Kristan Franco Graphic Designs and Web Resources

Recently, I came across Philstar's article about the beautiful and catchy iPhotos of Philippines' North to South vibrant colors. The shooters, equipped with a a photographer's arsenal, showcased the very unique sunrise, sunset, flavorful foods, and eye-catching beaches in the country.

"Makulay" is a tagalog term for "colorful". As what the article emphasized, the word "Makulay" has been the very appropriate word that could sum up all these beautiful iPhotos.

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One of the many interests I have in Photography is distortion. Distortion is art, and it gives a more dramatic effect to a simple and dull photo. Wide-angle and fish-eye lenses are the main reason why distortion exists in photography.Equipped with a basic DSLR and a good fish-eye filter lens, I was able to apply distortion to my shots.

This is a very simple definition of Fish-eye in Photography:

Of or being a wide-angle photographic lens that covers an angle of about 180°, producing a circular image with exaggerated foreshortening in the center and increasing distortion toward the periphery.

I've got so many fish-eye shots, and I think one blog post won't contain all photos, so I just select some clear shots.

1.) Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage. A shot during our parade. I zoomed the lens that's why the distortion is just low.





2.) RD Plaza, Gensan. Another shot from our parade. Since I zoomed-in the lens, the distortion lessened. One thing, the sky was overexposed.





3.) Sunny Highway. A shot from last month. I was riding a public-utility vehicle when the highway became an interesting scenery to shoot.





4.) Hope Springs. A shot taken from the place of a firework incident. The tree was half-burnt. You could see less distortion here because of zooming in, see the clouds.



Shooting in fish-eye is quite exciting. You get to see distorted sceneries. So, go, give it a try!

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Apologies for the delayed blog posts, I've been dealing with a slow computer in the past 2 weeks since my laptop crashed. So many wonderful ideas popping from my mind now, and this time, i'm going to share to you my own set of Bokeh shots which could be useful for Photoshop as textures.

Just in case you don't know what Bokeh means, then here's a simple definition:

In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field.

These three Bokeh shots taken using an Olympus E-500 dslr were mostly from leaves and figs I found during a stay at the school. Armed with only a 45mm kit lens, I was able to capture these colorful Bokeh shots. I was thinking of trying out Bokeh shots on night lights.

Meanwhile, you can download the 3 hi-resolution Bokeh textures for Photoshop here. These textures would serve as good background for any Photoshop canvas you'll make. Enjoy!

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Woah! February had began, and time flies so fast. To start off this love month, I'm going to showcase my 4th wallpaper filed under Monthly Wallpapers. Most of us knew that February is the love month, and seems like I'm in the mood playing with Xara 3D this time, and the creative juice is flowing freely. This time, I got to create a LOVE Typhography wallpaper.

Now let's talk all about this wallpaper. It is basically made out of Xara 3D and Adobe Photoshop CS4. Aside from the usual color red for Love, I tried playing with different color combinations and eventually came up with this output.

I got the cool grungy background from Inspiredology. The background gives much more contrast with the Insaburger font, and the theme colors.

This wallpaper is available in wide screen (1280x800) and full screen (1024x768). You can download the jpg files here:

L.O.V.E. Typography wallpaper Full Screen (1024x768)
L.O.V.E. Typography wallpaper Wide Screen (1280x800)

Set them as your dekstop background now! Enjoy watching the colors burst into your eyes!

P.S. Wanna put rock n' roll madness into your desktop? Check out the School of Rock wallpaper series here.


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With only 2 years and running,Plurk today is now one of top social networking sites. Aside from it's interactive GUI, you can also reflect your personality and creativity through customizing your timeline and dashboard themes.

Well, let's admit the fact that having our Plurk profiles tweaked inspires us more to Plurk. Trust me, I'm one of those.

Since most of the Plurk users don't have the knowledge on CSS coding, mainly used to create Plurk themes and layouts, here are 5 cool sites that provide Plurk themes and Layouts:

1.) Layout Freak




2.) Plurk Doodles





3.) Plurk-Layout





4.) Plurkocity





5.) Layout Monster




Choose from these wide variety of Plurk themes now, and see your Plurk profile shine!

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I've been a Plurker and Twitter user for about a year now, and losing Karma Points in Plurk might be the very heartbreaking news you'll ever get from Plurk. Tweeting on the other hand, is a must, updating my followers to check out my new posts.

In desperation for Karma Point, I became a frequent user of Phplurk's gateway just to update my daily activities even though i'm afar from keyboard (AFK). Just by texting to a Phplurk's associate gateway mobile number, one for Globe, and one for Smart, you can already update.

Later on, Phplurk became a major diversion for plurking in most of the Filipino Plurkers, since it is only locally available.  Meanwhile, Tweeting has been casual in most of the mobile phones with browser.

After quite some time, Phplurk had been experiencing frequent delay of Plurk posts. After these delays, Plurks won't arrive in the user's dashboard anymore. That was the time when Phplurk gradually lost it's essence.



In solution to this, and for Karma's sake, a new Plurk gateway had been create. Make way for gladlyCast and their services for Plurkers and Twitters. gladlyCast provides Plurk and Twitter gateways for SMS. Just like Phplurk, you are required to sign up and test a certain procedure to complete the registration.

gladlyCast's features:

• Available for 3 countries, Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia. Each country has a unique gateway number
• Local SMS cost/charge for each Plurk or Twitter update
• You can type in different language based on your phone's specification
• Unlike Phplurk, gladlyCast don't promote their url in every Plurk made through the gateway
• Very easy registration process

Sign up now, and be able to update your Plurk and Twitter accounts in just the rule of the fingers.

Be sure to follow them on Plurk, and on Twitter to receive the latest updates on their service.



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