So alas the second issue further expands what we as a team want to see in WMB 3D. More interaction, more variety, more stories, more more more! All of this gibberish to me means more designing. We jumped from 8 features in the first issue to 15. And instead of featuring primarily beautiful women, the second issue has everything from motorized bicycles to the legendary Marvel Comics co-creator Stan Lee. Just take a glimpse for yourself:

Gabrielle Union graces our second cover of WMB 3D. (2D version displayed)

Beefed up Table of Contents, and a much longer list of team members.

The Legend: Stan Lee. It was an absolute joy to design this feature.

Introduction spread to Gabrielle Union’s feature. Simple, graceful.

Funny guy Chris D’elia hamming it up for the camera. This is a good example of how much more words were added to the second issue.

Nick took his 3D camera to Kenya… yep, Kenya. Yep, 3D camera. You gotta see this.

Even more variety. Dyson fans, Louis Vuitton shoes, Pioneer speakers, to name a few.

And arguably one of the best photoshoots in the existence of photoshoots… this issue’s Fashion feature. Nick Saglimbeni tore the roof off wit this one. The pictures in 2D are stunning, but in 3D?!? It’s unbelievable. Further insight on Nick’s blog HERE

This is just a small taste of what the magazine offers. Once you finally put the 3D glasses on (c’mon, they’re cheap! Maybe $2 at a party store.) and view the magazine in digital or print form, you WILL be taken to a whole new world… Above all we’re a group of artists putting our heart into something we love, and hope the public enjoys as well.

Download WMB 3D Issue #2 from iTunes App Store, Android Market, or 9×12″ Limited Print Issue.

Mo Sabri – The Overnight Classic album cover

For the shoot, we decided on 2 different locations/looks. One would be in an open field with lifestyle photography. And the other would be a more stylized commercial look. With the sun setting, we went to the first location in the hills of Johnson City…. no shortage of grass and trees in Tennessee. Like that rhyme? I could be a hip hop artist too!.. (cough)

Then we headed to “downtown” Johnson City to do some low key night shots. The album title “The Overnight Classic” had already been determined, and I thought a night shot would be most appropriate for the album cover. Here it is without the title added:

His lyrical genius, good beats, and loyal fans skyrocketed him to the top 10 of iTunes World chart on January 1st on release day. Damn good way to start the new year.

The location was the HAX Athletic Club basketball courts south of Los Angeles. Like most shoots with high-profile persons, this one was short. My lovely assistant Lauren and I had roughly 15 minutes of shooting from first shot to last. No worries, I had more than enough images to mess with when I got home.

Despite the short time-frame of the shoot, Derrick was very kind enough to personally come over to me while I was packing up my gear and say a genuine “thank you” and pose for a picture with me. Definitely a moment I’ll never forget. The Chicago Bulls instantly skyrocked to my 2nd favorite team, and DRose easily my favorite NBA player… C’mon I can’t be a bandwagon jumper, go Suns!

For the short-attention spanned people out there, just watch the video below. Yes that’s right, you get to see me walk and talk (in High Definition at that). I bet you didn’t know today was going to be your lucky day.

NOW for the normal-attention spanned people out there, I’ll go in to a little more detail.
First of all it took much more time than I thought to find a good quality/sturdy desk that could roll. Simple to ask, hard to find. After some uninspiring hours of googling, I stumbled upon Anthro, a company out of Portland, Oregon. They have more options than a McDonald’s Big Mac. TONS of desks to choose from, and the one I got is the 60″ Anthrocart. Black, with 5″ caster wheels, and computer siderack.

Introducing the World’s FIRST rig shot from a desk.

It may look like a typical desk, but the quality of Anthro is top notch. You can just “feel” it. No flimsy parts here. Not to mention their customer service is 2nd to none. Ask for Doug Campbell if you give them a call.

