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.

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 first glance one might think the perkier shot on the right is from the M9. No, to paraphrase the bike rental shop owner,

"What the hell are you kids doing?"

"That's it, you two pixies outta here, through the door or out the window."

In lower light the Sigma exhibits a great deal of color distortion. Neither camera meets current expectations for low-light performance, with the M9 topping out at a grainy 2500 and the Sigma at an unusable 3200. Leica reps referred to the high-iso noise as a “desirable quality like a stylized film grain.”

Here, the Sigma exhibits a desirable quality, its stylized Vulcan green-blooded vignetting. The Sigma is prone it seems, to color abberations that offers a distinctively different look.

So is the M9 a slam-dunk? I often found myself wanting a live-view function that the M9 lacks. The original rangefinder framing method arose out of a technical solution using the technology available at the time, not as a shooting style, and there is very little reason to avoid offering it beyond a basic lack of engineering and technical capability that has arisen from the fact the Leica doesn’t own an imaging sensor chip fab, and has to utilize reference designs from Kodak. a rangefinder is fine with me if shooting from eye-level, and moot if doing street roaming spray-and-pray shots, but that’s no reason not to want it if you’d like it for framing odd-angle shots.

Although there were a few cracks in the Leica facade, there was no arguing that the build and optical qualities of the Leica lenses are beyond compare. I have $1000+ Canon glass that despite their pedigree suffer from a myriad of artifacts. The 24-105mm Canon that came with the 5D Mark II suffers from such severe chromatic aberration that I’ve taken to referring to it as the “rainbow lens.” The Sigma lens is hard to judge in relation to the sensor’s quirks:

This DP1s shot of Ed and Tim doing their best Reservoir Dogs imitation shows that in full sunlight at its lowest ISO, the Sigma cannot avoid discoloration artifacts. Will I buy instead the Leica M9? I think I’d rather wait to see what the M10 might someday have to offer. In the meantime, a M4/3rds body with a M-system lens adapter will allow for many of the benefits of using Leica lenses while also having a more up-to-date shooting technology behind the glass.

Update: Oh, who am I kidding, like a carrot dangled just beyond reach, I’d leap at the chance to own the M9 if I could, and you know how I love playing with HDRs, the Leica here shows off a built in 1 second delay before taking up to nine shots with one-stop or faster bracketing.

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.

Making your own part has a few advantages over a manufactured part. An engineer would have to take into consideration mold release draft, inserts, bosses, wall thickness, sink marks, ejector pin locations, and sundry other things critical to plastic injection molding. I, on the other hand, could just say “that looks about right” and see if it all works out down the trail. I did add as many fillets as possible so that flex-induced stresses wouldn’t find a sharp corner where the part might snap.

I printed the piece on an Eden 3D printer, and purchased a nylon 1/4-20 screw to attach to the camera (because I knew it would be easy to cut nylon to the desired length) and was ready to ride.

The Canon S90′s movie mode isn’t quite high def like the S95, but it had the advantage of already being in my bike bag. I think pretty much any lightweight camera would work here.

A few weeks ago I rounded a corner on my mountain bike in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu, and came face to face with a mountain lion. My first thought was that I knew it could take me down. My second reaction was to reach for the camera…in the bag…where is it? The lion fleeted into the chaparral, so I instinctively dropped my bike and began looking for it hoping to take the picture that would prove this remarkable sight. It didn’t take me too long to realize that this was a fairly stupid tack. That’s when I realized I’d need a camera that could take good stills and run for long video recordings, one that was easy to access at a moment’s notice, as well as let me concentrate on escaping alive.

The mount survived the first test ride unscathed, and although the lion will probably never make an onscreen appearance, the Chumash spirits rewarded my attempt with this parting shot of the moonrise over their ancient, yet remarkably resilient village:

I’ll trickle more in as time permits.

If this might be true, our assessment of grandeur may be based in an innate understanding of safe-ground, of the stability of soil. Not being a geologist, I haven’t a detailed understanding of “mass-wasting”, but I know when something doesn’t look safe to walk on.

The point of all this is to note that the eroding soil on a hill will settle at an “angle of repose” and by slightly manipulating the scale of an image we might be able to suggest with visual cues that an image is somewhat higher in the mundane-to-spectatcular scale.

So here’s the 110% solution: by scaling an image in the vertical axis by 10%, we can suggest more grandeur while not distorting the height-to-width ratio so much that another visual cue of “warped” is not offered.

The above mendacity of Rushmore, is actually an HDR taken during the same session as the following mundanity, with the 110% solution applied.

Obviously it’s also been forged with the HDR toolkit… the image sledgehammer and the Mordor filter, but try the 110% solution on any picture, every once in a blue moon, to see what effect you get.

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.

If you are going to pose the figure as in a statue (instead of adding ball and socket joints) you might luck out and find that an animation bone structure has been captured along with the geometry. If not, a quick trip through Maya is all that’s needed to add some form and deformation.

You don’t need to be very careful, as you are only posing and not trying to make a rig worthy of a Dreamworks cartoon.

I started working for a “Join me and we will rule the galaxy as father and son” pose, but I realized in the end that Ganondorf has a really really fat bottom. At this point I decided a traditional bust might be a better approach.

Using a reference image search can help determine what needs to be done, and sometimes, as is the case with Zelda, the textures might be attached to the captured model, and can be used to discover the form and location of missing details.

Adding missing detail is a matter of smooth dividing, subdividing, remodeling, or sculpting from scratch. It’s all your discretion, how much time you want to spend.

For sculpting the more organic features, Zbrush is the best choice.

There’s a lot of armor detail that still needs to be added, but my son fell asleep long before this lesson ended, so I’ll go ahead and send it as-is to the Objet printer. As a final step, the entire assembly is loaded into a voxel program called Freeform, which ensures a water-tight model that can be sent to the 3D printer without data repair issues.

UPDATE: There he is, ready to clean and paint.