#and it involved using a camera with fisheye lenses and stuff to take photos of real places

[solradguy]

can you post ur favorite official a.b.a arts? shes my favorite by far i love her so fckn much

Daisuke's technical skill on the A.B.A. pieces in the GGX art book are amazing so I'll just post all of them here. The one of her in the factory (the second one here) is probably my favorite though. The subdued palette and especially detailed background stand out compared to Daisuke's usual work. He laments in a few of the captions that they didn't let him draw backgrounds often and it's such a shame because he's got an incredible grasp on manipulating perspective for dramatic angles/compositions. I'd love to know how much reference he used for stuff like that or if he had to do a lot of studies to get it right:

[efosa123]

Passive Income: How I make $40,000/year doing nothing (software engineer edition) Passive Income: How I make $40,000/year doing nothing (software engineer edition) Video Transcript ▼ okay all right okay how's it going I think I'm getting all settled in here welcome back to another episode of the tech lead I am the tech lead and today I'll be the tech lead not to start off we actually have a sponsor today so let's go to that right now right now my name is the tech lead and I am the tech lead I hope you're enjoying the show but don't forget if you like the content we also have available for you tech weed season one complete HD for the low price of 1995 with this you get 28 additional episodes and nearly three hours of additional content check it out in the description link below everyone who has bother have left rave reviews saying that it has been well worth it for them they'll do it for me give it a like and subscribe and back to you tech lead thanks tech lead today I wanted to talk about passive income and about how I'm generating about $40,000 per year just on site income and this is income where I'm basically just not doing anything I'm just sitting around and each day I'm getting about low over $100 just for doing nothing now I wanted to talk about this video not actually because I think it's important for software engineers to build additional site income streams I would say that even $40,000 per year isn't really going to be that meaningful necessarily but but I would say it's a very fun happy to have it can help you get deeper into software engineering as you're building these side projects it can help build up your resume and what I hope to do is tell you about the ways that I generate aside the income and I'm not really sure if all of these are going to be completely useful for you because it may be difficult to replicate what I've done but it can help inspire you maybe give you some ideas so for me most of my side income comes from for projects that I'm doing now the first one is this photography software that I created it's called pan elapsed 360 comm check it out it is for time-lapse photographers and this project is a very niche project that I began when there was a big time-lapse boom like there were time lapses all over YouTube and I was into time lapses as well and people needed a way to add special effects to these time lapses to process the time lapses and there weren't many good time lapse software's so I looked into it there was one software that was retailing for over $200 and I thought you know that's really expensive and that I could build something better not the software I built did two things the first thing it would do was it would allow you to add motion to your time lapses using actually perspective correct math and this involved really understanding the math behind lenses like a 24 millimeter camera what does that actually mean in terms of field of view and what's like a hundred millimeter camera and this was very fun for me to learn and figure out and find the exact math behind it and I also applied some of my computer graphics skills to get this going I built the software using Adobe ActionScript which is like Flash technology now it's pretty funny because ActionScript is not a very popular language these days but the great thing about it was it was cross-platform across Windows and Apple and I wanted to make sure that the software I wrote could target both platforms and they needed to be desktop software because I didn't want users to have to upload their photos just together processed on like some web software so I've looked around for the appropriate technology for this and I could have chosen either Java or Adobe AIR ActionScript and I really wasn't keen on getting back into Java and it seemed to me that ActionScript and Flash technology could be something interesting it's something that I had already been doing a bit of and I was able to just build out the software pretty quickly it took like two weeks or so to build out I noticed at the time that a lot of time-lapse photographers were try to add motion to their time lapses using very expensive hardware rigs that would be based on timers and it was slowly like rotate the head and I realized that you didn't really need these Hardware timers and rotational motorized heads to do other stuff like you could do with or in software using perspective correction and just a bit of math and image distortion there was a very small niche messageboard community of time-lapse photographers I was part of it and I knew that if I built a software I could just go there announce it and everybody would see that message so that's exactly what I did and we then the first day or two of me launching the software I was already getting like five hundred dollars every day in sales over the years I continued to build up features into the software another big feature was allowing you to capture time lapses across sunset or sunrise when the scene exposure would change quickly and and for this I would use math to calculate the exposure of a scene based on the exposure triangle which is based on aperture ISO and shutter speed and using these three pieces you're able to calculate how bright a scene is and then interpret what Brenton is each frame should be as the cameras changing exposure quickly to try to capture the scene I also added some other interesting features like I had the support to do fish eye time lapses which is a very unique and strange effect and it literally took me like a month to work out the calculations for how to do a fisheye projection and then build like fisheye geometry into the program so I'm not sure if this was that well-received so I'm I don't know if it was a really good use of my time to spend the whole month building out this feature but it was really fun for me to do at least and I had to get into like GPU shaders to actually do it so I had to teach myself that stuff anyway the software something that I'm still maintaining these days I sell it for a pretty high price about $80 a piece and I think that's actually a very worthwhile price and also I just think that the economics is that for desktop software you can just charge more and I was pretty happy that I did not make this like an iPhone app where the standard is every app needs to be like $1 or $5 like like here's an app time selling for $80 but I still managed to make about one sell every day and it also helped when