Autumn, dusk, rain

Autumn, dusk, rain.


Once again I owe much to the high sensitivity and the image stabilization of modern digital cameras, the light was very low indeed, almost night.
I have emulated the darkness in the image with a little manipulation. The camera of course tends to make all pictures neutral no matter the light level.

Dayu said:
amazing to think one has the technology today to capture a visual of a streamlet (a droplet streaming?) of rain falling...

eolake said...
Interestingly, though, I only saw the drops on the lamp post after the fact. It was getting dark very rapidly, so I was working very fast, and I was really photographing the tree with the red house behind it. (The dusk light was very red at the point.) It was only the last images I took that I thought to focus on the post instead of the tree, and I finally judged that to be the superior image.
Below is an earlier version. You'll see that in the top image I zoomed in closer also. And I dampened some of the brigher parts of the background in the computer.


I don't think I would have gotten to the final version at all if I'd been shooting film. Even if I could have gotten myself to use that much film that rapidly, it is still a matter of running out of film every 36 pictures, and then having to get it developed and scanned.

Whigfield

Another Danish artist: Whigfield.
She was the first non-UK artist ever to place at number 1 on UK music charts.

It's a funny thing: like a contemporary song, Barbie Girl, Saturday Night is as "plastic pop" as music comes, but I still really like it (both of them). I have not listened to radio since I was a kid, but back in 1994 (good grief how time flies) a store was playing Saturday Night as I passed, and it grabbed me immediately, and I still really like it.

It is one of life's great mysteries to me: what is it about one song (or painting or whatever) that makes it so different from other ones that it just grabs people?

Gold and holograms

This must be the epitome of good taste: a coin pendant which has a hologram and is gold-plated!

My goodness, listen to the sales patter... the speed, the enthusiasm, the intensity... "...this is an heirloom..." I wonder, do these people really believe this stuff? Or are they that good at faking it? I am not sure which option is more amazing.

Marie-Anne

I don't often post nudes here, I have Domai for that. But I think this one is pretty much discreet enough to be all-audience, and I love the other pictorial aspects of it: the background, the hair, the light, and the wonderfully intense facial expression.
[Model: Marie-Anne, photo: Philippe Carly]

Symbols

A photo of mine. A little "abstractized" by limiting the number of colors in the file.
Apart from that, the photo is like the subject was found. The sign was on the ground, and there was sand and water on it, and the candy wrapper. (The candy user clearly did not follow instructions.)
I'm quite fond of this one.

Medium version (800x600):

Large version:

If you're curious, here is the original photo, with only a bit of contrast enhancement:

Giving less, sooner

Tim Ferris on early giving.
"Charity doesn’t work — empowerment does. The good news is that the latter depends on acting early and precisely, not lots of money."

A book project.

I'm reminded of the remarkable book The Soul Of Money.

Super-3D

Adobe's prototype super-3D. (French text, English video.)
I don't know if it'll ever be practical (that lens is awfully big), but it's kewl.

David Russel

Crop circle researcher David Russel is dead at 85.

How did he die? He crashed his microlight!
That's how I'd like to go at 85.
Especially if it was shot down by a jealous husband.
---
RonC comments:
Roger McGough, the Liverpool poet, offers some other suggestions in his poem 'Let Me Die a Young Man's Death' -

Let me die a young man's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holy water death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an all night party

Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns
burst in and give me a short back and insides

Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a young man's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death.

One of the few 'laugh out loud - and then notice that you are thinking harder about what was said' poets, perhaps ?

But for a photographer like Eolake, maybe a poem taken from the Barkers' pix 'n poems collection 'Portraits of Poets', where Roger McGough's photograph is accompanied by his poem The Survivor:

Everday
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
violence, terrorism, war,
the end of the world.

It helps
keep my mind off things.

One Laptop Per Child

The XO Laptop is finally out.
It's so cool. I want one.
(I realize I have to donate one also and have an American friend buy it for me. That's all right.)

There's so many excellent things about it. Like: it runs on 2 watts? Wow.
And the nice usability of the screen without backlight is great. I wasted my money buying an AlphaSmart Dana a couple of years ago. The keyboard was great, but the contrast of the screen was so low that it was pretty much unusable. Very disappointing. (OK, sadly for my cafe-writing ambitions, the XO does not have a good keyboard. Still waiting for the superior portable writing machine.) (Don't say pen and paper, I need to be able to read it too.)

Muppet Show: slinkies dancing "Java"

I've noticed that much of the genius of the muppets are the myriad little ways the puppeteers make the puppets come alive. One example I just noticed was that when one muppet accidentally came too close to another one in an otherwise dialogue-driven scene, the other muppet flinched. It did not add anything to the plot or the comedy, but it did help the character seem alive. A puppeteer has to be really invested in a character to make stuff like that happen in real time.*

Another example is how the slinky dancers in the clip below look down just by the puppeteer turning the tubes a little.

Ginger bigotism

Apparently there's a sizable subset of the population, particularly here in the UK, who are strongly antipathetic towards "ginger" people, meaning those with red hair, light skin, and freckles.

I've seen hints in TV shows before, and today I looked it up after viewing the South Park episode about it (in season nine). And it's real. I talked to the local shop clerk, and he says his daughter is like that. Where she works she will let another employee take the till if a ginger customer comes in. If too many ginger people are on TV, she will change the channel.

Even one of the South Park creators admits to being freaked out by them.

Isn't it bizarre? It's just a color, like blue eyes. And for me, I find real red hair to be just gorgeous, particularly on girls.

I have to say it again: isn't it bizarre? Isn't there a limit to how irrational you'll allow yourself to be?

scuba steve adds:
I've heard about it, and it's bizarre. It doesn't seem to really exist outside of the UK, though. A red haired kid in the U.S. might get teased a bit, simply because it's rare, but that's about it.
The kind of prejudice that appears to exist in the UK is definitely very weird.
I, too, find red-haired women very attractive.
BBC article
2nd BBC article

Of course, one problem is that you can't suppress things like that. The more attention you put on it, the worse it's likely to get.

Datamancer Aviator keyboard

The keyboard in these pictures is mine, I'll get it next week.
I'm speaking literally, this specific one is mine, it's the first Mac keyboard he has made.

Ray said...
Those keys look like ones on an old 1948 Underwood manual typewriter that I had reconditioned once, and recently donated to a pair of nice gals who run a shop where they hold monthly writing group meetings, using old typewriters. I also gave them an old Remington from the fifties, and
the girls assure me they have a good home and are much appreciated.

eolake said...
Yes, those old typewriters are beautiful.

(And clearly these keys are designed to be reminiscent of them.)

I have a fondness for mechanical objects from the early 20th.

I am considering buying a typewriter like that for decoration. I don't need to restore it, but I'd like it to look nice, so the question is: how do you clean a thing like that?

Another Danish invention: the amazing Hansen "typing ball".

... The web is amazing. A decade ago, if I had suddenly developed a (no doubt temporary) interest in vintage typewriters, I would have had to go to the library and see if they had any books about them, and they probably wouldn't have. Today I can google it in ten seconds and find wonderfully informative sites like typewriter.be. (I love its simple and handsome design too.)