University of Notre Dame Photographer and all-around National Treasure Matt Cashore (just back from shooting the Super Bowl) checks in via email with the following commentary on the White Balance post below:

Ya know, Nikon’s Auto White Balace is probably the best out there.  Not perfect–nothing is–but it’s gonna be right about 90% of the time.  Only stuff like compact fluorescent light bulbs or the McKenna Hall auditorium will be outside it’s ability to produce good results.  There should be a white balance setting of ‘A’ somewhere on your menus.  It will keep you from making Nunemaker look like a smurf.  I trust it–I shot the Super Bowl on ‘A’.  Didn’t help me get Santonio Holmes in focus, but he WAS correctly color-balanced…

I’m a new owner of a dSLR and I’m still figuring things out. For any other relative noobs who might run across this post, I wanted to illustrate the importance of the proper White Balance setting, which compensates for the variation that results from different light sources.

The images of John “Ruby Ninja” Nunemaker below were taken seconds apart. All of the settings are the same except for the White Balance setting:

The above image was set to the “incandescent.” As you can see it results in a blue cast over the whole image. I had run into the same issue a few days earlier and a friend had pointed out that my White Balance settings were the culprit. I changed the setting from “incandescent” to “direct sunshine” and took the following picture with dramatic improvement:

White balance is really easy to set (on my Nikon d40 at least). Press the info (”i”) button on the lower left of the back of the camera body twice. Scroll over to the “WB” setting and adjust as needed. There are built in settings for Incandescent, Florescent, Flash, Direct Sunlight, Cloudy, and Shade (and a Presets setting that looked too intimidating to bother with). Each setting comes with a handy preview image that allows you to gauge the kind of light you will be shooting in. 

Probably because this is so easy to set, it’s also really easy to forget when you move into different lighting conditions and start shooting otherwise well metered images. Remember to check this setting if the first couple of pics come out looking wrong.

-oAk-

I’ve posted a set of hi-res urban surface textures on Flickr. Please feel free to download them and use as you see fit. Previews below Free High-Res Distressed Urban Surfaces texture set on Flickr.

-oAk-

“You’re designers. Things will bother you that no one else will ever notice.”-Michael Beirut from a talk given at Notre Dame, October 21, 2005

Like all graphic designers who dream of a future in web user interface, I nurse a slightly obsessive fascination with economics.

(I’ll let the surreality of that sentence sink in…

…

okay).

Partially this is because I think economics explains how the world works, and partially this is because I’m convinced that information provided to people who are investing money (the Economist, Bloomberg, the FT, the parts of the Wall Street Journal that appear before and after the opinion page, etc.) represents the best, most accurate news you can get anywhere, but i digress…

Basically…when I need me some televised news, I spin past CNN on my way to Bloomberg TV so fast it would make your l’il head spin. I love Bloomberg for a number of reasons, not the least of which is Deirdre Bolton, but I certainly do not watch Bloomberg for their smoking hot onscreen graphics.

Bloomberg’s Interactive Display

Good lord, I don’t know if I have the strength…

For the record…the circular planning-an-attack-on-the-Death-Star thing mounted on the unadjusted RGB blue background is a pie chart that shows the sector breakdown of the S&P 500. And they use it All. The. Time.

Regardless of what it represents, it’s patently evident that this graphic would look out of place in a middle management Powerpoint. It’s sticks out like a small womp-rat among the generally high production value elsewhere in the Bloomberg media conglomerate. 

I’ll come back to the Star Wars reference for a moment to point out that meanwhile, CNN has apparently figured out the “Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi” holographic conversation thing. 

Like I said, I love Bloomberg. I wish they cared enough about design to realize that the content they provide deserves to be presented better.

InDesign makes page numbering easy with it’s “Current Page Number” character (From the “Type” menu select Type>Insert Special Characters>Markers>Current Page Number), but it automatically sets itself based on the document page number. What if you have a cover and an inside front cover page to start your document and you want to make the document page 3 to read as page 1?

Numbering and Section Options in InDesign

In the Pages Panel (Window>Pages if it’s not open), you’ll see a thumbnail preview of the pages in your document. Notice that page 1 has a black down-pointing arrow above it…

the Pages Panel

…this arrow indicates the beginning of a Section. All InDesign documents are broken down into at least one section. Unless you indicate otherwise, the entire document will be considered one section with the first document page representing page 1. This is why the section indicator arrow sits over the first page.

In order to change the page numbering, you need to create a new Section of the document. To do this, first select the page that you want to be your new page 1, then go to the options menu in the upper right corner of the Pages Panel and select “Numbering and Section Options.” The following dialogue box will appear:

Click the radio button in front of “Start Page Numbering at…” and set the field to whatever number you want (probably “1″).

Section Prefix

The Section Prefix is added to each page number for identification purposes. The best example I can think of is for printing. Say you want to print from the cover to the 4th page of your new section. You would specify the range as “1-Sec1:4.”

“Sec1:” is the default prefix, but you can change it to something less cumbersome.

Style

If you want preface indicators (”i, ii, iii”) or roman numerals, you would indicate that with this setting.

Once you’ve determined your settings click “okay.”

There will be a new, second black down arrow over your active page in the Pages Panel and the numbering below the pages should also have changed to reflect your new page numbering settings (it’s probably a one).

Now, all “Current Page Number” markers that you insert into the document will reset themselves to reflect the pagination of the Section.

A Couple of Things to Remember

As I mentioned above, your section prefix will now be added to every page number in the new section. Although it doesn’t appear as such in the Pages Panel, it will be reflected in the current page number indicator in the lower left corner of the document editing window. If you need to print, remember that you have to include this prefix in order to correctly indicate a page number in the new section.

Also, (and I’ve run into this a lot) note that the page number of the last page in your document as it appears in the Page Panel will no longer be the same as the page count of the document. The correct page count is in the lower left corner of the Pages Panel. In the above illustrations it’s the area that says “8 pages in 5 spreads.”