Grief

17

February 18th 2009

In the last two weeks there have been four deaths within two degrees of me. It's been a strange and sad time. The departed are a Grandfather, an eighteen year old by Her own hand, a Man dedicated to the safety of others, and a person on a flight with icy wings. In each case I know several people who where close to the departed. With any of these I would try and give comfort to my direct friends and it probably wouldn't have effected my daily life too much. When combined in such a short time it has had a profound effect on me. I have found my thoughts consumed with questions of mortality, morality, dogma, and just "why?". I am not normally one to do the whole "why god?, why?" thing but it did cross my mind. I just felt the need to grieve.

My feelings on this have been amplified by the fact that I am all alone right now. My Wife and Son are out of town helping directly with one of the families of the departed. They are off in the thick of it both helping and grieving while I am here in Los Angeles. The work my Wife is doing is incredibly important and she is being an amazing friend. This still left me here and my need to grieve.

I decided that like many artists before me I would express my grief though my art. I have spent my first valentines day alone in ten years at four cemeteries. It was an experience that has changed my perspective on things. I am no longer filled with thoughts of sadness. I saw unexpected things, things of tremendous beauty and sadness. Most of all I saw and bared witness to something most people never see and brought my artistic vision to bare on it. This series of photos more that others I have done in the past are meant to be seen in order and together as a set. It's only together that they complete the puzzle of emotions that was my day.

In the distance I saw a large family and an amazing display of flowers and balloons. I went down and talked to them, to find out who was so special. The woman seated at the grave told me It was her daughter, no more than 6 years old. Its a level of tragedy I never want to experience. It truly put my grief and emotions in sharp relief. This family came together and had lunch and dinner by her side. There missing family member. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I no longer felt the need to grieve.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

356 DVD Boxes

The image you see here is one of my DVD shelves, It's been rotated to make it easier to read. I always wanted to catalog the DVD collection but we have 10 of these in the house. That's a lot of typing, barcode scanning, or just about anything.  Last week I came up with an idea on how to solve this and tonight I pulled it off. 

With only 30 minutes of my time and $5.50 I got the names of every DVD in my collection.

Yea, under $6 and under an hour. How you ask?

Amazon Mechanical Turk.

MTurk is a service run by Amazon.com that uses people to do tasks computers are not great at. You can do tasks or post them at the site. In the past I did a few of them for fun. They don't pay much  but there are people out there that do it for a living. There are over 58,000 tasks in there system right now. It's a very cool system. The tasks are all over the board from clicking on websites to typing reviews of products. Most tasks pay about $0.05 for a 30 second task.

I went around my house and took photos of each DVD shelf. I filled out the forms for MTurk and got a task template all setup. I put 10 tasks online for people to type the names of every DVD in the picture. I put a $0.50 price on each one. It took less than an hour for all 10 to be done and turned in by the Turkers. I had to reject 3 of the submissions for missing movies but the 2nd attempt on each of those got it right. Now I have a nice spreadsheet I can import into any program that lists all my DVDs. I also added the shelf information to the spreadsheet since I know what Image each typed title came from. 

It's just amazing to me how easy it was to outsource a task I wanted done and how cheap it could be done.  Next up, my book library and wine cellar.

I can haz Video

Thanks to Russian programer Valexvir, my 40D can now record video. it's 1024x680 and looks just stunning.
There are a few issues with it but for free you really can't complain.

Without further, adieu I present: WRONGVERIE



Created with the help of Karl Rasche and his windows laptop and typing hands.
Music: "The Stars" by Moby
Shot with a Canon 40D and 24-70mm f2.8L.

Some interesting things I found out making this.

• The Framerate does not save correctly, I think I will have to use an external program to fix that.
• You can have manual control! Turn C. fn4:7 to 1, then hold down the DOF preview button to get desired fstop. The last shot in the view is f22 the others are f2.8
• If you press nearly any button on the camera the avi file will be corrupt
• My sensor needs to be clean, the dust was really showing up in some shots.

Next Up:

Stereo Movie's from my Loreo 3D Canon Lens!

Through the Viewfinder

The inspiration for this post comes from cardboard. Strobist and cardboard go together like peanut butter and jelly. If you add in some duct tape you have just about any light modifier. Any time I have a camera out you can be sure my 16 month old son Elijah is going to be reaching for it. He likes anything with buttons and especially things with buttons that he is not supposed to play with. To try and solve this for a moment I grabbed some cardboard that had a hole in it, folded down the sides and make a fake camera. The hole lined up nicely to be a right eye viewfinder.



Before handing it over I started looking at the world though this cardboard viewfinder. It amazed me how quickly I became disconnected from the world around me and became a viewer. It's much the same feeling I get when shooting with my SLRs. It's also something I find to be completely missing from shooting with a Point & Shoot.



I have many cameras and they are used for different things, most of the images in this post are shot with my LX3 point & shoot. It's tiny, Strobist friendly, and shoots RAW. I can fit it in a cargo pocket and not worry about it, Try that with a 40D. It just amazed me how different the feeling is when you shoot looking though a frame vs. looking at a screen. I would think the screen would feel more disconnected but it doesn't. Even as I write this post I am still playing with the cardboard view finder. The aspect of the hole is about 1:1. It's not an aspect I shoot a lot but I found myself wanting too after using the viewfinder. I also saw scenes that I wished I could press the shutter down and save.

I encourage those of you reading this to grab some cardboard, cut a hole in it and look at the world. You never know what you might see.

Upcoming Reviews

I am going to be doing full reviews of each of these apps in the coming weeks. Just a quick preview of what's on the docket and handy links to the app store if you don't want to wait for the review.


