To woot or not to woot? That is the question.

The woot

I love how this is a tablet + PC… two complete systems mashed together, with the PC capacity still letting you do SOME "serious stuff". Unfortunately, you can’t use all your normal Windows programs; only Metro apps, and anything released through the App Store.

I don’t like it when other tablet makers almost entirely ignore the ability to do serious stuff, for reasons like "people just want to consume now." Mankind doesn’t progress when important doors like that are shut for everyone, forcing an environment of consumption. Having options is good, and open doors are good. Every person who is doing "serious stuff" with a computer today started because there was an open door for that. (We often don’t *know* what we want, until we’ve come across an open door, and had the chance to try something.)

On to design, the keyboard cover looks great. It even has a trackpad, for mousing. The screen is pretty small, but it’s detailed enough that you can’t distinguish pixels on it. I also love how you can use a pen on the screen itself, since I use Photoshop. I hope the pen is eventually pressure-sensitive, so artists can actually do serious stuff on there. (Even kids who doodle will feel vastly more enabled if they can draw with pressure-sensitivity.)

The non-woot

- I have a lot of issues with Windows 8′s new Metro interface.
- You can’t run most regular Windows apps.
- It’s cheaper to get a full laptop, with complete PC capabilities. (The Surface will start at $500, for the low-end model.)

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Spring Cleaning

In other news…
Summer is almost here. In-between my other projects, I’ve been gradually updating the site, and trying out new layout stuff. The layout will be a little different when everything’s done. (Don’t worry, alphaila.com will indeed be finished, soon!)

For me, spring cleaning spans a little further than just my site, though… I post on forums allllll over the Glowing City (internet)… and, sometimes, I have to drop in and edit something, usually just because I’ve long since changed my views.

Today, my views grow and change faster than they ever have in my life. As such, I sometimes read something I said just a couple years ago, and it sounds like words coming out of someone else’s mouth. Some of those I update… not much, but things here and there.

But you may ask: aren’t most of these posts lost in the archives of internet history by now? Why do they matter?
Well, as I start to be talked about and quoted on the net, I prepare for the day when lots of people start looking up my stuff, and reposting things I’ve said.

The trouble is, when your entire livelihood is about constantly building and molding your views, it happens to really matter if you even believe in old statements or not. Some people don’t realize that… They think that if you’ve said something once, it must somehow apply forever. (It’s almost like, “Hey, if you said it, you should own up to it… umm, apparently forever.” And other flawed philosophies.) Others might be more thoughtful, at least if given the chance… but there’s no way for them to know which old posts of yours are still good, and which aren’t. So, I periodically lookup old posts of mine, and edit little things.

I plan to one day compile lots of stuff I’ve posted, and store it in some lost, buried press page somewhere, so I can mark it up with notes, and make things more clear… just in case anything stupid happens.

Today, I edited this, removing a part where I said I wished PC’s would decline, and face heavy competition. Now, if that ends up happening anyway, and a system like Mac or Linux becomes huge alongside Windows, well, good for them. After all, growing is what companies try to do, no? But I decided that I need not have the view that PC’s MUST face this competition, in order for problems to be addressed.

It’s more natural to first try to get all the companies behind PC’s to address the problems directly, themselves… which doesn’t require anything epic happening. The only time I would really desire for PC’s to decline is if some message somehow made perfectly clear to all the companies’ leaders what was going on, and why it was important to change, and they responded by doing nothing at all. If that happened, and it became clear that competition was the ONLY way they would fix their issues, then massive change would become quite valuable. For human progress, and the 85% of the world that lives in a developing country (!), it means everything to be on the fastest track possible. Unfortunately, us well-off westerners have almost zero concept of that, and most companies don’t yet seem aware of what their actions mean, and how much they could help.

I love the look of Rage. It’s an art museum. As such, I did a little ingame “photography”, to practice angles and composition, while admiring how far along games have come.

The location is the town Wellsprings. I wish I could take full credit, but the game’s art is such that it’s actually pretty hard to NOT get a usable shot.

Launch Gallery

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The Panoramas toward the end of the gallery (like this below) are multiple screenshots stitched together, with Photoshop’s ‘Photomerge’ tool. And a few of the shots – like the one below, again – are treated with tone-mapping; a photography trick often used in HDR photography. (HDR = High Dynamic Range, a technique for messing with lighting.) I tried photography-style HDR in-game, but didn’t do anything with it… just tone-mapping.

Rage doesn’t have gaming’s version of HDR, but HDR in games has a funny story to it. The term originated in photography/film, where it’s a technique used to help balance lighting. See, some scenes contain both light that’s too bright, and shadows that are too dark. Cameras can’t keep them both in balance at the same time… either the bright areas will be pure white, or the shadows will be pitch black. Like this:

This is because cameras have low dynamic range. They can only balance a limited range of light. Camera people spend lots of money to fight this, and try to get their scenes looking more like the human eye sees them… like this:

So, in photography/film, HDR helps you get the above. In games, HDR is completely different. Here, it’s used to change the brightness of everything when you suddenly walk into a brighter or darker area… and also add bloom (glow). A game doesn’t necessarily need HDR in order to have bloom, but the two can work together. In a lot of games (most?), bloom looks better when it’s built into the HDR.

What’s funny is that when games do the brightness transitions, they often do it somewhat heavily, looking like cameras… in other words, simulating LOW dynamic range.

