Jeremy Brooks

November was the last month of 2009 that had a monthly challenge from photochallenge.org. During 2009, there were six different monthly challenges:

January Challenge: one self-portrait each day of the month

March Challenge: night shooting, three photos each week of the month

May Challenge: the alphabet, one photo per day of a letter, in alphabetic order

July Challenge: the daily grind, three photos each week of people working

September Challenge: one photo per day in black and white

November Challenge: one photo per day using your mobile phone

The result? 144 photos, spanning January to November. Now, for your viewing pleasure (or boredom perhaps) are all 144 photos from the 2009 Monthly Challenges, with a soundtrack by Revolution Void:

The 2009 September Challenge was another photo-per-day challenge at photochallenge.org. The goal was to shoot and post one photo per day in black and white. As usual, I feel that the challenge helped me to grow as a photographer. As the days went by, I began seeing shots that I knew were destined to be black and white. I saw shots that I would not have seen before.

This video is a compilation of my shots for the September Challenge. You can see all the shots in my September Challenge Set on Flickr, and you can see all the participants shots here.

The soundtrack is “Infornography” by Revolution Void.

Here’s a video with my shots from the The 2009 May Challenge. One letter per day, in alphabetic order. The video was made using Animoto, and the soundtrack is “Increase The Dosage” by Revolution Void.
All my shots from the May Challenge can be seen here.

2008 Challenge from Jeremy Brooks on Vimeo.

The 2008 Challenge was a challenge. One photo per week, documenting my community. Committing to shoot the same theme every week was not always easy. Some weeks I had no idea what I was going to shoot. Some weeks I just didn’t want to shoot. But I managed complete it. Here are some things I learned from the experience:

1. Planning is essential

Doing some research about my community and planning to shoot specific things greatly helped in completing the project. I found a list of Richmond fire stations and a list of public art in Richmond. These lists provided an abundance of subject matter. Each week I picked one of the items on the list to shoot.

2. Don’t wait until the last minute

It was much easier to pick a subject and attempt to shoot it at the beginning of the week. If the subject was no longer there (as was the case for some of the public art I tried to shoot), I could pick another subject and shoot it later in the week.

3. Make the project public

Posting the shots on flickr, zooomr, and my blog gave me incentive to complete the project once I had started it. The shots appeared at photochallenge.org as well.

4. Tag the photos and make a set

Tagging each photo with ‘2008challenge’ made it possible to see everybody’s 2008 Challenge photos. In addition, it made it simple to automatically add my photos to a 2008 Challenge set. Flickr does not have the ability to create sets automatically based on tags, but you can use SmartSetr to do it.

Some of the project photos are not very inspired. Some are quite boring. Some I am really not happy with at all. But I posted them anyway, and I am happy with the project as a whole.
I’m really looking forward to the 2009 Challenge, and seeing what the completed project will look like at the end of next year. Can you do the 2009 Challenge as well? Why not give it a shot? It will be interesting to see a whole pool of photos from the year!

July Challenge, 2008 from Jeremy Brooks on Vimeo.

The July Challenge is now officially over. One shot per day, each of a different lighting fixture. I shot fixtures at my house, at friends houses, in restaurants, and in office buildings. Some are rather mundane, some are interesting, but they are all different.

You can see my sets of all the July Challenge photos on flickr or Zooomr.

The next challenge will most likely be in September. What do you have in store for us next, Trevor?

The May challenge is over. One photo per day on a specific theme. The theme changed every week. The themes were: A Drink, Your Car, Shoes, Seven, and Thumb. Thirty-one photos across five themes. Here’s the result:

The music is “Storm to four thirty”. by Jayson. You can find other cool stuff over on his blog.

The theme for the April Challenge was “Entropy” — that is, things falling apart. There were a lot of great shots from the participants, and a lot of variety in the interpretation of Entropy. If you want to see for yourself, check out all the shots tagged with aprilchallenge2008 on flickr.

You can also check out my April Challenge set.

And, just to keep it interesting, here is a video made from my April Challenge photos:

February Challenge, 2008 from Jeremy Brooks on Vimeo.

Testing out animoto, a web site that spits out a video based on the music and images you give it. You can re-render the video over and over, and get different results each time.

You can see the photos of the locks on Zooomr or Flickr.

How’s that for a verbose title?

Lately I have been encoding my DVD’s for viewing on Apple TV and the iPhone. A video encoded for the iPhone (or iPod video) will play on the Apple TV, but it does not look ideal when it is scaled up to fill a large TV. A video encoded for the Apple TV looks great on the TV, but will not play on the iPhone/iPod. So I have been encoding each DVD twice: once with Apple TV parameters, and once with iPhone/iPod parameters. The iPhone/iPod version contains “(iPod)” in the title to help me tell them apart.

This is great, except that by default iTunes syncs all new movies to the Apple TV, which means I have a large, high quality version, and a lower resolution version on the Apple TV. What’s the point? I am never going to watch the smaller version on the Apple TV anyway. There must be a better way.

Here’s the solution I came up with. Maybe there’s a better way to do it, there are definitely other ways to do it, but this works well for me.

First, I created a new Smart Playlist named Apple TV Movies which matched Video Kind is Movie and Name does not contain (iPod), limited to the 10 most recent additions, with live updates:

Then, I selected the Apple TV in the Devices list in iTunes, and told it to sync only my Apple TV Movies playlist:

Voilá! My Apple TV now only syncs the 10 most recent movies added, and only the movies encoded with the correct format for playback on my TV. I probably could have used the bitrate of the videos to determine which movies to sync as well, but I am going to have different versions with different names anyway, so I just used the name.