I’m wearing my new glasses. Of course, it feels strange. My prescription didn’t change much in all the years since my last exam, but moving to a new prescription always causes a little field distortion. I feel like I’m in a slightly different universe with an even less Euclidian geometry. I had to walk around a bit downtown for a bit before I could really say that I was happy with them.
Before picking up the glasses I went to CVS for some divider tabs to put in a binder. I wound up with a cheap battery powered LED book-light. I have often wanted a book-light, and I think getting light from LEDs is a brilliant idea - since they’re not just red and green the way I always remember them. You can even get replacement light bulbs that contain an array of LEDs and use even less power than a flourescent bulb. In addition, I’ve been wanting a small notebook to keep with the espresso machine for recording ephemera regarding how much coffee I’m using, how much money I’m spending on it, and anecdotal evidence about the quality of the output.
After the glasses, I went around the corner to print some photos at Penn Camera. It wasn’t a spur of the moment decision - I mentioned it earlier today - but, all of the sudden, it seemed like a really good way to road test my glasses, looking at detail on a computer screen, then looking at the same details on a print. The prints came out fast - only 15 minutes - but I still needed to kill some time, so I took a walk around the neighborhood, meandering through the 2-block radius of the store: L St, K St, 19th, Pennsylvania Ave; H to 18th, Eye to Farragut Square, then back around to the photo shop. Along the way, I realized that the real test is to see if I could read while walking. I do that all the time - it’s important that I don’t get a headache or start vomiting while I dart my glance back and forth from the book to my surroundings.
I didn’t fall down, or vomit, or anything, but still… everything on the periphery is a bit wobbly - this makes some sense when you consider that they have to looking straight ahead during the exam. There is obviously going to be some uncertainty about the effects of a prescription away from the line of sight. I know from studying optics that they don’t bother to grind the exact shape because they couldn’t do it cheaply enough. Paraboloid lens grinding is for billion dollar space telescopes. And they mess those up too.
I was daydreaming about some way they could use a temporary lens material to simulate your glasses - something just to verify the prescription before making the real lenses. Can real lens be melted down or something? Probably not, because that would allow them to recycle your old pair.
Posted in DC-roaming, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:42:00 GMT
Aside from the obvious adding of more photos… Wait: Adding more photos is the problem.
Vanessa remarked “Finally some organization for the photos…”, but I don’t see that at all. I see my folder of ~3500 photos, and I don’t think of organization. But, there are an astronomical number of different ways such a collection could be organized. I won’t consider them all, it’s a waste of time.
I’ve also been looking at a lot of photographer’s sites on the web for inspiration - both in the taking of photographs and in the presentation. A lot of these sites are flash-heavy, which is always a bit discouraging to me. If you’ve got the resources, then hey - knock yourself out - but, that kind of excitement is probably just going to overheat my computer.
This is one of my favorites so far: Zeynep Öztayinci - I’m a fan of the print textures there in particular, whereas I might expect to find them annoying in other images.
I wouldn’t look for such a total solution, since I’m not only a photographer - but it might not be so bad under a different domain name to call more attention the photos specifically.
XML
Although I abandoned an attempt at using XML the first time around, I can see it out there on the horizon, beckoning me. And, this is why: Hierarchy, plain and simple. There are going to be themed sets. As I add more photos, I am going to benefit from having a sensible framework.
The XML option serves two masters well: The Interface and the Database. What you see today on the gallery page was simply an expedient. I simply haven’t prepared very many photos yet for that format. I need a system to annotate the photos, perhaps with category tags - that suggests a database. I’m tired of naming the image files, but I don’t want to leave them with the original filenames the camera assigns - that also suggests a database.
I knew why I wanted to index the pictures in an XML file - because I can write scripts to dump the database to an XML file, and with a small collection I can write the file by hand as I pin down the finer points of the design. Unfortunately, the Javascript code to read the little file I wrote wasn’t working - and I couldn’t see why not.