There IS a reason that it still makes sense to call it HDR: before games had it, lighting was usually calculated on a fixed scale, like 0-255… where 0 meant black, and 255 meant white. But HDR extended the light further than that, allowing it to cover a higher range. And that range was dynamic, because the entire screen could slide from darker to brighter as you stepped in and out of, say, sunlight. So, it just happened to make sense to call it “High Dynamic Range”, by pure coincidence.

So, what to do? On one hand, games would never want to call it “Low Dynamic Range”, because that sounds like a step backward. If the average gamer ever saw a checkbox for “Low Dynamic Range”, they’d think it was to lower the detail.

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Another part of HDR is ”bloom”, which is an optional glow effect. Depending on which game we’re talking about, it doesn’t necessarily need HDR lighting in order to work, but it can be tied to it. In other words, you can set up a game so that any light that’s brighter than 255 (or any number) glows. In real-life, you only ever see bloom via lenses that are either junk quality, dirty, or equipped with special glow filters (like for weddings).

(By the way, Rage doesn’t have noticeable bloom, except around lights.)

Here’s bloom in the Unigine tech demo:

Today, less and less games are using heavy bloom (like Rage), and a lot more are making things look the way the human eye sees them. As far as regular brightness transitions, the human eye does that to SOME degree, but nothing extreme, like cameras.

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(Note: when I took the Rage screenshots, I also tried camera/film HDR, by taking 3 identical screenshots of the same thing, at different brightness levels… but I soon realized I was wasting my time. Blending the 3 shots is supposed to let you balance the lighting, but I realized: wait a minute… it’s not like there’s anything blown out in this scene to begin with, and I can certainly see into all the shadows. So, can skip the HDR step completely. For those wondering about tone-mapping – that optional surreal effect you always see in HDR photography – you can do that to a flat, already-balanced JPEG, and get the same result. The *HDR* part is just for recovering blown-out light, and dark shadows.)

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Now that you’ve seen what Rage looks like, here are some pre-rendered spectacles that used to blow my mind, to illustrate how far we’ve come:

Myst

    

 

Oddworld’s ingame cinematics

When I was about 12 (I’m 25 now), I used to wonder if games would reach this point in my lifetime.

    

    

To compare, here’s Rage again:

Last, here’s a timeline of a few 3D games, so you can see how they’ve progressed:

Doom (1993)

Mario 64 (1996)

Deus Ex (2000)

Quake 4 (2005)

Crysis (2007)

Well, I can’t hear you but brace yourself anyway… Mwahaha!!… MWAHAHA!!!… MWAAAAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!!!!

Ahem. Are you still there? No? Maybe? …………………………………………………… I’ll assume you said yes…

WELL!!! I don’t remember what I was even going to say.…… Oh wait. Now I do… Okay….. it was something about commas.

Do I mean commas like comets, sorta? No! I said COMMAS you idiot!! (Who is that guy, anyway?)
Commas like THIS:

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Actually, those look like water… or nails lying on the road……………………… <<<<And those look like ants walking…………

AAARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, COMMAS……………………………

I mean ants. Okay, wait…

FINE!!

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(Back in normal mode, because I have to show grammar stuff now.)

So!

For the past couple years, I’ve been at war with myself over how to use commas. I’ve noticed that written English has a few holes in it, and there are some areas where there isn’t just one correct way to do things. (It’s particularly a shame when you mix into the equation people who believe that whatever their English/writing teacher said is THE way, and other ways can’t exist.)

Among those who try to use commas WELL, there are two different schools of thought:

First is the “liberal” group, which doesn’t really care about using commas at EVERY half-worthy point, for different reasons. Depending on who it is, it might be because careful comma placement is too much to think about, or because heavy comma use makes sentences ugly/stuttered… or because the teacher simply said, “Do it like this.”

Then there’s the “comma nazi” group (me), who likes to use commas at every spot that can technically take one… because, since you CAN, not doing so feels, somehow, wrong.

Let’s examine the last part of that sentence:

Comma Nazi: …not doing so feels, somehow, wrong.
Liberal: …not doing so feels somehow wrong.

Other Examples

Comma Nazi: I don’t like that, either.
Liberal: I don’t like that either.

Comma Nazi: And, now, that’s better.
Liberal: And now that’s better.

Comma Nazi: This is a great, but flawed, movie.
Liberal: This is a great but flawed movie.

You might see the above other ways, too:
This is a great-but-flawed movie.
This is a great – but flawed – movie.

As “correct” as the nazi approach is, there’s often something better feeling about the liberal approach (at least to me)… and that in itself is a form of correctness. Besides, between one magazine or news article and the next, it’s anyone’s guess what comma method you’re going to see, so, it doesn’t make sense to give yourself a burning preference for one or the other. (…unless you like adding an element of annoyance to your reading.)

Here are all the comma methods I’ve seen out there:
- the heck is a comma anyway reading this sentence is easy enough right don’t judge me
- You can use them only when NEEDED I guess, but you don’t use them more than that necessarily.
- You can, of course, use them more often, but still leave out some lil’ tiny unimportant ones.
- You can also, perhaps, use them way more, sometimes even if it makes stuff, well, you know, harder to read.
- Nobody ACTUALLY uses this method, though it is, technically, the most correct… but, I mean, seriously, it’s annoying, hurts to read, and, realistically, won’t take you far.
- Some people use two dashes with no space as commas—as you see here.
- Some people use regular dashes as commas – as you see here.

