captin nod

Little bits of San Francisco

2009-06-12T07:45:00.000-07:00

Howard St:

Sabretooth cast on the Embarcadero:

Art at Humpry Slocombe in the Mission:

At the counter, Humpry Slocombe in the Mission:

I would watch this movie

2009-06-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

If there was a director who was able to combine this:

with this:

...then I would watch that movie, no questions asked.

Maker Faire 2009

2009-05-31T01:11:00.000-07:00

Bay to breakers 2009

2009-05-18T01:25:00.001-07:00

Slideshow here.

Bring Your Own Big Wheel 2009

2009-04-13T06:19:00.000-07:00

The plungercam gets a thorough workout at this annual San Francisco event. It was thoroughly awesome :D

EDIT: coverage on:
laughingsquid
sfist
digg

prn to pdf

2009-03-30T17:16:00.000-07:00

Lets say that you work in an environment where you occasionally have to deal with Microsoft Office documents. You need to convert these to .pdf's so everyone can read them. Openoffice does the job admirably most of the time but sometimes it crashes or just messes up the layout. There is a (slightly circuitous) way of converting any printable windows document to a pdf file that doesn't require having to install any special dodgy PDF converter software.

You will need:

A Windows installation that can read & print the document
A postscript printer driver for the Windows install (see below)
A linux installation with ps2pdf installed

If you don't already have one installed, you can get postscript printer drivers here or you can try following the steps here. Once you have the drivers installed, the steps are:

On windows, go to print your document
When the print dialog comes up, make sure you select your postscript printer

Also select the 'print to file' option
Hit print; a dialog will come up specifying the file you want to write to. For arguments sake, lets call it wombat.prn
Copy this file to somewhere you can get to on linux
On linux, open up a terminal where wombat.prn lives, and run:

ps2pdf wombat.prn wombat.pdf

...and now you have a shiny new .pdf. There are a ton of options you can use in ps2pdf to tweak document size and quality - see here.

building a tilt-shift plungercam lens for less than $25

2009-03-23T23:24:00.000-07:00

On the weekend I finally got organized and with some help from Briony we finished attaching a male EOS adapter on to a toilet-plunger - because, lets face it, there isn't any more productive activity than affixing low-end plumbing equipment to high-end optics :P From certain angles, it looks totally badass. From most angles, it looks like a toilet plunger. The whole thing was built for less than US$25, so I can't really complain.

My previous attempts at tilt-shift have ranged from pure fakery to some fairly decent results achieved by holding a prime lens a little away from the camera body and simply just tilting it. However, this was a fast path to getting dust and grime in the camera body, so I started to seek out a closed solution.

One key disadvantage of using a 35mm prime lens for tilt-shift is that the flange focal depth of the lens means that it has to sit right next to or even slightly inside the camera body to get a picture. However, by using a medium format lens, which has a longer flange focal depth and a bellows arrangement, you can afford to move the lens about a bit more. Two people who've championed this technique (and used a plunger as bellows) have been Dennison Bertram and Keith Loh, from whom I draw my inspiration for this project.

For this particular implementation, I wanted a fairly strong, permenant solution that would still allow me to swap out the lens at end of the bellows. My materials list was:

rubber tolilet plunger, US$5, from a hardware store
metal clip, US$1.25, also from a hardware store
canon body cap, US$1.50, ebay
Seiko Zenza Bronica medium format lens; f2.8 75mm. US$11.50, ebay

I first used a hobby knife to make an aperture as large as possible in the body cap; this was going to be the EOS mount for the plungercam.

I lopped the head and tail off the plunger; the smaller end had a diameter to match that of the body cap, and the larger end that of the lens. Here you can see where the male EOS adapter was attached. I was aiming to do this completely without screws or glue, but I ended up needing to glue the adapter into place to make a secure fit.

The lens is held into place by slotting into the end of the plunger, into a flange made up of tabs cut from the end of the plunger plastic. A screw-clamp is put around the lens and the tabs so it all holds together, which is seems to do quite securely.

