(Woo! post #100!)

There was a lunar eclipse yesterday, clearly visible in Sydney. By all accounts, it was going to be fairly spectacular. I collaborated with the always amusing Deborah to hatch an stunt to mark the occasion.

We were going to combine the ancient art of phooning with the lunar eclipse. A moonphoon!. The plan was simple, but of an epic scale:


Deborah is pro phooner, so finding a willing subject for the photo was going to be trivial. The idea was to pose a phooned silhouette in front of the blood-red moon, perhaps throwing in an ET-style bicycle for good measure.

We took the photo in Pyrmont, Dad came along to snap some pics too. Anyway, this is how it turned out:



On reflection, the planning stage was probably a bit too optimistic. I simply didn't have the zoom or the angles to pull off the epic phoon we were aiming for. Nevermind.

Phooning aside, the moon did, however, put on a bit of a show. Again, click for bigger versions:




Here's the one I like best:


The whole experience has taught me that I am but a phooning padawan, and have a long way to go before I am truly a Jedi phooner.

Labels: emotiv, photos

  As Briony alluded to, the final, not-going-to-tweak-this-bugger-any-more version of my thesis is printed, handed in, and forgotten about. Four copies had to be printed - doublespaced, ring bound, and sprayed with special pheromones to make the PhD assessors think they are poultry.

So I went on down to the graduate research school at UNSW, and I uprooted my thesis from its moorings, and hurled it across the desk into the willing arms of the PhD review machine. I filled in a little survey on my postgraduate life (What was your best experience? Worst? Discuss, with examples), and was promptly rewarded.

I received a box and a little congratulatory letter, wrapped up in a ribbon:



Inside the box, a little slice of flavoursome UNSW bling:



I plan to attach it to a huge gold chain and wear it around my neck at my graduation. That said, with bling in hand, I decided to pay homage to an old, old uni tradition.

You see, back in the halcyon days of being an undergraduate, we had this thing with exams. Our loosely knit group of friends (think of it more as a cardigan than a jumper), we'd turn up to an exam, and variously nervously twitch, scribble and fluster our way through it. About halfway though the exam, one of us would leave. This would prompt the rest of us to follow shortly thereafter, where we would congregate at the biggest dive that was nearby - in our case, invariably Mickey D's on Barker Street.

I exchanged some cash for a greasy apple pie from the equally greasy, spotty teenager behind the counter, and I wondered what he was going to write his PhD dissertation on. I munched on down on it, and realised the apple pies tasted better when they were made from chokos.

We're going to be moving in a few weeks, so now it's back to the unenviable task of re-packing all of our stuff into a small, small space. Luckily, I think I'll try to get a machine to do some of the work :P

Labels: nerd, PhD, photos

  So I was doing my usual rounds of aimless web surfing the a few weeks ago, and I came across the unusual photography of one Olivo Barbieri. This particular gentleman likes to hang out of the side of helicopters with his funky tilt-shift lens and take photographs of landmarks to make them look like little train-set sized miniatures.



I really wanted to give photos like that a go - but the lens is costly, and I couldn't justify the expenditure (not to mention the fact that I don't have an SLR to attach the damn thing to anyway). Imagine my joy, then, when I found out that you can quite easily fake the effect using pretty much any decent graphics editing package. I've got this whole big thing about making cheaper cameras do funky things via post-processing - you might have noticed :P

To acquire the right kind of photo to 'tilt-shift' (try saying that ten times quickly), it helps if you are high-up looking down. The above photo was originally taken by Briony when we were coming in to Sydney (from Melbourne) to land. I ran it through the tilt-shifting process (just a bit of masking and blurring), leading to more-or-less instant miniaturisation of good ole Sydney.



I took the above photo from the back porch at work, and again tilt-shifted it. There's a giant, enormous flickr group dedicated to faking the tilt-shift effect - it's worth a browse to see some really peculiar photos.

Labels: graphics, photos, travel

 

The Easter weekend was spent in Melbourne, where Kavitha kindly put us up in her new place in sunny Auburn. Briony has already covered the weekend in some detail, so I'll just add a few scrappy bits of commentary.

Melbourne itself looks and feels a lot more like a European city. Looking out over the rooftops, you wouldn't be hard-pressed to imagine it looked a bit like London. That said, the centre of the city is pretty cosmopolitan. The Eureka tower, dominating the Melbourne skyline, bears more than a passing resemblance to the Half-Life 2 citadel. Woo, spooky.

Something which did surprise me was the National Gallery of Victoria. Sitting somewhere in-between a museum and an art-gallery, it was pretty accessible (even the modern art), and the free entry helped too. This means I'll be getting up off my rear and visiting a few galleries here, too. I think I'll start with the MCA - it's open late on Wednesday nights, so that'll be a good time to take a wander through.



I'll accompany Briony along to the occasional Church service (trying to learn a bit more about what it's all about, that sort of thing), and the Easter service at Sts Peter and Paul in South Melbourne with Father Bob was an education unto itself. Fr. Bob is very much more a caricature of himself in real-life than what you see on the TV or hear on the radio.

The enduring memory I'll have is of the elderly, but terrifyingly fast, Fr. Bob running up and down the aisles with his little smoke generating thingo during a hymn. He terrorises unsuspecting members of his congregation, and he doesn't mind speaking his mind. The man is a law unto himself, he gets people thinking, and that's a good thing to see :)

Labels: HDR, photos, travel

 

Labels: photos