cow.mooh.org

 
Explorations in and around SF MOMA and Townsend St., San Francisco.

Labels: geekery, photography, tilt-shift

 
A work colleague and I were discussing the other day the how English might 'sound' to someone who didn't understand the words. I'm used to frequently seeing impressions of other languages from native English speakers, but rarer to see is English speakers coming up with their own 'impressions' of English.

One of the first occurrences we came across was John Cleese, who developed a type of nonsense English and has used it to great comic effect. Have a listen to this interview on NPR, around the 8:50 mark, where he talks about this nonsense language he developed. He's also used it relatively recently:



The interesting thing about this clip is the confusion it brings about - it sounds and feels like understandable language, but is in fact complete nonsense. I've passed this on to a few people I know and some have reported that it makes them feel uncomfortable as it sounds like it should make sense but doesn't.

In the NPR interview linked above, John Cleese states Stanley Unwin and his Unwinese as his inspiration for his nonsense language. I hadn't known about Stanley Unwin before, and it turns out he's absolute master of gibberish - and very, very funny to boot:



It's also possible to speak grammatically correct English without making an any sense either. The late great Ronnie Barker delighted in messing around with pronunciation and spelling, to great comic effect:



And now for the final variation: grammatically correct, valid English that unintentionally doesn't make any sense. For example, see this classic spoof of the Turbo-Encabulator:



I think it's interesting that this low signal-to-noise-ratio style of speaking is instantly recognisable to anyone who has encountered people who speak a lot of needless business jargon. Observe this unintentionally hilarious clip from Microsoft COO, Kevin Turner, weighing in at 4 minutes 20 seconds:



If you take that same clip, and reduce it down to just business buzzwords, its 1 minute 49 seconds long - that's 42% buzzwords(!!):



I'll just leave this here:

Labels: english, geekery, gibberish, language, words

 
I was recently contacted by the always awesome Udi from diyphotography.net, and I was delighted when he sent one of his Bokeh masters kit in my direction to review.

[Udi is a DIY photography ninja and unlike my own clumsy attempts Udi has a knack for coming up with some elegant hacks.]

The basic idea of the kit is put a cutout shape in front of the camera lens, which shapes out-of-focus lights using the shape on the cutout [Optics nerd time: I'm not sure of the exact optics going on here, but what I'm guessing is that it masks the circle of confusion formed at the image plane with the cutout shape. Someone please correct me here if I'm wrong]. Udi took the idea of his DIY shaped bokeh and turned it into a product where you can swap in one of a number of pre-made cutouts.


What's in the box:


The masters kit comes with five pre-perforated sheets. Four of these contain the shaped cutouts, and the actual 'bokehtinator', which is used to mount the discs. Another sheet folds into a little box for storing the discs when they are not in use. A rubber-band is supplied so you can attach the bokehtinator to the camera itself.

When you first punch the discs out, you might get a feeling that the plastic is a bit on the flimsy side; in particular the folds bokehtinator seem like they might tear. However, after a two days of of testing I was pleasantly surprised to find that by just being mindful of not pulling along the fold lines it is indeed quite sturdy.


Attaching the bokehtinator is relatively simple - the tabs are folded around the lens and held in place with the rubber bands. A clever part of this design means that the focusing ring is still accessible for use, as opposed to the DIY cap-based designs which would prevent this. One thing that I quickly discovered was that I needed to attach the bokehtinator with a good 5mm gap away from the end of the lens to allow room for the focusing mechanism to work.


Learning to work with shaped bokeh:

I used my trusty Canon 450D along with a f1.8 50mm nifty fifty. To really make use of the bokeh effects, you need out-of-focus light sources. If your lens has a good, big depth-of-field than you might be disappointed - as the instructions in the kit say, for this to work you need the aperture wide open (i.e. low f-stop).

The sweet-spot for usage (as I understand it) is with portrait photography with a backdrop that has point light sources. As is sometimes the case for portrait photography, you need to get in close for it to work, or alternatively settle for blurring everything out to get the effect.



By turning off autofocus and manually racking the focus back and forth, you can experiment with exactly how big you'd like the effect to be. In the example above, we start off with relatively small shaped bokeh, but a nice sharp foreground. As the focus is racked, we get bigger, more impressive looking bokeh but the foreground goes out of focus.


Comparing cutout discs:



The shaped bokeh is sharp - in particular, I do like how it turns otherwise plain-old background bokeh into sharp shapes, which (when the composition works) match a sharp foreground subject. I was also initially a bit doubtful about the sharpness of the cutouts when I first looked at the discs, but I'm happy to report that this wasn't a problem.