So the current direction is to rewrite what I have and pin down that XML format. Books on my shelf like “Document Design” or “Service Oriented Architecture” might help. We’ll see…
Posted in web-craft, photography, databases | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 26 Oct 2008 23:19:00 GMT
I spent part of the day putting together a new format for my photo gallery.
I went looking to crib some slideshow javascript code, but I wasn’t happy with anything I found. After a while it just seemed like I was wasting a perfectly good opportunity to reinvent my own wheel by spending all day reading about wheel theory.
First, I had to start a collection of photos in a medium-sized format. That was fun: I recorded some macros to resize and matte portrait and landscape aspects to a square. Choosing from among thousands of my photographs was not as easy. That will be the continuing struggle.
Next, with a few photos prepared, I went to work on stylesheets: A page title banner, a container for the current photo, and left & right navigation buttons. I tweaked the positions until I thought it looked good. Then, it was back to photoshop to craft some images for the banner and navigation. Every so often, I would make a small change that would wreck everything, and sometimes it was a minor keystroke error - like “i” for “l”, which is a bit hard to distinguish in the screen font I’m using.
Then it was on to the Javascript. If there were one way to do it, I’d be in luck, but as the design took shape in my head (what, did you think I planned it out in advance? such a small thing? well - you’re right - I should have), I kept contradicting myself and combining incompatible strategies. Every great new idea meant backtracking to redo much of what I had completed… only do discover that my new idea didn’t work. It almost sounds like the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I would commit myself to an idea until it proved absurd, then finally admit defeat and start working on a different idea.
The data is part of the problem: Somewhere in the middle of the process, I tried rolling my own XML file and writing and AJAX call into the Javascript, but I lost control over the ability to verify what I was doing - in other words, I would be flying blind. When it didn’t work, I didn’t have much recourse to debug the thing… So, I was back to storing the filenames and captions in an Array. This could still be pulled out into a separate file: It’s always nice to tease these things apart for editing - but this particular strength becomes something of a weakness when you need to do a lot of cross referencing among associated files.
Well, I think the results look pretty good. Any changes I make to it now can be little cosmetic stylesheet alterations. The best part about a slideshow is that not all the photos must be loaded immediately with the page. The size of the page is minuscule, and each photo is of modest size.
Now it’s back to preparing some good photos. From out of about four thousand. Don’t worry: most of those are duds.
Posted in photography, web-craft | 2 comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:00:00 GMT
A couple weeks ago, I was out on 18th Street late one night, fumbling for my camera to get a picture of a cool convertible driving past, but by the time I started shooting, the camera was in the wrong mode, and I shot a short video… Remarkably, the video was pretty good - but I need to edit out the sound or something because I was upset. And you could tell. Alcohol may have been a factor… At least nobody got hurt. You gotta watch out for fussy drunks who don’t like their pictures taken… On the other hand, they’re not always so aware of what’s happening.
As a special treat, along came this guy with his blue-tinted headlamps a few seconds later. I knew they looked blue to me, but well… just see for yourself: I didn’t even have to boost the saturation. All I did was clip the black point on the master levels so the three shots would have the same overall tone. Mmmm… bread and butter Photoshoppin’.
I take a lot of these night shots along the main drag in my neighborhood. Frankly, the light sucks… but I suppose it could be worse. It’s probably more ambient light than some daytime shadows. I turn the flash off and the red hand blinks to warn me about holding steady. I do what I can…
Posted in bar-scene, photos, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 11 Aug 2008 02:12:00 GMT
I got the urge to re-read J.G. Ballard’s “Super Cannes”. Some of that has to do with how much I like the visual response to Ballard’s work. Without having read most of his novels, it doesn’t seem likely that taking this one book as representative of his total output would be fair. Nonetheless, I found it to be an accessible and enjoyable read, with much of what serves as his signature: A fetish for machines, broadly speaking. You see it in the attention to detail given over to vintage or luxury automobiles, the leg brace the main character is forced to wear after his minor airplane accident. You also see it in the bizarre social structure of the corporate office park where his young wife is employed, and the backstory of their meeting in the recovery ward after his accident - I assume that traction and leg braces played a part in the attraction.
