On June 27, 2009 · Comments Off
It’s always bugged me how confident people can be about what they see and hear, or touch smell and taste for that matter. Maybe it’s just me. Have you ever had the taste of cheap tequila just appear in your mouth? Or have some smell drift into your nostrils that nobody else can smell? I have, often enough to know it’s some part of my brain playing tricks on me. Hearing is just as bad, but vision is perhaps the least reliable sense. Of course most of the time this is a feature of the system instead of a bug. The brain can take a signal that is mostly noise and extract the meaningful data without us even realizing what it’s doing. A very useful skill if your hunkered down in the bush and from all of the data your taking in from your eyes, ears, nose and even the vibrations of the ground that you feel through your bare feet the short hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up and you know something is out there and it’s watching you.
Optical illusions illustrate just how much processing the brain does on the raw inputs that our eyes take in and even provide a window into the types of data crunching that the brain does. It goes beyond simple optical illusions though. Our brains can internalize and adjust for things that we don’t even understand and have never even spent any time thinking about. For an example lets look at miniature photography. If some one shows you a photo of diorama of small models, no matter how detailed the models there are subtle cues that your mind picks up on that tell you your looking at miniatures. This is so reliable that you can create photographs and even video that fool you into thinking that you are looking at a miniature. Some great examples of this were posted on Jalopnik.com this week here and here. The trick is playing with the depth of field of the photo. Basically this is means that the photographer is adjusting the area of the photo that is in focus. The lenses that are used and the conditions that miniatures are photographed under mean that most photographs of miniatures have a very narrow depth of field meaning that only a small portion of the photo is usually in focus. A clever photographer can manipulate this depth of field to make big things look small. The method used in the above links was done by using tilt shift lenses, meaning that the photographer can not only adjust the depth of field but the plane of focus. But there is an even easier way to do it, it’s not quite as effective but it’s much cheaper and is an even better illustration of how easy it is to fool the parts of the brain that process vision. All you have to do is take a photo and blur most of the photo. Here’s an example I cooked up in a few minutes in GIMP.
That one came out pretty good. better than this one.
I kind of like these too even if the effect is more subtle.
Even more reasons I find it hard to trust what I see.
On June 22, 2009 · Comments Off
On June 22, 2009 · Comments Off
On June 21, 2009 · Comments Off
Just about caught up. Last weekend we went to Metropolis to shoot the Superman Celebration for Con Trek. My favorite shots.
I showed you this one to you before but I like it so much I’m including it again.
I’ve got some more nice ones I’ll post during the week.
On June 21, 2009 · Comments Off
I took a few trips to LA in May. Instead of doing all of the touristy stuff I headed out to the mountains. Southern California is gorgeous. I could never live there but I love to visit.
An hour out of the city and your in God’s country.
Digital Photography tip #23: if the photo doesn’t pop like you think it should try black and white. A lot of the photos I took off the Angeles Crest Highway did have the drama that I remembered. Maybe it was the haze. A lot of them could be salvaged though by converting them to black and white and fiddling with the filter color.
On June 21, 2009 · Comments Off
It’s become a yearly tradition for Dad and me to go the car show in Granville each May.
On June 21, 2009 · Comments Off
We went to Louisville to shoot Wonderfest for Con Trek. Of course I took pictures.
On June 21, 2009 · Comments Off
A while back I tagged along with Stephen, Suzie, Alan and Brittney to MTAC to help promote Con Trek
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On June 21, 2009 · Comments Off
It’s funny how old movies can be interesting on so many different levels. On the most basic level. Is it fun, sad, exciting, basically is it worth your time watching it, that’s all that really matters. The next level has more to do with how good the movie could have been. Is the story there, is the acting good, is the direction and cinematography competent. None of these things are necessarily required but the better they are in most cases the better the movie is. If they could have been improved 99 times out of 100 the movie would have been a better movie. I find myself thinking about this stuff watching the original Gone in 60 Seconds. The direction and cinematography are decent enough considering the conditions this movie was made under. The opening scene was iconic enough for Tarantino to homage it in one of the Kill Bill movies, I think it was the second one. The acting is not bad except for when then actors are acting if that makes any sense. The story is crap, but the forty minute car chase that is the heart of the movie is an outstanding feat of narrative. Back to the point this is a very enjoyable movie really marred only by the fact that the protagonists are thieves. I don’t care if you only steal cars that are insured car thieves should be strung up by their balls. I could write a big long screed about how great the car chases are in the movie, aside from some frivolous gags that seem to have only been included to up the carnage level, but that’s not what fascinated my watching the movie tonight. The next level, maybe not the next but another level. The time capsule level. Now everybody knows what a time capsule is, but think about what a time capsule really is for a moment. A time capsule is a collection of items that people want the people in the future to remember them for, not particularly what is important or truly representative of the time being recorded. The hair, the dialog, the cars, this movie is a great time capsule movie. There are some scenes that look like everybody walked walked out of a magazine ad. Did anybody really walk around dressed like this? Well that’s the interesting part. There are enough crowd scenes in this movie, enough extras that you can actually see that nobody did dress like that. Another big kick I got out of the movie this time is I’ve actually been on several of the roads that are covered in the car chase. It was amazing seeing these thirty five year old views and comparing them to my memories from a month ago. Long story short I think I enjoyed this movie more tonight than I ever have before.
Here’s just a few favorites that I can’t resist posting out of order and context before I wrap up posting for the day
