New Years Resolutions

I was looking through some old pictures today from my freshman year of college and I began to think of how I have changed since I started in 2005. I started to think about the improvements I have made to myself and things I still need to improve upon.

This brought me to create my list of New Years Resolutions. This list will hopefully be completed in the coming year. I also have made a list of things that I would have put on my New Years Resolutions list, but thought why wait? So there is a list of things I am already starting to do so I can end the year strong.

New Years Resolutions:

• Be frugal with my money
• Save money for a car
• Get better with CSS and HTML
• Switch my site over from Flash to CSS based
• Graduate
• Accept Gingers as human beings
• Read 3 new books
• Practice my fine art skills (Painting, Drawing, Sculpting maybe)
• Finish Final Fantasy 7
• Try more wines

Resolutions already in progress:

• Eating healthier
• Working out
• Running
• Writing letters to a friend again

Resolutions that I will never complete:

• Accept Gingers as human beings

Christmas Cards

My roommate Andy and I made our annual christmas cards. They were made to be humorous so keep that in mind. Happy Christmas!

Burma Awareness

A friend here at my school asked me to edit a trailer for Raging Forest so that it is shorter and more like a teaser. The teaser trailer will be shown during one of our chapels to let people know about Burma Awareness Night in December. It has been about 6 months since I have really used Final Cut Pro 5 so it was fun to dive back in especially for this particular cause. I took 7.5 minutes of footage and shortened it down to a teaser that is about 51 seconds. The audio was probably the hardest thing to work with at times, but in the end it flowed very nicely and worked very well with the images. Whoever made this trailer to begin with did an amazing job with editing and with syncing the audio. The audio was very effective in making the images more powerful and left a big impact on me. Here is the original trailer and the shorter is my editing.

View Camera Workshop

Recently my school, Taylor University, held a workshop on using medium format cameras. I was pretty excited about this and decided to sign up. These cameras are wonderful to use and give such clear prints when you focus them right. Now you have to deal with the fact that they are a pain to move around and to see the shot since it doesn’t fix the orientation of the image for you. We were to take pictures and experiment with the camera for about 3 days and then come back at the end of the 3rd day and show what we had printed out. One thing I did like is that these were all contact prints meaning no focusing required. You just lay the photo paper down then the negative over that and press it down with a piece of glass and expose it with light.

Now if these cameras didn’t cost over $6,000 I would defiantly buy one. I encourage anyone who is interested in photography or just curious about these cameras to look around for camera shops that have them and play around with them. The camera I used 5×7 negatives and the cameras were provided by Keith Canham who owns Canham Cameras. Keith is a great guy who loves photography and loves building cameras. Keith also is one of the few private owners of a complete Brown Sisters series of photographs by Nick Nixon. Taylor University had the pleasure of having his collection on display in our art gallery, a rare treat indeed. Here are my better prints from the workshop, critique them if you must.

Birch’s Saftey Matches and Lighters

So it has been a while since I posted anything about design so I felt the need to bring it back. I am in the process of trying to get my college degree in the graphic arts and unfortunately I have to suffer through a 5th year of school. But I am gaining more knowledge so I guess it isn’t no bad.

Currently I am in a design history class that goes through the history of design and we are assigned a project for each major period. For each project we have to design within using the style we are currently learning about. This is seriously an awesome class that gives you great skills that can be used after college, and broadens your design style horizons.

The first assignment was to design and produce the logo and packaging for a specialty match stick company based in Bar Harbor, Maine. But we had to use Victorian style design. Hard to come up with ideas for this one since Victorian style is all over the place. But here is what I cam up with. In my sketches, as you will see once I put them up, I stuck with a nautical theme and went crazy with the anchor. I ended up going with the idea of having the name Birch’s, the sub heading “Saftey Matches and Lighters”, and the tag line I made up to create an anchor around the match stick. I put this final design on a metal tin which used to hold Camel cigarettes and the design on the cover looked amazing. I placed the strike pad on the bottom and used matches that would be roughly the size of a cigarette. Now putting the design on the tin was a challenge. I used a decal at first and that failed miserably, so I am now resorting to finding sticker printing paper to put apply it on.

This is the product I turned in, but some advice from my professor has caused me to redo some things before I decide to put it into my portfolio. The newer version will come later. Enjoy and feel free to say hateful things or helpful things about it. I will also include a picture of the packaging once my professor gives it back.

Here is the new one based on the feedack from others and the professor.

