A Commonplace Book

The Product

I just received my much-anticipated Gelaskins iPhone cover today, and I feel a bit like the kid who orders The Musculator from the back of a comic book. You know, this kid?

I’ve really come to appreciate the pop surrealist look as a sort of 2-D counterpart to the aesthetic of the vinyl toy scene, so the chance to wrap my precious new Apple toy in an equally precious cover was hard to pass up. And as I hoped, the art itself and the quality of the print is great. (You can see it at the top of this post: Blow Fish, by Nanami Cowdry.)

The Problem

It’s not really a skin. It’s definitely not a cover. It is a sticker. Granted, it’s a very pretty and very well made sticker, but it is still very much a sticker, and there are two problems with this.

The first problem is that, despite the offer of a freely available matching wallpaper, it is very obvious that the back of my iPhone has had a sticker slapped on it and nothing else. The pictures at Gelaskins only show a direct shot of the front and the back, giving an accurate picture of what your phone will look like but not a very accurate picture of what your phone will look like. The pictures I’m referring to are here.

The second problem is that this, being a sticker, provides zero protection. Its very possible that other Gelaskins for other products cover the entire device and provide a protective layer, but the iPhone skin only protects a fairly unimportant rear.

The Caveat

I should have known all of this.

My unhappiness with the Gelaskin is more a function of my not reading closely enough than anything else. It’s not like they don’t mention the size of the skin; they do. And it’s not like they don’t provide multiple pictures of it; they do. The problem is mainly that I had somehow convinced myself it would be more along the lines of a substantive case, like such.

So it was only $15. Why not just toss it and get the InCase cover linked above? Because the InCase cover is hideous. Do I really want my phone to look like the underside of a pair of Tevas?

I really liked the idea of a fully protective but still aesthetically pleasing phone cover. And since both InCase and Gelaskins are still in business, I think there is at least a market for both of these things separately. I’m hoping that in the near future one of them will move in the direction of combining the two. So I understand that it might be hard for Gelaskins , which I assume is a fairly small company, to take their archive of licensed art from stickers to rubber/gel covers. But if they did I would absolutely be first in (virtual) line to get one.

Architectural Digest photographer Peter Aaron spoke at the Apple store in SoHo on Monday night (that being his photo of the Apple store under construction at the left). Since my knowledge base about shooting for magazine publishing is comprised of having read several magazines in the past 24 years, it was illuminating even beyond what I was expecting.

After some background, including an interesting aside about his start doing portraiture in Provence before moving on to architecture, Aaron got down to the details.

Although I assumed there was a fair amount of post-production going on with the magazine’s photos, I didn’t realize how important it was. I’ll reverse the order in which he described his process.

Old (Film) Process

In the question and answer period, Aaron described his old technique. He used to take one long (~10 second) exposure of the room lit for the main shot, followed by a series of short (~1/60 of a second) exposures on the same film. During the short exposures he (or his assistant) held a single strobe in different positions around the room to highlight different furniture, art, and angles.

Because of the different exposure times, the light from the strobe shots would show up while the strobe-carrier would not. The result was photograph impossible to do in a single exposure unless one artfully set a number of strobes in positions around the room that cast the desired light while hiding the light source from view.

New (Digital) Process

Like, I suspect, much of modern photography, the new process is very similar to the old process, only with more Photoshop.

As he demonstrated with wonderful clarity in his talk, Aaron now starts with his main shot, then takes a series of shots with increasingly darker and lighter exposures. After these capture the main thrust of the picture, he moves on to the highlights in much the same way as before, with an assistant holding a strobe for shots that bring out different parts of the room.

After finishing work on location, Aaron returns the various RAW files to another assistant who spends his time putting the different layers together in Photoshop, producing the final picture that appears in Architectural Digest.

I wish I had some of the pictures that Aaron used to illustrate his process, as they pretty quickly show what it would take me too long to write. Regardless, this is definitely one idea to file away for the day I move into any sort of extensive Photoshop work.

(I’m also willing to note that this is probably a technique I’d have learned on the third day of a photography class if I’d ever bothered to take one. So its probably not all that interesting to the trained eye, but I thought it was fairly cool.)

In a stunning insight that I’m sure they teach you on the first day of HTML school, I realized why I was having so much trouble getting a “Related Posts” plugin working.

I couldn’t figure out why pages remained the same even after I was pulling all of the code out of them. Equally frustrating was when they started changing at random a few minutes later. I forgot I had the wp-cache program running, which caused the delay between changes to the code being made and changes to the pages displaying.

Once I disabled that and cleared the cache, every change I made was instantly recognized. Getting the formatting set took only a few short minutes after that.

Whew.

Unfortunately, I reinstalled most of my wordpress theme files in an attempt to troubleshoot this, which means I lost my personalized page banners. Hopefully it shouldn’t take too long to recrop them and reup them sometime tomorrow.

Lesson learned? Backup everything. And don’t be an idiot.