So, for a while now (a few months?), I’ve been gradually dropping my very heavy comma use, and going for a method that sits somewhere between Nazi and Liberal. Instead of trying to write lines that are filled with the most technical correctness, I’m trying to figure out if I can just make sentences easier to read.

See, I think people who at least understand how to read commas hear the sentences differently in their heads… so, it’s important that they hear something good. An author’s tone doesn’t come through on paper, so commas are one of the top 1 or 2 things that you can DO to try to get some character across.
(Note: There’s still a scary amount of guesswork in understanding an author’s tone and actual emotions. What makes this okay is that, even if we aren’t perfectly on the mark, we can still build a very USABLE understanding of how the author might be speaking. But, in very personal contexts – like writing emails, or chatting online – this blindness to the actual emotions of the person writing can be absolutely and completely disastrous.)

For comma newbies, here’s a quick lesson on how to use commas, and how to “hear” them:

Sentences change direction.
This sentence is going left, and now it’s going right. First it’s coming, then it’s going. I like pizza, but I hate anchovies. I could eat, or save it for later.

Try that:

When you’re writing a sentence, it will change gears, just like driving a car. Try to feel the little pauses/hitches, and change gears there.
If you like horses, first you get on, then start riding. You just think first, then make a plan, and go for it. I liked tiny speakers, but then I got good ones, and now I’m in heaven.

Commas also help you list things.
I tend to run, walk, sit, and jog. I’ll need a tent, sleeping bag, clothes, and lots of other things. I met John there, saw Kate, waved at Tom, eventually bought some food, then went home.

That’s it!

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Closing note:

Various teachers/books will tell you to end your lists like this: “apples, oranges and bananas”… Notice there’s no comma between oranges and bananas. However, I personally recommend against leaving out that comma, because doing so creates a structural hole that will get you into trouble. Here’s an example I noticed once, when listing “color” with “black and white”:
I like old styles, silhouettes, color and black and white.
(or, with comma)
I like old styles, silhouettes, color, and black and white.

Hmm, there’s a Wikipedia article about this. (They call it serial comma vs. no comma.) They have some better examples:

To my parents, Ayn Rand and God. 
To my parents, Ayn Rand, and God.

and

They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid and a cook.
They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid, and a cook.

Here’s a concept for what I believe is coming next: computers that you use with your eyes and mouth. (Update: Turns out Google is working on computer glasses, but their take on this has some differences.) The screen covers your vision, like in a movie, and, as a courtesy, a light is projected onto your eyelids, to indicate your status. (Green when you’re computing, and nothing when you aren’t.) I’m still working on the right pattern, so it doesn’t look like glowing makeup.

One problem with projecting light into your eyes is that if you’re in the sun, for instance, you won’t be able to see dark regions of the screen. So, alternatively, this same eye-computing method could be done with glasses, if it turns out that companies can make this technology small enough. (These screens can block light, letting you see dark regions.)

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How it works

Your eyes are the mouse, and you can click on whatever you’re looking at. You click by making tiny clicking sounds with your mouth. Higher-pitched clicks could be left-clicks, and lower-pitched clicks could be right-clicks. (You can try it now, by looking at buttons on your screen, and making faint click sounds.) Dragging a selection, or drag-n-dropping files, would be done by making a “tsssss” sound, which lets go when you stop.

There would be two forward-facing cameras, like Microsoft’s Kinect, that watch your hands, analyze where you are, and decide where to project things in your vision. (For example, if there’s a table in front of you, the computer could show you a 3D hologram floating above it.)

There would be different ways to type:

• You could simply talk, after making a “talk-begin” sound with your mouth.
• You could air-type, with your hands, onto a virtual keyboard that you see floating in front of you. (However, that would be hard with a regular keyboard layout, so, it might need something different, like 2 donuts that surround each hand, following them, with a different method of reaching keys.)
• You could put both hands on any table/surface in front of you, and type on a virtual keyboard that you see laying out flat. (only you can see it, unless you opt to share some of your projections with those around you. A wireless signal would send your feed to others.)
• If you’re walking/jogging/etc, you could also put both hands on your stomach (in a “my belly’s full” gesture) and use that as a solid surface for typing on… as long as your eye-cams could see your hands.
• You could use your eyes to manually punch out keys on a virtual keyboard, that you see floating in front of you. (slower) This would be one of the newbie methods of typing.

(Here’s a 95% un-thought-out view of what you might see, using pieces of interface from a different article of mine.)

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You might wear a small box behind one ear, almost entirely hidden, with a tiny, see-through wire or tube running out to power the projectors/glasses. If a computer of that size couldn’t process high-quality 3d by then, the actual thinking might be done by a larger computer, elsewhere. (That computer would receive a wireless feed of everything you’re seeing… It would process it, decide where you should see buttons/windows/etc, then send the image back to your eyes.)

