It's done with a long exposure, dark clothes, and a flashlight (torch).
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Light painting
Wonderful Light Painting photos.
It's done with a long exposure, dark clothes, and a flashlight (torch).
It's done with a long exposure, dark clothes, and a flashlight (torch).
Kung Fu Panda and other trailers
Loveth the animations. Kung Fu Panda looks like fun.
Oh, and I'm def gonna see Hancock too.
I'm glad to see that Jason Bateman has made the transition to the movies after Arrested Development folded. He was also with Zach Braff in The Ex, which I enjoyed.
And House Bunny. I like Anna Faris (Scary Movie).
I doubt I'll watch Ember though, even though it's nominally SF. Am I the only one who is fed up with the "thriller" kind of trailer? The inflated suspence, the swelling music, the fast cuts...
----
Talking about movies, I've just re-watched L.A. Story. It's one of my favorite movies ever. It's a nice love story, it's quirky, it's hilarious, it's seminal, and it's brilliantly filmed and cut.
Oh, and I'm def gonna see Hancock too.
I'm glad to see that Jason Bateman has made the transition to the movies after Arrested Development folded. He was also with Zach Braff in The Ex, which I enjoyed.
And House Bunny. I like Anna Faris (Scary Movie).
I doubt I'll watch Ember though, even though it's nominally SF. Am I the only one who is fed up with the "thriller" kind of trailer? The inflated suspence, the swelling music, the fast cuts...
----
Talking about movies, I've just re-watched L.A. Story. It's one of my favorite movies ever. It's a nice love story, it's quirky, it's hilarious, it's seminal, and it's brilliantly filmed and cut.
Snopes and rice
You gotta love the web: there's hardly anything you can't find an instant answer to.
For example I was just reminded of a wedding some years back, when my sister told that the reason the rice was in little nets was that it made the stomachs of birds explode when they ate it. Thinking of it, it had the flavor of urban myth, so I looked it up, and viola.
(OK, so most people say "voila", but my mother's middle name was Viola, so...)
PS, doesn't "Snopes And Rice" sound like a movie title? Sort of like State And Main with William Macy. Boy, what a lemon that was. It was made in the rich style of Magnolias, so I thought at the beginning that it was a quality movie. But then the cracks started to show. Good example: an important appointment is accidentally erased from a big schedule board, and it is claimed and shown later that it was re-entered under the wrong date causing a missed appointment with the mayor, when in fact the movie clearly showed earlier that it was re-entered correctly.
Worse, of course, is when a movie deliberately misleads the audience. Like in Rules of Engagement with Samuel Jackson. One scene shows that the mob which was massacred was an innocent, protesting mob. A later scene shows the same mob at the same time, but this time all of them are firing wildly with automatic weapons at the embassy, completely changing the story.
But I digress. Big and often.
For example I was just reminded of a wedding some years back, when my sister told that the reason the rice was in little nets was that it made the stomachs of birds explode when they ate it. Thinking of it, it had the flavor of urban myth, so I looked it up, and viola.
(OK, so most people say "voila", but my mother's middle name was Viola, so...)
PS, doesn't "Snopes And Rice" sound like a movie title? Sort of like State And Main with William Macy. Boy, what a lemon that was. It was made in the rich style of Magnolias, so I thought at the beginning that it was a quality movie. But then the cracks started to show. Good example: an important appointment is accidentally erased from a big schedule board, and it is claimed and shown later that it was re-entered under the wrong date causing a missed appointment with the mayor, when in fact the movie clearly showed earlier that it was re-entered correctly.
Worse, of course, is when a movie deliberately misleads the audience. Like in Rules of Engagement with Samuel Jackson. One scene shows that the mob which was massacred was an innocent, protesting mob. A later scene shows the same mob at the same time, but this time all of them are firing wildly with automatic weapons at the embassy, completely changing the story.
But I digress. Big and often.
B/W digital
I wish somebody would make a black-and-white digital camera. Not only would it revive the feeling and the art of shooting in BW, but since there would be no colored microfilters over the pixel sites on the sensor, the apparent sharpness would be greater than a normal color sensor, since no extrapolation of color data would be needed. And without the filters the sensitivity would probably be two stops higher.
Imagine such a camera based on the Nikon D3 sensor. A sharpness equivalent to 20 megapixels, and nearly grain free images shot at ISO 25,000! You'd be able to make pin sharp hand-held photos in conditions so dark you could barely see what's going on.
Update:
This article from 2004 has data of a professional BW camera Kodak made, but never perfected.
