“Underground: Glimpses of D.C.’s underground rock scene”

The issue: In the 1980s, D.C. bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat, fronted by Ian MacKaye, laid the roots for what would become known as hardcore. This independent, do-it-yourself approach to music would nurture a local scene that for decades was awash with emo, punk and more. In 1987, MacKaye would form Fugazi, a band known as much for its post-hardcore style as for its total contempt for the music industry. That same attitude flavored MacKaye’s Dischord Records, an independent label that specialized in recording local groups.

The local scene has changed considerably since the early days of D.C.’s underground rock heyday. But just as Dischord Records continues to operate on Beecher Street NW, there remain countless bands practicing a DIY ethic in line with D.C.’s seminal underground rock bands. Such groups are largely unknown by the majority of people who live here. Look hard enough, though, and you’ll spot them at clubs like the Velvet Lounge on U Street or at unofficial house venues.

Dickson Mercer, Elliott Wallace, Travis Pratt

Link to Critiqued Tutorial – http://www.jolielee.com/blog/?p=1473

While browsing for a tutorial to critique I found Jolie Lee’s “Tutorial: Create a photo slideshow using JQuery cycle plug-in.” I figured what the hell, I’m a photographer who makes lots of slideshows, why not! Moving through the “Objective” it seemed like a simple clean design I could make good use of in the future. “Skills”…. sure, then came the best part “10-15 minutes to complete.” An auto cycling JQuery slideshow that can be slapped together in fifteen minutes or less? Jolie Lee has been holding out.

I gladly clicked the intrigueing photo that read “Click on screenshot to launch demo.” I must say I hoping to find a caption on this photo. The image reminded me of something one might see on a greeting card in the “encourgement’ section at Hallmark. Anyway, like I said, I launched the demo and found a clean, simple slideshow with intuitive buttons. Seeing the final result of the tutorial made me want jump into the code to see how it was built.

Jolie Lee’s blog post makes this JQuery slideshow a cake walk. Seriously, after spending a solid week building my own tutorial, I realized I should of just paid her to do mine. After checking out the demo, I played the video and followed along to Lee’s well timed and nicely executed step by step intructions.

Moving past the demo and instructional video on Lee’s blog post you’ll find all the elements she used to build out the slideshow. She has included the photos, code, a JQuery library link, the JQuery plugin and what I found the most helpful were the screen grabs that showed you what your progress should look like mid-production. This let me know I wasn’t lost in process and kept me moving through the steps.

In conclusion, this was the most productive fifteen minutes I’ve spent in front of my computer all week. I highly reccommend this tutorial to any one who spends time pushing pixels. I’m looking forward to using this in future!

Pimp Your Soundslide from Travis Pratt on Vimeo.

This tutorial will show you an easy way to customize an HTML5 Soundslides shell. This knowledge is helpful for a couple of reasons; first, it allows you to control the look and feel of your Soundslides presentation, while giving you the ability to customize and brand your Soundslides player page. Previously you could have Soundslides.com convert your Soundslides project into a video using their generator. The generator caused undesirable video compression resulting in pixelated images and choppy transitions. Using Soundslides’ new “html5_compatible” shell you can maintain smooth transitions and gain Ipad and Iphone functionality.

The following tutorial is for users who have a working knowledge of Soundslides, basic Photoshop skills and a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and CSS. If you don’t have these skills you can follow the links to find the software and some quick training.

Soundslides is a Flash-based software that allows you to combine still images and audio to create a quick multimedia presentation. The software was designed by Joe Weiss in 2005 and has become an industry standard for creating quick presentations. I would like to emphasize the word “quick,” because the software is billed as “Ridiculously simple storytelling,” and is not the type of software you want to use for creating an over the top presentation. It is useful “slap it together” software for recording some audio, and assembling shoot photos while on deadline.

