Anyone can be a Film Maker

Might this be the start of something new where film buffs pay good money to watch something created by the (real life) Gorillaz. I doubt it. One day, we could take advantage of them for financial gain.

Gorillaz single tomorrow, iTablet Wednesday. It should be an exciting week for us consumer whores.


- Posted from my iPhone

A Second Symbol

Here's another idea for a tattoo. Nothing special, just a combination of the World Transhumanist Association moniker combined with Darwin's classic illustration, the final step in the evolution is p-brane suggesting, over time, through technological and exponential evolution we may be able to become pandimensional beings.

Star Trails... Again

Unedited Star Trail. Fine JPEG's stacked using Dr. Russel Brown's famous Scripts for Bridge. Sadly I had to trade up from CS3 to CS4 to make this work... so I'm back to trial-using, poor-student status. Composed of 855 individual frames out of something like 2000 that I took in a single evening over Christmas Holidays. 

Star Trails

My first experimental star trail photograph after adjusting levels and curves. Composed of 147 shots. Three are missing because a plane flew through it.
f/5.6 at 15 second exposures. I plan on eventually cropping out the buildings in the foreground.

Hmmm...

Moon (2009)

Spoiler Alert!!

I just finished watching Duncan Jones' first movie: Moon.
The movie follows the story of an isolated engineer who works in the Helium mines on the far side of the moon. His work seems somewhat typical and our protagonist, Sam Bell, follows a very intense routine of taking a rover to mining vehicles and collecting the fruits of the operation's labor.

The film has a very unique set with tips of the hat to several other science fiction pieces. 

There are also quite a few themes; most notable of them include isolation, artificial intelligence and the ethics of practicing human cloning.


Although one may immediately think back to Kubrick's masterpiece 2001 as to how isolation in space and AI work. This film was a delightfully creative change from what has become a staple for almost 40 years.  The costarring Artificial Intelligence named Gerty (Voiced by Kevin Spacey) is as helpful as can be, and often repeats one of it's primary directives: "I'm only here to help you".  The helpful AI is actually a pretty functional plot device and helps the story progress.
The reversal occurs when we finally learn that Sam (Sam Rockwell) is a clone and that he's is part of a process which is ongoing. With this knowledge he begins to question the surrounding and actually learns from Gerty that he is a clone. He is also given a life expectancy of three years after witnessing recordings from previous missions.

At first it feels like the film will be a schizophrenic thriller a la Fight Club propagated by the theme of isolation, but it evolved to challenge concepts involved with human cloning. Essentially, Lunar - the company running the joint - wants a cheap employment base. They're also the furthest mine located from human civilization. With this trump card they've essentially farmed a population of employees all sharing the same back story, the same interests, the same projects (Sam has a model he works on, which was started before he got there), and even the same family which is long dead.

The clones are suspended in this state of ignorance by a conspiracy that the communications satellite is down.

However, things change once there are two clones on the base simultaneously.
Their teamwork is unique also as neither of them have ever communicated with another human being, only Gerty. When the Lunar company relizes the older Sam has crashed a rover, Gerty wakes up a new clone and a team from Earth is sent to repair the damaged equipment.
The new Sam disobeys Gerty's insistence on not leaving the base and finds the wreck with the old Sam still alive. He brings him back.

As the old Sam gets older and older his health diminishes and the pair decide to leave him in the wreck for the rescue crew to find. At the same time the new Sam convinces Gerty to wake a new clone up.
The new Sam leaves the clone, and reboots Gerty erasing the memory banks and leaves for Earth after he reprograms a mobilized piece of mining equipment to collide with one of the communications jamming towers.
The story ends with everything on the Lunar base being as it was at the onset of the film and radio transmissions over the image of the shuttle carrying the new Sam returning to Earth.

This is an amazing movie which evokes several concepts of the perils of our times, the foremost being energy management on Earth and how far we will go to maintain it. It is also dark in illuminating how we collectively view human life and how a company - a company evidently managing all the planets energy - can so easily make this sacrifice.

