Stallion Spotlight offers stud farm representatives a chance to address breeders and answer questions as they finalize their mating decisions for the 2020 breeding season. In this edition, Claiborne Farm president Walker Hancock and stallion seasons and bloodstock manager Bernie Sams discuss First Samurai, the sire of Grade 1 winners Lea, Justin Phillip, and Executiveprivilege. First […]

The post Stallion Spotlight: Claiborne Farm’s Walker Hancock And Bernie Sams On First Samurai appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

We’ve been making lenses for thousands of years, but someone just now discovered the formula to let you make lenses that have zero (ZERO!) spherical aberration. Will this be the miracle cure to make super lenses for cheap? [sc:podlovebutton] Links: The Formula: Spherical Aberration Solved SPONSOR: MasterClass. Get $30 off the All-Access-Pass by visiting masterclass.com/topfloor … Continue reading "877 Smaller Cheaper Sharper Lighter"

The post 877 Smaller Cheaper Sharper Lighter appeared first on PHOTOGRAPHY TIPS FROM THE TOP FLOOR.

New kitchen in St. Louis Park home remakes space for optimal workflow, organization and natural light.

The Baltimore County executive was on with C4.

Police Commissioner Michael Harrison spoke Thursday to C4.

TVG, America's horse racing network, will partner with NBC Sports to bring live horse racing into the homes of fans across the country for the seventh consecutive weekend with twelve hours of coverage scheduled from Friday, May 8th through Sunday, May 10th from 4:00 p.m. ET to 8:00 p.m. ET each day. The coverage will […]

The post Preakness Winner War Of Will Highlights TVG’s Weekend Coverage appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

The National Park Service (NPS) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will hold a meeting on Tuesday, July 28 to update an advisory panel on the agencies’ efforts to restore natural quiet in Grand Canyon National Park. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/national-park-service-and-federal-aviation-administration-to-hold-meeting-on-grand-canyon-overflights.htm

Afternoon thunderstorms brought abundant lightning to Grand Canyon National Park this week; and fire managers have identified six new fires, all on the North Rim of the park. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/news-2009-07-31_fires.htm

A free event to celebrate National Parks in Arizona and other public lands will take place on the University of Arizona campus in Centennial Hall and on the nearby grounds on Saturday, August 29, 2009. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/free-outdoor-family-expo-to-highlight-national-parks-in-arizona.htm

A thunderstorm passed over Northern Arizona late last week resulting in three lightning caused fires on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/14jun10_news3.htm

https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/4oct10-news.htm

https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/2011-08-04_lightning.htm

At approximately 1:00 p.m. on Monday, July 15 a lightning strike near Mather Point resulted in several visitors reporting injuries to the Grand Canyon Visitors Center. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/lightning-causes-minor-injuries-at-grand-canyon-national-park.htm

Grand Canyon National Park invites bird enthusiasts of all levels to participate in a weekend of birding fun and excitement including a LIVE radio broadcast with Talkin’ Birds Radio. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/grand-canyon-bird-festival.htm

Fire crews are actively working to suppress the lightning ignited Imperial Fire. Currently the fire is estimated to be three (3) acres in size and is located along the Cape Royal Road near Vista Encantada. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/imperial-fire-being-suppressed-on-north-rim-of-grand-canyon-national-park-20180718.htm

Travellers should consider taking legal action to get money back

A CSS take on the javascript LightBox using hover over thumbnail images

A click version of the Light Box for all browsers except Safari and Chrome

Using the latest techniques to update the previous lightbox demos.

Using :before/:after and content: together with the general sibling selector to produce a CSS only lightbox with minimal code.

Using CSS3 Keyframes to produce an animated 'lightbox' type gallery, for Safari, Chrome and the New Firefox 5.

Using only CSS to animate a 'LightBox' style droplist menu.

Re-coding and styling the 'oneBox' to make use of the html5 support for tabindex and :focus on any element.

A CSS only lightbox with PREVIOUS/NEXT/CLOSE buttons and captions with links.

Using my latest techniques to produce a Lightbox type gallery.