My other quest was to find sturdy monitor holders that clamp to the back of the desk. I’m extremely impressed with the arms from Ergotron. Super snazzy, sturdy, and quickly adjustable on the fly to my heart’s content. The big 30″ monitor needed the MX model for the extra weight. For the smaller monitor I got the more compact LX model. Power Rangers eat your heart out.

See that big window in the background? That’s one of the main reasons I wanted the desk to be portable. During the day the sun can really beam down on the desk. No worries, just push it a few feet into the shade. I’d bore you with specifics on the computer. But to skim, it has 12GB DDR3 RAM, i7-920 2.66 GHz Processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 grahics card, SSD internal hard drive, and TONS of bullet proof back-up external hard drive space thanks to drobo. pew pew pew! Steve Demmitt helped me put all the pieces together, can’t forget about that.

And there it is. I’d bore everyone if I went over EVERYTHING associated with my workspace, so leave a comment below if you have any questions… Chances are I’ll be typing my response from this very desk!

I’ll be the first to admit that I hop on google and dedicated creative sites to brainstorm. For example look at what I found after doing a quick search for “creative résumés” www.honkiat.com

Reading résumés can be boooooooooooring, and boooooooooooring résumés (unintentionally) can reflect your personality. I chose to be light-hearted with my approach. Specifically, talking about being the “Grand prize finger painting winner at Sunshine Preschool” in 1986, continuing my timeline to 2021, and inserting a slew of informative fun (somewhat true) graphs.

A few rules I go by when creating a résumé:

1. Keep it under 1 page (more than 1 page makes you seem egotistical)
2. Address each résumé to their respective peers (cover letters are so 1997, and wastes paper)
3. Throw in a few fun facts and/or graphics (a wall full of words isn’t very engaging)

For a final touch, I made two versions: computer friendly and print friendly.
On computer monitors (back lite), less energy is exerted with the color black. And for print, less ink is used on white. You get the idea. Not like I’ll be saving any forests here, but this small step can go a log way into showing attention to detail.

Left: computer version / Right: print version

Who is Cargo (the addressee)? A killer ad agency in Greenville, SC I’ve been working freelance for over 6 months now… See a connection here? I’ll save another blog post for that. But till then check out their website: http://thinkcargo.com

Rahsaan also brought along local cyclist Stella Tong as well to model the women’s outfits. She was like the Asian MacGyver, she had a reflector (reflective car sun shade), flashlight and a bike shop in the back of her Xterra. Also big thanks to Roxie for assisting, Nick Saglimbeni for letting me borrow his AMAZING Canon 85mm 1.2L lens, and my boy Luke Munnell for letting me borrow… everything else! That’s right I didn’t even use my own camera or lights for this shoot.

A few items are available to purchase here.

On a serious note… on the day of the shoot, Rahsaan got word that his first cycling coach that brought him out of trouble, and on to a bike of limitless opportunity, had passed away. The cheetah marks on his uniform are symbolic of his coach nicknaming Rahsaan “little cheetah.” Pedal on big cheetah, you’re an inspiration to myself and many others.

Growing up in my high school and college days, I was HUGE (massive) into cars. So much that I started a car club when I was 15. The legal age for a driver’s license in SC used to be 15 (insurance companies get confused about that). During that time I made a very good friend who is the North American distributor of D2 Racing, which is primarily a performance suspension parts manufacture.

My buddy wanted me to take a few pictures of his new inventory. Being the good friend I am, I gladly obliged… However I’ve never really tried my hand at product photography. I’m NOWHERE near as patient and talented as my friend Jeff Creech, but thankfully the pictures were requested to be a simple white background.

So, I took a quick trip to Micheal’s crafts store, picked up two pieces of big white cardboard (I asked the young cat-crazy cashier if she could put them in a bag… she didn’t think that was funny). Set them up in an “L” shape, flanked the 2 alienbee large softboxes, and was amazed at how easy it was to snap away beautiful solid shots. Now I’m not going to write a book about product photography, I’m just letting you know how simple it was to get the following shots:

As you may imagine, a little bit of photoshop was involved to nuke some of the trailing shadows out. Other than that, the images are practically untouched. Not bad for half a days work!

