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 16:04:00 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
Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:08:00 GMT
I may have thought I was in a hurry to catch the train last Monday, but I wound up with a good fifteen minutes of extra time.
I bought my ticket, and the train wasn’t even on the platform yet, so I went back for coffee and a snack at Starbucks (mmmm… cheese plate with apple, grapes, cheddar chunks, a little brie wedge, and a few slices of a dark nuts and berries bread). So there I am with two carryon bags and a paper cup of cafe mocha when I decide that I must absolutely take photos of our nation’s transportation infrastructure. How could I resist that buttery sunset light on the brick building? And, the converging lines of the platform? And, the boxy parking structure?
Well, don’t worry: nobody hassled me. Didn’t you think when you started reading this that I was going to get hassled? I just wanted to document my trip. This was the ride I described in Commuter Train Christmas.
I worked my way up along the platform toward the rail yards looking for good angles, stopping at each point to set down my bag and coffee cup. I didn’t have much time with the light the way it was, and I still have to struggle with some of the camera’s special modes - it’s a lot of icons to recognize, and as soon as I change modes, the flash bulb setting is set to match from memory. On my 35mm SLR, I get by with the exposure controls only, but it probably has the same problem. Because of all that, I don’t like switching modes - but there is no alternate control for it, so I’m forced to learn the icons.
In the interest of documenting my trip (oh, who am I kidding, I was testing my reflexes with the zoom control as the train approaches…) I got a shot of the locomotive. Yes, it’s blurry. I didn’t think it was moving all that fast, but the light was what it was. Longer exposure and more blur would have been fun, but then we get back to those camera modes I don’t fully understand.
I rode one of those Pullman double deckers - the design is much less modern than some of the other cars they run, but this particular car was nicely refurbished. The car has a center vestibule with really wide steps, since they imagined the car would be so packed with commuters that everybody would be standing up. That splits the car into two double decker galleries with a gap down the center aisle, letting you see up or down through the gallery. Here you can see a portion of this arrangement on the right: I’m looking up to the second level, and that is the luggage rack we can all share. On this particular day, I had more than enough room to scatter my bags around my feet, but hey… Thanks anyway.
Posted in photos, DC-roaming, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 01 Jan 2008 17:43:00 GMT
I need to apologize up front for this: It’s nowhere near done yet, and you might read it. For now just enjoy the photographs, but check back later for my more extensive descriptions of what I was doing, and what I was looking for, and if I think I found it.
Saturday morning I took a bus downtown to amble around in the increasingly misnamed Chinatown of DC. It was too early to take in an exhibit at the Museum of American Art, so I expected to hunt for good photographs. It was a crappy morning, and I had no idea that a couple of hours later the sun would emerge from the clouds.
Saturday morning is - in case you didn’t know - the best time to rent cranes and hoist things on top of buildings. Every time I go walking downtown on a Saturday morning, I see about five cranes in action. I tired long ago of my original fascination with construction equipment. Check out the flying jib reflected in the library window below. That is all I am going to say about that.
When I noticed how dominant the florescent lights were inside the library, I was fascinated, and so I started looking for views that would cross the fanning lines of light with the other lines shot through the Mies van der Rohe design. Well, I don’t know if I succeeded. What do you think?
I was not going to launch into an architectural criticism based on these images, but on second thought, maybe that is a good idea…
(I was hoping to map out some other stuff first, though…)
I like to think I’ve found some good looking grays here in this series. Winter is the time I like to take B&W photos, but the colors you find in winter can really surprise you sometimes. I liked the tree branch hanging in front of the box and the reflections in the window. Add the blond brickwork of the wall in front, and it’s amazing how warm a brown can look, isn’t it?
The next thing I found was these historical DC photographs hanging in the windows. All that blocky floating rectangle action in perspective geometry. The interior, the plane of the photographs and the reflections in the glass melded into this pleasant chaos as I got up close.