Crews and officers from Surrey Fire and Rescue Service and Surrey Police were in attendance

Lidl was given permission at Wednesday's meeting of the planning committee to open a new supermarket in the Co-op Store on Parsons Drive in Ryton

International Consolidated Airlines Group owns British Airways, Aer Lingus, Iberia, Vueling and LEVEL

What companies such as Ryanair, easyJet, Jet2, TUI, Virgin, British Airways and Emirates are telling their customers during the coronavirus crisis

Kalydeco is the first medicine in Europe to treat the underlying cause of the disease

ENTERCOM Country WNSH (NEW YORK's COUNTRY 94.7)/NEW YORK added sound bites from listeners to THOMAS RHETT's track, "Be A Light" (featuring Reba McEntire Hillary Scott, Chris … more

Here's a video segment on the Hensel Porty ringlight kit that we use. A transcription of the video is available after the jump.

Desmond Eastwood told us he first planned a career in law

Are you a logical individual? Do you carefully consider all options before making a decision? Are opinions shaped primarily through facts and reasoning? If you answered yes to these questions, you’d be wrong. We are all emotional beings, and our emotions are the root cause of our thoughts and behaviors. Our logical, conscious thoughts simply […]

The post Fight or Flight: Which Emotion Does Your Website Evoke? appeared first on Psychology of Web Design | 3.7 Blog.

Benjamin Stuben Farrar of Iowa City is a storyteller without a story to tell at the moment. The first story is as dramatic and layered as his bold scenic and lighting designs for area stages:...

The post Twilighters.org appeared first on WPCult.

For those looking for a way to optimize your search results on your WordPress blog. You may want to check out the following plugin. Goolge Highlight It will highlight or colorize the background of any letter or word that you search for. Head over to the site to see it, or do a search on […]

The post Google Highlight appeared first on WPCult.

Benjamin Stuben Farrar of Iowa City is a storyteller without a story to tell at the moment.

The first story is as dramatic and layered as his bold scenic and lighting designs for area stages: “Benjamin Stuben Farrar” is not his actual name.

He was born Stewart Benjamin Farrar 41 years ago in Kentucky. He didn’t want to go through life as “Stewie,” so he went by “Benjamin,” until he got to college at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He ran into so many other Bens, that his buddies decided to combine his names into “Stuben.”

That name followed him to grad school at the University of Iowa in 2002, where he earned an MFA in theater design. But when he moved to New York City in 2006 to pursue his career, he didn’t like hearing “Stuben” shouted across the theater.

“It sounded too much like ‘stupid,’ ” he said, “so I reverted back to Benjamin.”

But nicknames have a way of sticking. When he and his wife moved back to Iowa City in 2015 to raise their daughter, he switched to “Stuben” again, since that’s how people knew him there.

Professionally, he uses “S. Benjamin Farrar” and on Facebook, he goes by “Benjamin Stuben Farrar” so friends from his various circles can find him. Even though most people now call him “Stuben,” he still introduces himself as “Benjamin.”

“To this day, I have 12 different names,” he said with a laugh. “Only the bill collectors know me as ‘Stewart.’”

Like his name, his artistry knows no bounds.

He has planted apple trees on Riverside Theatre’s indoor stage in Iowa City; a child’s outdoor playground on the Theatre Cedar Rapids stage; and dramatic spaces for Noche Flamenca’s dancers in New York City venues and on tour.

These days, however, his theatrical world has gone dark.

His recent designs for “The Humans,” “The Skin of Our Teeth” and “Kinky Boots” at Theatre Cedar Rapids and “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Riverside Theatre have been canceled or postponed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. He has “The Winter’s Tale” in the works for Riverside Theatre’s free Shakespeare in the Park slated for June, but time will tell if that changes, too.

“Within the course of two weeks, five productions were canceled or moved indefinitely,” he said.

Looking ahead, he’s not sure what shows he’ll have time to design for the upcoming seasons. He’s used to juggling three or four productions at a time, but he said that could become really difficult if the shows fall on top of each other at the various venues.

As with so many artists right now, his world keeps changing.