I was just toying with re-reading the whole thing. It feels much too familiar - it was only a couple years ago that I read it… For example, I don’t find a lot of surprises - mostly in the details. I realize now that I read slow and spend a lot of down time unconsciously considering the structure of the narrative - but that also has a tendency to shuffle my memory for what happened in what order. There is some uncertainty to the memory.
Posted in books, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:08:00 GMT
On the bus this morning, I was writing in my black Moleskine notebook when some guy sat down next to me.
Public buses have their own special geometry. I would like to sit facing forward, and have enough legroom. There are about five seats like this on a bus. If I want some quiet time to think, I avoid the crowds - sometimes that’s the front, sometimes the back. That doesn’t leave much.
A note to policy makers: If you want people to ride public transportation, think about the inside of your limo, and work from there. It doesn’t have to be luxurious, but it’s in your best interest to allow the actual workers in a society to get some work done - or alternatively get some rest on their way to do the work. I understand why a bus ride can’t be smooth, but it would help me out a lot if the bus didn’t try to bounce me out of my seat every half block along the route.
So I’m trying to compose a thought in my notebook. The back corner faces forward, but doesn’t allow me enough leg room. It’s one of those buses with the access panel to the engine instead of a center seat. That’s an ideal seat, should you get a bus that has one - it not only gives my legs enough room, but they don’t get in anybody else’s way either. I’m happy (relatively speaking) with the seat I’m in when this guy wants to sit in the corner seat next to mine - I have to break my concentration to let him sit down, but usually if you prefer that corner seat, you’re an introvert and won’t bug me. But then, another guy sat down in the sideways facing seat right in front of us. They must have known each other - it wasn’t really a conversation, but they did occasionally mutter something disinterested to each other.
The guy in the corner said something incomprehensible, and when I darted a quick glance over at him, he muttered more as an apology - I could tell from the tone of it. “What are you writing, there? Porn?”… Huh? What? Is my brain that tired? I can’t tell what he’s saying, or why that would be his first guess. I’ve just about latched on for a full analysis when I get “You know - Porn - Rhymes?”… (Oh, you’re saying “Poems”!?!? Why did I… Nevermind.)
“No, it’s just stuff that comes to mind. No big deal.” It’s not strange in the city to imagine that everybody is a budding rapper-poet. By a strange coincidence, I was thinking about poetry while waiting for the bus. When I don’t have a whole thought, I will latch on to little atoms of meaning - a turn of phrase that works well with an visual image. But in fact, I’m having trouble being anything other than literal these days. I write the truth of what I see, and I use my camera in the same way, so I’m mostly about documenting reality. It’s tough for me to commit to a fantasy, even when those fantasies percolate through my conscious mind.
If I was having trouble concentrating before, now I’m shattered. All I can do is daydream and wait for the ride to be over… I’ve got some gibberish written down about digital images, and the snapshots people deem worth taking and keeping - I was working up to two different ideas when I got sidetracked and could have benefited from some concentration:
First, Who gets to claim photos as art? And, should I be paying more attention to Marcel Duchamp?
Second, What is the nature of the casual photography on cheap digital cameras? How does it relate to the snapshots the Replicants cherish in the movie “Blade Runner”? How are we to think about these photographs as artifacts?
