Városligeti Műjégpálya

Városligeti Műjégpálya, originally uploaded by attila acs.

A Solid Leather Passport Holder

This gallery contains 7 photos.

I just finished another leatherwork project. This time it’s a passport holder for 2 passports because my German one was too big to fit into the one we used before. I used very thick leather for this one and a … Continue reading →

Lightroom preset update: Red Haze

I just updated my Red Haze Preset to make it work better with more photos.

Download the updated preset here:

http://www.attilaacs.com/downloads/presets/Red_Haze.lrtemplate.zip

 

 

 

Tutorial – How I make the DIY Kindle leather case

This post has moved to http://highonglue.com/tutorial-how-i-make-the-diy-kindle-leather-case/

Leather Choice

For the main part of the Kindle case (the front and back) you can use 3.6mm thick leather. Anything that’s thicker than 2.5mm will work fine but an extra mm makes the whole case much more rigid and heavy.

Use a standard A4 sheet of paper as a template – I found that the size works great for the Kindle 3.

The main leather cut

My new handmade leather Kindle 3 case

This is my new DIY leather Kindle “book cover”.

The corners are made from kangaroo leather.

The Kindle sits in the case nicely and all buttons are still accessible.

The front cover is a carved Kindle logo and surrounded by red thread.

All ports can be easily accessed with the Kindle in the case.

The top corner is a rubber band so that it’s easier to put the Kindle in the case and to take it out again.

The back is all black and has an extra layer of leather for added strength…

Compress your native Pentax DNG photos AFTER import into Lightroom

I spent the last days cleaning up my photos and Lightroom catalogs. While importing/exporting and updating I noticed that the Pentax DNGs are uncompressed (around 17mb per file) and if I import them using the Lightroom “convert to DNG” command, they are compressed to about 9mb each.

However, using the existing “Convert Photos to DNG” command will not compress the existing DNGs in the library!

This is found under the “Library menu in Lightroom 3″ and works great with Nikon or Canon Raw files. However, DNGs are ignored by this command.

You won’t have to re-import all photos to get the benefit of compression though.

There’s a solution which is not very obvious but worked very well for me:

Select the photos in your catalog and choose “Metadata -> Update DNG Previews & Metadata”

This will take the uncompressed DNGs and compress them, giving you between 10%-40% of space back!

Before:

After:

CASIO meets Rock ‘n Roll?!

I pimped my CASIO, originally uploaded by attila acs.

Poser: Praying mantis near our kitchen window

Poser: Praying mantis near our kitchen window, originally uploaded by attila acs.

After weeks of iPhone photos, I decided to use my SLR again.

Bleeding hands and a few days of work…

I finally managed to finish my first leathercrafts project. It’s far from perfect because I pretty much just did it without any template or plan. Started cutting, moulding, dyeing, sewing and glueing without having the slightest clue what I’m doing. Considering that, I think it turned out OK and I already started working on my second project (a Kindle case).
I hope my hands will get used to it one day…

Object oriented audio for music?

The audio-nerd in me just got very excited about “3D audio”!

I’m a huge fan of the sound of real instruments in real places as opposed to the overproduced recorded crap you can hear everywhere these days. So, naturally I love the idea of object oriented audio! 

What’s that? 

I’m by no means an expert but this is what I’ve heard so far: metadata about an object’s location is saved in the audio stream and your home speaker system uses that location data to playback that certain sound in its original location. This leads to much more useful information than your average stereo or surround mix. It’s not a fixed number of channels anymore but any number of objects in a certain position. The listener can perceive actual depth, speed, direction and location.

While this is mainly useful for movies or gaming, this could turn the whole idea of recorded music on its head and remove the artistic side of a recording/mixing engineer which essentially takes a performance and squeezes it into 2 channels (L/R) or any type of surround setup.

To apply this idea to music sounds like a niche product but I find it very exciting: hear your favourite bands as if you were there with them in a rehearsal room. Not a refined mix but their real sound in that space… Something you can probably achieve with binaural recording today but 3D audio would free you from having to wear headphones.

Surely, the recording engineer could then take any performance and manipulate that audio and meta data and still overproduce it all but I guess he’d have to do that in order to still have a job.

check out http://www.3daa.org for more information