The imagery of the dark side of the moon and a lunar base usually containing all but one astronaut is accompanied by a chilling score by Clint Mansell. A truly remarkable first film.

If you live in Toronto and want to view it on BD, good luck because it has literally sold out EVERYWHERE. This just shows you what a meager budget of $5 million can achieve.

NK Remote vs. Nikon's built in Intervalometer

Time Lapse. It's a subject of much interest for me and others. Including my Australian brother who was having some difficulty with the integrated D300 intervalometer last night while shooting some star trails.
Essentially he would like to take 30 second exposures, one sequentially following the other for a duration of one hour. Let's use this example as our benchmark to compare how the two different tools mentioned in the title stack up against eachother and the workflow required. Let's begin...

D300 Intervalometer: 
1) Go into the shooting menu, select interval shooting and select a period between intervals
2) Select a number of intervals
3) Now is where it gets tricky. The camera software will factor in the time it takes to take the exposure against the time you've preselected between shots. I was shooting full manual with a fully open aperture and 30 second expose time. As you can see on the left column when I select 1 second intervals, the number of intervals decrease at a more rapid rate. Over the course of one 30" exposure it goes from 999 to 966.

Instead, choose the approximate time between exposures as the interval time as demonstrated in the right column. This results in going from 999 to 997. The following shot not pictured shows 996 remaining intervals. The varying speed likely relates to noise reduction or the amount of time writing the file to the disk.
Note: editing the number of shots per interval results in the camera taking immediate sequences as fast as possible in the span of a single interval. This is really only useful when you're bracketing exposures because the time between shots is biased a great deal.

NKRemote

The other tool available is a software solution. Albeit this requires having a computer in the field, but laptops are the best selling machines in the market. They also have batteries which will usually last an hour or so.
1) Connect the camera.
2) Go to Camera -> Time Lapse
3) Set up the number of intervals and the time between each interval.

Using this method the software will report that it's 'running late', but it will take the full number of programed shots.


Conclusive Remarks:
Using the integrated intervalometer you can do most of you need while working in the field, but you're limited in the way that you can't rely on how long your project will take. The camera changes this based on:

• How long the exposure will take
• How long it will take to write to the disk.
  

This essentially means shooting in Av mode you can't rely on how much time you have before you have to 'restart' your sequence.

With NKRemote you have a little more control over how long the project will take which works a great deal better when your project is taking more time, or occurring in varying light (ex: Sunset) but of course you'll need extension cords, batteries, and a weatherproof PC in the field.

Floating Xbox

This is what I've been working on. I've suspended all the components of an Xbox 360 equally spaced and balanced. My muse for this project was David Rokeby's recent project displayed in the lobby of the Brookfield Center on Bay street.

I had the luxury of witnessing the installation when I was traveling to one of the early-morning Rogers Plus locations in the summer.
The photograph is the result of hanging the elements with a velour curtain as the backdrop. I illuminated it with one Ellipsoidal lighting instrument with a green gel.
I also used a couple other lights on the floor, also gelled.

This is the result of an HDRI experiment which is not going exactly as I'd like, even though there is some additional contrast provided I've defiantly noticed there is a enormous lack of depth because of the lack of color reflecting off the surface.
The inspiration for the color was from the Xbox marketing campaign which has endured since the beginning of the franchise.

This project took a great deal of effort to design and actually set-up and so I likely wont be immediately repeating it, but I've learned a great deal and the next time I do something similar I will be more conscious of the lighting I use.

The final image is something of my own creation. I placed a small green LED behind the power button of the Xbox, kept it low profile and top-lit with a table lamp I use alot for table top photography. The button is somewhat concave and that's what caused the dark shadow on the front.

State of the Union

Sometimes I get frustrated with the TTC. Unions are destroying this country. But then I tell myself $22.50/hour in 2010 for a job driving offers zero job security. This job will be automated soon enough.