Using the projection method, there are probably different ways to get light into your eyes:

- If light-based projectors are never able to shine an image directly into the eyes, without ALSO requiring a lens somewhere, everyone might just have to wear tiny glasses.
- You might wear contact lenses, like these. (They need to figure out a way to make contacts non-annoying, or at least not have to be taken out more than once every 2 weeks, or something. I wore contacts for a while, and just went back to glasses.)
- You might wear glasses that hold the projectors… even if they’re just a strip over your eyebrows, with no lenses.
- Transparent tubes could protrude from the computer box, like seen in the first picture. They would need a kiss-proximity detector, which detects an approaching face (or your hand), and pulls back behind your ears… like when you touch a snail’s eyeballs.

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Some Uses…

- You could record video of anything you see, any time. There could be an ability to everything, but delete whatever you don’t soon specify as being “a memory”. So, every amazing moment you ever had could be saved and rewatched, without the fuzziness and inaccuracy of your memory. (However, I think everyone would need a little training on how to not ignore natural memory in favor of computer ones, or you might literally lose your ability to remember well.)

- Video games would be amazing. You could go outside, and see the game all around you, and walk through it. There could be games where you find yourself hiding from enemies that actually seem to be hunting you down in the real-life. In shooters, you’d see rockets flying across your actual street, and soldiers storming your neighbor’s house. You could get real exercise, running around and having fun. (Forget jogging.) You could play Capture The Flag with your friends, just by going outside, and telling the computer where to put the flags. (I believe all society would quickly get fit if there was a method of exercise as attractive as that.)

Update: Here’s a video by Google, showing some possible future uses for their computer glasses, Project Glass.
(This is all conceptual. None of this works yet, but they’ll surely have stuff like it in the final product.)

Alright, just shut up, everybody… I can explain this.

Before the model arrived for the final moon/sunglasses shoot, I had to test the lighting. Always, before any shoots involving people, I setup by shooting Suzy this unnamed doll.

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Vincent’s good friend, Mary Marzano, agreed to model for this shoot. She’s a model-model (takes classes and everything), and is building her portfolio. Since I too am in the market for adding to my photo-pool, I said we’d start by taking random portfolio shots indoors, so there’d be more than JUST the moon shots.

First, though, I had to test the indoor stuff, before she arrived. This was the first time I tried using a projector in photography (for lots of control over the lighting color).

While shooting this, there was a laptop beside me, where I loaded up a bunch of tabs on the internet, each with an image of a solid color. The projector shined the laptop’s screen onto the side of my face…

This is my snowsuit. 5 layers of protection.

That last one is my “Abe caught” face, from the Oddworld games:

(Oddworld was my biggest inspiration when I first started getting into computer graphics.)

I also had to check to make sure the sunglasses were dirty enough.
Check.

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Yay, Mary’s here!

See the giant gold reflector in the glasses? It’s bouncing some of the projector’s light back, from the left.

For this shot above, I took it to the workbench (Photoshop), drained some of the green out, and added some cloudiness.

If you’re wondering why the wintery look, I don’t know. It was COLD.
Mary brought a pile of accessories (hats, scarves, sweaters), I picked out the ones closest to the look I had in mind, got my mom’s fluffy jacket (above), and the sunglasses…

After the indoor stuff, it was time for the moon shots.

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Initial tests showed lousy sky reflection.

Also, what I’m doing differently here from the last glasses shoot is using the iPod Touch for most of the lighting. Getting good lighting with JUST the moon is more difficult than I have time for. And I just love iPod lighting.

Like with the first glasses shot I tried (with me on the car), she had to be lying down, in order to hold perfectly still. The shot is taken for 20 seconds, during which she can’t move.

Yes, my photography towel is also a football (soccer) towel, covered in world flags. The plan was just to remove that in Photoshop.
(Yes, I may be American, but I’ve become territorial about the word “football”, which was taken first by soccer at least 2 million years in advance. It should be called “Tackleball”, or something. It’s a sport that has absolutely nothing to do with feet, and, in fact, if anyone but the kicker kicks the ball, they’re penalized.)

I wanted something good-looking in the glasses reflection – the sky just wasn’t cutting it – so, I switched over to the iPod Touch. For each shot, I had 20 seconds to wave it around, to literally soak the picture in light.

I soon switched over to one of the specific angles I had in mind. I wanted to try a dramatic shot, which had to be reversed in Photoshop, then edited, to make this below:

The way I saw it in my head was a little more dull, with the hair. I pictured the hair flowing outward, but more… usual… like you see in the blue shot above. I’m happier with this above, however… and I didn’t originally plan on making it green. Sometimes, you get lucky, and bump into little ideas that you end up liking better.

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(unfinished)

Shooting in the dark is dark! I have to wave around my iPod Touch everywhere…
So, today, I went out and bought some Brinkmann Headlamps. I found a 2 pack online, for $10, and picked them up at The Home Depot. I really like them, so far! Next, I just need a macro lens…

Tonight, I started with our yard snails:

I love snails! (Yes, I don’t keep a garden.)
I’ve been learning that they’re the coolest little people…

This species of snail is called Helix Aspersa, or “garden snail”.

The headlamps can switch between white and red light! Therefore, they didn’t spend much time on my head, and ended up lighting the snails.

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I’ve observed that, quite unsurprisingly, people will attempt more, and reach for better, when they have better tools. See, I was planning to go out and use my iPod Touch for colored light, but it’s so dim, it only works on things that don’t move. (The camera’s exposure-time for each pic has to be very long, so, any movement results in a streak of blur.) So, I would have given up on trying to add any color to the snail shots, and just used white light + Photoshop. But, since I had the option of RED, I used it… and was very happy to.