He and his wife, Jody Caldwell, an editor and graduate of the UI Writers’ Workshop, are both freelancers, leaving them with no income during this pandemic. So Farrar has been wading through red tape and delays to secure unemployment compensation and the government stimulus check, for which he’s still waiting. One bright spot was receiving a $1,000 Iowa Arts & Culture Emergency Relief Fund grant given to 156 Iowa creatives who have lost income from canceled projects.

With his regular revenue streams drying up, he’s been considering other ways to earn money through teaching theater or creating and selling more of his digital and film photography — an outgrowth of his fascination for the way lighting can sculpt a scene on stage.

“I love doing nature (photography). I love doing details,” he said. “I love photographing people, too, especially on stage — I love photographing my own shows. It’s just a lot of fun.

“For me, nature’s so interesting, especially living where we do in North America, there’s vast changes from one time of year to another. I just love looking at that on a very small scale, and how light happens to fall on that particular surface — how that surface changes color,” he said.

“Right now the redbuds are out. The magnolias came out two weeks ago and then they started to fall. It changes the landscape dramatically, especially based on whether it’s a morning light or afternoon light or evening light, whether it’s cloudy, whether the sun’s peeking through clouds and highlighting a few individual leaves. I find that super fascinating.

“That’s how I can look at the same boring tree at different times of year, at different times of day, and find something interesting to photograph.”

While his scenic designs create an immediate visual impact and help tell the story swirling around the actors, Farrar was a lighting designer before he became a scenic designer.

It wasn’t love at first sight. He took a light design course in college, but didn’t “get” it.

“It’s really difficult to wrap your head around it,” he said.

His aha moment came when he was running lights for an operetta in college.

“I just had these little faders in front of me so I could raise certain lights up and down. And the music was happening in front of me and I thought, ‘I control this whole little universe. I can make things completely disappear. I can sculpt things from the side, I can make things feel totally different — just like music can — just based on how it’s lit.’ And then I finally started to understand how the lighting hooked things together,” he said.

From there, his interest in lighting soared.

“I absolutely love lighting,” he said. “I think it’s probably given me more joy than anything else, just because I can go for a walk someplace and just the way the lighting changes as the clouds come in or out, or as the time of year changes and the angle of the sun changes, I really enjoy seeing that — and that’s what got me into photography.”

While his design work is a collaborative process with the director and other production team members, the ideas begin flowing as soon as he starts reading a script. With the flamenco dance company in New York, he might start working on a show two years in advance. With Theatre Cedar Rapids, the lead time is generally six months to look at the season overall, and four months to “get things going” on a particular show, he said. The lead time is about two months for Riverside Theatre shows, which have shorter rehearsal periods.

He begins thinking about the theater spaces, the text that the audience never sees, the show’s technical demands, and the scale in relation to the human body. He still likes to do some of his design work by hand, but computers and the 3D printer he has in his basement workshop have made the process much quicker for creating the drawings and scale models for each show.

He also enjoys the variety and challenge of moving between the small space inside Riverside Theatre and the large space inside Theatre Cedar Rapids, as well as the theaters at Grinnell College and Cornell College in Mount Vernon, as well as the theaters in New York and the touring venues that have housed his designs.

Ultimately, the goal of scenic design “is always about the storytelling,” he said.

“There’s a version of a show that exists in a script, if there is a script. Assuming it has a script, there is a scaffolding for that show in the script, and then there’s a version of the show in the director’s head, and then there’s a version of the show that’s performed in my head as I read the script. So there’s all these different versions.”

If the show is a musical, the choreographer brings in another idea, and the musical score adds another element. Sometimes Farrar knows the music very well, but other times, he doesn’t.

“Hopefully, I can integrate that well if I listen to the music while working on the show — not usually when I’m reading the script, but while I’m drafting the show. I’ll listen to the music to get a sense of how the show wants to move.

“Integrating all these different versions of the show — the text, what’s in my head, what’s in the director’s head, what’s in the choreographer’s head, the role the music plays — and then you synthesize all those elements, and then you find out how the show wants to move in the space it has. And how a show moves is one of the most important things to me. ...

“You get a sense that the show becomes this conscious element that wants a certain thing, and will reveal those things over time.”

And time is something he has right now.

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com

CEDAR RAPIDS — Like other members of the United States House, the “new normal” for Rep. Dave Loebsack involves a lot of time on the phone and in video conferences.

