In order to “hand-hold” a time-lapse, I wrote a Processing program which allowed me to draw the camera move on top of a Sigma 8mm 180 degree image, then fire the shots with a Celestron ALT/AZM mount holding a Canon 5D Mark II. This is really just a buggy proof of concept, and as usual I have no free time to pursue it further.
Just a long exposure of some bugs in cornfield in Plano Ill.
Russell Brown, Kerrick James, Ron York and I made a fast dash through the snow to the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley between the crushing load of other projects. My goal was to try out a Pentax K-5′s astrophotography features under the moonless skies of mid January. In the film era, shots like these would have taken hours. In the digital age, they’d have needed an expensive tracking mount and a lot more time and patience. Thanks to this new Astrotracer function in the Pentax GPS, such shots as these can be shot from your backyard with nothing more than a standard K-5 kit.
My OCC unit’s astro-stacking feature was a little buggy and needs to be rewritten, so this is a single 30-second exposure using Pentax’s Astrotracer function at 56K iso.
A mystery for any astronomy experts, what is the streaking object passing the nebula over the 30-second time period? It has a faint twin following along.
I fired off a few shots of the M31 galaxy, which would have been much cleaner had the stacking controller worked. It’s my fault, I need to rework the software.
Sunrise on the playa was very dream-like.
I took the opportunity to test a new Canon 45mm tilt-shift, which allowed a deep range of focus.
Using a Canon 400mm & a 5D with the bandpass filter removed, I caught Russell using his spacesuit for some CS6 marketing shots.
Finally I shot one of the strange moving rocks that dot the Playa. Sadly, people have begun to remove the magical rocks, apparently unaware of the curse associated with taking them.
We’ve been playing around with computational photography. Our plan is to be able to shade a diffusely lit photographed subject after the fact using depth information from a 3D camera. I believe Sony refers to this subject as “rotomation.” In this happy accident, computed color info is added to whatever is already present in the same location so edge areas will accumulate more light than surfaces closer to perpendicular to the camera viewpoint, giving an x-ray like appearance using only rays from the rest of the alphabet.
Our paths crossed only a handful of times, and just one of us ever took notice. In 1977, my middle school friend Joe’s father took us to his new job, at a company in Santa Clara where the boss had a secret panel that opened up into his office. When I worked as a modeler on Rat crew and Toy Story 3, our lives again came into proximity, where it was suggested that I endeavor to avoid any contact. Better safe than sorry! If any question Steve’s real significance in the development of the personal computer, remember that Edison didn’t invent the filament nor the vacuum tube, he just put them together in a way that changed culture.
This early Apple ad, which I reprint because I can’t find it elsewhere online, says a lot. What advertising agency would layout something that is impenetrable, with so much text, so many fonts, five pictures of a man and a mere glance at the machine? This is a Steve diatribe that breaks all the rules because the rules are not his rules, and I love it!
At the prestidigitatious Brooks Institute of Photography recently, I had a chance to compare the Sigma DP1s and the Leica M9, low-end and high-end rangefinder alternative cameras with relatively large image sensors, in a mano-a-mano street battle amidst the edgy slums of coastal Santa Barbara. I didn’t expect the sub-$1000 Sigma to topple the Leica, although I thought it might be interesting to see how well it held against $10,000 worth of precision German engineering.
It all started with a lion. Not a bobcat, no this was a real John Mellencamp type of beast. But more about that later. In desperate need to have a sports cam, I’m saving my pennies for a 3D GoPro Hero, but at $800 it will be a few weeks. What I can afford is the GoPro chest harness at $40, but I needed a camera to go with it, and the Canon S90 seemed like the likeliest candidate.
The GoPro chest harness features a clip-on bracket meant to attach to their weather resistant camera housing. I measured the bracket using digital calipers and using Pro/Engineer, a 3D solid modeling program, I roughed out an attachment that would mate the GoPro to the tripod point on the Canon.
Sean Young recently posted some candid shots she took while making Blade Runner. Fun stuff, then I thought “I must have hundreds of polaroids taken on the sets of Harry Potter, Matrix, Star Trek, Polar Express, &, as Gilligan puts it “and the rest.”" I should post a few. Well now I have to scan them. Meanwhile enjoy this shot of Director Chris Columbus (Goonies! Yay!) discussing early VFX work with stop motion impresario Ray Harryhausen.
I’ll trickle more in as time permits.
What makes a mountain spectacular? Here’s my hypothesis (with apologies, literally: less than a thesis.) Although one might speak of one’s personal understanding of how much geological forces come into play in making a hill into a spectacle, it’s my experience that much of what we take as our own thoughts and conceits are possibly an evolved reaction. Taken from Psychology Today, “One of the liveliest discussions today concerns the influence of our evolutionary past on our present-day biology and behavior.”
‘ever loved a game so much, you’d buy any toys you stumble upon? Nine times out of ten (made up statistic) there is nothing available, and if there ever is, it’ll come out long after you are DONE with the game.
After spending a day at Comic-con looking for Pikmin toys for my seven-year-old, I decided to instill in him the notion that you don’t need to wait for those toy company marketing wizards to realize something is worth producing, you can take matters into your own hands.
First stop: Spriters Resource where the wonk gods have outlined many ways to capture 3D game model data from roms or disk images. There are many programs that will intercept the 3D data inside your graphics card and export a usable model.
“Usable” might be stretching it a little, game models are usually very efficient low-polygon affairs that allow real-time animation with less than renderfarm levels of computing power. I’ll outline some of the process required to refine the data to the level of detail needed for an action figure.