The cutest thing… a little snail nom.

“For me? Oh, you’re too kind…”

This light!…
That evening, while I was gearing up, a neighbor dropped by to visit my mom. She commented on all my lights, and pulled out this little LED one above, which has a pen-like base, a bendable neck, and a laser pointer. I mentioned I was in the market for small lights, and asked if I could take it for a spin, to see if I wanted to order one for myself, on Amazon.

It’s really nice, and can clip onto your clothes. However, for shooting small things at night, you only need it for SOME shots, so, it would probably be better to keep it clipped to your side, for when you need it. Before settling on this, though, I’m going to try and see if I can find a similar light that can take a rechargeable AAA battery (easier to manage), and hopefully have a few photography-centric features.

The light is nice for hitting just the exact spot you want, like the snails’ eyes.

I love these headlamps, too. So much. The light can be tilted down, at any angle…

Unfortunately…

I think this shot is just using the headlamps, with the white one held above and behind.

I realized my breath was making fog, so, I tried huffing into some of the shots.

(More tools = reaching for better.)

And look at this arch that snails make. I didn’t know about this.

(Argh, my Lumix GH1 can’t handle low-light video, without terrible grain. I think this is ISO 1600, at which the image gets muddy.)

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This guy also showed up for the shoot:

By the way, I had some water out there, which accidentally got in the way of my camera. It may be hard to tell, but it’s half full. (or is it half empty? Hey, hey!)

We were out of milk, so, I went inside and got some Egg Nog, and did what photographers do.

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After that, I took a stroll around the yard, just to think about what else I could shoot before getting to the grass and tangerine shots that I wanted to finish.

…and, somehow, this happened:

Look at that thing!

Up until now, my life had been depraved of amazing bugs. I’d never seen anything like this in my life, at least in person… (not counting in cages. Well, okay, I don’t think of scorpions as bugs, and crane flies are considered scary, not amazing.)

I swear that it seems like all these fortunate coincidences happen almost every time I shoot… or at least a very, very decent number of times.

While I was trying to think of a shot, I literally almost walked over this guy, just sitting there, right in front of the garage. I ran inside to get a see-through cup, then came out and trapped it underneath… not that this lazy thing was in a hurry to go anywhere. After that, I could barely get it to turn around, by pressing the cup against it on all sides.

So, I setup shop next to it, throwing down a towel to lay on. Before I had a chance to pull out my iPod, and look up what type of bug it was, some of Vincent’s friends arrived, parking right next to me… and one of them told me what it was. A Jerusalem Cricket. (I really needed that tip… Imagine, I would have been doing net searches for “halp, giant orange cricket that doesn’t want to move”.)

After they left, I laid on my back, and looked up details about it. Apparently, Jerusalem Crickets are also known in California as Potato Bugs. Unfortunately, however, they are neither crickets, nor do they prioritize potatoes, nor are they from Jerusalem.

…

I think the reason he was just sitting there was because he was confused, trying to figure out who he was.

95% of my time shooting the cricket was spent trying to get it him to face the right direction, and not press himself against the glass.

Still, look at that thing!

Shortly after releasing the cricket, I somehow got caught up with snails again, and my battery died. (I need to order a spare. So far, every single night has ended with my battery dying.)

Day 5

Snails are just too much fun, and there are 10 million ways you can shoot them.

But, first, a note on slugs:

(This shot is all you’re getting, because I quickly went back to snails.)

1 – Slugs are either faster than snails, or just always in a hurry to get somewhere.
2 – They’re impossible to pick up, when you want to put them back where you’re trying to shoot them.
(There’s a special technique for rolling them upside-down, and getting their bottom-side to stick to your finger, but then they get dirt all over them.)

After a minute of shooting the above slug, I just let it scoot away, while the snails calmly waited their turn…

I huffed some breath into this one…
(The streaks coming off the eyes are real, but they look fake. Funny as it sounds, I should fake them, so they look real…)

I also swear that snails are blind… because they can’t see my finger right in front of their faces, so, they scoot forward, and bump their eyes into it.

This snail checks out another snail’s license plate…

Snails are cool. I often find them just sitting and relaxing, with their eyes and bodies only partially extended. When they do that, they look like they’re sitting in little recliners.

(This isn’t the best shot to see the recliners thing, but hey… shut up.)

“Reaching” is a snail’s maximum feat, so, it’s one of things you want to shoot. I still want to try to get a snail reaching over from one leaf to another, but I don’t think they can see.

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SO!
Tonight, I was also supposed to try to finish some of my shots from the previous nights. That was the plan, but, right in the middle of shooting the snails, the heavens sent a sea of FOG. >:(

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FINISH MY STUFF WHEN PHOTOGRAPHIC PARADISE DESCENDS AROUND ME???

Needless to say, the instant I realized the fog was getting thick, I stopped what I was doing, and took off to get my floodlight.

In euphoria. >:(

I started with the persimmon tree, in the backyard. I stood up a ladder, and clipped my floodlight onto it.

Same branch, different angle.

(By the way, I’ll post everything in order. I don’t usually post the photos in EXACT shot-to-shot order, but I do go in sequence of what I was shooting… so, like: snails >> cup >> cricket.)

Floodlight over Lake Grass.

Under the persimmon tree.

