haha, oh god. So I just started a new job, and I’m the incoming treasurer for the IES SF section, and I’m in submittals on the library project, and I’m taking my LC exam this fall, and I’ve been dating some, and my D&D campaign has started up again so I’ve got that prep time every week in addition to game night… things are going really, really well for me right now but I don’t have a lot of time for personal artistic pursuits, and also everything I’ve been working on has been pretty laptopy lately. So I decided what I really needed was some immediate gratification, in a project I could finish in a weekend with a minimum of planning.
Test-fitting the film, before the film advance mechanism was finished, and the whole thing was painted flat black inside.
I went shopping for the cookie tin that became the camera body Saturday morning, and was scrambled to finish it up before I ran out of light on Sunday. I finished about 45 minutes before dusk, loaded up a roll of film, and started walking East, through Union Square and down to the Embarcadero. The shot at the top of the post is the last one on the roll, the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, with the fogline rolling into the East Bay.
And above is the first picture I took. A selfie! I spent some time today building a smaller aperture, which should fix the blurry problem. I also need a better attachment to the tripod, the one I tried first is pretty wobbly. I’d kind of stopped taking pictures of things because I’m just kind of burned out on digital photography right now, but this has been really fun and creative.
Oh, hey, if you have any tips about how to get a nice round hole .29 mm in diameter, leave me a comment!
Sunday at Cup a’ Joes, one of the enduring loves in my life.
I am getting to be alright at this WordPress stuff: I’ve just completed a redesign of www.wingedvictorydesign.com, which is my theatrical lighting design portfolio. It’s the same content (for now, I have some new shows to put up there as well), but the pictures are larger and the layout is much nicer.
I’m also working on getting my architectural lighting design stuff up on the web, that will happen soon-ish. In the meantime, if there’s anything you find seems broken or hard to use, do drop me a line!
So Many Thingssssss: I’ve been so busy working on projects that I haven’t had time to write about them! Here is some of what I’ve been up to for the last few months.
So my dad is a classic car enthusiast, and he has a ’63 Lincoln slabside and a ’56 Lincoln Mark II. It’s not really germane to this post, but let’s have a picture of that, shall we?
So anyway, he edits the newsletter for the club he’s in, the many-syllabled Lincoln Continental Owner’s Club, Texas Gulf Coast Region. As people his age go, he’s fairly computer savvy, but not really a desktop publishing guy, so his method of publication has been to assemble the stories in Word, and then create a PDF from that with links to flickr albums and email that to everyone in the club. It’s a functional solution, but I thought an upgrade was in order, so for Christmas I built him a blog of his very own, now up at www.thecontinentalstar.com
If you want to stop by, there are lots of pictures from prior events, as well as listings of cars for sale, directions to the next meet, etc. etc. etc.
I found some planks that had been discarded on O’Farrell street (picture here), and decided to make a cutting board from them. I’ve only got about 2′ x 3′ of counter area in my comically tiny San Francisco apartment anyway, so I’m essentially replacing all of the counter space. That suits me because I feel like cutting boards are kind of a sub-optimal solution, in that you’d ideally want the entire workspace to be a cutting area.
Some months ago, I went with my family to the Alexander Calder exhibit at MOCA Chicago. The collection was impressive, dozens of his collages and a few sculptures for good measure.
Afterwords, as we were eating our ice cream, my father wondered aloud whether how much calculation or adjustment Calder would have had to do, to get things to balance out. My off-the-cuff answer at the time was that only the last, smallest leaf would have to be correct, but I’ve since started to doubt whether that was correct. Continue reading “The Mathematics of Calder” »
I went to Chicago last weekend for the premiere performance of my sister’s latest musical project, Nylon Radio (My sister is doing a doctorate in Music, um, Theory? at the University of Chicago).
All of the pictures were taken with my Panasonic G1 with 20mm/f1.7 lens. It’s a digital camera, and a good one, but I feel like something has been lost with the switch to digital photography. With film media, you have this really fascinating and unpredictable interaction between the type of film stock/processing and the environment that you were trying to capture when you opened the shutter. When I shot on film, this was usually very, very frustrating, as you could do everything right and still end up with a bad shot, due to some quirk of the processing or stock or spectral distribution of the ambient light or measurement error in the metering or whatever the hell else. But I find that digital cameras, especially high end ones, can render the scene so neutrally that the results are nice enough but boring.
So I was presented with something of an opportunity when I loaded the SD card into my laptop on the plane back to San Francisco. I had to shoot nearly all of the shots wide open at f1.7 at 800-3200 ISO– there was no light, except for some ambient bounce that didn’t give any modeling and some LED music stand lights that look like death warmed over on skin tones. If I was going to have anything usable, it was all going to be in post-process. I decided that rather than trying to make a purse out of a sows ear, I’d instead play around with all of the fun ways you can abuse the Camera Raw filters, and let taste be no object. Here are some of my favorites, with a quick description of the techniques used in each. Continue reading “Nylon Radio” »
That’s it! As per usual, you will have to replace the stock HardwareSerial.cpp in C:\Program Files (x86)\arduino-0018\hardware\arduino\cores\arduino with the modified version included in the zip file. Get it here!
Edwin Dolby at Laser Productions had an elegant idea to address this, namely that you could use the constrain function to map out of bounds values to the correct 0-511 range. However, I have decided not to implement this by default, as without some kind of numerical readout I think the values should just be set to what you set them. But, easy to implement if you decide you want it!