"Without an anti aliasing filter and no Bayer color matrix, the resolution of a 6 mega pixel monochrome camera is astonishing. In monochrome, 6 mega pixels effectively does what it takes 12-24 mega pixels with a color matrix." [...]
"I ended up in shock at watching exposure times go from 1/60 or 1/125 of a second with my Leica M6 and film, to 1/800, 1/1200 and even 1/1600 of a second for the same aperture with the DCS 760m. With a base ISO of 400 exposures times are brisk – another advantage of a digital monochrome over a color based sensor." [...]
"The image quality certainly beats the pants off of anything I have seen on film in medium format and often what I have seen in large format in terms of resolution, gradation and dynamic range.
So why am I crying in my soup at this point?
Along the way, a serious problem came up with the images from my [Kodak] 760m. There is a form of “banding’ horizontal to the frame as the data comes out of camera."
Bert helps:
"I think the color bayer filter cuts out like 70-80% of the light, that's two stops."
Well, I don't know the numbers, but filters by nature block out part of the light, and a substantial part too, in the case of RGB filters.
I am no optician, but the Bayer arrangement always boggled me. There are two green pixels by image cell supposedly to increase the luminance channel's responsiveness. If that's the goal, why not leave the fourth pixel uncolored? This would provide a serious boost in sensitivity in low light, and mimic the eye much better(1).
I suspect that it has to do with charge bleeding, a phenomenon by which a strongly charged pixel will leak charges into neighboring, lesser charged pixels (this was quite a problem in early CCDs, and most likely still is a concern). The greater the charge difference, the bigger the problem, so ultra-sensitive pixels embedded into a filtered matrix may be more of a problem than an asset.
Mind you, I remember reading a few month ago about an SLR with a sensor that does just that (isn't it from Sony?). It has small, (uncolored?) pixels interspersed withing the Bayer matrix to increase dynamic range. I should have paid more attention...
In any case, it is certain that a pure B&W sensor is incredibly more sensitive (I own a few such video cameras, used for inspection & machine vision). I never measured it, but I would say that the sensitivity difference is more than two stops. But try to sell B&W sensors to the general population...
(1) The retina is composed of two different types of light-sensitive cells, namely cones & rods. (Apparently, a third type was recently identified. A lot more info inWikipedia). Cones detect color, while rods don't. The rods outnumber the cones by 10:1 or more, and are also much smaller, yielding a far better resolution.
The brain is the key element in this system. It uses the information from the rods to compose and decode an image, and then uses the much sparser color information from the cones, when it is available, to add color to the overall picture. This is what newborns are so busy learning to do when they fiddle endlessly with small, well defined and brightly colored objects.
During this learning phase, the preprocessor located in the optic stem learns to recognize basic primitive shapes, to which color information can be easily applied. We are still far from the day where a camera with similar capabilities will become available.
Also worth noting is the sensitivity of the rod cells. While the color information simply vanishes in low light (try to reliably detect color just from the moonlight), our vision is still quite good. In fact, I have read somewhere that the sensitivity of the rods is such that they react to a change in illumination corresponding to a candle being lit in Paris... for an observer standing in New York.
And we wonder why images taken by mere electro-mechanical contraptions never really represent the world as we see it through our own eyes...
Update: Please excuse the many typos in my previous post, I'm still trying to get used to a new keyboard. I'll try to do better this time.
One thing I forgot to point out previously is that scientific instruments never use Bayer-filtered image sensors because of the extremely poor resulting information and the huge sensitivity penalty. This goes for all astronomical observation equipment (well, the few visible-light telescopes remaining, anyway), as well as other space exploration devices.
For example, all cameras aboard the many Moon and Mars landers are monochrome, yet equipped with filter wheels. When a color image is needed, a series of exposures are made, using various filters (seldom RGB, other bands are usually far more revealing).
Imagine such a camera based on the Nikon D3 sensor. A sharpness equivalent to 20 megapixels, and nearly grain free images shot at ISO 25,000! You'd be able to make pin sharp hand-held photos in conditions so dark you could barely see what's going on.
Update:
This article from 2004 has data of a professional BW camera Kodak made, but never perfected.
"Without an anti aliasing filter and no Bayer color matrix, the resolution of a 6 mega pixel monochrome camera is astonishing. In monochrome, 6 mega pixels effectively does what it takes 12-24 mega pixels with a color matrix." [...]
"I ended up in shock at watching exposure times go from 1/60 or 1/125 of a second with my Leica M6 and film, to 1/800, 1/1200 and even 1/1600 of a second for the same aperture with the DCS 760m. With a base ISO of 400 exposures times are brisk – another advantage of a digital monochrome over a color based sensor." [...]