Impressions & conclusion:

One could easily argue that given the relatively simple nature of the kit, that you could build your own at home. If you're the kind of photographer that can do that, more power to you, but I'd say that then this isn't the kit for you. My feeling is that this kit is aimed at the photographer who just wants to get going with shaped bokeh and doesn't have the time or inclination to craft small cutouts.

It'd also make an awesome tool for portrait photographers who are looking to differentiate their work. As cheesy as it sounds, the provided good selection of cutouts means that you can quickly pick one out that suits the occasion.

In practice, I found that my shooting tended to consist of taking a few test shots on auto-metering and auto-focus, and then switching to both manual mode (for shutter speed) and manual focus. You also need to be mindful of the depth of field of the lens that you are using, and how a careful choice of both subject and distance from the camera will affect the result. As such, I don't think this kit is for the total beginner - however, I think an intermediate to advanced photographer would get a lot out of it.

If you fit into one of these categories, I'm going to go ahead and cheerfully recommend it.

Labels: geekery, nerd, photography, photos, review

 


Slideshow here.

Labels: geekery, nerd, photography

 
[Prefix: A huge, enormous thanks has to go out to Margena Wade, (Community Liaison Officer) and other staff at the Bay Bridge project at Caltrans for giving me the opportunity to go out and look at the construction of the bridge. It's an amazing project on an enormous scale, and I've been enormously lucky to have had the opportunity to go out and have a look at it first hand :)]

I set out on Friday afternoon after work to have a look at the Bay Bridge bypass construction work first hand. Heading over on the trusty 108 MUNI, I scuttled about Yerba Buena and Treasure Island trying to get a few good shots. I nabbed a spectacular moonrise over the construction site:


...as well as a time-lapse with ye olde plungercam of the old bridge section being rolled out, as well as a timelapse of the moonrise :)



However, I was lucky enough to be invited back to the island for a tour of the site on Saturday evening - and it was absolutely spectacular.



This is the boat pier on the East side of the bay bridge construction site. Here a service connected the two Caltrans command centres at Yerba Buena island, and it's from here I got the awesome ferry ride out on the water to have a look at the entire span of the bridge.

On the left hand side of the image you can see the new section of the bridge completely rolled into place; when I arrived on Saturday evening it was being worked on by engineering crews who were working on a pile of verification and connection tasks.

The bypass weighs about 7000 tons (!) and was assembled 50m up in the air and slid into place on rails. I asked about what it takes to overcome that sort of inertia to get it moving, and the answer was lots of hydraulics and dish soap.

In the mid-ground on the right two-thirds of the image, you can see the existing Bay bridge; just behind it is the new bridge. For the majority of the distance, the deck is in a side-by side configuration. I believe that the current point where it is up to is named W2; from there until pier E2 (mostly obscured by the construction work) it becomes a deck suspended by a pylon, and after that it converts into a double deck configuration to enter into Yerba Buena island.



On the far left of the image, you can see 'falsework' construction leading up to pier E2; on the right, you can see the twin deck coming over from Oakland and pier W2. The falsework is in place so that the deck, which is normally going to be suspended from a pylon, can be constructed whilst the pylon is put into place. When the suspension cables are added, the falsework will be removed.



The Left Coast Lifter is one of the world's largest floating cranes, and was constructed specifically for the job of installing sections of the Bay Bridge. This behemoth is about 30 stories high (!) and after the job with the Bay Bridge is likely to be deployed elsewhere. Before construction it was used to lift a sunken WW II tugboat. Here you can see it parked at Oakland, just in front of some falsework that is going to be used to temporarily support the span of the new bridge.



One of the many characteristic cranes lining the Oakland foreshore.



Inspection of the Bay Bridge revealed that a two-inch crack in an eyebar on the East span of the bridge; I'm pretty sure the crane and lift in the middle are near where the broken eyebar is. The crack means that the re-opening of the bridge may need to be delayed whist crews work overnight on fixing the problem.



This is my favourite shot; the plungercam does all sorts of interesting things with smearing out point light sources. Golden hour at sunset is very, very kind to photographers in the Bay area summer :)

In the centre of the image you just make out the crane next to the newly discovered broken eyebar support on the bridge.

All in all, it was an awesome weekend :D The full photoset is here.

Labels: geekery, nerd, photography, photos, tilt-shift

 
Last weekend was a trip up to South Lake Tahoe, and it wouldn't have been the same without some unwarranted and needless geeking out.

I was keen to test both plungercam 2 and the time-lapse recording setup under some more challenging conditions out in the field.