You can download a free trial and find out all you need to know at www.support.soundslides.com. If you can’t find an answer on the support site, post your question in the forums and Mr. Weiss will get back to you, sometimes on the same day. If by chance you think of something useful that should be included in Soundslides, he’ll probably build it. That’s the kind of guy he is and that’s how Soundslides became what it is today. However, If you’re looking for finite control over your presentation you may want to look at Apple’s Final Cut Pro, or Adobe’s Flash software.

Adobe Photoshop is where we’ll create the graphics we will use in our Soundslides project. You can download a free trial at www.adobe.com/photoshop or use another graphics editor to do the job. Another Adobe software we will be using today is Dreamweaver. We will you use Dreamweaver to edit some of the code used in the Soundslides presentation. You can also download a free trial at www.adobe.com/dreamweaver or use another code editor of your choice. If you want to learn more about these Adobe software checkout Lynda.com’s training library, they have lots of useful tutorials.

In order to speed things up while getting started in Photoshop I created the graphics used in this tutorial in advance. I created a header that brands my Soundslides and a background image that will dress things up a bit. The header graphic I created is 620px x 60px, this is good starting point for creating a custom header. You can determine your own specific size to suit your design. The background I created is 2560px x 1440px. I chose this size because it’s probably the largest resolution used by an average user. It’s important to save your header as header.gif because we will use this specific file name later in our code. For the background we will use Photoshop’s “Save to Web” feature which will reduce the file size of our background image. This will help the file load faster for the user.

- Go to File/Save for Web/
- Click on 4-up
- Make adjustments to reduce the file size of the image
- Save the image as background.gif

Once you have saved your image as a .gif go ahead and close Photoshop.

When you open Soundslides the program will prompt you to create a new project. This project will hold the files used build to build the presentation, including a folder of .jpegs and a .mp3. Once you’re inside of the software find the “Templates” tab in the upper right hand corner. Under the “Templates” tab you will edit the interface and tweak the final look of your presentation. This is also where you will the find “Shells” tab. In this tutorial we want to focus on the new “html5_compatible” shell. So what is the “html5_compatible” shell.

“This shell is the same as the default Soundslide player, except it uses a standards-friendly W3C-valid method to embed Flash content, SWFObject 2.1. It also uses an HTML5 version as the fallback when displayed on an Apple iPad or iPhone.”

Knowing this “Shell” is so powerful let’s take a look under the hood of Soundslides and see what is housed in the “Soundslides” folder with the “Applications” folder residing on your computers hard drive. Opening the “Shells” folder we can find the same shells that we are able to load in the Soundslides program. If you open the“html5_compatible” folder you will find all the files that make this particular Soundslides shell so useful. In this folder you will find the Flash, Javascript, HTML, CSS and JQuery files used to make the presentation work.

Before you start editing these files, back out of the “html5_compatible” folder and make a duplicate of the shell. This will allow you to work on a copy of the shell, just in case yous accidentally crew something up, you will maintain the original.
Simply copy and paste this folder inside of the “Shells” folder and you will now have a folder called “html5_compatible copy.” In order to prevent confusion between the two folders, Rename this folder as “html5_pimped.” Now you have a copy of this shell and are ready to get started with the customization.

1. Open a new Finder window and copy and paste the graphics files, we created earlier in Photoshop, into the “_files” folder that is located within your “html5_pimped” shell.

2. Drag and drop the “index.html” file on the Dreamweaver icon, this will allow us to edit the HTML and do some CSS styling.

3. Within the “index.html” file replace the “background color” CSS, at line 9, with the following code:

	body{
				margin:0;
				background-image:url('_files/background.gif');
			}

4. Add the following code at line at 116, just below the div id=”slideshow” tag

       <div id="top"><img src="_files/header.gif"></div>

(You have now inserted our header file and our background file.)

5. Finally, add the following CSS between your style tags at the top of the page, where you previously inserted your background image. This code will add style to your new header and space out the Soundslide player.