Although the Senate returned to Washington this past week, the House may not return to the Capitol until mid-May. As representatives work from their districts, many face the same challenges as their constituents who are working from home via various phone and video meeting platforms.

“They’re clunky, difficult, frustrating at times,” the 2nd District Democrat said after a 90-minute Energy and Commerce Committee teleconference meeting, “but we can get a lot of things done that way without necessarily going into Washington. It’s not the same by any means ... but I think we can get a lot of our work done that we have to get done even though were not there.”

If there’s an upside to the telecommuting downside, it’s that the poor connections, dropped calls and sometimes spotty internet signals highlight an issue Loebsack has been working on — Congress and the country need better broadband connectivity. A member of the Communications and Technology subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over telecommunications issues, Loebsack also serves as a co-chair of the Rural Broadband Caucus.

In one meeting, Loebsack said, a fellow committee member was unable to ask questions because the Wi-Fi signal at his home outside of a southwestern city was so poor.

“So I think we’re going to make some progress” convincing congressional colleagues of the need to connect all Americans to reliable and affordable broadband internet, Loebsack said.

“In times like these, when families are at home, millions of K-12 students do not have access to the high-speed internet needed to take classes and complete their assignments online,” he said in an announcement with House Majority Whip James Clyburn and others of a House Democratic plan to connect all Americans to high-speed internet.

When the transmission of COVID-19 slows, the need for high-speed internet connectivity will remain as well as the need for Congress to provide incentives for internet service providers to close the “broadband gap” by extending service to the las mile in rural areas and eliminate what he called “internet deserts” that exist in cities.

The plan calls for an investment of $80 billion over five years for internet infrastructure and another $5 billion over five years for low-interest financing of projects.

With more reliable connectivity, Congress could consider remote voting at times like this when members don’t want to gather in Washington. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been cool to the idea, but Loebsack thinks members are “more open” to voting remotely.

“But we have to make sure that it’s completely secure, that the system can’t get hacked, and that votes are recorded properly,” he said.

Remote voting may be a may be a generational issue, “but I think this is doable.”

“I’m not making that prediction, but I would not be shocked if we move in that direction, especially the longer this (isolation) goes on,” Loebsack said.

Comments: (319) 398-8375; james.lynch@thegazette.com

BIG NEWS: My custom Lightroom presets are now available and 50% off for a limited time with discount code HOLIDAY50. Link in profile!

This collection includes two styles (Everyday and Clean) that I use to edit every shot on this feed. I can’t wait to see what you all do with them! Stay tuned to my upcoming tutorials on how to put the presets to good use. ???? (at Toronto, Ontario)

Lights, camera, action. ????
—
A few more days left to get 50% off my custom Lightroom presets! Link in profile. (at Toronto, Ontario)

Four days from now I’ll be boarding a one way flight to San Francisco to take on the next evolution of my role at @shopify. Leaving the city that I’ve called home my entire life and the people who have defined everything I am was one of the most uncomfortable decisions I’ve ever had to make. But this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve chased discomfort in my career.
.
I wrote about my ongoing pursuit for discomfort this morning in hopes of inspiring others to do the things that scare and challenge them this year. You can find the link in my profile.
.
Happy 2017! ????
.
????: @jonasll (at San Francisco, California)

Even light exercise can counter the damage of stroke in survivors, a new study suggests.

How many of you love wasting hours of time making the same basic edits to a lot of photos? Anyone? No? Well, that’s understandable. None of us like doing menial repetitive tasks and it’s no different when editing images — even for those of us who enjoy the editing process. The good news is that Lightroom has a handy tool Continue Reading

The post How to Use Lightroom Presets- A Handy Guide appeared first on Photodoto.

Are you a logical individual? Do you carefully consider all options before making a decision? Are opinions shaped primarily through facts and reasoning? If you answered yes to these questions, you’d be wrong. We are all emotional beings, and our emotions are the root cause of our thoughts and behaviors. Our logical, conscious thoughts simply […]

The post Fight or Flight: Which Emotion Does Your Website Evoke? appeared first on Psychology of Web Design | 3.7 Blog.

Designer Spotlight: Burnt Toast