In case you’d wonder, I haven’t color-corrected these. The strong orange comes from the camera’s White Balance setting, and the floodlight is somewhat orange.

Short clip:

I liked all these weird little spider webs. Made me wonder what the spider’s idea here was. (Or maybe he’s just an artist.)

This is still right under the persimmon tree. For some reason, our back yard is divided from the rest of the property by this fence. It’s like its own little enclosure, perfect for keeping all the animals we don’t keep.

The persimmons look a little TOO ripe.
(This is a persimmon. They’re my mom’s favorite fruit.)

Our Deodar tree.
(I like that name they chose… “Deodar”. It’s almost as good as if they called it the Dario tree.)

Our backyard provides lots of entertainment. At times, it seems like it’s the central nexus of all the local wildlife. Depending on the time of year, we have occasional sightings of the following:
- (currently) A family of squirrels AND a family of rabbits. They both live in a woodpile by our shed (just to the camera’s right), and always go out and nom together. They’re out every day.
- The crows drop in daily, and compete with the squirrels/rabbits over backyard foraging territory. Every day, in late afternoon, the squirrels and crows take turns trying to intimidate each other, till one side backs off (usually the squirrels). The crows also get pecans from our giant pecan tree, and drop them onto our roof, or onto the street, trying break them open. They also just take nuts onto the roof, and pound them with their beaks, to get them open. (When they do that, we say the crows have opened up their workshop. It sounds like people knocking on our roof.)
- All manner of birds come and eat the persimmons every day, and fruits off various trees. (We don’t need all of it, so, we can share…)
- Gophers are the actual property owners. We need to get a cat.
- Occasional raccoons and opossums pass through, between their weekly ‘Night On The Trash’. The raccoons regularly clunk around on our roof.
- In the summer, scary orb weaver spiders build large, circular, perfectly architected webs between trees. Half the year, everyone in California walks with their arm extended forward, to absorb any webs. (Strangers may laugh, but we let them absorb the webs with their face.)
- Red-Tailed Hawks sit daily in the Deodar tree.
- Sometimes, at night, we also see (or hear) Great Horned Owls and Barn Owls.
- The local coyotes regularly start up a chorus of howling and barking excitedly, I think every time they catch a rabbit.

Right now is fall, so, the green half of the year is booting up. Seeing as all our landscaping money (and energy) is diverted into computers, we let our yards come and go with nature. (That means we don’t take care of it.) Half the year it’s gorgeous and natural-looking, and half the year it looks like a brown wasteland.

Our next-door neighbors have the nature thing even better. They put out a ton of bird-houses, so, in the spring, all you hear is hundred birds out there, all arguing over property lines.

A 2007 shot of one of our yard rabbits, named Greg:

This was the first thing I shot when getting out of my car, on the way home from buying my $800 18-200 Nikon lens. He was just waiting for me there, by the driveway, in perfectly challenging low-light (so I could try out the lens stabilization I had just gotten). Perfect.
(I brightened the pic in Photoshop.)

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Back to night-shooting:

This is Vincent’s room. I took this while he was practicing with a music-making program, Ableton. He said of this shot, “My music is so loud, you can see it coming out my window.”

Here’s Mom. While I was trying to get this tree right, she came out to bring me a burrito and warm milk with honey.

This is me, while I was showing Mom some stuff. This came out looking more like Mr. Macho, but I’m trying to do a monkey pose. Apparently, this is what monkeys do. One arm to pick my fleas, the other arm to scratch my… Onward!

My headlamp… It makes night-shooting so much easier.

The fog made the fence wet and shiny. There’s an idea for anyone shooting stuff even in a regular environment: get something wet, to bring out these highlights.

A full moon arrived, I had my new Lumix GH1. It’s time to boot up a little night-shooting project, and document it like an African safari.

I wrote about each shoot later that night.
No lions entered my yard.

Day 1

(I mean Night 1. Shut up.)

Here’s the first test of the sunglasses-lit-by-the-moon shot.

Argh, getting this shot right is going to be ROUGH!
To start, I did NOT buy the GH1 for its low-light capability… but I already knew that getting into this. Notice all the smudge/grain and lack of detail in this shot. This is what happens when you shoot in near total blackness, with only the light of the moon. A newer cam plus a prime lens would help a lot, but, with the gear I’ve GOT, I feel like a technician out there, walking around trying to overcome some difficult challenge.

That’s me in the shot, by the way. I’m still trying to decide who I want in the final one… (a girl, probably.)

(Yes, that’s the moon behind me. In my right hand, I have the camera remote. It’s just a single button that snaps pics.)

I may have to finish this shot next month, when the moon is full again, and I have some $4 chrome sunglasses (from Amazon), and maybe a cheap Prime lens. (Prime lenses are non-zooming, and super good for low-light. They have much larger than average iris openings, which let in much more light.)

Thanks to Vincent for letting me borrow his sunglasses, and helping operate the camera. We were out there for almost an hour, testing different angles, and trying to crack the code. Here he is, in one lighting test:

(Click images to see larger.)

No special effort needed here… just the usual clunking around with settings. Shots like this are easier on the camera, and we also have an iPhone 4 lighting everything up from from the right. (The light for its camera flash is just sitting in the ‘on’ position, and it stays on, like a flashlight. The battery was already low, and we reached zero in just a couple minutes.)