					#top {
		background: #FFF;
		padding: 50px;
		height: 50px;
		border-bottom:solid 5px #000;
	}
			body{
				margin:0;
				background-image:url('_files/background.gif');
			}
			
			#slideshow {
				margin-top:100px;
	}

6. Save your styled “index.html” document and close Dreamweaver.

7. Open Soundslides and return to the “Templates” tab and click on “Shells” just below. We will now select our newly created “html5_pimped” shell. This is also a good time to select our “Display” settings. I’ve selected the following:

8. Now save, test and export our Soundslides project. Once you export the “publish_to_web” folder will appear. This is the folder that you will upload to your server. The folder is located in your original project file that you created when you began. I generally copy and pase the contents of the “publish_to_web” folder into a new folder on my desktop and give it a more specific browser friendly name.

Once you’ve uploaded and tested the flash version on your computer, check to see if the HTML5 works on an Ipone or an Ipad. If you prefer to embed your Soundslide into a blog post you can use the following URL to grab the embed code for the project.

www.yourwebsite.com/publish_to_web/index.html?embedcode

Long gone are the days of removing a cartridge from the Atari or Nintendo 8-bit to blow out the dust or wedge a stick into the machine to make it work. So are the days of coming home late from work and finding your roommates sprawled out on the couch, still awake, taking bong hits and screaming at Madden NFL on a Sony Play Station 2. And until recently, it had been too long since my wife and I stayed up late chugging cheap champagne and playing Super Mario Bros, Wii.

I purchased the game as a gift for my wife. Just like little kids we ripped off the shrink wrap packaging and galloped down the basement steps to fire up the Wii. At first, we spent many nights trying to conquer the game. Since then, Mario Bros. has worked us into a frenzy on many occasions. A copious amount of high-fives have flown. Swear words have probably made neighbors shut windows, and cover their children’s ears. Arguments have developed and teamwork has overcome but I must say until now I haven’t thought about the story involved in the game. As a class assignment I’m to figure out the plot of Super Mario Bros.? Just save the damned Princess, right?

From www.mariobroswii.com, Some uninvited guests have crashed Princess Peach’s birthday! Will the heroes of the Mushroom Kingdom be able to rescue the princess from her captors

I have to say after playing the game I’m not left thinking about the storyline or the plot in anyway. I’m mostly thinking about strategy. The strategy thus far, for me, is to re-play easier levels of the game in order to stock pile extra lives. This stock pile comes in handy when trying to beat the final levels of the game. Another strategy is to not run out of lives at the same time as your partner, Mario, in my case because someone likes to be in charge of the first controller, and I’m not mentioning any names. However, I don’t see anyway possible of completing this video game as a single player. Hence Super Mario Bros. not Super Mario.

My wife thinks playing the game is a good source of marriage counseling. In the end, she’s probably right because teamwork is what ultimately makes or breaks your success throughout the game. Just like the original game – in the end, Mario and the princess live happily ever after, or is it actually Luigi and the princess? For now we’re not sure, we haven’t finished the game, but the story is just the same as it was in 1985, when the original was introduced. What’s different is the Wii’s physical interactivity, the ability to physically manipulate the controller in addition to using the control pad and buttons. This interactivity adds excitement to the game and of course better graphics don’t hurt. Another welcome addition to the WII Super Mario Bros. is the new “Power-Ups.” The propeller mushroom and penguin suits, along with a couple others, that bring new life to the game. These “Power-Ups” gives the player more tools to complete the often difficult levels that would be impossible with out strapping a propeller helmet to your fat cartoon head.

For the Webstudio 2 “visit a museum” assignment I visited the Newseum in Washington, DC. The museum touts being the most interactive in DC. In addition to being the most interactive it’s the most overwhelming. Boasting fourteen galleries and fifteen theaters it’s hard to consume in a single visit. So, for the assignment, I decided to focus on the Pulitzer Prize Photographs Gallery.

