Interesting Duracell Ad

This is an interesting television commercial featuring thousands of rendered bunnies. The animation was directed by French talent Pleix, who has established himself by directing videos for both Basement Jaxx and Groove Armada.

Something that bugs me...

I guess this is a rant combined with a lesson.

The Rant: Social Networking websites are really excellent tools for exposing talent. Both showing off and being seen, they're really quite ground breaking. Having been involved in a couple of these communities I've got a couple hang ups. I feel like I'm not taking advantage of one of the key features - whore your creations out to different groups. I'm not sure if its something to criticize in other users: submitting a photo or video to 50+ groups to get 40 views. Perhaps it's the opposite: I'm not talented enough to get alot of views. Also, I don't know many intellectuals to converse about my passions. In any case I choose to not whore out my photos like crazy.

The Lesson: I don't spread my photos to more than two, maybe three groups because it reminds me why I do what I do. I take photos because it's something that makes me happy. I enjoy the technical challenge more than the challenge of capturing an emotion.

I value creative dialogue, but I find that's very difficult to find on flickr. I don't know if it's a communal pretentious attitude or my expectations being projected.

I don't want to appear as though view counts matter to me, but I do yearn for educated, positive reinforcement.

 

Above: John + Overabundance of Thought

Tokyo Glow

This is an epic timelapse that I would hang myself for not reblogging.
tokyoglow-low from Nathan Johnston on Vimeo.

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...

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.

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.

Ghetto Stills

I've been on Flickr for years, but you can no longer link accounts and so here's reference to my old accounts. 

MorganSwarm

iPodamous



And now...

JDM HQ

This is 70 images on my D90 stitched together. I tried to edit the control points to optimize it, but I still have a couple things to focus on in the future:
1) The bright orange shelf over my desk is difficult to warp properly, some orange 'fuzz' surrounds it.
2) The closet door is considerably out of proportion more than the windows.
3) The light coming through makes a reflection pattern ( you can see it as those green waves across the book shelf)
4) Too much vignetting, avoid the cir. pol filter.