Here are the long awaited sketches! Enjoy!

Harvest Moon

The Autumn season moves on and I am finding myself to love the fall brews the more I try them. Blue Moon’s summer style was a let down for me, but I figured I would give them a second change with their fall style. I was pleasantly surprised at how wonderful the Harvest Moon really was! It was full bodied with a great smooth finish with a hint of pumpkin. This was very different from the summer brew which was very sweet, which I was expecting with this one. It had the right amount of spice and the perfect amount of sweetness too it making it a great autumn beer. It is getting cold out now so warm yourself up with a Harvest Moon.

Dogfish Head Punkin Ale

So it has been a while since I have posted about any beer, but this was worth waiting for. I have once again tried another fall seasonal beer and it was rather grand. Dogfish Head’s Punkin Ale is another great fall beer with a spicy and pumpkin taste to it. It’s very smooth and has nice hints of the pumpkin flavor as well as brown sugar.  The Punkin is pretty high in alcohol content with 7%, but you can’t even tell it’s that high.

I personally think the Punkin Ale is far better than Shipyards Pumpkinhead Ale making it my favorite fall beer and pumpkin beer as of now. Dogfish Head makes some great beers, but most of them have been on the higher end of cost so I haven’t dared to touch them. The cool thing about the Punkin too is that it was the first brew that Dogfish Head ever made. It was brewed before the brewery was established in 1995. Punkin Ale is still the best selling seasonal of Dogfish Head.  I was lucky that I got to try this at a bar in West Hartford where it was rather inexpensive. Defiantly give this one a try this fall before they sell out!

Shipyard Pumpkinhead

Summer is nearly over and fall beers have been pouring into the store by the boat loads. I really wish I wasn’t on my way back to Indiana, the land where anything other than Budweiser is shunned, because I really want to try out the fall styles like I did with the summer beers. But I did at least get to have a taste of what fall beers taste like and I was pretty pleases.

I decided to try Shipyard’s Pumpkinhead merely for the name and fun little label, but now I have a new reason to buy it again. Just as the name would suggest it has a spicy pumpkin flavor that just screams the fall season. I personally LOVE pumpkin so it was a given that I would fall in love with this beer. It wasn’t too sweet and had a great kick in your face with the fall spices. It was smooth, very drinkable, and had a medium body. Perfect little beverage to enjoy after raking up the infestation of leave amongst the yard. Pick it up and enjoy it!

Chimay Grand Réserve

The benefits of working at a liquor store is that when it is your birthday your bosses give you beer as a gift. This year they got me the best gift yet, Chimay’s Grand Réserve. One of my bosses, Geoff, told me that this was the best beer he had ever had until he tried another high end Belgium beer than knocked his socks off. I can’t remember the name of that beer, but I will be trying that since I have now had the best beer I have ever had!

The Chimay Grand Réserve was about as expensive as most bottles of wine, coming out to around 16 bucks, and boy was it worth it. I guess it would have been more worth it if I had actually bought it, but it was equally as satisfying to receive it as a gift. When I opened the bottle it was like opening a fine champagne. The cork went flying and so did the aroma into the air. The light roasted malt taste is spectacular and is so smooth it’s scary. The right amount of bitterness and the greatest chocolate taste in the finish maybe even a light taste of coffee and almonds. This Trappist beer is by far my favorite beer and I am only dreaming of having the one that will top this exceptional Belgium beer.

Avery’s Kaiser Imperial Oktoberfest

It has been a while since I have done a post on beer so I felt it was about time. Lately I have just been enjoying what is left of the summer beers that I had, but I did get to try some new ones that I have never had. Last year when I started my venture to try as many different beers as I could I tried Avery’s Kaiser and man I thought it was pretty good back then when I really had no palette.

So I decided to try it again so I could give my thoughts on it, since I had forgotten how it tasted. Man was I surprised! The first mouthful was wonderful, smooth, sweet, and creamy. But after that first mouth the sweetness was pretty over powering. I honestly had to struggle to put half of this pint bottle down before I gave in and did  horrible thing…I poured it down the drain. If you have read any of my other beer posts you know I hate sweet beers and man this was way too much for me. But other than that it was a really nice full bodied beer. It was very creamy and smooth, which was rather nice. I am saddened that I couldn’t enjoy the Kaiser, but I am sure someone else will love it. So go out on a limb and spend the dough on this pint, even though it sometimes will cost as much as a six pack.