It’s 1938 on the rooftop of a downtown Los Angeles building, the owners of a penthouse apartment with a chewing gum view of the snowcapped San Gabriel mountains (very Wrigley,) closed the door and walked away. For seventy five years, the apartment sat empty. With downtime during a photo shoot setup, playfully examining the rooftop, I began turning door knobs. One opened….

The first indication that a bit of mystery was involved, the household appliances sat where they had been the last time they were used, the GE Refrigerating Machine keeping the leftovers cool, as our penthouse apartment dwellers looked down at the neon marquees announcing the premieres of Snow White, Gone With The Wind, The Wizard of Oz. The maid’s quarters offered easy access to the then exceedingly luxurious spoils of a machine that actually washed your clothes for you!

Looking at the bathroom, I realized that life back in time wouldn’t have seemed much different from today. Everybody poops.

Even the circuit breakers in a closet off of the maid’s room exuded coolosity:

It seems there might have been a spitting problem, as this sign on the sun deck evinces:

From the 1938 patent date, the air conditioning unit on the roof must have been the latest and greatest. Why would they leave?

Imagine this view at night, with the neon lit.

The Eastern Columbia department store would have made for convenient shopping, though today it stands as the finest example of Art Deco era architecture surviving in Los Angeles.

If our mysterious tenants needed an excuse to stay, this million-dollar view would have been worth, in those days, over seven hundred dollars!.

Although world war would effect the City of Angeles a few years later, requiring roof light black-outs during air-raid (tests), I think the pano view of the penthouse best explains the reasons for deserting this magical loft: the pipes that travel through the apartment walls reflect laws that arose in the depression era that required high-rise residences and hotels to retrofit fire sprinkler systems, and unfortunately the only way to make that happen was to seal off the rooftop apartment, and leave it alone for us to discover.

The Lytro is just a tiny bit uncomfortable in my hand. That’s why I 3D printed this slide-on hand grip prototype that makes it a but more ergonomic – meaning I’m a bit more likely to choose it next time I’m shooting.

Russel Brown finally put his Abe Lincoln beard to good use, dressing as Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter at San Diego Comic-con. Guardian UK link. He even made the papers as far away as England. My time was spent looking for photographic accessories with a nerd bent at the flea-market in the main hall. As Ansel Adams said, don’t just take photos of weird people, make photos of weird people. My search for this year’s comic-con oddities elicited this Star Wars retro camera, which I put to good use after the con, using it to ruin a vacation’s worth of photos; you see, this special camera overlays the ghost of Star Wars episode 1 cast members on each photo one takes.

I think this is supposed to be a rendition of Luke Skywalker’s binocs used to hunt for the missing R2 unit in A New Hope. As a crew-member of the Star Wars films myself, I was lucky enough to hold in my begloved hands the original prop, which appears to be a Vietnam War era military surveillance ranging device.

But agh, the results speak for themselves, each and every picture had a bizarre lomo effect that grew on me, and I now treasure the resulting ruination. Here’s Jar Jar on the deck of an aircraft carrier for some reason:

Then a quick photographer grabs a shot of Qui-gon preparing to decimate a hoard of tourists:

Ah, but the ghost of Darth Maul warps to his hide-out in Bryce Canyon National Park, his body reassembled in spirit form for some reason:

Liam Neason appears to do battle at the Grand Canyon, for some reason:

Then baby Anakin returns in spirit form to save the day. I guess he’s a ghost now too:

Industrial Light and Magic, with its sea of midichlorian fueled interns, could not have done a better job than this. On a scale of one to five, five being awesome, I give the Tiger Star Wars Character Camera a thumbs-up.

We downloaded a 1080 resolution trailer from Apple’s Quicktime trailer site, then using Quicktime version 7, saved a few frames from a battle scene in the Hobbit, and ran it through a photogrammetry program from Russia called Agisoft – there’s a free trial available.

After a few hours of thinking, the program returned the best 3D model of the set that could be derived from the view available using the film frames. The amount and quality of the data that can be computed very much depends on the image quality and style of camera movement used in a particular scene. I noticed that Peter Jackson seemed to lean towards a pan and tilt from single point, meaning there is very little 3d-viewpoint change because the camera is rotating on the “nodal point” of the lens. He may have done this as a style choice, or it may have something to do with the movie being shot in 3D with two cameras. This type of movement is not useful as the photogrammetry algorithm depends on detecting parallax differences among frames, so a dolly or crane movment works best. The end result will also depend on whether the overall scene depicts multiple viewpoints of the set so that it can be filled in to cover as many directions as possible in the 3D model. Here’s the resulting Maya model render. I’ve removed a tree from this view for clarity.

The result might be used for constructing a game level, or 3D-printed to create a miniature scene. It might even be used by the film makers themselves in order to add effects that would interact with the physical dimensions of the set and match up perfectly with the original scene footage.

Crater Lake Oregon may be one of the most difficult to photograph spots in The West. (Ok, Rainbow Bridge is a bit higher on the list.) I was especially chagrined to see the lake surface mirror-smooth as I jetted past at 30K.