Posted in DC-roaming, photos, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 10 Dec 2007 15:33:00 GMT
As a writer (if I even am one), I get peeved with stereotypes about what “we” do. Mainly because I doubt writers have much in common with each other. The similarities are not really that important: despite routine, something about finding and assembling words makes members of that category all seem the same, but almost everybody does it at one point or another. What troubles me the most is the word “Writer” is a poor choice of word. Of course, we use it to talk about obsessive writers, or professional writers. But the writing isn’t unique to that group, and in fact, it’s incidental to what actually takes place. Yeah, okay - I still get a picture in my mind of someone sitting at a desk with a pencil and paper - it’s how much of my writing is done these days, but properly speaking people called “Writers” are really more like “Composers”. With a word like “Poet” there is less confusion, but it’s a specialty.
For one thing, I’m not sure what I came here to say today. It’s really just a vague sense that I’m not writing enough to maintain the discipline of practice. It feels like I’m getting left behind. The thought of resting a few days - taking a break from writing is pleasant enough, but technically that’s not what I’ve done. When I invoke the term “obsessive” it should tell you something about how I spend my non-writing time, and it should further be clear that I should be writing enough to injure my hand.
I discovered during my adolescence that I like to explain things. And I also discovered that few people have any patience for me doing it. The deep dark secret seems to be that they don’t actually want to know. The more I read, the more my inner monologue coalesces into one lecture after another. My comfort zone is a rambling explanation of how the world works. This is why I believe I should be an expert at writing books and giving presentations - but it is also why I am not good at those things after all. I can maintain a ‘practice’ - I even find writing one of the easier things to stick to - but staying focused on particular ideas is not so easy for me. Within the space of these few paragraphs, I have frequently had to remind myself of the topic, which I stuffed into the title line sometime after I had spit out a bunch of notes (now deleted) and finished the first paragraph more or less as you see it now.
So as a particular issue in writing: What do you do with all the scraps you have to cut out? I usually include the mish-mash of other ideas because I don’t have any convenient place to put them, and the choice is include -vs- omit. Consider this writing problem another way: I am never writing one thing. I am always writing many things at once - but I keep trying to do it on one page. And to further complicate the issue, everything I write belongs to a larger collection. Each thing to a different collection, usually. And, this is why I’m about to talk about something completely different.
What does a photographer actually do? Amazingly, I can remember writing about this question on paper one day. Basically, when writers or painters want to evoke an image, they work painstakingly stroke by stroke, but with the introduction of the camera, images could be made instantly. The time consuming aspects of photography are the preparation and the post-processing. Having tried to write, to draw pictures, and to take pictures, I can see that photography eliminates an entire aspect of image creation, providing an interesting point of view on the other aspects, which are not really alien to writers or painters.
I propose that the photographer is an artist dealing in collections. Writers and painters also deal in collections, but it’s not what they are really known for. We visualize - as I did with writers at the start - the strokes; the techniques. Preparation and processing don’t count for much in the glamor of these techniques. Nobody cares how Picasso cleaned his brushes. The art savvy are usually aware of how early painters were forced to make their own paints - I suppose I could get really crabby and complain about art stores, and maybe I will - but suffice it to say that I should give this idea a better treatment some other time: “The S-Curve in Art Store Convenience - Why paint in a tube is okay, but having your photos printed at the store isn’t.”
When there is so little work in each individual photo (my friends with the bulky Mathew Brady rigs excepted - perhaps…), the real work is after the fact. The real art is in selecting and grouping the output of the machine. And, anyway, only true nerds still get excited about home-brew emulsions or cardboard tube macro adapters and tilt-shifters.
Speaking of techniques, it startles me how difficult it can be some days to say what I’m thinking. The ideas in my head can move too fast - and hang right there in view only to disappear from consciousness when I sit down to write about it. It shouldn’t ought to be that hard, should it? But here is where I think writing might be more similar to photography that I am willing to admit: the real work with anything longer than a few sentences is in the management - the “post-processing” of pulling scraps together - and, it’s the heart of my complaint about not knowing where to put the off-topic bits I write in the course of other intentions.
I guess we identify most with romantic notions of the moment of creation. And it’s this very fact that makes me laugh. Artists might have those moments, but it’s an unrewarding life for long stretches.
Maybe I just say that because it’s such hard work to make up for a lack of talent.
Posted in photography, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 07 Oct 2007 17:34:00 GMT
(with apologies to Laurie Anderson…)
This morning while I was walking to the bus stop, I spotted this windshield defect from down the block. I was curious. Such a nice car to have a damaged windshield.