I was a bit worried that the lens would bend the plastic and would need constant holding. However, the plunger is relatively stiff, and I feel fairly confident that the lens mechanism holds up under its own weight without flopping about dangerously. And there you have it - probably one of only a few toilet plungers in the world that come with an EOS mount.

Once you work out a way of holding the lens comfortably, it's pretty easy to tweak the focus of the lens. It's quite sensitive to position, and the rubber is fairly stiff, so I it's not advisable to use it for long-exposure shots. Also, the lens completely and utterly throws out spot metering. The fix is to switch back to evaluative metering (bah! humbug!) and underexpose the image a little (one f-stop seemed to work for me); this way you can merrily shoot in aperture priority mode without having to constantly tweak the shutter speed.

But does it take decent pictures? I did a field test with it yesterday, and I've included some highlights below (click on the images to see larger versions). It's still early days yet with this lens, but I'll leave the quality judgement up to you.

Here the lens really shows its lovely shallow depth of field. From the tests so far, I really do think it's ideal for portrait and macro shots as opposed to trying to miniaturise cities.

Later on in the day, after a bit of practice, it became pretty easy to select a target to focus on in the image.

Another tilt-shift artifact - bright lights (see reflection of tail-lights in the window on the right) become big, fuzzy bokeh highlights. This might be a boon for some, but maddening for others.

I really love what real tilt-shift does to parallel lines in the image - what seems to happen is that the blur increases as you move away from the focal plane.

Classical Penguins

2009-02-23T07:00:00.000-08:00

A murky memory for anyone who has studied English using textbooks that date back to the 80's or earlier are the minimalist covers for the books themselves. I didn't give them much thought at the time, but there is a kind of clean, cheesy look to them that is quite appealing. Penguin covers have become a bit of a design icon all on their own, even releasing a book on the topic and re-issuing a few classic design books using the old-school cover design. Pelican books also have some pretty distinctive covers, though I personally don't like the look of them as much as the Penguin covers.

However, what has been especially awesome in the past few months has been the interpretation of contemporary creative endeavours - in the style of these minimalist book covers. A few of my favourites:

Games:

Movies:

More movies

Harry Potter:

A template if you'd like to have a go yourself.

Water rocketry

2009-02-06T07:05:00.000-08:00

As part of an inane quest to prove that all that one needs for an effective method of public transport is water and air, a bunch of us had headed off to Crissy field to do some launch tests with a rocket.

The rocket itself was a construction of Florian's design; the initial test was done at dusk on and employed the use of speedlites and an ingenious flash trigger to get some high-speed shots of the rocket at launch. Shelly's pics of this can be found here.

We headed out the next day to get some daytime shots; my camera gear in this case was a bit better equipped for the task. Florian had estimated that the rocket was easily travelling at 145km/h just after launch, experiencing about 40g of acceleration. Briony was happy to trigger the launches, with the rest of us snapping away at the rocket.

Briony adding air pressure to the rocket - we used between 40 to 10 psi.

Launch! Note the awesome sputtering you get when the rocket runs out of propellant (a more spectacular example can be found here).

mini muni

2009-02-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

I'm still enamoured with the 50mm f1.8 lens on my camera. I've also found that if you're willing to wander around with the lens off the body, you can easily achieve some selective DOF/tilt-shift effects (a running series of experiments with this technique are here) A few pics of one of my fave subjects, the San Francisco MUNI, are below.

The Vader Project

2009-02-06T06:55:00.000-08:00

At a work function recently, a bunch of artworks from the Vader Project were up on display. The idea was that a set of replica Vader heads were sent out to pop artists around the globe to reinterpret as they wish - the results were brilliant. A small subset of the heads can be found here; some highlights are below.

El-cheapo DIY ringflash using the inbuilt flash

2009-01-07T23:00:00.000-08:00

Late last year I took an incredible photo class, run by the always awesome Joel Aron. During class, I was impressed by the sheer amount of geeky gear that is available for photography, especially in terms of lighting. One particular bit of gear - the ringflash - looked interesting, especially in terms of its use for portrait (note the soft shadows on the wall) and macro photography.

