Check your local newsstand for this issue of Advanced Photoshop – The magazine for Adobe® Photoshop professionals.

So You Want To Be A Vinyl Toy Designer...

Cahill Center 01

Originally, Craig had taken the photos because he was intrigued by the building and, after searching online, was disappointed that no one had captured an image that did justice to the extravagant architecture of Cahill Center. It seems Caltech felt the same way; as they were searching online for photos of their own building and stumbled upon Craig’s photos.

Future collaboration between Craig and Caltech have been discussed and results of this collaboration will be posted here when available.

Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Caltech in Pasadena California was designed by Thom Mayne, founder of the architectural firm Morphosis.

Conceived of and designed by Genshi Media Group founder Craig Anthony Perkins, Kricky is distributed world-wide by DKE Toys and will be available at your favorite vinyl toy retailer shortly (and if it’s not, please ask for it by name!) In addition, a Blank White version of Kricky, for those of you who like to customize your vinyl toys, will be available exclusively on the KrickyTheAlienFrog.com website.

Please visit Kricky’s site for more information and photos of the design process.

We had originally planned on using one of several publishers that we have access to but instead, we think this would be a great opportunity to publish the book ourselves! It’s something we have always wanted to do and since we are pretty much a DIY shop with all of our other projects (e.g., our music label, our toy label) we thought we’d give it a go and create a book publishing label as well.

Details about the book: though he has recently taken on a part time teaching position at a local community college where he teaches Digital Photography, Craig Anthony Perkins has had a recent love affair with shooting film again, especially with the Holga camera. The images in this forthcoming book were all shot with the Holga using Ilford Delta Pro film and then professionally scanned directly from the processed film with no Photoshopping involved (though there was minor level/ exposure editing performed in Apple’s Aperture software.)

Stay tuned for further updates on the progress of this, our first self-published book. In the mean time, you can view a small sample of images in our gallery below which will be featured in the book.

What caught my eye though was that the picture they used for the article was one I took of my Broken Heart Robot toys! I’m very honored that Wired Magazine chose my Broken Heart Robot as the image (inspiration?) for the story.

Broken Heart Robot in Wired Magazine

Coincidentally, I’ve been experimenting with the Arduino platform; thinking about making an actual, autonomous robot… maybe I should program it to fear me as well!

The article was written by Katie Scott for Wired U.K. (Online editing by Holden Firth.) Article link: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2009-03/30/robots-taught-to-hide-from-grumpy-humans.aspx

iPhone App Cool O Meter

You can download Cool O’Meter now at the iTunes App store!

Light Leaks is a magazine dedicated to those who use low-fi cameras such as the Holga.

Abandoned Train Car

This particular photo was selected by Aline Smithson, the guest photo editor for issue #10. She was a photo editor for Vogue Patterns in New York and has worked as a photo editor and fashion stylist for some of the top photographers in the industry. Now she shows her own photographic work in galleries across the country.

Some details about this photo: Craig used a Holga 120S loaded with expired Ilford Delta 3200 Pro film (which is a grainy medium format or 120 film.) Yes, this is film not digital and no Photoshopping was involved other than to save the photo as a jpg from the scanned negative.

Radius iPhone Game

The game is already out and available on the iPhone’s App Store but the music is not in it yet; should be in by the next free update (version 1.04) coming shortly.

We met at the Hollywood and Highland Metro Station and after a couple of hours getting to know each other, camera gear discussions and taking photos, we took the Redline down to Union Station.

I met some great people, took a few cool pictures and wished that this was a monthly event (at least) as it was just too important to be a once a year thing and it was a great experience as well; to get out on the streets and capture the many characters of Hollywood and Downtown Los Angeles.

National Photographers’ Rights Day

This particular photo was taken at Union Station of video-blogger Naomi Mercer interviewing Discarted about the Photographers’ Rights Rally. To see more photos from my perspective, you can view my flickr set created for the event.

A Day In The Life Of A Design House - Part Two

As I mentioned previously in part one of this series, the shoot gave me real insight to the day to day workings of such a huge company and their process. From the executive meetings in the showroom, to the art director’s brainstorming sessions, to the designers and their fleet of iMacs as they mockup patterns using CAD programs, to the pattern factory where they take the CAD files and create prototypes of the designs as well as the warehouse workers that pack and ship tens of thousands of products each day; their warehouse overwhelming.

The shoot itself was quite fun and more importantly, gave me a chance to tell their story Reportage style as I tried to capture the “moments” of the employees in their day to day business.