I'm a huge fan of Keith Loutit and his use of tilt-shift for minituarisation, and I wanted to have a go myself:



I carried a netbook, camera, lens and mini-tripod up on the hike around Emerald bay to get the shot. Chuck kindly took a couple of shots of me setting up the whole thing and running the capture, so you can get an idea of how (relatively) minimal the setup is:



On a less terrestrial scale, I also wanted to get a nice capture of stars in motion. Given that we were well outside of the city, I thought it was a a reasonable enough proposition - however, the moon was nearly full, so that did tend to wash things out a fair bit as soon as it rose. However, the result wasn't awful:



I used auto-levels to try to bring out the stars a bit, but it does tend to cause some odd colour artifacts - see the weird green hues in the second sequence above. Next time I think I'll try to control the levels manually rather than leave it to an algorithm.

On the plain old 2D front, Tahoe yielded a few nice shots:



...and last Wednesday, I was helping out the San Francisco Bay Guardian again by taking some candids at the annual Best of the Bay party downtown. Good time had by all :)

Labels: geekery, nerd, photography, photos, tilt-shift, travel

 
[Edit #0: hi to everyone from hackaday, crunchgear, makezine, lifehacker, and wired! And Photojojo too :)]

[Edit #1: Some new results with Plungercam 2 here; earlier video experiments with tilt-shift here and here.]

[Edit #2: Those who are looking for the reasoning behind the project and details on how to get parts might want to check out the write up for the original plungercam first.]

[Edit #3: Need a tip with building the plungercam? Want to collaborate on a project? Don't hesitate to drop me an email]

[Edit #4: See some of my other DIY projects (plungercam 1, iPhone SLR lens adapter, papercraft etc) here]


The original plungercam that I built earlier this year has been an absolute joy to use. However, the original design has a couple of problems.

1) The mounting mechanism to attach it to the camera uses a plastic body cap, which was never designed to hold much weight. As a result, the teeth on the cap have been slowly disintegrating under the weight (see inset, above). Mounting the lens has now become pretty unreliable.

2) Usage - there is a lot of fun to be had by forcing the user to tweak the focus by hand, meaning zero repeatability - no two plungercam shots will ever be the same. However, this means that it is unusable for time-lapse video applications, where it is important to keep the lens in the same place between shots.

I'll go through the construction of the dead simple Plungercam 2, which addresses the above two issues. It's worth pointing out at this stage that this is the first step in getting the plungercam to behave like a proper tilt-shift lens. Currently it only really handles tilt, so, strictly speaking, it's role is more like a very quirky selective focus mechanism than actual perspective correction.


Plungercam 2 keeps in the spirit of the original plungercam by using cheap plumbing equipment and affixing it to precision optics. This iteration eliminates the need for glue altogether, so all the optical components can be easily taken out and re-used elsewhere.

The main component is a rubberized pipe coupling, which I got for $7 at the always awesome Center hardware. The two adjustable steel bands will be used to hold the mount and lens securely in place. This particular one is two inches on the narrow end, and three on the wider end.

To fix the problem with the body cap mount teeth fraying, I decided to replace it with a T-mount T-mount adapter. I picked up the one I'm using for $3 from one of the closing Ritz camera stores.

I'm re using the $12 (from ebay) Zenza bronica medium format lens that was in plungercam 1. Since this was only held in place using a metal clip, it was easy to take it out and re-use it.

Total cost: ~$22 :)


The narrow end of the pipe connector is going to be connected to the camera; to maximise the usability of the lens, we want the narrow end to be as short as is practical. The general idea is to put the t-mount adapter into the narrow end, and to use the pipe clip to secure it into place.

Slide the pipe clip as far along as it can go along the connector, and score using a hobby knife around the edge of it that is going to be attaching to the camera. Remove the clip, and cut along the score line (again, a hobby knife will do the job here) to chop off the top of the connector. Keep the cut as perpendicular to the surface as possible.

My T-mount adapter was a little than two inches on its external diameter, and the connector itself is designed with a two inch fitting on its narrow end. With a bit of careful levering, the adapter can be wedged into the connector. Whilst it is a good fit, it's a good idea to put the pipe clamp back on and screw it tightly into place. Last thing you need is the adapter falling apart when it is on the camera :P


To finish the adapter, place the lens inside the wide end of the connector, and adjust to get the tilt desired. To fix it into place, simply tighten the screw clip. To reposition, loosen the screw clip, mess about with the lens position, and try again.

The design works because the mount is rubber, and the lens size is just a little less than the diameter of its mount. The lens sits comfortably in the mount, and the adjustable rubber gives it room to move when you want to tilt it. The metal clip (when tightened!) ensures that the lens can be held in place. The field tests that I've done so far have shown that the lens is indeed held pretty solidly in place.

The main drawback is that it's not as interactive as plungercam 1, and it takes much longer to set up a shot. On the other hand, you can definitely use it for time-lapse captures, which was a goal of mine.



It's definitely still a work in progress (I still need to add a rack to more precisely control lens shift as well as tilt), but results so far are not too bad :)



link to video

Labels: DIY, geekery, photography, photos, tilt-shift

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