"The image quality certainly beats the pants off of anything I have seen on film in medium format and often what I have seen in large format in terms of resolution, gradation and dynamic range.
So why am I crying in my soup at this point?
Along the way, a serious problem came up with the images from my [Kodak] 760m. There is a form of “banding’ horizontal to the frame as the data comes out of camera."
Bert helps:
"I think the color bayer filter cuts out like 70-80% of the light, that's two stops."
Well, I don't know the numbers, but filters by nature block out part of the light, and a substantial part too, in the case of RGB filters.
I am no optician, but the Bayer arrangement always boggled me. There are two green pixels by image cell supposedly to increase the luminance channel's responsiveness. If that's the goal, why not leave the fourth pixel uncolored? This would provide a serious boost in sensitivity in low light, and mimic the eye much better(1).
I suspect that it has to do with charge bleeding, a phenomenon by which a strongly charged pixel will leak charges into neighboring, lesser charged pixels (this was quite a problem in early CCDs, and most likely still is a concern). The greater the charge difference, the bigger the problem, so ultra-sensitive pixels embedded into a filtered matrix may be more of a problem than an asset.
Mind you, I remember reading a few month ago about an SLR with a sensor that does just that (isn't it from Sony?). It has small, (uncolored?) pixels interspersed withing the Bayer matrix to increase dynamic range. I should have paid more attention...
In any case, it is certain that a pure B&W sensor is incredibly more sensitive (I own a few such video cameras, used for inspection & machine vision). I never measured it, but I would say that the sensitivity difference is more than two stops. But try to sell B&W sensors to the general population...
(1) The retina is composed of two different types of light-sensitive cells, namely cones & rods. (Apparently, a third type was recently identified. A lot more info in
The brain is the key element in this system. It uses the information from the rods to compose and decode an image, and then uses the much sparser color information from the cones, when it is available, to add color to the overall picture. This is what newborns are so busy learning to do when they fiddle endlessly with small, well defined and brightly colored objects.
During this learning phase, the preprocessor located in the optic stem learns to recognize basic primitive shapes, to which color information can be easily applied. We are still far from the day where a camera with similar capabilities will become available.
Also worth noting is the sensitivity of the rod cells. While the color information simply vanishes in low light (try to reliably detect color just from the moonlight), our vision is still quite good. In fact, I have read somewhere that the sensitivity of the rods is such that they react to a change in illumination corresponding to a candle being lit in Paris... for an observer standing in New York.
And we wonder why images taken by mere electro-mechanical contraptions never really represent the world as we see it through our own eyes...
Update: Please excuse the many typos in my previous post, I'm still trying to get used to a new keyboard. I'll try to do better this time.
One thing I forgot to point out previously is that scientific instruments never use Bayer-filtered image sensors because of the extremely poor resulting information and the huge sensitivity penalty. This goes for all astronomical observation equipment (well, the few visible-light telescopes remaining, anyway), as well as other space exploration devices.
For example, all cameras aboard the many Moon and Mars landers are monochrome, yet equipped with filter wheels. When a color image is needed, a series of exposures are made, using various filters (seldom RGB, other bands are usually far more revealing).
Finnish business presentation
Finnish business presentation. This is why Europe will soar ahead of the US in the near decades.
Giving away money
Man throws money in the street.
He may have succeeded in spreading a little sunshine as was his intent.
(I think twenty thousand pounds sterling is way off, though, probably more like two thousand.)
I suspect one might be more successful at it, though, if one gave away one twenty-pound bill at a time, personally. For one thing I know that while I would pick up money on the street, I would feel foolish about it, especially being in competition with strangers. For another thing, I think most people feel guilty getting something for free, and I think they are more likely to be able to feel good about a twenty-pound bill, where more substantial amounts would be troublesome. And for a third thing, I think that the personal contact of somebody deliberately handing you something as a gift will make it mean a lot more than cash you pick up from the asphalt because somebody had so much he threw it away.
He may have succeeded in spreading a little sunshine as was his intent.
(I think twenty thousand pounds sterling is way off, though, probably more like two thousand.)
I suspect one might be more successful at it, though, if one gave away one twenty-pound bill at a time, personally. For one thing I know that while I would pick up money on the street, I would feel foolish about it, especially being in competition with strangers. For another thing, I think most people feel guilty getting something for free, and I think they are more likely to be able to feel good about a twenty-pound bill, where more substantial amounts would be troublesome. And for a third thing, I think that the personal contact of somebody deliberately handing you something as a gift will make it mean a lot more than cash you pick up from the asphalt because somebody had so much he threw it away.