OK first and foremost, Nick Saglimbeni is the mastermind behind WMB 3D. I was lucky enough to be trusted with designing the layout for the magazine. After hearing his vision, I was on board faster than a cat on a ship full of tuna. My main job was to layout the magazine, however Nick is quite a talented designer as well, for he did the logo, and many of the ads you see in WMB 3D. Now I’m not one to boast about something to make an extra buck. I truly believe what has been done to accomplish WMB 3D is ground breaking. I’ll say it now, Nick has established himself as the best 3D photographer in the world. Correct me if I’m wrong. And if you don’t believe me, view the magazine for yourself (free sample gallery, $5 for full magazine):
iPhone/iPad iOS version
Android version

If you haven’t figured out already, WMB 3D is the world’s first magazine fully rendered in 3D, from the photography to the design. It was originally planned to be a tablet and smart phone (backlit) only magazine, but we also decided to print a limited run of beautiful 9×12″ collector’s magazines as well. We chose to do the red/cyan 3D approach because it is the most accessible across the world, and the least expensive. When technology progresses we will move towards glasses-less 3D.

3D lately has made a comeback and has seen it’s ups and downs since the recent explosion of Avatar (up), and the lackluster-last-minute botched downs of The Last Airbender (down). Seems like everyone was trying to hop on the 3D bandwagon, and in return there are a lot of bad apples to ruin it for the artists that follow through from beginning to end. I will not give away Nick’s secret on what camera he uses and how he processes the images, but I will say it’s certainly not as simple as mounting 2 cameras side-by-side and pressing a button. The attention to detail in WMB 3D is stunning. The ability to see immersive depth, and every minor detail without straining the eyes is mind blowing. Have I used enough flattering adjectives yet?

DESIGN
I’m all about the saying “less is more”. Taking any idea and condensing it into a design that fully describes what needs to be said, in a minimalist way. Too many shapes, colors, fonts and pictures can quickly turn a classy Dwell magazine into a Star magazine. Minimalist was the way to go with WMB 3D, mainly because the images were the #1 stars of the magazine. The bigger and less cluttered I could make the pictures, the better. Because of that, the articles are well written, but again, minimalist so the images aren’t covered by walls of text.

Font is by far the most important design aspect we had to decide, because on most pages they will simply contain an image and a few words. After going through hundreds upon hundreds of fonts, we agreed on the sleek rounded font Quicksand by Andrew Paglinawan. We chose this because 1. the curves match the WMB logo 2. the font family is quite large (7 variations) and 3. it is very user-friendly, modern and easy to read. To add a little spice when needed, we decided to use various fonts for section titles.

Designing with 3D images was new territory for me, but turned out to be more convenient than traditional 2D magazines. Funny thing is, you can literally place text anywhere on the image, and it WILL be able to read when viewing in 3D (unless the font is a very similar color to the background). This is because the font is being placed on the plane closest to your perspective, while the 3D image is “sunk” into the page, so you are actually reading the font as if it is floating above the image… therefore making it easier to read on busy backgrounds. Trust me once you put the glasses you will instantly see what I mean.

RESULTS
Thanks to Nick and the team’s hard work, Kim Kardashian blowing the lid off the premiere, and E! News leaking the details days before the release… the magazine has been a major success on it’s first week. But we could of told you that after documenting people’s reactions on the Las Vegas strip:

I’ll be happy to answer any questions, so feel free to comment. But overall, download this revolutionary magazine, I promise you will be amazed by the amount of detail Nick has gone through to deliver you the ultimate 3D magazine.
iPhone/iPad iOS version
Android version

I never like to shoot alone, so I brought my talented friend/neighbor Ian Curcio who helped GREATLY. For this assignment I braved the direct sunlight, and to overpower the sun I had to have a sophisticated VAL (Voice Activated Lightstand) to circle around the car and combine exposures in Photohsop for the final results you see below.

Mad props Ian, you were a BIG help!!