But I can’t think about one thing without immediately feeling the push of a thought at right angles: I’m already on to the film’s prophesy of photographs on the same Kodak style paper… Not everything in the future is going to be futuristic (books come to mind) - but the prediction is not so easy: The desire to retain old forms and the desire to use the newest innovation are both subject to the will of producers. Having your photos on a stack of photo paper or in flash memory LCD screens will depend on unforeseen changes. And, it’s not hard to imagine that technology as a class boundary: Nice photo paper could be the luxury item if the digital version remains cheap. Or, the opposite could turn out to be true. You can imagine the reversal, the conventional wisdom probably already has it: Paper for the poor people, clutching their ‘precious photos’, on the run from disaster, or toward dubious opportunity.
I’m still trying to imagine what happens after the breakdown - partial or total. The partial breakdowns are more interesting for the sake of variation. If we run out of some crucial ingredient for the status quo of this world, and we can’t find a reasonable substitute, then what happens? Cheap energy is a linchpin: With it, we make whatever industrial-scale transformation we desire. But without it, we have to be very creative, and that still won’t be cheap. If you follow the ‘Peak Oil’ crowd, then you know that all our flexibility in crafting new solutions depends on both innovation and cheap energy. All the innovation in the world won’t help if the pantry is bare. I listen to the voices of optimism: “We’ll find a solution because we always have in the past”, and I can’t help thinking they’re right… until the battery runs out. We haven’t been thinking about how to recharge that battery, and we don’t know how much is left, or how expensive the future transformations will be in practice.
Add a Link: Kevin Kelly’s “Where the Linear Crosses the Exponential”.
And, be careful how you choose that discount rate…
Posted in photography, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 06 Jul 2008 12:54:00 GMT
These photos make me wish for a tilt-shift. Of course with a Nikon Coolpix 5600, this is completely absurd. All the distortion tricks I know in Photoshop are annoying to work with: I used to know how to do all the ‘free transform’ options, but the last time I tried, I couldn’t get it right: I was going to take some up-pointing photos of gridded windows on a building and pull them back into plumb - but it wasn’t as easy as I remembered it. I might have to go back to the manual for this. And the pinch settings are very hit-or miss: I have to widen the canvas and move the image into place for the pinch to land in the right spot - but finding that place is a matter of trial and error. Maybe I’d be better off abandoning the wide setting on the zoom (if only I could have it start up in a medium zoom position).
These are my attempts to pinch filter and free transform the distorted original. As you can see, there are some tradeoffs. I was able to straighten the vertical lines at the cost of stretching the white car. I stopped because the laptop was getting sluggish from all the disk trashing.
It should go without saying that I liked the look of the back windows on this building. Too bad about the plywood patch, but this is exactly the kind of organic character that isn’t built into new buildings. The brick is probably original, while the big block of windows and door on the left is a later adaptation.
As I was gazing into the alley with my camera, some old woman waiting for a bus came over to look too. When she couldn’t see what she imagined I saw, she was distinctly puzzled. I didn’t exactly confront her, but we had a moment… She had some preconception about what would be worth taking photographs of, and I didn’t match it. I have a variety of sentimentality for the built environment that other people have for relatives or pets. That’s just the way it is.
Posted in DC-roaming, photos, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:10:00 GMT
It seems like I had more conversations with people yesterday than I do on a normal day. Some of it has a perfectly reasonable explanation, but not all of it.
My sister came to town. Her train was later than she expected, and I misunderstood - thought she sounded pessimistic about the arrival time when she wasn’t. So, I was planning on a late evening. However, she arrived, I wasn’t at the station yet, and she was leaving me phone messages at home while I was visiting at the Reef. I planned to return home, get my bearings and head over to the train station when in she walked with Olga. It may not have gone as planned, but it did solve the problem of dinner - by this time most restaurants in the neighborhood had stopped serving, but the Reef’s kitchen stays open late. So we ate there.