our managers to translate the whole web site into Japanese and the software became quite popular in Japan as well so that's one side project there's another side project that I've been running for the past 10 years or so it's called human pets comm it's kind of a social network and this was very popular back in the day like there were 2 million users and it was generating like $2,000 everyday or something for a while these days the website has lost a lot of popularity from its heyday it's still pushing out about say $100 per month and the way it generates money is generally through memberships take off these shoes so I feel like I probably should be charging more for membership I charge like 6 dollars for a monthly membership which is probably too low when you become a member you gain a bunch of additional features and another great thing about this that added was that you could buy or give to memberships to other people so a lot of people will be doing that because often people seem to treat others better than they may treat themselves I also run some Adsense on the site the ads don't really make much money it's like $60 a month but this site has been operational for the past ten years or so and it's just been spilling additional income for me the whole time so that's great the third project was a set of iPhone games web RPG apps really where people could just progress a character through a game and there would be levels a storyline to push the player through many items to collect monsters to fight and you just click buttons and kind of move your character through I think the key to this was there was a storyline that was just very engrossing for it to player and the other thing was I had high limits for purchases like you could buy items that were like $20 in the game there's a statistic that 90% of your income will come from the top 10% of players for in the game and those players are concerned with their whales they're basically people who have either a lot of money or don't mind spending a lot of money on gaming and so I think that was one mistake I made with my first website which was unlimited so that you can only pay a maximum of about 6 dollars per month for membership and after that it didn't matter how much you loved the app or game it was kept at that amount and what I wish I did was add higher thresholds for spending now the fourth project I did was very interesting and this was actually photography and you can sell stock photography or stock videos now stuff photography doesn't pay very well because it's so cheap like one photo the most you could get is like 25 cents or something like my best selling photo was a photo of the Brooklyn Bridge a New York just happens to sell very well because it's so iconic and this photo so about 1,500 copies and each copy was a dollar so me just standing there taking one shot with that was like a fifteen hundred dollar shot right there with video it's even better because each video you can sell for about $50 a piece or so and these days I think people are looking really for 4k video like they need to be extremely high quality my videos that I sold really well were videos of Japan there was actually the shrine called fushimi inari in kyoto with a bunch of red gates this was actually relatively unknown when I visited and there were very few people but it's funny that now if you go there's tons of people and I think it's because I helped popularize it you know I had this video and sold over a thousand copies of this video and usually it's travel agencies that buy these videos and then they use these to try to sell that that's a nation tours packages and they take tours there so it's kind of shame now that this place is now completely overrun with tours and I probably helped contribute to that mess and then I also did videos of Iceland the ice caves and Northern Lights and each of these videos generally brought in like $1,000 so in the end my photography work brought in about twenty thousand dollars over four or five years or so the other great thing about the photography work was I actually got sponsorships so I was able to work with a selling company and they offered us $10,000 catamarans and sailboats in exotic locations like the Bahamas or Phuket and we were able to just take these sailboats around and this was kind of unique because I knew how to sell and I'm a photographer so as I was able to take week-long sailing vacations in the exotic areas worthy lodging and that boat would be free so it was pretty great when you add it all together we're looking at about thirty six hundred dollars a month or forty K a year and the great thing about citing income like this business income is that you can actually deduct expenses on this so if you buy a laptop you can deduct against that anything i buy that may have some business purpose would be like about thirty percent off or something like that now one funny consequence of this is i don't actually do much github open source contributions because a lot of what I work on I sell like I wanted to be commercial software so I don't actually want to open source things so one time I had to recruit her asked me like hey what's your github and I was like I don't do open source you know I actually make money from her projects and they're just like that yeah that's I would say though that another way I generate a lot of site income so to say is I just live with my parents that's saving me like at least $3,000 per month on rent and the funny thing about this is you calculate that as post-tax income so it's equivalent to about 4 K per month in income you might earn at a job that's like 48 K savings right there's so I don't know what I'm gonna do with all this money I'm saving but maybe I'll give it to my kid or something like that so the last thing one says when I look for a project there's a few things I'm looking for so the first thing to look for is timing like why now and everything I've done that has succeeded I think there was a reason that timing made sense like like there were certain trends in user behavior or technology that signified that it was at that moment that it would be ripe for some project to succeed the other thing is I look for things that are scalable so running a restaurant I think is not very scalable it's I think what you're really looking for our scenarios were you can affect far more many people and that's usually done through the internet and that gets the last thing is using coding to automate these systems such that you don't have to do anything and then the system just automatically takes care itself that's when it becomes really passive but yeah that's pretty much how I've been looking at generally the inside income I think in the whole scheme of things it's not much compared to say the salary that a software engineer is able to generate but I think it's really fun sometimes you're actually able to strike gold in certain areas and make a lot but there than that I think it just makes the Hobby that much more interesting and overall just push your craft to a higher level no matter what you're doing so there you have it that'll do it for me if you liked the video please give it a like and subscribe it really helps grow the channel and that we'll see you next time bye

