If you give important presentations more than once a year this book is for you. Personally I am comfortable in front of a crowd and was not looking for a ‘how to’ book that would calm me down. Confessions certainly will provide some nice tips, but I was looking for a book that was more of a conversation with a professional speaker.

That is the tone of this book, a conversation with a pro. But don’t let the word ‘pro’ intermediate you, the author is humble and funny.

Warning: Reading this book will make you analyze the next 100 speakers you hear! While doing this you should improve your own skill sets but it will make those speeches tuff to sit through!

Form factor: This is the first time I used O’Reilly’s ebook download feature and read the entire book on my Sprint EVO. The experience was excellent. So kudos to O’Reilly as well.

I give this a 5 out of 5… and honestly, a few people agree with me Check out Amazon’s 100+ reviews!!

Monkey Butler Reviews LIDLIPS

I am not a “traditionally” trained photographer. I have spent maybe 10 hours in a darkroom and never owned a ‘real’ film SLR. Video was my first love anyways, it was only two years ago that I started shooting professionally. This lead me to think ‘am I missing something that other photographers got at photography school?’ Read tons of books on the subject, from theory to functionality. I spend a ton of hours working with the camera in the field, but never taught by a master. Looking up specialty schools you will find no shortage of people saying, ‘full sail didn’t provide me with the skills I needed’ or ‘save your money from x,y,z and invest into gear’.




Well, Syl Arena DID go to a ‘photography’ school, and instead of complaining about it’s short falls, he wrote this book. LIDLIPS is SHORT. I mean REALLY short. But it’s not meant to be burned through on a lunch hour break. The way I approached it was reading 1-3 LIDLIPS a day and reflecting on them. It truly is a book to keep handy to get a quick dose of inspiration!






Wish it was 1,001 Lessons, but that’s the only ‘con’ but at $0.15 per nugget of wisdom, I can’t knock it. 5 out of 5 from the Monkey Butler.

“The Photographer’s Eye shows how anyone can develop the ability to see and shoot great digital photographs.” This is written on the back cover and most accurately describes this book.

Written more like a reference manual than a 1-on-1 author to reader relationship, this book takes major components of photography and break them down in 2-4 pages of detailed description. I particularly enjoyed the graphics that displayed eye movement or motion for a corresponding photograph. While I did not always agree that the suggested paths were the ‘normal’ views, it was cleverly displayed.

You will not know how to work your camera better or have any new tricks to try in Photoshop or Lightroom after reading this book. Instead you will capture better photographs… your composition will improve, and the depth of the photograph.

One of my favorite parts came from the Chapter 5: Intent intro, “…This is actually one of the central problems in photography-overcoming the sheer mindless ease of taking a picture. The problem is compounded by the evidence that occasionally a strong image can result from no intention…”

Another very helpful and educational section is the case study: Japanese Monk (page 160-161). Properly illustrated and easy to read, Michael Freeman walks you through the process of capturing a moment. The addition of a time-line in seconds was great!

Overall this book would make a very nice college level Photography basics book. It’s like a text book but doesn’t feel too ‘text-booky’. Overall I give it a 4 throwing stars out of 5.

Your Money the Missing Manual book review

The filling of a Wikipedia page is undeniable. Illustrating this to my wife I flipped to random pages and found multiple external AND internal references. Some internal references are literally saying “see page x for more details” where x is the NEXT PAGE. Some might see this as magnifying the value of the book, personally, it’s not for me.

Being a basic book it is written in clear English and anyone with a Jr. High level of education should have no problem breezing through. This is a pro. Money is a complex issue, being able to communicate complex ideas in a simple manor is not always easy.

For all its simplicity, the book has a few great nuggets of inspiration. Telling the difference between credit reports and credit scores… explaining some need to know information regarding those ‘free credit reports’ you see advertised everywhere. Good vacation information for saving money. Do you understand how the marginal tax rates work? You will after reading this book (and it’s good information to have!). Most of the book has well defined bolded text at the beginning of paragraphs that will let you know to skip it or read it.

