Jon Valade, MGDC

HDR Photos – Use photoshop to create a fake HDR effect using a single JPG image

admin — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:26:25 +0000

I have looked at a few different techniques for creating fake HDR in Phoshop and the following is my favourite because the effect is a little more subtle and most of the steps can be done with keyboard shortcuts. The photos on the left are the originals with the adjusted photos on the right… click [...]

Photography for Ocean Side Gifts

admin — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:01:34 +0000

For anyone who might have read my blog post on ‘How to Build a Photography Light Box’, this is the project that I built it for and a cross section of the pictures. I will add a link to the website once it is completed.

Photography for ImmunoPrecise

admin — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 19:15:53 +0000

Photography taken for the website we are building for ImmunoPrecise

How to build a photography light box on a “light” budget

admin — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 05:48:01 +0000

I decided to build this in order to take some product shots for the rack card and website we are designing for Ocean Side Gifts. Material needed is… - 12 lengths of 1 inch PVC piping cut to 28 inches long - 8 PVC couplings with three holes - 2 sheets of card stock 28”x36” [...]

Marginalization of Mental Health Patients by VIHA Slum Lords

admin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 22:26:34 +0000

Mental health disorders carry society’s most negative stigmata. Over the years I have heard the worst possible comments directed towards my son and other young adults fighting with bi-polar and other mental health issues. Among the most damaging comments I have heard were: “Living on the streets and in shelters are perfectly acceptable options for [...]

Trip to the Okanagan Valley

admin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 21:54:35 +0000

Click on any picture to enlarge

BC Ferries – From the mainland to Vancouver Island at dusk

admin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:42:45 +0000

Click on thumbnails below to view

Horses on Mary’s Farm

admin — Wed, 05 May 2010 07:58:29 +0000

Mary is a wonderful lady with a wonderful mission. She takes in horses that otherwise would very likely be euthanized. My son and I were invited to her farm on Easter for an Easter egg hunt and I fell in love with the location. After speaking with Mary it became evident that there was a [...]

CBC’s business practices violates graphic designers’ code of ethics

admin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:00:31 +0000

One way of trying to get free, or at the very least cheap, design material is to launch a contest for a logo or other design elements. This is not surprising coming from an association as clueless as the IOC but for Canada’s ‘leading’ media supplier to take this on as a practice is ethically [...]

WordPress – How to stop the visual editor from filtering out line breaks

admin — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:39:45 +0000

The visual editor in WordPress is built around the open source TinyMCE editor. By default this editor scrubs out empty paragraph tags <p> and additional line breaks <br>. This is useful for encouraging clean code but frustrating should anyone actually want any level of control over the layout and text flow of a page. Finally [...]