Capturing a 3D Flame

Dateline: Science Friday (NPR)

It's as awesome as they said it was, especially the wax travelling up the wick.

Late Bloomers in Hard Times

This is my bit of camera prOn, for the day. I really should be blogging these a lot more if I had much sense. At this point it seems like my Flickr descriptions are becoming my blog. In the interest of efficiency, I'll adapt today's blather from what I've already said today over there.



@dailyshoot #ds228. Construction seems to be perpetual: streets, sidewalks, buildings. Make a photo of something under construction today.

@dailyshoot is a Twitter-based project for sharing photos done to match a daily assignment, as a way to kick free the mental cobwebs, and push photographers, some serious, some fascinated newcomers, to explore ways of shooting, and aspects of photography that they might not come to on their own.  And especially on Flickr it seems to be turning into a community of similarly obsessive photo nuts of all kinds.  Usually one is more or less expected to shoot and process images on the day of the project.  But some projects don't really seem well suited to that, and not every day can be dedicated to a project that, so far, has not generated any income to compensate for the costs involved in photography (something I really need to be keeping in mind, at least for myself at this point).  I probably  need desperately to be doing a lot more self-promotion at this point, here and with some of the writing projects that I've been working on in some cases for years.  With many of the major studios in financial free-fall, though, it is hard to generate enthusiasm.  Perhaps I just need to be on drugs so that tilting at windmills will seem more like a rational plan of action?
 

Anyway, here's what I said about this image on Flickr, and it's still true almost 45 minutes later:

In the interest of the environment (and the fact that I'll be driving for at least 5 hours tomorrow) I've taken the liberty of adapting a RAW image from January that I'm pretty sure I've never made public, rather than spend what may be hours scouting for an interesting construction job, or risking shooting while driving, if I were to find some surprise road construction (which is almost a certainty if I drive long enough).

This is the faux HDR version. Photomatix was used for tonemapping from a RAW image.

I might find an actual today shot if plans work out, but that depends on a lot of random.

Sidenote to camera nuts, this was taken the first day I had this lens (a Canon EF 28-300mm 1:3.5-5.6 L IS USM). And after looking at this image and processing it a few different ways, I found a new source of extreme camera pr0n from the wonderful people at Creative Cow.  Go there only if you, like me, wish you'd figured out much earlier in life how to get trained and hired as a cinematographer/director of photography for major motion pictures or indie masterpieces.

Source file: IMG_6405_tmFhdr.jpg 
There's really not that much more to say. Some days I wish I'd saved myself from installing this particular bit of code, since most of the time I don't really need to generate a "next page", do I?

This photo is starting to haunt me

There's something terrible about digital, both in general and specific. I think for the very first time I actually looked at this one in full scale. You probably won't notice the haunting artifacts unless you look very closely, or you're one of those permitted to see the full scale image. Anyway...



That's it. I'm procrastinating and pushing myself to a strange exhaustion, probably because I'll be seeing my parents a little later today, for the first time in over a year, and I'm conflicted about that, guilty, trapped, pummeled... You can pick your term and I've probably felt it sometime recently.

I'm going to add in a book that's helped me resolve at least some of my photography issues, if not my persistent feelings of ineptitude and such. Also, if I don't do this soon, Amazon might shoot me, or cut off my Associate "privileges." Anyway, I'm in love with Freeman's books, and even though this one is probably the hardest to read, it's also the one that has probably helped me the most over the past year or so, even though I didn't do so badly with exposure issues before I started reading it. And now I have someplace to point to when I talk to people about exposure.


Let's see how that worked.

ECRS Winter Workshop: An Adventure

And I mean that in more ways than one. Here's a slideshow of a few collages from the event. More when I have the time and energy to put them together. All photos are also available in individual form. They are also, it should be obvious, available in much higher resolution and quality. Most of what's presented here is strictly based on raw, unprocessed images whereas I usually try to spend at least 10 minutes and often much longer when presenting photos in "finished" form.

Note that if you click the link to view the images below on their Picasa page, you can see these at full screen size (still not actual size, but especially on older monitors it may be the best choice available).



Video below the fold, so to speak.

The Adventure Game from B Unis on Vimeo.

If I can think of something to add to this post, that too will happen. First I need to get some feedback and ensure this is not something that others might object to.

Winter strikes coldly.

Just got the lens I should have had years ago, so this is a very fresh shot, processed over the past 24 hours or so. We didn't get slammed by snow nearly as badly as Philly did, but we are closer to the Shore. Though not by that much.


Winter bones by *ebbixx on deviantART



There's nothing much else here to see, except for another, somewhat less stunning shot.


Solitary lunacy by *ebbixx on deviantART

More about video than it is about Second Life

This is somewhat related to the posts below. Maybe it's just that I'm spending a lot more time lately on video projects than I am in Second Life. Anyway, this is still something of a spanner post, but again, it's a technique that has a lot more video applications than it has anything really direct to say about Second Life, where photosourcing has something of a bad name.


Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.

The video pasted above here spells out a way to use photos to compensate for poorly shot video, or video that comes from a substandard source. At present I'm not sure the technique is commercially available, and it's not clear from what I've seen so far whether the grad student whose project it is has a plan to release this code into the cultural commons in a way that will make it widely accessible or a matter of open source.

There are weaknesses to this approach, foremost among which would be that I'd imagine using this method would require one to become extremely well organized with one's footage and the still that should, by all rights, be taken more or less at the same time as the video, unless one wants to wind up with some jarring mismatching of lighting conditions.

It may also require more sophistication about shooting technique than one can reasonably expect from most people likely to be drawn to the technique. Or perhaps not... only someone pretty obsessed is likely to take all the steps needed to use this method, as I see things.