I'm not quite ready to get an off-camera flash yet, let alone drop hundreds of dollars on a ringflash. I had read about a number of home-made ringflash setups on diyphotography.net so I set out to build my own ringflash that utilises the in-built camera flash, assembled with a few hours of work:

(click for images for larger versions throughout this post)

It forced me to be a bit more disciplined in terms of getting the shutter/aperture/flash exposure ratios correct. In macro or close-up shots, it casts soft shadows. One of neat techniques I'd had suggested to me was to get someone standing against a solid coloured surface, with the ringflash casting soft illumination and fuzzy, warm shadows behind the subject.

Another neat effect is to get close up if the subject has reflective surfaces - note the awesome circular reflections you get in the pupils of eyes.

Construction

Since I already had the materials, the whole thing cost $0. The design was largely based on this setup, which uses an off-camera flash as a light source. As I mentioned previously, I really wanted to use the in-built flash, so I set about designing my own. The materials I used:

Yoghurt tub (though any bowl-shaped object with slightly sloping sides and a diameter of 7-8cm and a depth of at least 10cm will probably do)
Aluminium foil (mylar would probably have been better)
Sturdy cardboard
PVC glue
Electrical tape (any opaque tape will probably do)
Stanley/x-acto knife

The idea was to put a forward facing reflective bowl around the lens, and feed light into it - for example, the setup here. Instead of an external flash for the light source, the plan was to reflect light down from the inbuilt flash into the bowl itself. This means that the ring isn't particularly evenly illuminated, but it's more than good enough for the experiments I'm doing. When it reaches the limit of its usefulness, I'll build another one, probably using mylar as the reflector and a speedlite as the light source.

First step is the yoghurt tub. I drew a circle at the base that was a little (3-4mm) bigger than the diameter of the lens that it was to fit around, and drew radii on it - 16 segments is probably ideal. The important thing to do here is to cut the plastic along the radii, but only to gently score the circumference.

Once you've made the cuts, gently push the segments inwards and the plastic should fold easily along the scored circumference. Cut the top off the tub at a height that should be equivalent to the desired depth of the flash - I found 9-10cm ideal.

I was amiss not to have taken more photos of this step. I slid the lens into the hole at the bottom of the container, pushing the cut segments inwards. I took a length of cardboard and wrapped it around the segments to get the size for my inner reflector. I unwrapped the cardboard, and cut it to size. Using a light layer of PVC glue evenly spread over one side, I glued foil to the unrolled cardboard.

Measure out a length of foil that will cover the inside radius of the tub; ensure you have a little bit extra on the bottom end so it will also cover the inside bottom of the container. I again used a light layer of PVC glue and then attached the foil to it, making sure I also covered the inside base of the container.

Once the glue dried, I then attached cut segments to the cardboard using short strips of electrical tape - PVC didn't cut it here for attaching the stiff, non-porous plastic to the porous cardboard. I also used electrical tape to neaten up the edges of the foil around the outer edge of the container.

The light scoop for the flash down to the base was a lot more ad-hoc in terms of construction. I slid the assembled base on on to the lens, and traced out two curves from the flash down to the base to describe the sides of the scoop, as well as two flat pieces for the top and bottom. These were cut out, and like the base the foil was attached with a thin layer of PVC glue. Once this had dried, the base of the scoop was attached to the side using several short strips of electrical tape.

Completed scoop - the sides are completely sealed with tape to ensure no light will escape.

The scoop was measured against the base, and a hole about 1mm narrower than the scoop exit was cut out of the base. The scoop was attached in a similar fashion to the scoop assembly, using tape to prevent any light leakages.

The ringflash itself produces a bit of a hotspot close to the attachment between the scoop and the base. Hopefully I'll be able to work out a way to prevent that in the next revision :)

Results

Left: inbuilt flash, right: ring flash

In both these comparison shots, I used the same exposure, aperture, and flash settings - firstly with the inbuilt flash, and secondly with the ringflash attached. The ring flash does decrease the output of the flash, so I think in this configuration it's best suited as a fill-flash when the subject is already reasonably well lit. The softness and diverging light emitted seemed to help cast softer, wider shadows that would otherwise be possible.