Enjoy your 5 minutes.


- Posted from my iPhone

Lance's T-Shirt

I just noticed something in Pulp Fiction which has no-doubt been noticed by countless others.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that Tarantino included this shirt in the wardrobe of Lance, the drug dealer aptly played by Eric Stoltz. What's more neat is that Tarantino was quoted last fall showing interest in the racing genre as a full length picture. Which he sort of did with Death Proof in twenty odd-seven.

Would it not have been super if he challenged the story of Speed Racer instead? When that early trailer came out I was sure there would be some neat brain-Mach 5 interface included in the plot. But oh no. Had to stay PG...
Joel Silver learns from his mistakes though...

High Dynamic Ranger

I keep experimenting with HDR. I like having more control over contrast in a photo beyond simply applying curves and levels. This is image was created from three images I took nearly a year ago facing out of my friends balcony near the York University campus facing North West.
It's pretty difficult to allign images outside of the automatic feature when creating HDR shots like this one. At the time I didn't have a tripod and was instead focused on merely capturing the 'god rays', so a fair portion of the image was unusable after the conversion.
After oodles of brushing and spot healing this is what I came out with. I'm still an uber beginner, but I like sharing.

Animal Observation and Technology

In the centuries past, the development of spherical optics and gallelios astronomical telescope being repurposed as a terrestrial sighting device allowed the development of bird watching and the observation of land mammals.

Photography and its advent inspired the formation of some classical institutions devoted to the act of observation, for instance National Geographic.

Then we invented the submersible. And King James Cameron conquered this technology observing more and more of the wonders hidden hundereds of meters below the surface.

I would like to postulate on one concept available for our future. What if we identify life on other worlds? For instance, what if we find species of animals living in the clouds of Jupiter? Or live below the frozen oceans of Europa? Should we then send teams of either men or remotely operated machine to investigate and record these findings? Would that be the extension of what we're cataloging today?

No! You can't has cheeseburger!

Juxtaposing animal protection and animal exploitation with a crowd that thinks both groups are equally valid.
Part one of eventual hipster-dissection series.

Samsung's OLED ID card

Samsung via Engadget has this interesting video of an ID card which includes a paper-thin OLED display.
In the example the display is used to show a rotating model of the card holders noggin.
It's a little freaky, but I'll be excited to have one once my current passport expires.

Liquid Crystal Tie

This is a project I took the time to design. The principle is simple: Track the owner with a GPRS high-speed radio. The radio tracks location and compares this data to a database built and maintained by an advertising agency.
The agency updates the database using a system of auctions that occur constantly where advertisers compete for the ad-space on the users.
The company then uploads images to the memory on the ties micro controller.
The user then recieves a big fat paycheque for the work they've done.

Potential problems: users may not like having a company which is hardly impartial knowing where they are constantly, however I imagine it will be more acceptable once CCTV in urban areas really starts to ramp up.

Of course the user shouldn't be entitled to a cheque when they just wear the device around their home, so location tracking is a necessity.

Finally, the user could also drop the tie off in a downtown dumpster and rake in the dough so a measure will have to be initiated where every week or so the device needs to communicate with the users personal computer to receive an 'update' that tracks the user as active.

The potential for this kind of marketing scheme is massive and once flexible OLED technology becomes commercially available I hope this will become more realistic. It will also afford the ability to have, say, a full color display surrounding a simple t-shirt, effectively turning our troubled, fashion-centric youth into cheap, reliable full-motion billboards. As it is now, the technology is cumbersome and somewhat delicate, but this will not be the case for much longer.

Google Phone. Yay.

Could I be anymore sarcastic?

 

The worst kept secret - not that Google is one for secrets anways - the Google Phone was revealed at a press event. The Nexus One was finally 'officially released' alongside some new Android stuff. Shareholders are happy, and I guess that's all that matters. Thanks Brian Miller for posting this faboulous still of the keynote.

A long ways away from Jobs in May 2006 - sigh - Nostalgia.