Personally, I am confident in my financial knowledge and comfortable with my cash flow. I have minimum debt and contribute to multiple retirement plans. This book is not for me. Who is it for? I would love to see freshmen in high-school be assigned this book. People who are in debt and are looking for a good start to start digging out, this book is worth the $20.

So for me, it’s a 3 Star but for the young crowd and in debt (or slipping into debt crowd) I’d give it a 4 Star. Therefore I’ll average the two and say Monkey Butler Ninja will budget 3.5 expense slashing ninja stars!

The case studies are perfectly relevant and efficient teaching aids for the reader. You decide if this is a pro or con but there are a LOT of case studies in this book.

As someone that works with a business that uses PowerPoint for nearly EVERYTHING this book armed me with a few other tools to help guide the “higher-ups” to a more successful design.

Chapter 3, Creating Diagrams is particularly strong as it helps expand your concepts of diagramming all sorts of different concepts. Hundreds of simple thumbnails to get you started; or use as is for an end state.

Chapter 12, which hardly could be classified as a chapter, is Manifesto: The Five Theses of the Power of a Presentation. SHORT, and AWESOME.
Bottom line: this book takes an everyday presenter and transforms them into a designer! The world would be a better place if everyone that was ever going to make a PowerPoint presentation sat down and read through this book FIRST!

Monkeybutlerninja gives slide:ology 5 ‘power point’ ninja stars!

“At what point does a burnt-out software developer like me take a dive into being a creative professional doing what he really loves? What avenues are there? Does it all come down to a slick portfolio or what? I’d like to think my technical/engineering background would give make me a unique asset, but who knows.”

My reply:

So much of what I enjoy about starting and running KCVideoCore is being able to give away the software! It is a game changer for so many people.

Your question is a very good one… and actually very relevant to my life.

For the past few years I have had the same four jobs claimed (DESE:full time, Channel 2:part-time, Coaching:summer/fall, and Freelance:full time) Add in KCVideoCore, Helping with a movie, trying to further my self-taught education and oh yeah… I am married!

So, when do I get to play? Well the simple answer is: I travel, that’s how I play.

The complex answer is: I incorporate what “i really love” into as much of the work that I do as possible. I really do love all four of my jobs. Obviously as a freelancer I can pick and chose the gigs I want to take. How much will they stretch my creative legs? How much can I push the envelope!?

Here is another example. For coaching, I was trying to advance some Flash skills… I ended up designing some football plays in Flash… to the point where I attached the depth chart to the x’s and o’s. Mouse over the position and the kid’s name/pict pops up. Talk about a heck of a way to learn 40+ kid’s names!

On the rare occasion that I get to combine FUN + NO CLIENT + FUN + MY SKILL SETS it is some of the most exciting/rewarding experiences. The short film Tell-Tale Heart and my little ‘The Jedi’s Sphere’ that I did with my nieces were very exciting.

Underlying message here is do what you love. If you are at the early stages or perhaps have only entry level skills then get another job to pay the bills, but ALWAYS focus on getting BETTER at what you love.

Premeire Pro in CS5 using Mercury from Landmine Media on Vimeo.

Imagine getting into an elevator, right behind you follows a famous professional photographer who happens to have one piece you absolutely love. A conversation then follows about that piece, then the elevator reaches the floor and the two of you part ways.

This book will take you on that elevator ride with 50 photographers.

I’m not sure how if it was David Clark or the Focal Press team who is responsible for the layout of this book, but they deserve to be recognized for their work. It’s clean, it flows, it is sharp. I question the shrink wrapped decision but the book being a short read may have something to do with it.

Who is this book for? After reading through it, I’d say it will make a nice coffee table book in a studio. Certainly one I am proud to have in my collection.

I wouldn’t call this suggestion a critique, and barely a suggestion at that. More of a curiosity of how this book would have been if, instead of one picture and one short write up, we would have had a series of four or five photographs. Certainly not 50 different photographers in this case, but it probably would have drawn me in to a more personable connection, and not the elevator encounter.