In the top photos, the rough folds of the tablecloth are smoothed out a little without the harsh shadows cast by the inbuilt flash. In the bottom photos, where I was aiming for a macro shot, the ringflash seems to actually brings in shadows, whereas the head-on inbuilt flash casts sharp shadows hidden behind the subject.

As it stands, there are a lot of tweaks to be made, and I learned a bunch from this first revision of the experiment. I'm looking forward to better, future versions :)

Low-cost HD time-lapse photography using DSLR's: a quick HOWTO

2009-01-06T09:00:00.000-08:00

After pushing my trusty FZ-50 as far as it could go, I ended up investing in a DSLR which has treated me very well. What's most impressive is the level of low-cost, DIY hackability that becomes available once you move on to an SLR.

As an example: high definition video. A few months ago I put together a pair of time-lapse, 'tilt-shifted' videos using a DSLR, a linux laptop and some post-processing. The results:

Dawn and dusk in mini San Francisco from captin nod on Vimeo.

San Francisco Transitions from captin nod on Vimeo.

Dawn and Dusk in mini San Francisco was posted to laughingsquid, and from there I was privileged to be asked by George Lever to add the video to the Citypulse collection. It's currently on show at Citypulse at the tower in Santiago, Chile right now:

The recipe needed for making the videos was actually relatively simple:

Equipment

Canon EOS 450D (Rebel XSi)
USB cable to connect 450D to laptop
Netbook (Aspire One) running Mandriva 2009 (any laptop will suffice)
gphoto 2.4.3 installed on laptop
tripod (sturdier the better)
Photoshop (or gimp)
Quicktime (or mencoder)

Technique

You'll need to pick a subject - get as high up as you can. I've found that people don't work all that well in time-lapse videos, but traffic and slow moving things (especially boats, clouds) are awesome
Set up the camera on the tripod; use spot metering and aperture priority to reduce flicker, and turn auto-focus off
Connect the laptop to the camera, and use this command line for gphoto: gphoto2 --set-config capture=on --capture-image-and-download -I 5
You could probably also use the bundled Canon software, but I've never tried it
I capture an image every 4-5 seconds, but you can crank this up or down depending on what you're capturing
You'll end up with a long sequence of images
These can either be fed directly into Quicktime to make a movie, or you can run them through gimp or photoshop first to tweak/post-process them
I added a fake 'tilt-shift' effect on a few of the sequences (I'll try to post a guide on how to do it for real soon) using photoshop - see tutorial here.

It's a relatively simple technique, and if you have a DSLR chances are you probably already have all the equipment and software needed already, making it a low-cost hack.

Doctor woohoo

2008-04-02T00:14:00.003-07:00

I've just got off a late-night phone call from my rather excited parents in Sydney; turns out my long suffering PhD manuscript has finally passed the last hurdle, and I am now officially a doctor.

Goodbye phdcomics!

*sob*

(not)

Pining for the fjords

2008-02-16T08:47:00.000-08:00

Despite being distracted by faceblag, cow.mooh.org is still very much alive and kicking.

I'll be following up with my long-promised post about living in SF soon :)

Good riddance

2007-11-24T13:42:00.000-08:00

I'd like to say that I've got some sympathy for the outgoing government. I'd like to say I can hear the sound of sad little violins.

But I can't.

I hope I never hear about any of those miserable sods ever again. Good riddance.

San Francisco: part 1

2007-11-21T17:30:00.000-08:00

Regular readers and xml suction cups alike - apologies for the long time between posts. It's just that there's been a few things really occupying my time recently.

Like moving to San Francisco.

In my ongoing quest to get into high-end special effects work, I was stunned when an application I had made to Industrial Light and Magic was met with a request for an interview.

View Larger Map

There was a bit of back and forth in terms of phone interviews, after which, I came in for a couple of interviews on-site at The Presidio in San Francisco City, followed shortly thereafter by an official job offer, at which point my head simply exploded. As Briony can attest, the subsequent mess was a bit difficult to clean up.

So began our six-week odyssey to get moved to California. You know, with that guy in charge.