But I might have made the same mistake if I had to park in my neighborhood - not even I noticed gawking at this car that it was blocking a utility shed behind an apartment building.
Soon enough I got close enough to see that it was a note left for the driver. An unsubtle message. This is the sort of thing that winds up happening at 7am - It’s late and you’re sick of looking for a parking space, so you settle. Maybe you’re too loaded to notice, too tired to care. My personal prejudice against people who own fancy cars is: “They can obviously afford to pay parking tickets!”, but maybe I’m wrong. Were they thoughtless or desperate? I’ll never know.
WARNING
PARK YOUR CAR
AGAIN IN FRONT OF
OUR GARAGE & THE
POLICE WILL BE CALLED
FOR TOWING (Hopefully
to the Potomac River!)
I would bet that a second person added the Potomac River embellishment at the end. Partly because it is not in all-caps like the rest of the note, and partly because they were running out of space.
But here is the real treat: Later I was reviewing these pictures, and saw that - I’ve done it again: I’ve made myself a bystander in my own photograph. Do you like reflections as much as I do?
This is the hand.
The hand that takes.
Posted in DC-roaming, photos, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 18 Sep 2007 23:49:00 GMT
I always thought it was odd to have a Marconi memorial in DC - but especially in some little park uptown. I don’t know if there is any significance to the spot, but I guess it was simply available.
These pictures are from June 21st. This blog doesn’t say much about what I was doing that day, but the camera never lies: On my way home, I got off the bus to take a walk around unfamiliar neighborhoods. Columbia Heights, mainly. When I was done there, I crossed back to Mt. Pleasant. This was a particularly good time to take pictures of Marconi - and his unexplained ‘nymph of the air’ up on top - with that fresh gilt applied. Getting the background to cooperate was no mean feat. I had to circle around in the park, regard it from many angles, play with my zoom controls and framing. You don’t see the lecherous homeless men who egged me on to capture her golden form.
I just wish - and this is not to say you don’t deserve a statue, Marconi - I just wish I knew where the Tesla memorial was…
StopBlogAndRoll
Let’s have a hand for ‘friendship among blogs’ folks: I was rooting around in my site statistics and found I had a link from Stop, Blog, and Roll, a community blog from Northeast DC. That got me thinking about all the DC photos I haven’t posted yet. Come to think of it, I’ve been wandering around DC on foot any by bicycle for a good 15 years now. I’ll bet I can come up with a lot of stories. So we have a new category, and this is the inaugural post, just so you know after I go back and add the tag to older ones.
Posted in DC-roaming, photos, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:31:00 GMT
I rode my bike to Dupont today around noon and picked up “The Lookout”.
Very impressive. I must not be very chatty tonight, because I can’t quite explain what I liked about it. Maybe more than anything it was the mood of the film. The look of everything.
Meanwhile, it’s hot again. The bike ride was a real workout in the heat. It couldn’t have helped that I got an espresso while I was in Dupont, then rode up Rock Creek to return home. There was some road construction, and for a minute, I couldn’t figure out how to get down into the park. I stopped to take some pictures along the creek and try out a couple exercise stations. By the time I pedaled up the hill to Woodley, I was beat.
The paint job on the stairway is almost done. They work like crazy, into the night, then days go by with nothing. Mysterious. Are they going to leave those scraps of linoleum tile sitting there in the middle? Are they going to finish the edges? It actually looks pretty good - it’s just not finished yet.
Posted in photography, film-and-TV | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 25 Aug 2007 01:34:00 GMT
Last night I met up with Troy and Tomoko at DC9. It’s a popular place to see indie rock bands, but every Friday they have a DJ, and they call it “Revolution Dance Party”. Apparently, music used to come on circular pieces of plastic, and there were ‘players’ that read the information off the plastic as it spun. Our historians are still unclear as to why. (…end mischief)
I’ve been hearing such wonderful things about DC9 - and when I told the gang at Reef I was headed over there, they were jealous: Kim even predicted I would wind up at BCB (ahem… Ben’s Chili Bowl. Where a sign on the wall proclaims that Bill Cosby can eat for free). But DC9 was pretty lame. It didn’t strike me as a particularly cool place to hang out. Also, being August, there were only about five drunk girls dancing. Very pathetic. In addition to some very good music videos for bands I like but had never heard of, they were playing old episodes of “Wonder Woman” on the video screen. I suppose we can tally one for the plus column.
