light – 6dB boost split between bass and highs
• Purple light – decrease of 3dB for high input devices

For a flat music experience, as the audio engineer intended, keep it on the EQ off mode. The red mode boosts bass quite a bit, too much for me. The blue mode cuts the bass boost in half for a warm but not boomy sound. I like this setting when I’m wanting to have fun with music. The purple setting would be used only if you’re using an input signal that is high which will probably never be the case. In short, I choose flat or blue

FiiO E6 Amp with iPod Nano connected through line-out via FiiO L9 Lineout Dock Cable

Performance

Despite it’s cheap feel in hand, the FiiO E6 does a great job. For headphones like the Audio-Technica ATH-M50, Grado SR80i, Sennheiser HD 558 and really any larger headphones, the FiiO E6 will provide a sometimes necessary bump in volume. Quieter headphones, those with higher impedance or lower sensitivity, will sound remarkably better with any decent amplifier, luckily this amp is both decent and affordable.

However, if you’re looking for something to power something like the Sennheiser Sennheiser HD 600/HD 650/HD 800, you should look to the FiiO E11 or some other higher powered amp. While FiiO says this amp is suitable for headphones up to 300 Ohms, I disagree. Anything over 150 Ohms won’t shine with this amp. Actually if you have any of those Sennheiser headphones, invest a little more money for a professional portable or desktop amp. I love the stuff from Headroom.

You get none of the benefits of a dedicated digital to analog converter (DAC) but you also save quite a bit of money. If a DAC is something you want, check out the FiiO E17 USB DAC Headphone Amplifier.

With this amp paired with the Audio-Technica headphones mentioned above, music became more lively and warm. I found myself listening to more dubstep and other bass heavy music and noticed I switched the EQ to the blue setting more and more. I found this EQ setting better than any of the preconfigured iTunes EQ settings, it was quite addictive.

If you’re using headphones like the Grados or Etymotic Research, the blue setting turns your flat response headphones into warmer, bassier and generally more fun headphones. Sometimes you want a flat response and other times you just want to have a little fun. This amp allows for both!

There is a hiss noticeable at time when no audio is playing. For a $28 amp, this is considered totally acceptable and is inaudible once music is being played. Battery life is stated to be 10 and then sometimes 17 hours. I’m not sure why there is the confusing but from my experience I’d say that’s about right depending on how you use it. At full volume, 10 hours, at regular listening volumes, 17. I’ve never timed it but it has also never died on me. A quick charge up through any USB port keeps it tapped up.

Conclusion and Tips

• Buy this amplifier if you find the volume of your headphones out of your portable music player anemic and weak.  
• Buy this amplifier if you want higher quality amplification than what comes from your iPhone.
• Buy this amplifier if you want to try out amplification without blowing a ton of money.
• Don’t buy this if you are using generic, unexceptional headphones. You won’t realize any of the benefits unless you have headphones that can take advantage of amplification.

If you are using the headphone jack as an audio source, keep the source at around 75% volume. I found this prevented clipping on the input side.

Before I go I want to give you a quick tip. If you are using this with an iPhone, skip the headphone jack on it and use a line-out dock adapter instead. This will bypass the mediocre iPod/iPhone amplifier by using the line output of the iDevice. I use this the adapter on the right. It’s only a few dollars and totally worth it.  They come in various lengths for your convenience and have top notch build quality.

There was no professor that affected me in such a positive way as Joe. Until his courses I did not look at photography as anything but a hobby. I shot photos, over-processed them and found myself more worried about having the best equipment than making the best art.

When I moved to San Francisco Joe told me that I had to go to Pier 24 Photography. He told me it was free, it was massive and inside I would find some of the most important photographs.

Pier 24 Photography is an exhibition space devoted to photography, which hosts rotating exhibitions and houses The Pilara Foundation Collection. Visitors experience an environment in which to view and quietly contemplate photography. By collaborating with photographers, educators, collectors and curators, we are able to share diverse ideas with the public. Through our partnerships with local institutions, we also work to advance the creation, scholarship and understanding of the photographic medium.

Somehow I managed to spend three years in San Francisco never making it to this free and incredible photography museum. If you’re in San Francisco, this is the first art museum you should think about visiting. Not only is it the largest photography museum in America, it is free, it only allows 20 people in at a time so it’s never crowded and the work they curate is out of this world stunning.

In addition to being a free museum visit with only a limited number of people allowed in at a time, they provide you with a beautifully printed book of all the featured work for just $10. I wish I could get a subscription to receive these books with each exhibition. The entire experience was beyond anything I ever expected and I’m kicking myself for waiting so long to visit. Any future guests of mine to San Francisco who are into photography in the least will be taken to this museum.

After the time at the museum Breezy and I took a few minutes to take pictures just outside of Pier 24. I took this photo which is actually a stitching of five photos into a single, almost square, image. I almost only ever have a 50mm lens on my Nikon D700, fitting the scene of this bridge into a single image would have been otherwise impossible.

Ever since I created the first version of this video a year ago I’ve been wanting to try it again with more water and better lighting / footage. This is a really fun project and when you first see the results, chances are your jaw will drop. The main thing to keep in mind for this project is that you need a camera that shoots 24 fps.

The effect that you are seeing can’t be seen with the naked eye. The effect only works through the camera. However, there is a version of the project you can do where the effect would be visible with the naked eye. For that project, you’d have to use a strobe light.