The crater itself was hollowed out when an entire mega-volcano exploded, collapsing on its own magma chamber, then erupting again to form a tiny baby volcano cinder cone in the middle of the lake.

I am amazed at the number of volcanic craters one can see passing over the North American northwest coast, as two continental plates interact, one sliding under the other, forcing magma up in a line about 100 miles from the coast.

A Cubify 3D printer arrived today. 3D printing is an old-fangled way of making real objects by printing computer models. Seriously, this is old tech, in fact the company that makes the Cubify has been making 3D printers for about 30 years. That’s one of the reasons I chose this device over a rep-rap, the Cubify is a solidly built applience that works minutes after removing it from the box. UPDATE: YMMV not every build is a sucess.

We purchased the Cubify to help with a new portrait lighting system we’re developing. To jump start the learning process, though, I decided to print all of those missing lens caps and tripod feet and other little bits of kit that have wandered away. My first print is of a cap for an old Russian screw-mount that I use with an E-P1. I bought the lens from the Lomography store in Soho. I fired up Pro/Engineer and minutes later had a over-built cap design that threw in everything I could think of as far as styling, including giant letters indicating the lens’ filter thread size for some reason. I just wanted to push the thing. I realize now that I’m going to have to relearn all of the industrial design and injection-mold engineering knowledge that I once used daily; thing like wall thicknesses, stress fillets, tolerances etc. If this is going to work.

The first attempt at building was a mess, I learned that even though I was certain that the Pro/e model was clean, the data MUST be run through the repair module in the Cubify software before printing. Once past that, the print process seemed rather routine, which I think is a good thing, 3D printing was once a black-art. The first successful print came out mis-sized, I’m not sure if there us some shrinkage factor that needs to be considered, (UPDATE: on my unit, a103% scale is required for every part) though for now I simply scaled the part and hit print once more and the result is a practically perfect replacement cap.

The default supplied material is neon green for some reason, so I’ll have to order a black print cartridge once I’ve got the process down.

Here are some new feet for my I printed for my tripod, the originals were sucked away in some quicksand-like mucky muck on the Vancouver set of Man of Steel. I could have ordered new ones from Manfrotto in Italy, but frankly I like these 3d printed ones more.

A continuous bead of transcontinental freight trains lace directly through the middle of the city of Plano Illinois, never dipping below 100KPH, in a seemingly contemptuous disregard for this tiny heartland town set in the cornfields of the midwest. Since we were committed to capturing reference data of the town for a 2013 superhero movie, a spontaneous idea sparked us to record this westbound with a 5D Mark II and feed into a hastily coded Processing program on the Macbook Air we used for archiving reference and texture photography. The result is a very, very megapixel image of an entire train with what is essentially a computational lens that is orthographic in the horizontal axis.

Turning off auto exposure settings would have fixed the sky brightening effect. Even though the scale hasn’t been corrected, this can be tweaked with some additional coding, though as-is there is a surprising charm in the result.

COMING SOON: Taking then concept another step, where we grab a snapshot of an entire Arizona main street.

Coming into DV from the north via highway 168 connecting from Big Pine, a long often snow-covered dirt road called Death Valley Rd. leads past abandoned mines and endless desert (well, fifty miles of it anyways) and along the way passes the massive Eureka sand dunes. So remote that the Navy uses it as a training ground for F18 fighters flying so low that you can see the pilots, so a visit to the dunes will likely also feature this gratis airshow.

Google maps won’t even let you choose the offshoot road that leads to the dunes, so you’ll have to look out for the turn off at 55 miles. With photographer Kerrick James guiding our convoy, we knew we were in good hands.

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Bring plenty of water, extra tires, and ideally more than one vehicle, and be aware summer temperatures hover around 120 degrees. Even this far from civilization, you still might find footprints, as a few others know this is one of California’s unsung treasures.

Russell suggested I might run some old raw images through Adobe Camera Raw V7 to check out the new shadow and highlight recovery features. I am impressed, here’s a before and after of the same image run through Aperture’s RAW converter and ACR in Photoshop CS6.

I’ve made it a new habit to load ALL photos, even JPEGS, as Camera Raw to take advantage of ACR’s tweaks, it has largely eliminated the need to run Nik Dfine and Nik Sharpener.

On the ground in Iceland recently, I was struck by how much ground/sky contrast predominated. The sky was Arctic-circle 24 hour sunlight, but the ground was mostly lava made even darker by the dim midnight sun. In trying to capture this with a Leica M8 (which has no bracketing abilities,) I decided to underexpose by two stops so as not to blow out the sky, and cross-fingers rely on ACR to pull up the dark ground in post. This combined with the “clarity” slider and some dust removal was all I needed to process them back in LA.

There’s a hawk’s nest hidden in there, ACR brings it out of the murk.

Today’s photo greeblie is a pen that has a glass fibre tip. It was found at Radio Shack, I bought this along with a what was later to be found pre-hardened bottle of cyanoacrylate. (By Grabthor’s hammer, what a value!) The tip is basically a bundle of hard strands that act as a sacrificial brush that carries debris off as it breaks away. It seems to be ideal for detailing the hard-to-reach areas around thumb grips or knobs.