Media arts internship March 20 - 22, 2015

March 20

I began going through the audio recordings I had taken at Spring Training. I’m editing out any non-baseball sounds that happened during the recordings.

March 21

I created the post for Sunday’s podcast recording then began some preliminary research for the show content. I also listened to a music sample someone sent me for use on the show and responded with some feedback.

March 22

I did research and prepared the show notes for the podcast recording. Then recorded the show. I also updated the Spring Training roster graphic and created a post scheduled to be posted Monday.

Media arts internship March 18 - 19, 2015

March 18

I updated the march madness tournament bracket with the results from round 2. I then finished my organization of the pictures I took at Spring Training.

March 19

I processed all the pictures I planned to release in gallery post on the site, then wrote the post. I process pictures by opening them in Adobe Bridge and adjust the different settings of the pictures.

I shoot all my pictures in RAW so that I can go into Bridge and adjust levels for different elements of a picture. RAW is exactly what it sounds like, a starting point for an image with tons of information. For example, one of my RAW files is 22 MB. After I converted it to a JPG, after adjusting different elements to make the image look better, it is now 3 MB. JPGs get rid of a lot of information to make the image more size efficient. I can adjust levels in the JPG format, but due to the lost information, it doesn’t work as well.

I start at the top and work my way down. Exposure is adjusted first, then recovery, fill light, blacks, and finally brightness. As I’m adjusting I’m looking between the image and the histogram. Ideally, the histogram should have a hill shape, but that’s rarely the case. I end up trying to get the histogram as close to looking like a hill as possible and watching the image to see what I like. I’ll also crop the image to get rid of polls, garbage cans and other things in the shot that tend to draw the eye away from the main focus of the image. If I like the image as is I’ll save it directly from Bridge.

Other times I’ll open the image in photoshop to remove stuff from the shot or add a filter. I typically add filters if a shot is blurry, but I like the shot anyway. Other times I’ll experiment with shots, like this:

The idea here was to get the words and the number on the back of the jersey to show along with the shadow. Again, I was experimenting. Next I uploaded the pictures to the website and created a gallery post for them, which will release Friday. I’ll be uploading all the pictures to the gallery on this site as well.

Media arts internship March 16 - 17, 2015

Monday, I upgraded the Astros Spring Training roster infographic. While we were in Kissimmee, some players were cut from major league camp and sent down to minor league camp. I updated the graphic to reflect those players as off the major league Spring Training roster. In Photoshop I dropped the opacity of the names to 30% and removed the shadow, this helped define the players cut from the players still in major league camp.

Tuesday, I edited the podcast audio together that Brooks and I had recorded over the weekend. I started by recording an intro, a break between the days and then the outro for the episode. Then I went in and cleaned up the audio from the weekend and put it all together. Created the post for the podcast and updated the RSS feed so that the episode could be distributed to podcast directories.

http://www.crawfishboxes.com/2015/3/18/8240151/adventures-at-astros-spring-training-camp

Media arts internship March 13 - 15, 2015

Brooks and I traveled to Kissimmee, Florida, to get some content for the website. On Friday I shot 1230 pictures and started the process of organizing the pictures I shot. I found with the Canon T3i that I had checked out from media services that I needed a special plugin to view the pictures properly in Adobe Bridge. Once I got that installed I started sorting the pictures I wanted to use from the ones that I would not use. I ended up taking so many pictures because I was burst shooting a lot of the action happening at Astros Spring Training. While this filled up my 32GB card quickly, it allowed me to decide on the best action shot for the site.

One of the challenges of shooting pictures and even video at the Astros backfields is getting good angles for shots. We couldn’t go directly on the field so had to shoot through chain link fences, when the players were on the field. Luckily, the players have to traverse the same paths that we do and so going station to station allowed for some cleaner shots of the players. The time of day also caused some issues with getting good shots that properly lit players, because we were limited on angles and where we could shoot from. We made due though.

Friday evening, we recorded our first of two podcast sessions that ran about 45 minutes long.

Saturday we went back to the backfields to shoot some more pictures. The practice ended around noon, which was earlier than we expected, but did allow me to get further along in my sorting of the pictures. I shot another 300+ pictures on Saturday, bringing the total between the two days up to about 1500+ pictures. In the evening we went to the Braves Spring Training facility to watch the major league teams face off in a Spring Training game. This gives us an opportunity to evaluate the players in real game environments, to use for writing and podcast content. Along with pictures I recorded some audio that I planned to use for a soundscape. After the game we recorded another podcast about 30 mins long. I thought about releasing the podcast in parts, but decided it would be better to just keep it all one podcast.

Sunday, we had another major league Spring Training game to go to. I shot about another 300 pictures and, again, recorded some audio.

Media arts internship March 9, 2015

I edited the podcast recording from Sunday and scheduled the post for Tuesday. I also wrote the post for the Dallas Keuchel GIF and scheduled that for a Wednesday morning release. Then I scheduled a post for Sunday announcing that there would be no live podcast recording for Sunday. Brooks, a writer on the site, and I will be traveling to Kissimmee, Florida, Thursday to take in the sights and sounds of Astros Spring Training baseball. I like to announce non-recordings, because the podcast recording is a regular event and people expect a podcast recording to happen weekly, but may have missed my audio announcement on the previous episode.

For the post I decided to create a quick custom graphic, that will be the posts main picture.