I wasn’t hugely interested in the Olympics from a sporting perspective. I’m more a Winter Olympics kinda guy. However, I’ve found myself enthralled by the lengths taken by photographers to capture the games.

The main entry point is Vincent Laforet’s blog. He’s an experienced photographer and is sharing his thought processes as he covers the games for Newsweek.

Newsweek have taken an interesting approach and sent three photographers to shot the games and to blog about it. Their combined blog is here. This article is a good example of the kinds of information being posted. The editor also selects a photo for the day.

Reuter’s photo blog is also featuring an Olympic photo of the day from their photographers.

I’m learning a lot about sport photography and photography in general by reading through these, especially Vincent’s musings. I now have enthusiasm for the Olympics.

On a PC, I want to be able to easily capture screencasts for the products we use at work. The ulterior motive is to be able to show a video rather than repeat the demo hundreds of times.

VMWare gives a tantalizing option: Capture Movie

It is under the VM menu in the menu bar. Prompts for a filename and you’re away.

Slight catch. Playing back the movie that is recorded leads to not much but trouble. Turns out that VMWare encodes the movie into a non-standard video format. Details of it are here. (It is using the VNC protocol to encode the video with some VM specific headers)

If you’ve installed Workstation, the decoder for the codec is included. Otherwise, you can download the codec here. I found you need to use Microsoft Media Player to actually play back.

That still leaves the problem of editing the video. With the video recorded and the codec installed, you can convert the video into a suitable format. I used Prism’s conversion program to produce an AVI that can be read by Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut Pro took a bit of effort, but produced a very slick result. You can use simpler options for the video editing piece.

The result is that I can now capture video of demonstrations that are run in a VMWare environment, and re-mix them into various screencasts.

1. Be Aggressive
2. Diversify
3. Look for new resources for finding customers
4. Pay attention to your primary message — don’t let it get lost
5. Look for new promotional partners
6. Build your brand
7. Pay attention to your website
8. Use your own work for your holiday cards and stationary
9. Look for new promotional opportunities
10. Stay on top of technology

This is a very short synopsis of Skips’ normal four-hour presentation.

From Skip Cohen (via Jeff Greene).

I started out in photography as I love taking photographs. I’m sticking with photography as there is so much to learn; business strategy, marketing, technology & more.

I’m recently become quite excited about printing my photos. So much so that I’ve bought an A4 photo printer for “proofing”. For high quality prints, I’d rather outsource to a professional lab. The information on which ones are in Melbourne is a bit scattered, thus this list.

Melbourne labs:

• Bond Imaging – Richmond (quote on request)
• CPL Digital – St Kilda (price list)
• Digital Works – Hallam (price list)
• Lab X – St Kilda (price list)
• NuLab – Braeside (price list on registration)
• Vanbar Imaging – Carlton / North Melbourne (price list)

To get the most out of a good photo lab, or any photo lab, you need to be using a colour managed workflow. This should include proofing in Photoshop based on the colour profile of the print device. If the lab can not supply a way of colour matching to their printer, you may want to consider another lab.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with any of these labs. I actually haven’t used most of them, so if you have recommendations, please leave a comment.

Coblyn is just released for Mac OS X. A combination of puzzle solving and action, harks back to the computing days of old. If you loved Boulder Dash, check it out.

The neat thing is that the user manual includes details on how to create levels. The site also includes a bonus pack of 200 classic levels.