Take a step inside and it’s more than just a gallery, the exhibit displays big, bold images that encompass a glass encased theater. A movie of interviews with the prize winning photographers loops as you sit and take in some of the most powerful and historic images of the last seventy years.

Dig deeper into the exhibit and you will find individual booths with touch screens. At these stations users can explore the pulitzer prize winning portfolios. The portfolios show individual photos and caption information in addition to audio excerpts that explain the circumstances under which the images were made and in some cases the impact that they had at the time of publication. The stations are self-guided hubs, and could serve as history lesson to students of photojournalism and beyond.

The Newseum’s Pulitzer Prize Photographs Gallery is the definition of multimedia. The gallery combines the power of the still image with contextual audio, video and interactive elements. This is an exhibit I’ve wanted to see for some time and it didn’t disappoint, my only regret is not having more time to experience it.

If your looking for sentiment in an 9/11 multimedia package don’t go to Al Jazeera’s The 9/11 Decade. Al Jazeera went to great lengths to give voice to a variety of people affected by the Sept. 11 attacks. Ranging from a nearly thirty-minute video interview with former US Secretary of State Colin Powell to a group discussion with students from Islamabad’s College of Arts and Science. Al Jazeera’s The 9/11 Decade is not short on perspectives.

The website’s 9/11 package begins with a wrap up of the Sept. 11 memorial services held at Ground Zero, the Pentagon and the crash site in Shanksville, Pa. The web page is divided into sections including background, opinion, features and multiple sections for users to “join the conversation.”

The anchor of the package is three hourlong documentaries. The first, The Image War, a look at both, Al Qaeda’s and the US’ ability to capture hearts and minds using media to their advantage or at times disadvantage. The second, The Intelligence War, which examines the presidential finding that gave the Central Intelligence Agency full discretion to capture and kill terrorists worldwide. Lastly, The Clash of Civilizations

The 9/11 Decade package can be found under the “In Depth” tab on Al Jazeera’s main web page. However, “In Depth” is an understatement, one could spend hours if not days (I did,) reading stories, watching videos and looking at the interactive elements.

Punch. Breathe. Punch, punch. Breathe.

“There ya go, that’s it. A little bit higher with that right hand,” trainer Jason Minnick says..

Punch. Breath. Punch, punch. Breathe.

Light heavyweight boxer Larry Pryor, 29, takes swings at Minnick’s mitts. The interval timer sounds. Pryor breaks for a few and puts on head gear and gloves for an end-of-the-day sparring with a younger, less experienced boxer.

Fighting is Larry Pryor’s job.

The Frederick, Md., native recently returned from Houston, Texas, where he has spent most of his professional boxing career.  He’s busy training for an upcoming match at the Patriot Center, in Fairfax, Va., on March 12, against Mark “TNT” Tucker of Eldersburg, Md.  The 15-0 Tucker currently holds the United States Boxing Organization’s title.

Red walls, black mats, and the sound of chains rattling as boxers pound bags with their gloved fists. Rage Against the Machine riffs keep time with the sound of intermittent grunts and trainers yelling.

Pryor’s family life has been no easy bout. He currently lives with his mother in Walkersville, Md. His nine year-old daughter lives with her mom in Frederick, Md., and his two sons live with his ex-wife in Durham, N.C.

Pryor has been boxing since he was eight, and has always had a passion for fighting, though coming out of high school Pryor had a scholarship to play basketball at Temple University. Back then, Pryor thought basketball was going to be his profession until his daughter came along, but he gave up his scholarship money to take care of his child.

At the Sport and Health Club Pryor works out with meatheads and moms alike. His work out actually seems pretty tame: forty-five minutes on the treadmill, a couple hundred crunches. Then Minnick shows up.

