Author Archives: Brian Lawler

About Brian Lawler

Brian Lawler is an Emeritus Professor of Graphic Communication at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and was a Guest Professor at Hochschule München from September, 2021 to September, 2022. He writes about graphic arts processes and technologies for various industry publications, and on his blog, The Blognosticator.

175,000 readers!

178,265, actually. Thank you to all of you who read the Blognosticator! I started blogging about 11 years ago when I was hired by Graphic Arts Monthly magazine to do a weekly blog about topics in the graphic arts. That … Continue reading

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Time-lapse project, part III: a new circuit board

My time-lapse camera has been running now for 25 days. It snaps a photo of Bishop Peak (elev. 1559 ft.) every five minutes. I have over 2,300 photos so far. This is a sample of the photos being taken by … Continue reading

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An adventure in the Distiller Time Machine

Way back in 2003 I wrote an essay for inclusion in an article in Pre magazine about using Adobe Acrobat Distiller with hot folders to get PDFs with specific settings just by dropping a source file into a watched folder … Continue reading

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365 days taking photos of a mountain

On Thursday morning this week I set up my time-lapse camera on the roof of the Kennedy Library at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. It’s facing almost due-west toward a mountain named Bishop Peak, which stands over the city of … Continue reading

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Time-lapse weather-proof box construction

This is part two of a blog about making a weather-proof time-lapse camera box, and the camera equipment to go inside it. You can read part one here. With may plan to do a year-long time-lapse project, I began in … Continue reading

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Time-lapse with a Raspberry twist

What’s been going on since December? I’ve been spending a lot of time making a cabinet for my camper (another thing I designed in Illustrator and built on my CNC Router). That has taken a tremendous amount of time, and … Continue reading

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Calibrating the iPhone with i1 Display Pro

I see iPhones being used for all sorts of “professional” applications including video capture, and now that the phone sports a 12Mp camera, graphic arts quality photography. No excuses professional photography. Several years ago I was made aware of a … Continue reading

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My mission to Mars, continued

In a blog I posted last year, I described how I developed a series of AppleScripts to control Adobe Photoshop to crop, then increase the canvas size, then draw crop marks on a series of image parts to make a … Continue reading

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My brief visit to Mars

I spent a couple of weeks on Mars earlier this year, on assignment to take some photos. There was no oxygen, so I had to hold my breath for two weeks. I did not run into Matt Damon. The work … Continue reading

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My Chicago Exposure Expedition

In my last blog, about taking the Photowalk with Trey Ratcliff at Burning Man, I mentioned that young Mr. Ratcliff does this in cities all over the world. He has a tremendous following, and it’s an impressive thing to have … Continue reading

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