I haven’t seen either Troy or Tomoko since Texas, so I showed off some of the Texas pictures left on my camera. That was probably everything - since I upgraded the memory card, I’ve never run out, and why would I bother deleting anything?
After one drink, we took off in search of food. I was under the impression that all bars were legally obligated to serve food in DC, but the bartenders claimed total ignorance of a menu. This lead us to the aforementioned “BCB”. (Kim’s prophecy was fulfilled!) Mmmm… Chili cheese fries and a Coke. And then, the two of them are complaining they can’t finish and sawing off bits of half-smoke to pile on top of my fries. Pretty good deal. It even prevented me from drinking too much later - I was too queasy for another whiskey!
I closed out the evening back at the Reef. The Friday DJs are good - even though it’s hip-hop, which isn’t exactly my forte. I had a little whiskey, and a lot of water, did some good people watching, met some folks for a change - one bartender’s non-bartender girlfriend, one of the guys from Asylum making his first visit on Carina’s recommendation, who turned out to be pretty cool. We even started conspiring to laugh at the drunks. I suspect Carina worries I’m too much of a loner, and she’s always happy when she sees me making friends. Part of the charm could be that it’s such an awful place to attempt it some nights. It’s so easy to feel like everybody has been infected with some space virus a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the truly cool people are struggling to blend in so they don’t get infected too.
Posted in gourmand, bar-scene, photography | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 19 Aug 2007 00:02:00 GMT
A while back, I picked up a copy of Billmeyer & Saltzman’s “Principles of Color Technology”. It explains a lot about measuring and producing colors, along with some good discussion of color spaces and other standards. I look at it once in a while.
The other night I was thumbing through my Photoshop CS manual. I’ve always been impressed with how useless it is - it is often vague. A lot of what, but very little why. The chapter on color profiles is one of the vaguest. I read and re-read it, but I seem to be missing something. So why don’t I try explaining some of it to you?
Light comes from sources. Those sources emit a spectrum of light, which means that some light is shining at every wavelength visible to the eye. Start talking about something other than a ‘normal’ human eye, and it gets more complicated. Add in the filtering effects of the atmosphere, or the ambient light reflected off walls and you’ve got real problems. The ideal source is blackbody radiation. Heat something up in the dark and it will glow, although most things will melt or flame out first. Quantum mechanics provided the explanation for why blackbody radiation looks the way it does. Incandescent filaments are a close fit, but other sources like lasers or florescent bulbs give off sharp spikes at specific wavelengths, instead of a smooth spectrum. Most people have already noticed that the light from florescent bulbs looks different. The coating is an attempt to solve that problem.
After sources, you’ve got detectors. Light detectors like the CCD in my digital camera or some photo-reactive surface like Kodak film or a daguerreotype plate respond to wavelengths of light in a different way than the eye. Same with computer scanners. Other animals see a different range of wavelengths. Sunlight provides much more than you or I can see, and it apparently didn’t matter for our survival. This
Lastly, there is the possibility that you are looking at light reflected from a surface. It’s possible to think of the reflected light as a kind of source, just as it’s possible to think of the sunlight that makes it through the atmosphere as a source. All materials reflect, absorb and scatter some portion of every wavelength. Some even emit new light at some wavelengths - your florescent coatings and glow-in-the-dark stuff.
Sensitivity of the Eye
But for all the ways that light is emitted, transmitted and reflected, the human eye and its imitators only deal with the variations among three ranges of wavelength: Loosely speaking, the reds, greens and blues (r,g,b). This graph shows how the different kinds of receptors respond to different wavelengths. To make color distinctions, the nerve cells bundled with the eye detect balance in light/dark, red/green, and blue/yellow (L,a,b). There is some overlap in the sensitivity of the three receptors, so it’s impossible to experience certain combinations: you can’t see something red without a little bit of green and blue stimulus. There are combinations that just don’t exist. Remember, they’re not colors yet - just three levels of stimulus. The rest of the brain won’t learn to recognize combinations that never occur because the overlap in sensitivity prevents it.