Monkey Butler Ninja gives Photography in 100 Words 4 ninja stars out of 5.

I enjoyed listening to her TED video, but have one argument… World of Warcraft. That is the ONLY game she references (that is not one she designed). I understand why she would pick this game, it fits her presentation/argument perfectly. World of Warcraft is an anomaly however. No video game in history has been as successful, nowhere close and it’s been out for five years. 10 million people subscribe to this game… that is around 1 / 700th of the world’s population. You know what that tells me? World of Warcraft is such a rarity, it may be decades before we see this amount of gamers in a single game again. Therefore, I would be cautious about using a group of gamers to solve a pressing issue. I hope the weight of her studies isn’t only in World of Warcraft.

A comparison would be Avatar which has made 734 MILLION dollars domestic (as of Mar 19). This movie touched 60 times more people than WoW… let’s use that as a platform… but wait, ah crap, someone was smoking in the movie. If I asked random people for a movie that literally changed their life, I would get a long list of inspiration. If movies can change individual’s lives, then they can change the world.

Now, because “movies” could do it better than “games” and others, does not mean we should abandon all other sources of human horse power. But I get the feeling after listening to Jane McGonigal talk about solving problems, that is what she is doing, but with the problems. Focusing on solving world hunger is great, trying to figure how to live in a world without oil, fantastic. But maybe, just maybe, we should not abandon all the smaller world issues.

Some reasons gamers play? Well, simple. Kill stuff and build stuff (to be knocked down by someone stronger) oh and escape.

Here are real world fixes that I see games influencing in our near future:
• Amazing surgeons.
• Successful managers.
• Combat where human casualties don’t exist (heck we already do this with UAVs).
• A species that can live without sunlight.

My advice to her, please please please keep pushing. If you could somehow focus the efforts on something smaller perhaps to give the ‘non-gaming’ community (you know, the other 90% of the planet) a result that they can see, your support would grow to mind-blowing numbers.

If you are inspired by her speech (and by the way she is a fantastic presenter) then I would suggest checking out the Folding at Home project [LINK]. They have goals in mind that requires a ton of computer processing power so they decided to create a network where users can ‘donate’ their CPU power during downtime. To apply this to a ‘game’ they created a point system where the leading contributors are rewarded with a ranking ‘score.’

Poor layout of the book shocked me almost as much. Photography is a visual medium, how does a book get published with such poor attention to detail.

Not all is bad and lost in this book. There are some beautiful examples of photographer’s work, nice mathematical breakdowns of complex subjects and a fantastic series of examples for moving lights.

Pros:

Chapter 2 had fantastic examples of different lighting techniques and results they yield.

Early in Chapter 5 the authors describe exposure in mathematical formula that helps simplify the important task! Page 69 in particular is cram-packed with goodness.

The posing chapter is a good read. I found lots of helpful information here, some basic, some complex.

Cons:

The “very brief history” seemed to drag on and on. I’m not a huge history buff but it took a lot to get through these 24 pages (roughly 13% of the entire book).

As early as chapter 2 there are multiple times a sentence gets cut off by the end of the page and does not continue for MULTIPLE pages later! Example: The last sentence on page 34 gets clipped and does not continue until page 40! Six pages! And intensifying this problem was that I wanted to spend time on those six pages.

Some parts mention a method and stop there. No clear instructions/suggestions. Page 72 mentions substituting a gray card for metering exposures, but that’s it. Another example of this con is in the ‘facial analyses’ section. The authors mention how glasses can be a bit tricky but offer no insight to handle the situation.

That all being said, I have to say this book can be skipped. The lack of emotion, distracting layout, and overall ‘manual-feel’ is not enough to overtake the pro’s.

Monkey Butler Ninja gives The Portrait by Glenn Rand and Tim Meyer 2 out of 5 stars.

The layout of this book needs a serious overhaul. Perhaps an additional editor with some layout and design skills.