Gabe Toth is a photographer in Toronto who I’ve known since my early days in blogging, and he does some incredible portrait photography, so I was happy to come by and document his latest photoshoot with Superstein’s John Walke. Fair warning – this video is probably a little not safe for work seeing that Superstein was doing a shoot for some new underwear designs they’re releasing. Music by Crystal Castles.

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Beyond our participation in Toronto’s Annual Zombie Walk Ryan and I made our way up to Church Street this past Friday on Halloween to get the lowdown on all the crazy outfits and characters. Check it out above.

The format of how we shot and edited this video reminds me a lot of the one Ryan and I shot for blogTO way back in January for CBC’s Test the Nation. Quick forewarning: some mildly edgy costumes and a wee bit of cursing makes this one probably NSFW.

One of the big sources of inspiration for me over the last couple years has been the work of people like Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, who gives a truly inspiring talk at TED, above. Gilbert provides a lot of hard data that shows that happiness can be synthesized, and how we often over-rate the difference between a good situation and a bad one using quotes from Adam Smith and William Shakespeare.

Gilbert closes off with the following:

“Our longings and worries are both to some degree over-blown because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience.”

It’s a compelling argument, one that he proves through research is true, and crucial to keep in mind especially given the current global climate around the economy collapsing. Things are only going to get worse, as smart people like Jason Calacanis have said, so it’s more important than ever for us to moderate our temperaments and maintain perspective , even if the sky is falling.

As if Fashion Week and the Toronto Marathon weren’t enough for the city this past weekend, we just had to throw some zombies into the mix. Check out our shambles through the Toronto Zombie Walk 2008 at Dear Toronto.

Last week I traveled to Cambridge, MA for the UI13 conference. Aside from the really well done conference, I had the chance to check out the city and neighbouring Boston while I was there. There’s some photos over on Flickr!

It was a busy weekend, and I’ve never felt better about getting back into the creative saddle with lots of photo and video out this week. Our second Dear Toronto episode of the week is a bit of an epilogue of our adventures with Nuit Blanche.

I didn’t see nearly as much as I wanted to over the course of the night, but I think that’s always the case with an event that has the kind of scale like Nuit Blanche. Either way, there was some really cool stuff out there and we tried to feature some of the best of it in this video.

Thanks to Jerrold who’s featured our work once again on the front page of blogTO!

Just before heading out for the night to see what this year’s Nuit Blanche had to offer, I checked out a show by Brazilian Girls at the Diesel Playhouse.

It was admittedly a bit of a bizarre venue for a music show, but Sabina really worked the crowd well. What a presence that girl has! They were pretty lax about cameras at this place so I managed to stap quite a few photos of the show.

See the full set on Flickr

Brazilian Girls – Good Time

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I don’t try to hide the fact that I love Nuit Blanche. It feels like a grown-up’s Christmas, and to me it’s one of the few times in the year when everyone in Toronto comes together to really witness something cultural and something really wonderful.

Just like last year, I was out all night (after checking out Brazilian Girls live – a topic for another post) up until about 5:00am seeing what artists had to offer this year. Things were fairly low-key for me up until the very early hours of the morning at about 3 or 4 when I started making my way home.

At around 5 I came across the exhibit that I shot in the video above, La Mamma Morta that was truly surreal – not only due to the fact that I was exhausted and freezing from the single digit temperature and probably slightly delirious, but because it played out right next to the historic St. James cathedral just down the street from my place.

We’ll have a bunch of other videos going up throughout this week over at Dear Toronto so your best bet would be to subscribe to Dear Toronto in iTunes to make sure you don’t miss anything and get the best video quality possible!

Last night I had the pleasure of stopping by the offices at Idée Inc. here in Toronto to check out a preview of their new iPhone app in development, TinEye Mobile. As Leila explains it so nicely over on the Idée blog, the whole idea is to take the power of their killer image search engine, TinEye, and make it available on your smartphone.

The whole idea is if you’re at the record store, book store, and see something that you’re into (but you’d rather give it a price check first or purchase it immediately from your retailer of choice online), you just snap a photo of the product, and TinEye will connect you with the iTunes Store or other online marketplace to immediately sample or buy the product.

Overall the app really performed well, recognizing just about any album cover I snapped and immediately pushing me out to the iTunes Store. It’s the kind of technology that when you put it in a non-techy person’s hand and ask them to try it, they think there’s some kind of magic happening.

One intriguing part of this app is that it could totally subvert brick & mortar retailers, while at the same time if they take full advantage of it, really propel their business. Indigo/Chapters would really benefit by getting in touch with the Idée folks sooner rather than later, and make their inventory a checkout point for users snapping photos of books all over the world.

There’s been a lot of buzz around using QR codes, barcodes, and otherwise to do comparison shopping in-store on mobiles lately, but I think this is where the future is. Companies shouldn’t have to build additional complexity into their packaging, and users shouldn’t have to hunt for these identifiers on the packaging in order for phones to be able to identify them.

It’s apps like this that are going to make the number of new mobile application platforms really interesting to use and work with.

This weekend Last.fm put out a new version of their app for iPhone, and it looks great! The interface enhancements alone are a treat – showing bands like the “On Tour” one above when the artist has events listed on the site.

It’s unfortunate that the app is crippled by Apple’s gimped SDK that prevents it from running in the background and scrobbling songs, but beyond that they’ve done a great job in bringing the Last.fm experience to the iPhone.