Photogene
Photo editor for the iPhone, Color Corrections, frames, text bubbles.



CameraBag
CameraBag is a dedicated filter program, with 9 filters. This image is the 1974 filter on a current pic of downtown Los Angeles.



Pano
My favorite panorama software for the iPhone.



Polarize
There are many polaroid apps on the iPhone, infact both CameraBag and Photogene have a filter for it, but this is my favorite, the look of the frame, the style of image.



StereoMaker
A very interesting app, it allows the creation of parallel and cross view stereo images on the iPhone.



Night Camera
This app is as close to Image Stabilization as we have on the iPhone, it waits till your hand is steady before taking the photo.


Ceiva Snap
This app is great if you have Ceiva digital picture frames, it lets you upload to all of them at once.



ieasyphoto lite
I use this for it's self timer, it's free and has many other features but the self timer is easy and has a nice loud countdown.

Welcome and Welcome Back

This post is aimed at everyone who just got there first Digital SLR. You may have shot film before but things are very different in the digital realm. I am going to go down a quick list of things you should know about your new camera and photography in general.

• Shoot in RAW, This will need to be a post of it's own, but just do it. You should Rendering: Rendering the Print: the art of photography read by Karl Lang. It explains this better than I can. In short you will kick yourself later for shooting jpgs.
• Get Adobe Lightroom, with out this you are going to waste a lot of time in the software that ships with your camera. It's better, it's not a replacement for photoshop, it's something else. Lightroom is your darkroom, Photoshop is an airbrush and scissors. You use photoshop after you develop your image.
  
• Stop using the Auto mode. In full auto you have a very fancy and fast point and shoot, move that dial elsewhere. Same goes for auto white balance, don't bother with it and shooting RAW it really doesn't matter anyway.
  
• Shoot, Shoot, and Shoot some more. Storage is cheap and with a Digital SLR feedback is instant.
• Never leave your camera at home, Seriously, don't. If you do you will miss things you want to shoot.
• Always have the batteries charged and the memory card empty and ready to go. This relates to the one above.
• You need to use Autofocus. If you come from a film SLR background you need to know a few things about modern Digital SLRs. The viewfinders suck. You have to buy a $8000 Digital SLR to get the same viewfinder as a $300 film body. Trying to do manual focus through a crop frame viewfinder is hard, and you will miss a lot. These cameras are built around autofocus and do not have a split prism viewfinder. So get used to using it. There are times when manual focus is the way to go, but if you are just getting started with Digital SLR, now is not the time. If your camera has a Live View mode you can manual focus that way for decent results.
• Start Reading. Start with your camera's manual or at least a dummies guide to it. Then head over to my Recommended Books section, and get some books to read. If you are new to terms like fstop, Tv, Av, and M then get Understanding Exposure to start with.
  
• Shoot, Shoot, and Shoot some more. Yes this again, take more pictures. Now show them to someone who is not emotionally connected to you have have them tell you what's good and whats not. Flickr is good for this, so are photography groups and company photography mailing lists.
• Work with ambient light to get started with, shoot outside where there is more of it. Once you know how everything on the camera works without thinking about it you can start looking into lighting. When you are ready, hit up Strobist.
• Talk to people who have been doing this a while before you buy anything else. Lenses, Flashes, Gels, Tripods, etc... Use there knowledge to your advantage.
• Go out shooting with someone who's work you like or even a group of photographers you know. Watching other people shoot the same subject can really open you eyes to other viewpoints.
• Save Your money and buy good glass, Glass can last you a lifetime, but bodies keep getting better and cheaper.
• Borrow gear as you can from friends to try things out. If you have no friends into photography or they all have different systems hit up Samys Rental Dept. or RentGlass.com
• Have Fun, don't get caught up in the technical side so much that you forget to have fun out there.

Aebleskiver

Aebleskiver
Originally uploaded by The Eye of Brad

Breakfast is a great invention. I am a big fan of sleeping, even bigger fan of sleeping in. About the only good thing about waking up on the weekend is Breakfast. It helps that my Wife is a trained Chef. As you would imagine this gives me lots of opportunities for food photography.
My wife decided that this morning would be a good time to try and make Aebleskivers. Our kitchen contains just about every pot, pan, gadget, and spice you would find in a commercial kitchen or good restaurant. Now a special pan is required to do this and she did get one last week so I knew they would happen sooner or later. Now you could just toss them in a bowl or plate and eat but that's not how we roll around here. She made up a show plate with powdered sugar and raspberry syrup and before I thought twice I proceeded to start eating it. After finishing the first of the four Aebleskivers I looked down at the artwork I just just smeared and said doh. That was one really nice plate to not photograph. Luckily for me she was already making the second plate and it was better than the first.
This would be a good time to point out the two types of photography I do, candid and planned. When I do planned shots there is usually lights involved, gear, diagrams, and my big SLR Cameras. For candid work I have started using a small camera called the LX3. It's a point and shoot with Full manual controls, a hot shoe, and a wide f2 Leica lens.
The Aebleskiver breakfast shot is candid. It's mostly natural light was done with the LX3. I have a 8'x4' window behind me with the blinds rotates to block direct sun and bounce it at the plate. There is a xenon light fixture directly above the plate adding some rim and top fill. The camera has a very good macro focus and at f2 you do get some bokeh even with such a tiny lens.
As always it was shot in RAW mode. I used lightroom to develop shot. I did remove some saturation from the background and darken it a bit. I also tweaked the colors of the crust vs syrup to give them a bit more separation.
I am happy with how this came out for a candid and was even happier when I stopped shooting and ate the rest of my breakfast. Good Eats.