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It happens with homeowners who fall in love with a color but have a wandering eye when it comes to the other rooms in the house.
You know you’ve found the patchwork effect, says Bortugno, owner of B Designs in Latham, N.Y., when you stand outside the house and there’s a different color of blind in every window.
” You want harmony in your home,” she says. ” (But) I don’t want to tell people just paint their house white, because that’s really not a solution. That’s just fear. It doesn’t need to be boring, but it does need to be harmonious.”
So how do you use color from room to room without your house looking like your 3-year-old’s latest art project?
Find something that you love and then work from there.
If you have a favorite upholstered chair, set of china, rug or painting, the colors that are within that likely work well together or the piece wouldn’t have been created that way, says Nancy Smith, owner of Saratoga Signature Interiors in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
So pull those shades and use them throughout your home for a unifying effect. just be careful to keep tone in mind. Not all shades of blue work perfectly with all shades of yellow.
An open floor plan gives homeowners a great opportunity to then use that inspirational painting or rug in a central location, tying all the rooms together.
Having upholstered furniture that coordinates with everything else in the house also allows those pieces to be moved from room to room, giving a home owner a chance to mix things up.
For home owners who don’t know where to start with color, Bortugno suggests they look inside their closets. Most people wear their favorite palette without even realizing it, she says. And often, there’s some built-in color coordination.
Tying the colors together from room to room, however, is sometimes the trickiest part. Bortugno suggests using a bold color in one room and then employing neutrals on the neighboring walls. Smith says an accent color in one room can be used as the dominant color in the next room, tying everything together.
And don’t forget lighting, the designers say. if you find a color that you love, it may not look the same on the wall in every room.
” You need to take the paint color home and hold it up in the space where it’s going to go,” Bortugno says.
A creamy beige can look cheery in a room with multiple windows and bright morning light, she cautions, but look dingy in a more closed off room or a room with a large tree just outside the window.
Where you live also matters when it comes to how paint will play on the walls.
” our light in the Northeast is a little bit grayer in the winter than it is in the South,” Smith says. ” So even if you were doing a color that was bright and cheery, it might not look so bright and cheery in our light.”
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Full HD mode captures 1080p (1,920×1,080-pixel resolution) video at 30 frames per second. Tall HD captures at an odd 960p (1,280×960-pixel resolution), also at 30fps. Original HD steps down to 720p (1,280×720 pixels) at 30fps. Finally, Action HD also captures 720p but at 60fps. All of these modes are for the NTSC standard, but the Contour+ can also be set to record PAL video in 25fps and 50fps increments.
Each recording mode also has three quality settings (high, low, and medium), automatic or user-set white balance; three metering modes (center, average, and spot), and adjustable contrast, exposure, and sharpness settings. Microphone sensitivity can be adjusted and GPS power and capture intervals can be set. GPS data is embedded in the MOV file that the Contour+ produces, so you won’t need to keep track of a separate metadata file if you want to archive your videos.
Still photos are captured at 5MP (2,592×1,944 pixels) at intervals of 3, 5, 10, 30, or 60 seconds.
The Storyteller software is used to download captured video, trimit, and upload it to Contour’s Web site.
Recording modes and settings are all adjusted using Contour’s Storyteller software, which is a free download from Contour’s Web site. Aside from tweaking settings and updating camera firmware, the Storyteller software can be used to download and edit captured video from the connected Contour+ unit. you can trim the beginning and end from a video, keeping just the good parts, by tapping the new Awesome button at the best part of your video to initiate the trimming mode. on the video’s timeline, selection handles will appear around the point where the button was pressed. Simply drag the handles to the points where you’d like the clip to begin and end and Storyteller will automatically crop the video for you. When GPS capture is enabled, Storyteller can also parse and display that data on a Google Map with an elevation graph.
Once the video is edited, you can post it (or just the awesome part) to Contour’s video-sharing community for online playback via Contour’s player with GPS map and speed data intact. you can also export your edited movie as an MOV file for posting to other video-sharing sites like YouTube or Vimeo. GPS data can also be exported separately as a GPX, CSV, or TXT file for use with external GPS software.
Earlier we mentioned that the Contour+ lacks the aiming lasers that made the previous Contour models so easy to use without a viewfinder. However, the Contour+ has a new trick that’s even more useful and accurate for framing shots. After pairing the Contour+ with an iPhone via Bluetooth, you can install and launch a Contour application that turns the iPhone’s screen into a viewfinder. This connection is not full-resolution and the frame rate is more akin to a slideshow than a video feed, but it’s good enough to use for a few seconds at a time to make sure that the Contour+ is pointed and oriented the way you want it before recording.
From the Contour app, you can also adjust the settings of the two user modes and select one or the other on the fly. at the time of this review, Connect View is only compatible with iOS devices (iPhone 4, iPod Touch), but the company says an Android app is being developed.
ConclusionsSo, the Contour+ offers upgraded hardware, but at an MSRP of $499.99, is it worth the $120 premium that it carries over the ContourGPS ($349.99) with a Connect View card ($29.99)? looking at specs alone, probably not. The only real advantages that the Contour+ offers are a wider-angle lens, 90 degrees more articulation on its rotating lens, and a microphone input and an HDMI output that we’re guessing the average consumer will never use. Professionals interested in adding an inexpensive camera to their current setup, on the other hand, will likely find the HDMI output indispensable for connecting the Contour+ to, for example, some sort of wireless video capture box that sends the video to live editing hardware for broadcasts. Don’t be surprised if you started seeing little silver Contour+ units attached to the helmets of contestants in next year’s X Games or to the bumpers of a few cars at a broadcast racing event.
Looking past the specs to the video quality, we noticed an improvement in the exposure and noise levels of captured video compared with the ContourHD 1080p that we normally use to capture video for the Car Tech Live podcast. Audio quality is the same slightly muffled capture that we’re used to from a Contour device’s internal pinhole microphone, but that can be improved using an external microphone. at the very least, an adjustable microphone level will allow slightly better recording quality. However, the improvements in video quality aren’t so stark that most users would be able to tell the difference between video from the Contour+ and the GPS or 1080p models with the latest firmware. The main advantage of the Contour+ is that its iPhone app enables you to adjust settings on the fly.
However, while the Contour+ may not have a decisive advantage over its predecessors for many users, it definitely has one over its competitors, our current Editors’ choice GoPro HD Hero and the recently reviewed POV.HD. The Contour+ is more compact than the bulky POV.HD, making it easier to use and to set up. with the addition of still-photo capture modes to Contour’s firmware, the Contour+ matches the GoPro HD Hero’s levels of functionality, and embedded GPS data takes it a step beyond. Contour’s smartphone and desktop software makes the Contour+ easier to use than the GoPro with its archaic interface. The GoPro is about $200 less expensive than the Contour+ and it comes with more mounting options in its box–including a waterproof, shockproof case that can take a serious beating. However, when the time came for us to go record in-car footage, the Contour+ was the camera that we most often reached for during our month of testing. The video captured was simply better and it took much less effort to get the shot we needed. it would appear that we have a new favorite action camera and a new Editors’ choice.
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