Friday, June 20, 2008
April Bowlby - Toes Are People
April Bowlby is a genius. And for how hot she is, see related YouTube vids.
Internet addiction
Internet addiction.
"Block explained: "The relationship is with the computer. It becomes a significant other to them. They exhaust emotions that they could experience in the real world on the computer through any number of mechanisms: emailing, gaming, porn."
Yes indeed. The healthy life to lead instead is to talk on the phone, frequent casinos, and watch the porn channels.
"Block explained: "The relationship is with the computer. It becomes a significant other to them. They exhaust emotions that they could experience in the real world on the computer through any number of mechanisms: emailing, gaming, porn."
Yes indeed. The healthy life to lead instead is to talk on the phone, frequent casinos, and watch the porn channels.
Pain au chocolat
Image by Luc Viatour. Once in a cafe, I pointed at a pain au chocolat and said I wanted a "chocolate pain". This consternated a well dressed lady next to me, who wanted to know why I called it that. I said that I couldn't pronounce it in French. This almost upset her, she couldn't see how that was hard.
Like John Cleese says, humor is brittle.
Damien informed:
It's called a 'pain au chocolat' in most of France.... except in the southwest where it's a 'chocolatine'. And people would get very upset if you used that word in a parisian bakery ;-)
However you may have better luck with this one, it's pronounced [shockolattin]. No weird nasal vowels ! Not sure they will know it though.
Be carefull when asking for a "chocolate pain", you might end up shackled in a dungeon and flogged with confectionnery.
No, I can pronounce it in French, I just think "chocolate pain" is a funny term. It hints at the love/hate relationship many of us have with chocolate.
LEGO Death Star
Isn't it amazing how immortal the Star Wars universe is? OK, the hardcore fans may be considered geeks by some, but that's just ungracious, donchaknow.
Electronic Device Stirs Unease at Book Fair
Electronic Device Stirs Unease at Book Fair, NYT article.
"But excitement about the Kindle, which was introduced in November, also worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller. Those executives note that Amazon currently sells most of its Kindle books to customers for a price well below what it pays publishers, and they anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices."
Let's hope! It's greedy and bad business to try to stick to old prices when your expenses are suddenly cut drastically. Not only may low prices very well increase your profits by multiplying sales, they will certainly increase your exposure, and they will help combat piracy (copying and unauthorized selling) and "piracy" (free copying).
"But excitement about the Kindle, which was introduced in November, also worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller. Those executives note that Amazon currently sells most of its Kindle books to customers for a price well below what it pays publishers, and they anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices."
Let's hope! It's greedy and bad business to try to stick to old prices when your expenses are suddenly cut drastically. Not only may low prices very well increase your profits by multiplying sales, they will certainly increase your exposure, and they will help combat piracy (copying and unauthorized selling) and "piracy" (free copying).
"All Marketers are Liars" - Seth Godin speaks at Google
"All Marketers are Liars" - Seth Godin speaks at Google.
It's a good speech, but the video presentation is almost worthy of Seth's own "this is broken" label. Somebody decided to put subtitles on the video. I am all for that, except I can't turn them off, and they are distracting. And Seth speaks really clearly. To make it worse, they are messed up. Special characters are replaced with a little diamond, making them more distracting and harder to read.
Further, when something is actually hard to hear, like a faint question from the crowd... there are no subtitles! And further yet, there are several mistakes. For example, one man says "and be ebay'ed", and it's transcribed as "and be delayed". And Seths says "I'm a big fan", and it's transcribed as "have a big brand", whatever that means.
Seth and Google are the biggest names in their respective field, and since this supposedly was produced by Google and they supposedly paid a lot for Seth, you'd think they would take care to do it properly.
It's a good speech, but the video presentation is almost worthy of Seth's own "this is broken" label. Somebody decided to put subtitles on the video. I am all for that, except I can't turn them off, and they are distracting. And Seth speaks really clearly. To make it worse, they are messed up. Special characters are replaced with a little diamond, making them more distracting and harder to read.
Further, when something is actually hard to hear, like a faint question from the crowd... there are no subtitles! And further yet, there are several mistakes. For example, one man says "and be ebay'ed", and it's transcribed as "and be delayed". And Seths says "I'm a big fan", and it's transcribed as "have a big brand", whatever that means.
Seth and Google are the biggest names in their respective field, and since this supposedly was produced by Google and they supposedly paid a lot for Seth, you'd think they would take care to do it properly.
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