So a hat tip to Brusspup for making me smile and look on in awe. Such a simple experiment all done with things I have in my apartment yet I never thought of doing this. He did a great job of explaining what’s going on in the video and gave plenty of instructions on how you can do this yourself in the full video description. Can’t wait to see what he does next.

Rob Thomas, the creator of Veronica Mars, has been pitching a movie version of the cult TV show for a while now. Sadly Warner Bros., who owns Veronica Mars, kept saying no due to the relatively low ratings the show got (ahem, Firefly). However, Warner Bros. said their mind could be changed if Rob Thomas could prove the fan interest was there.

Warner Bros. still owns Veronica Mars and we would need their blessing and cooperation to pull this off. Kristen and I met with the Warner Bros. brass, and they agreed to allow us to take this shot. They were extremely cool about it, as a matter of fact. Their reaction was, if you can show there’s enough fan interest to warrant a movie, we’re on board.

So with that, they launched the Kickstarter campaign. Within hours they’d pulled in all the money they’d need, and then some. As of this posting, they have raised $2,165,390 of their $2,000,000 goal. That’s an average donation of $62. Not bad!

As a huge fan of the show, that Kickstarter video is the best thing I’ve seen all day.

This is the first time I’ve seen something like this happen on Kickstarter; famous actors working with huge production companies to raise money via the masses. In a way it doesn’t make sense. A production house will throw hundreds of millions of dollars at a movie that ends up totally flopping but are weary to spend $2,000,000 on something like a Veronica Mars movie?

Maybe this is just the democratization of featured film making. Netflix recently picked up Arrested Development to bring back one more season plus a movie when the networks wouldn’t because they knew their subscribers would dig it. I guess this is the new world in which we live.

There are still 30 days left in the Kickstarter campaign and at this rate there is no telling how much money they will raise. I wonder what other cult shows will get similar treatment now that we’ve seen such incredible success.

The Veronica Mars Movie Project has proven to be the fastest Kickstarter campaign ever. That says a lot about how much people want this movie to happen as well as how crowdfunding has reached the masses. I worked on a Kickstarter campaign for the Keith and the Girl podcast. While we didn’t make $2,000,000 in eleven hours, we did raise over 200% of our goal. Not bad!

The way people are talking about this on Twitter and Facebook, you’d think Google just killed RSS entirely. RSS, for those who don’t know, is “Really Simple Syndication” which basically allows people and services to easily subscribe to blogs like mine. It does a whole heck of a lot more but that’s the basics and what Google Reader took advantage of.

There is much speculation that Google shuttering Reader means the end of RSS and all the apps that use RSS and/or Google Reader integration. I read hundreds of articles a week through my Google Reader account, as viewed on my iPhone/iPad/Mac in the awesome Reeder app.

I log into Reeder with my Google information and it presents to me all of the RSS feeds I have subscribed to. Instead of having to load up dozens of sites a number of times in a day, I just tell Reeder to refresh the feeds. RSS also powers the distribution of podcasts and is incorporated in lots of social media and device/system status services.

RSS is brilliant and it isn’t dead

RSS can’t just die. It’s decentralized like Ham radios. It might be replaced with something else (ATOM is superior but hasn’t taken off like RSS) but the function it provides will live on. A lot of tech pundits are making the point that social media is at blame for this. More and more people are getting their news through Twitter and Facebook shares many of which get aggregated by apps like Pulse and Flipboard. There is definitely truth to that. The overwhelming majority of traffic to my site is through Google searches followed by Twitter. But these forms of news-gathering only work “in the now” not after the fact. Once it isn’t trending, it isn’t seen. That’s where RSS comes in.

As you see in the image above, there are days that I am just too busy to read my RSS feeds. Then there are days where I read a ton of articles. These are the days I’m catching up on articles posted earlier in the week and where relying on Twitter for my news would fail.

If you live off of Google Reader, or an application that uses it to aggregate your feeds, fear not, there are workarounds and Google was kind enough to make backing up your Reader painless:

Google Reader will be retired on July 1, 2013. If you’d like to download a copy of all your Reader data before then, you can do so through Google Takeout. You’ll receive your subscription data in an XML file, and the following information will be downloaded as JSON files:

• List of people that you follow
• List of people that follow you
• Items you have starred
• Items you have liked
• Items you have shared
• Items shared by people you follow
• Notes you have created
• Items with comments

Click here to start downloading your Reader data from Takeout. Once downloaded, your subscription data should be easily transferrable to another product, where you can continue to keep up with your online reading.

How will apps that rely on Google Reader to sync RSS feeds live on? Only time will tell but I have an idea of how an app like Reeder can survive. Export your Reader OPML file (above) which holds your list of feeds organized into folders and simply import it to Reeder. Reeder could then synchronize the feed subscriptions via iCloud between your iPhone, iPad and Mac.

These apps could even do this for you automatically. The apps already have your subscriptions and hierarchy data so a relatively simple tweak to their apps would scrape that data and again sync it through iCloud. The user wouldn’t need to do anything besides maybe authorizing the transition.

So the end of Google Reader doesn’t mean the end of blogs or RSS. Yeah it sucks to lose a fantastic web version of what we now use apps for but that’s just the way things go, even if it was predicted to be the other way around. Just make sure you download your data!