Quick note: You do NOT need a fancy camera to do night-shooting… just one with Manual controls (for shutter speed and aperture/F-stop). A more expensive camera just keeps the grain/noise down, but you can still fight that by putting your ISO setting as low as possible (like ISO 100).

There was a very thin haze across the sky, making the whole thing glow brighter than usual. It bounced the moonlight down from all angles, so, it was like being under a giant umbrella/softbox. Since it was thin enough, you could still see most of the stars, even though it doesn’t seem like it here. Very nice… but, overall, much better can easily be waited for, another month. If possible, wispy cirrus and cirrostratus clouds are much better looking. (Thank you, Google, for telling me what they’re called.)

By the way, the next great camera innovation: a hand-warmer… and a mini microwave for hot pockets. Lucky I had my home-sewn gauntlets, over my hands.

Day 2

Today, I watched as a great layer of altocumulus clouds rolled in for the night… (otherwise known as spotty-looking little popcorn ball clouds). But the sunglasses I was planned to order wouldn’t arrive until next week… so, I ran to the store, not caring that I didn’t have a good enough lens yet, and looked for two pairs I saw online. I just figured that if reason came back to me, I’d cancel my store trip, and get tacos instead…

But I am a defiant fool:

(This happens to be the last thing ice cream sees.)

Before I took the glasses out for the shoot, I had to have anything with two eyes try them on… Here’s Mom rocking them. But mom can rock anything.

You can see Mom making dinner. Her granola bars recipe (not shown) is spreading like a disease around here, and has become my staple breakfast. (I break it up into a bowl, with milk). They’re healthy, easy to make, and SO good.

[And now, after the shoot.]

The clouds delivered!

Absolutely gorgeous clouds rolled through… really fast, too. Perhaps too fast. (You can see their streaking motion, above. These were 60-second shots.)

(The “sun” in the background is a street light.)

To begin the night, Vincent and I went out to look for sunglasses, at the Everything $5 store. We stopped first to pickup some sub sandwiches, and drop off a car battery at Autozone. Well, right inside the entrance to Autozone, I nearly walked into a rack of sunglasses. Upon this rack was the pair of aviators you see above. ($13) It was one of the two pairs I was looking for. Perfect.

So, then we went to see if our big $5 store had the second style I wanted to try. They have a gargantuan collection of sunglasses – somewhere close to 200 pairs – but not the ones I wanted. Dang. (They had lots that were similar, just not chrome.) I like this store, though. It’s called “Everything $5″, and the first thing you’re greeted by outside is a rack of $8 clothes.

I ordered the 2nd pair of sunglasses on eBay, but it’s shipping from Hong Kong, and will take some weeks to get here. $7. Fingers crossed on how they turn out.

Day 3

More night-shooting! Alongside the shots that worked, I’ve included some fail-shots and test shots as well.

It has been raining, so, I went outside to peek at the sky, and see if there was any cloud/moon goodness going on. There wasn’t (all cloudy), so, I started looking around for other stuff to shoot, and immediately noticed this baseball… with an earwig (pincher bug) camping on it.

It was also surrounded by numerous pillbugs (rolly pollies), but they were all running around, and wouldn’t hold still. If I made them roll up into a ball, then, well… a tiny black ball is hard to make into an interesting shot, and there was that earwig there, waiting for hers. (Thank you, Google, for telling me how to distinguish the males from females. For the record, the males have much more rounded pinchers.) She was a good sport, and only calmly, slowly walked around the ball, while I kept having to rotate it. This only happened about 20 times.

The ball and earwig needed special light (too dull without), so, I used my iPod Touch, which is literally like a little softbox/umbrella. (It’s a wide, “soft” light source, excellent for getting soft shadows, and not over-emphasizing cracks/crevices.)

I couldn’t get a SUPER close shot of the earwig, because I don’t have a Macro lens. (Macro lenses are designed for shooting bugs and things WAY up close. They can focus on things almost touching the glass, whereas I have to back up about a foot, and zoom in.)

Photography is rarely about every shot just working… You take a ton of shots, and pick out your top few (or sometimes your top 1.) Sometimes, you get a LOT of shots that you’re happy with, like in very controlled conditions, where you feel you’ve got all the different elements down… but, even then, all the attention is handed over to just your handful of “winning” shots, and those are the only ones that will see the light of day.

At first, the thought is annoying, but you learn to really appreciate the process. It’s better if you learn to see it like this: why show tons and tons of mediocrity when you can show a digestible amount of something that’s hopefully much better? (If you want tons and tons of mediocrity, just flip some channels on TV.)

I was liking this grass clump, until I took a picture of it.

For night-shots of small things, a large-screened phone or iPod Touch is fantastic to shoot with. You can set the screen to whatever brightness you want, and even choose exact colors… (just Google image search for any color, and make the image cover the screen).

Further, while the shot is being taken (20-60 seconds), you can move the screen around, and light up whatever parts of the picture you want, with complete control over where the light goes, and how much.

Here, though, it only served to make the ball more flat-looking than the others. By the way, notice that this is the same as the first earwig shot, except I ‘cropped’ that one (cut a piece of it out).

Observe:

Cropping is very important, and helps bring out your focus zone. Lots of people don’t realize how important it is, and have a hard time cutting away precious parts of the image. At first, your mind wants to believe that seeing MORE – getting the WHOLE scene – must be better… but that often isn’t true at all. (It’s easy to see the benefit in a shot like this one above, but there are harder instances as well, where you really need to pay attention to notice that a crop will help.)