Leah called me at work to ask about our friend who was having surgery this week. We talked a little about job prospects of someone with bookstore experience, She also reminded me that the people at her bookstore play ping pong. I believe the gauntlet has been thrown down…
My brilliant plan was to work until seven, then take the subway down to meet my sister at 7:45. Plan B was to leave a little earlier, go home first, then go to the train station. Two things caused that timing to drift: I worked until seven anyway, and the bus was in no hurry to take me home. I heard a lot of other people grumble about how long they waited. Not me. I read my book. But I noticed there was a guy craning his neck to get a look at that book. I was reading “The Economics of Attention”. I was starting to get nervous about his attention. I made eye contact, and he asked “What do you think of that book?” He’s read it? The sheer improbability! But it was true. We launched into an exchange of intellectual bravado - tossing out the deepest ideas we could, straining relevance at times, but always returning. This was not a conversation as most of you know it. We took long silent pauses to integrate each other’s point of view into our own. I had a thought about the silence of companionship, and how comforting it can be, even if it is usually quite awkward. We eventually traded some biographical details. You know the sort of thing: Career hilights, bookstore preferences, etc. It didn’t even occur to us to introduce ourselves.
Later at the bar, I fell in to some chat with some of the regulars. April the bartender was running her usual Wednesday night iPod jukebox. Producing my sister out of the blue served as an excellent conversation starter. April’s friend Amber was suddenly much more motivated to talk to me. She’s moved to Baltimore and dedicates Wednesday nights to visiting DC. We both had a boss go in for surgery this week. I pulled out my little folder of photographs, since neither Vanessa or Olga had seen them - they’re different from what is online now. Eventually, Amber was unsatisfied with the guys down on the other end of the bar trying to chat her up, so she ditched them. There was some odd social dynamic happening with a smug guy who was plastered and nobody could claim him as a friend. He hovered a bit, not receiving the nonverbal cues. Soon after that we broke up the party and wandered home, most of us grumbling something about work in the morning.
Posted in bar-scene, photography, employment, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:04:00 GMT
I’m going to try to tweak the format here a little. These are mere insets of the full photograph, so you’ll have to click through…
I’m doing just as I promised - sifting through old photos for a few gems. These are from my Texas trip, taken six months ago - practically to the day. It’s more urgent every day: as I add new photos, I’m tempted to archive the old ones, which makes it a lot more trouble for me to go back and examine them. This was the day we went to the Cathedral outside MacAllen. I liked that shot of the bird on the lawn, then later when I was inside wandering around, I found statues of various saints in a dimly lit hallway. I may not have any pets at the moment, but I still consider myself an animal lover, so St. Francis was the saint who interested me most as a subject of photography.
Looking back now, it strikes me as funny how unalike the birds are in these photos. Those black birds were prancing around looking for trouble.
I show you the insets here because I want to talk about detail. Exposure was a problem with St. Francis - it was a dark hallway, as I’ve said. I used the widest lens in the zoom range, leaned back on the opposite wall and did my best to stand still. The camera might have chosen a longer shutter speed, but it didn’t. I’m back to complaining about not fully understanding its modes. Having to ‘push process’ it in Photoshop isn’t so bad, but it can really bring out the chromatic noise inherent in the camera’s sensors. Every mid-tone region is splotchy with red green and blue. I can think of a couple ways to minimize those artifacts, but I didn’t think they made the image look any better as a whole. Still, I got basically what I was looking for: Reasonably good contrast.
I have run this bird through the ‘Unsharp Mask’. I know I read it somewhere, but why is it unsharp when the effect is to sharpen? Anyway, you choose a pixel radius, a levels threshold, and the output intensity. The filter then emphasizes ‘gradients’ within those parameters, even if that means creating areas brighter or darker than the surrounding bright/dark areas of the image. High thresholds pick out and emphasize only the sharp transitions that already existed. Large pixel radius determines how wide that area of exaggeration will be, and the output intensity weakens or strengthens the ‘overshoot’ - those areas made brighter or darker than anything else around.
Keep in mind also that if I applied that filter to St. Francis, it would very much emphasize the blotchy color artifacts I just mentioned, so it would be a bad idea.
Posted in photos, Texas, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 07 Jan 2008 23:08:00 GMT
