Help-Portrait

News:
I'm very excited to be part of the Help-Portrait project. Some of the guys from the Seoul Photo Club I belong to and I are looking to help by photographing kids at an orphanage near Seoul. One of our club members, Dylan, is organizing everything and has rallied us together. This is an excerpt from what he wrote in the SPC discussion forum:

Seoul Photo Essay Contest 2009: The Real Story of Seoul

News:
So, I'm participating again in this year's Hi Seoul Photo Contest. Last year's competition garnered me one of four fourth place participation prizes for 30,000 KRW [photo here]. This year, the prizes are much nicer and I'm hoping to place higher if I'm selected. It took me a while to narrow down a photo I wanted to write about, but I really enjoyed visiting Changdeokgung Palace with Shannon back in June, so I decided to rework one of those photographs to suit the competition. Wish me luck and check out my short essay!

Seven Wonders of Illinois Photo Contest

News:
After more than 90 submissions, the judges at the Seven Wonders of Illinois Photo Contest have chosen me as one of the seven finalists. Help me out and vote for Wrigley Field: The Heart of Chicago! All votes must be in by November 17 and the contest winner will be announced on November 18.

Let's show everyone how important Wrigley Field is! I know the Ricketts family will do right by the fans. Here are my thoughts on this photo, Wrigley, and being a Cubs fan in general:

Happy Pepero Day!

News:
It's Pepero Day! Well, here in Korea it is. Since this blog is tied to Chicago Central time, you just have to add 15 hours to see it's officially 11/11 here in the land of the morning calm. I live in the future; It's awesome. I'm too lazy to use my own words to explain or comment on this holiest of holidays, so enjoy this cut and paste directly taken from the most trustworthy of sources next to Fox News, Wikipedia. ;)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Pepero (빼빼로) is a cookie stick, dipped in chocolate syrup, manufactured by Lotte in South Korea since 1983.[1] It was inspired by the Japanese product, Pocky produced by Glico.[2]

Pepero Day:
Pepero Day is an observance in South Korea similar to Valentine's Day. It is named after the Korean snack Pepero and held on November 11, since the date "11/11" resembles four sticks of Pepero.[3][4] The holiday is observed mostly by young people and couples, who exchange Pepero sticks, other candies, and romantic gifts. Lotte denies starting the holiday and instead states that they noticed a bump in Pepero sales around November 11th and after continued popularity they decided to then encourage the holiday with special gift boxes and other promotions.[2] Some consider it to be a contrived holiday and some teachers have encouraged children to exchange healthy snacks to help combat obesity.

Apgujeong Noir

Muse:
The little lady and I went out to Apgujeong to enjoy some yummy Hooters and decided to walk off some of our gluttony afterwards through the downtown streets. While we were wandering about through back alleys and dark corridors, I felt more like a foreigner than usual. There's something surreal about Seoul at night. I had been on a futuristic neo-noir / steam-punk film kick, i.e. Blade Runner, for a while so I thought I would take a stab at a "look" in these photos.

So here you have it: desaturated / bleach bypass process, viggnette, fade to black edges, soft focused / distorted edges, added texture / noise, and other artistic licenses along the way like the occasional lens flare / light glow. This is just the start to a bigger project I have in the works -- an experiment like the post-apocalyptic look in the Halloween Special I did (actually, I worked on these a week or two before those). I think it went well. How about you?

Feel free to comment below. Use the Facebook Connect option to link up and feel free to share with your friends. Click on any of the photos to go directly to the exhibit gallery. Thanks for checking these out!

My Blog Wordle

News:
So I happened across Wordle via the interwebs and had a lot of fun playing with it. I entered every blog up to the Halloween Special to see what words come up most often when I write, and this is the result.

Wordle is a cool little applet with some nice customizing tweaks. I had to screen-grab it in order to save it as an image since Java doesn't allow writing to the HD. I up-scaled it from there. There's no surprise that "Seoul" and "Korea" came up as top hits, since I've been living here for the last year and a half. I can't wait to bump "Chicago" up larger when I get back home.

From the website:
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Thanks for checking it out. Make one, like I did, at http://www.wordle.net