Light heavyweight boxer Larry Pryor talks about being a prize fighter and his upcoming fight against Mark Tucker.
Larry Pryor

2/12/11
Digital Storytelling
Prof. Pohl
Written Story about a controversial photograph.
Photograph: Kevin Carter’s 1994 Pulitzer
By:Travis S. Pratt

Six days after photojournalist Kevin Carter won a Pulitzer Prize his friend Ken Oosterbroek was shot and killed while covering what would soon be the end of apartheid in South Africa. Beside him were Joao Silva and Greg Marinovich, who was also shot and injured. As Carter’s colleagues were photographing the unrest in the Thokoza township, he was absent due to an interview about his recently announced Pulitzer.

Carter, Marinovich, Oosterbroek and Silva were unofficially known as The Bang Bang Club. The club was comprised of four photojournalists known to do the impossible: gain access where no one else could and make pictures of the atrocities occurring in the townships around Johannesburg.

In May of 1993 Nancy Buirski was working as the foreign picture editor at the New York Times. At 11 a.m. one morning she was still looking for art to illustrate a story about Sudan scheduled to run in the next day’s paper. She phoned Marinovich in South Africa. Marinovich referred her to colleague Kevin Carter who had just returned from Sudan. Carter informed her he planned to send his photos to his agent. Buirski convinced Carter to send her some pictures via the Associated Press in Johannesburg.

“When the picture did arrive, my hands just shook. It came over the machine and it came out of my hands and I thought… Oh my god this is incredible,” Buirski said. She took the photograph to photo editor Nancy Lee, who was preparing to attend the daily page one meeting. The two agreed it was a page one photo. After the meeting, Buirski learned that The New York Times decided to play the photo on page three with the Foreign Report. “They didn’t have the documentation to support the power of the picture. The New York Times is very careful about that. They don’t want to be inflammatory,” Biurski said.

“We got many calls the next morning about whether or not the photographer had helped the child,” said Buirski. The response spurred The New York Times to issue a somewhat rare editors note about the photograph.

Editor’s Note
A picture last Friday with an article about Sudan showed a little Sudanese girl who had collapsed from hunger on the trail to a feeding center in Ayod. A vulture lurked behind her.

Many readers have asked about the fate of the girl. The photographer reports that she recovered enough to resume her trek after the vulture was chased away. It is not known whether she reached the center.

Documentary filmmaker Dan Krauss, the director of The Death of Kevin Carter, released in 2004, says this is perhaps the classic journalist dilemma. “Whether to intervene or document, what is my role as a journalist, what is my role as a human being,” Krauss said. Krauss hopes his film has made a dent in raising awareness that journalists make these tough decisions. Even though Carter’s intentions appeared to be good he didn’t take the public’s criticism lightly. “It is a photograph of a vulture praying on suffering and Kevin saw himself in that same role, that he was praying on suffering,” Krauss said. “I don’t think enough people are apathetic with the experience of journalists. In fact it’s usually the opposite, most people are angry, or vitriolic, or completely unsympathetic with journalists and the decisions that journalists make.”

“It may be difficult for people to understand, but as a photojournalist my first instinct was to make the photograph. As soon as that job was done and the child moved on… I felt completely devastated. I think I tried to pray…I tried to talk to god, to assure him If he got me out of this place… I would always… I would change my life…”

Kevin Carter, NHK Television Interview, 1994.

Carter blamed himself for not taking the bullet that killed Oosterbroek and the public’s scrutiny weighed heavy on his mind. Apartheid had ended and Nelson Mandela had been elected, Carter was left feeling purposeless. Carter committed suicide just four months after receiving the Pulitzer. “It’s gonna take a lot of Kevin Carters coming out of the wood work and making their presence felt to really affect society at large,” Krauss said.

Mike and Liz Doody, owners and operators of Dool-Leigh Farm in Union Bridge, Md., were recently honored as Maryland Holstein Dairymen for 2011 by the Maryland Holstein Association. The Doody’s milk approximately eighty head of cattle twice daily. The farm day begins at 3 a.m. with feeding and various preparations leading up to the first milking at 5 a.m., the second milking follows 12 hours later.