[thenorthfacejournal]

Behind the Lens: An Interview with Photographer Tero Repo

Like many powderhounds, it was Tero Repo’s thirst for good snow and big mountains that led him away from home in Finland to the Swiss Alps, first for a season, then two, and then permanently. But if it was his snowboard that took him there, it was something else in his bag that made him stay: A camera that his parents gave him as a graduation present. Now he makes his living shooting photos for magazines like Transworld Snowboarding and brands like The North Face, so we called him up at his home in Vollèges, Switzerland to find out how he began his journey to become a pro photographer and the challenges of life behind the lens.

Although he claims his photos were not very good in the beginning, he caught on fast and began selling images in his second season in Switzerland. However, it was a chance connection with another pilgrim to the Swiss Alps that really catalyzed his career, a then-little-known snowboarder by the name of Xavier de le Rue. Tero and Xavier, along with filmer Guido Perrini, became a tight-knit crew. As Xavier turned into a household name in the international scene, Tero was increasingly busy supplying the media with images: “In the best years, we had, I don't know, 500 photos of Xavier published. It was a full time job to organize them between the magazines. His riding was getting so good, and I was there at the right time.”

How did you develop your skills and learn the trade?

I didn't really take any courses. I read a few books, and what I was doing the most was reading all the ski magazines I could find. That was my school, staring at them for hours.

Were there specific photographers you looked to for inspiration?

There was one guy I was really looking out for, Jancsi Hadik. He used to work a lot here in the Swiss Alps with riders like Gilles Voirol (who died in Bella Coola quite a few years ago), and the Falquet brothers, and I just thought that his style was really, really clean.

How has your own style developed?

I really like scenic stuff. It was difficult in the beginning because people were saying I'm framing my photos way too wide, and there's too much room and the skiers are tiny, but that's how I want to do it. Now I've done that for many years, and I kind of want to go back to the basics and shoot more in the ski resorts and on the slope. More closeup stuff, bring more emotions into the photo.

I remember my first photos in Europe. European magazines were like, "We're looking for closeup shots, we're not interested." And then Nick Hamilton from Transworld, he was still the photo editor, said, "I'm going to publish a few photos like this, it's something a little bit different." Then one year later, European magazines started to run them as well.

What kind of gear do you shoot with?

It's actually pretty simple. Back in the day, I used to travel with all my gear. And then you realize after the trip, "Oh, I only used two lenses." Now it's a lot easier if you know what kind of trip you’re going to do.

I'm a Canon guy, pretty much all the photos I take with a 5D mkIII. From the heli, I shoot with a 24-70mm, or 24-105mm, and then a 70-200mm f2.8. If I have to hike up, then I normally take a 300mm and a 1.4x converter. For really wide angles, I use a 14mm f2.8 because I don't really like the fisheye style. And then 50mm, it depends where I’m going. If I'm hiking I take the 50mm f1.4 because it's a lot lighter and it's still great for the portraits. The one that I really like for the portraits and stuff is a 45mm f2.8 tilt-shift. I don’t use the tilt-shift that much, but I think that lens is really nice quality.

For the lights, I use Elinchrom mainly. I have two Quadras and then I have the Ranger AS, and well, it depends what I'm shooting. I try to travel as light as possible, but it never really happens with flashes.

Do you shoot with light much when you're not in the heli?

Actually, yeah. If I go shoot at a ski resort, I'm really keen to take lights and try to find some easy access spots. Maybe people recognize me more for the big lines and big mountain stuff but personally I think some of my best photos are with the flashes. If I'm traveling, I take just the basics and if I need something extra I rent the stuff.

What keeps driving you year after year?

That's a very good question. There was a moment last spring when I had to stop, because there were all these accidents and I just didn't feel good. My blood pressure started to go down and up. I was uncomfortable with that whole scene, I was just thinking, "My god, if any of this will happen in front of my camera, I don't know how to deal with that." I had to take a little break, a couple weeks, and then I was like, "OK, I can do this."

To be honest, I don't know how much longer I could push on this level, shooting extreme skiing and snowboarding. The more you do that, the more risk you have that something bad will happen. I'm not really scared for myself, because a lot of stuff we do with the heli, but just the fact that you lose someone you know really well. It's not just a rider or skier, it's a friend. I've been super lucky to work with the athletes that are super focused and I can rely on them. I know they're not taking stupid risks, but even then, you never know. You can't say, "OK, let's play safe," if someone is riding a 55° ice wall.

Now my biggest passion is to do more creative stuff. Everything has pretty much been done in skiing and snowboarding, but I think there's always something a little bit different you can do and that's what keeps me motivated. If there's a cool mission and we go somewhere and shoot one gnarly line and it's a one month project, it's totally worth it. If you do a cool trip that doesn't involve that much riding but there's one highlight, I think these kinds of things are really special. [TNF]