Here’s another example:

Notice the (somewhat) improved nature of the shot.

I do personally like it, but only “just”. I think much better could be done, so, this is one of the shots I want to try again, later.

Moving on, the iPod Touch itself can also be included in the shot, like above, and looks like a glowing wall of light:

These are the mysterious yard shoes that have been sitting outside. I like how they shine. And a black widow spider was living inside the one on the left, at the opening. (For those who don’t live around black widows, they’re very poisonous, but rarely fatal)…

Inspired by the yard shoes, I wanted to try shooting something cleaner, and that wouldn’t kill me… so, I popped off one of my shoes, hopped around on one foot (because everything was wet), and tried to take a couple shots. Since the image is “taken” for many seconds, I have all that time to wave my iPod Touch around behind the shoe, making that wall of light.

I like the pic, but not all that much, which is unfortunate, because here’s what I had to do to take it:

- Balance on one foot.
- Bend WAY over, to wave around my iPod Touch.
- Operate the camera from the lens side, with the screen facing forward (it swivels around), and my hand wrapping around the back, to push the settings buttons.
- Use my camera hand to also pick up the remote, and snap a pic.

I felt like this guy:

The shoes could easily be shot better, later, but I don’t care enough about them to try again. While, given enough time, you could even think up a much, MUCH better shot for them, you could identically use that time to think up an easier shot for something more appealing. In other words, why think up a nice shot for ugly shoes when you can think up something better for something else?

Not like these tangerines:

Bleh. I didn’t have much time to shoot these tangerines right, before my battery died.

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So, my homework for the next shoot is to finish up the shots that I couldn’t quite crack here (or that I simply think more could be done with), and try some new ones.

I now come in HDR. :D
(high dynamic range lighting)

Well, fake HDR… shut up.

In this shot, I was taking a tour around the house, checking to see if all the light-sockets were working…

Here’s the original:

(click images for huge versions)

In other words, my Lumix GH1 arrived. (It’s hacked to have insane video quality.) Here above, it caught me at my worst moment… but hey, I discovered that when my hair is like this, everyone around me gets free internet.

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I took the pic above while trying to do a lighting comparison, pitting hard shadows vs. soft shadows… which, at first, seemed to be going absolutely nowhere:

When the lighting is coming from the FRONT, you’d have to get out your scanning electron microscope to spot the difference. (ignore any color/tone changes. Notice shadows only.)

Things get a lot more dramatic when the light comes from the side, even though I somehow forgot to test the soft lighting from this angle:

With hard lighting like this, most of the shadow issues could be solved by using a 2nd light (of any kind) from the right… but, for now, I was just trying to see the most obvious shadow differences between hard and soft lighting… without remembering to test soft lighting.

It may have been a complete test failure, but shut up… at least  I got to have tacos, later.

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Throughout the day, there also come times when I need to force myself to stop “work stuff”, and do “other stuff”. This is sometimes known as break time, and it’s usually spent either finding creative ways to do work anyway (and convince myself it’s restful), or do stuff like playing computer games. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible for something that I do to not be “work” in some way. For instance, playing video games is a form of immersing my brain in art, and developing theories about how elements in general media work (or don’t work). Video games are like art museums (both 2D and 3D), sound design demos, concerts, movies, and storytelling sessions all in one. If you do ANY of these things, there’s a lot to study.

In these days, I’ve been trying to play Battlefield 3. (and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And Skyrim.) Battlefield is this amazing game where 64 actual human players can split into 2 teams, and duke it out a modern battle together… but I tend to daydream and just sort of wander through the battles, pretty much only weighing down the war effort.
(no, theirs is no war effort. It’s more like a bunch of random sports matches, where each team just happens to be an army.)

My kill/death ratio is terrible.

Quick story: The Battlefield series and I go way back. The first game, Battlefield 1942, came out in 2002, and was the first large-scale multiplayer game (that I know of) to mix infantry combat with the ability to drive tanks, jeeps, boats, ships, and planes (including bombers). I was at Comp USA one day, and asked the 20-something guy working around the games section what he would choose, if he had to pick one game. With emphasis, he said Battlefield 1942. I was a little skeptical at first, because I wasn’t a fan of WWII at the time, but he said it featured 64-player multiplayer battles, and was as good as I had been hearing. So, I picked it up, and was hooked by sunset.

I did, however, find another use for break time today. I realized that I’ve never sat down and just had a session with Photoshop’s Liquify tool. It was introduced a couple years ago, in Photoshop CS4 (I’m using CS5 now), and I’ve never just gone nuts with it. That’s sacrilege. What’s the point of upgrading to a new version of Photoshop if you aren’t going to immediately sit down and destroy your face??

I’m stoked about my Lumix GH1. I was going to get the newer GH2, but, for video – which is what I’m focusing on right now – the GH1 is nearly identical, at least when hacked…

Also, I decided I needed the extra money for a new Mac. (used) I don’t have any use for a brand new one, because the extra CPU/video power would only be used for some gaming or graphics task that I already do on my PC. I’m just tired of using the slow 2007 Mac Mini, or emulating OSX within Windows (using Virtual Box), which doesn’t have sound, and is often buggy.