Because of this, the colors we can describe are only some of the mathematical combinations. Nothing way out at the edge, concentrated in one color receptor but not the others.
Chromaticity Diagram
The diagram on the left is my amateurish mock-up of a chromaticity diagram. It gives you a good idea of what a real one would look like, but since we’re seeing it on a monitor (more on that later…), it’s not going to be all that accurate anyway. I can’t vouch for how the colors are distributed, but the pure wavelengths of light run around the curve from blue, through green to red. I wish violet were down on the corner where blue is, but that’s what I get with rapid results. I know what I would do to fix it, at least.
The graph is a plot of how each single wavelength stimulates the different receptors and lands on the chromaticity diagram. There’s a z-axis, too - which I am ignoring for now - just remember that the curve spirals up and down off the screen something like a roller coaster track. Every possible color is some mixture of these visible wavelengths, so those colors wind up averaged in the middle, giving you the rainbow bulk of the chromaticity diagram. The important thing here is that the curve encloses all the colors that exist - outside the curve are combinations of stimulus that real light won’t cause (now if we go into your brain with electrodes, that’s a different story - Let’s not).
Color Gamut
Computer displays: Output devices come in two basic groups. The screens and the printers. Phosphors and inks. I used to wonder about this a lot. I knew about the wavelengths of light, and how they represented colors that could be named, but in human history, bare wavelengths didn’t occur to be looked at.
These diagrams show the portion of the chromaticity diagram that can be reached by different devices. On the left is a hypothetical computer screen. With red, green and blue, it’s possible to reach pretty far into those regions, but since no monitor is providing pure versions of those colors, the range is limited. Colors like cyan, magenta and yellow can be approximated by mixing. On the right is a hypothetical printer. By using only cyan, yellow or magenta inks, you can similarly reach pretty far into those regions, but you’ll never get a really bright saturated green like you might see on a monitor. The quality of your paper and inks can shrink that region way down, and seriously limit what can be represented.
Computer screens (color, that is…) mainly work on Red, Green and Blue (r,g,b). Add together different amounts of those three to get any(?) color. No two screens are exactly alike. And some are downright different. The sources of this red, green and blue light are phosphors on a tube or filters in a projector. And, every new flat-screen technology improvises something similar. To get any kind of brightness for viewing, you need a spread-out spectrum, and that squashes the range further of picking out one eye stimulus from the others. You also need a really dark background of black since you’re adding colored light. Try as they might, the computer displays just can’t produce every color you can see.
Printers use ink. Most colored inks just aren’t that bright. And paper isn’t all white. By adding ink, you subtract some light that would otherwise be reflected. The normal route is to use Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks (c,m,y,k) on white paper. It’s also possible to use other ink colors, which is nice when you need to show a really saturated green. The inks add color, but only up to a certain point. Add more ink and you just make it muddy. Inks have their own problems, like how a different papers will bleed the little dots of color.
Why Do I Care?
Internal representations on a computer are just numbers. Numbers that are meaningful in the context of a particular model. You want as much range and detail as you can get, but some color numbers will be impossible colors. Impossible for some device, or just unavailable in any branch of reality. With calibration, we can begin to agree on what those numbers should produce on a given output device. And, if the input devices are also calibrated, then all your results should be close.
And this brings us to Photoshop. Without calibration, the numbers in the files that should represent colors are blind guesses. And - hey - maybe they’re not too far off. They look great on screen. They come out reasonably well on the printer at work. They look the same on somebody else’s screen - but you’re not comparing them side-by-side, are you?
All this thinking about color models has me inspired to play around with how Windows displays color. And, more importantly, how to manipulate the numerical models. I’ve decided that it might be nice to write a program to plot out that chromaticity diagram. But it raises some issues: What is the right way to assign (r,g,b) colors to the points of the graph. And how should I go about plotting it? I have a table of data that defines the boundary curve, and Billmayer & Saltzman offer one choice for the white point in the center.
Posted in photography, programming | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:24:00 GMT