One of the great things about moving country is the pressing urge you get to start shedding stuff. San Francisco is notoriously expensive to live in, so we quickly came to the conclusion that we'd not have a lot of room in whatever apartment we end up living in. So you need to just start aggressively getting rid of the myriad piles of junk that you accumulate over the years. Our stash was considerable, so it was with some relief that we got rid of a good chunk of it. Once we had pared it down to the bare essentials, OSS removals (framed html?? why why why!??!!????) arrived to get it sent off. We had been expecting a large truck. What we didn't expect was..

..the whole shipping container. That was kind of awesome. Anyway, that all got loaded into the truck, and is in transit as I write. There are numerous other little hilarious situations that occur when moving country (including a whole heap of fun in regards to visas - but that's a post for another time), as anyone who has moved country can attest to.

We've been here less than a week, but I have to say that one of the more pleasant surprises we got was that US customs and immigration isn't quite as insane as they are quite often portrayed. I'm sure that there have been many cases where things certainly haven't gone down so well, but for myself and the boss it was fairly benign. There was the small issue stemming from the fact that the E3 Visa isn't listed on the system properly at immigration, but they ended up simply picking the nearest one (E2) and are going to let DHS figure the rest out :P

Last weekend, my cousin Amie (visiting from Manhattan), was in town to present a paper at a conference at the Parc 55. Apart from catching up, she wandered around town with me, pointing out what to look for in apartments and neighborhoods (and expanding my lexicon - I now know a lot more about sketchy parts of town).

(Amie is a legend in our family. She's graduated top of the class in pretty much everything she's done in New York, and is currently studying medicine whilst moonlighting as a publishing machine. She's getting married this coming May, and the wedding is going to be in Baja California, in Mexico - how cool is that!)

But that's enough of that. Today is Turkey Day, and we have to somehow find lunch whilst everyone else is consuming some rather startled, but dead, birds.

In part 2 (after lunch!) - living and working in San Francisco:

phases of the phoon

2007-08-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

(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:

(click for bigger version - make it your wallpaper!)

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.

electronic theatre highlights from SIGGRAPH'07

2007-08-15T06:21:00.000-07:00

Again I couldn't make it to SIGGRAPH this year in person. However, I had the opportunity to check out a screening of the electronic theatre. Here are some of my hand-picked highlights from the screening:

burning safari (link) - youtube, quicktime.

raymond - youtube,quicktime

travelers (think katamari) - youtube

the itch (link) - youtube,quicktime

gentlemans duel (link) - quicktime

Enjoy :)

09/08/07 06:05:04

2007-08-08T13:05:00.000-07:00

muahahahahhahahahahahha!!!

more moving and shaking

2007-08-06T21:48:00.000-07:00

As seems to regularly be the case, the only thing that's constant is change. Briony is hanging out in sunny San Francisco for three months, we have moved out of our apartment in Gladesville and I'm back to AWP'ing defenceless Radiophysicists from my old bedroom in Marsfield. I've also gotten my act together and I'm working in the film biz.

I'm learning a lot, very quickly. The whole film-making process is a lot more measured and slower than I had previously imagined. The amount of work that goes into short, isolated segments of film is truly staggering.

The pace of film-making, however, is positively harefooted compared to the glacial pace of pedestrian commuters in the morning. In a vain attempt to squeeze some extra exercise in the day, I walk just over 3kms from the bus at QVB to work, near Fox Studios.

The morning routine involves getting off the bus on York street, and colliding with a giant group of people who are, for all intents and purposes, standing still. I think that they're slowly moving somewhere, perhaps hoping to be propelled only by molecular-scale Brownian motion. All I can hear is the moans and limp shuffling of undercaffeinated zombies, somehow occupying the entire pavement in an insidious, dozy mass.

It's not like I'm late or anything. I just don't like to shuffle - I can't do it, its too hard.

There's no concept of keeping to one side. Recent studies have shown that deceased mammals outpace most people in and around Town Hall around 8am on weekdays. It's enough to make one go a little postal.

The paragon of evil mario levels

2007-06-25T17:24:00.000-07:00

It's like watching a horror movie. So numbingly terrifying, that you can't tear your eyes away from it:

Via destructoid.

uni-bling

2007-06-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

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

Probably one of the most important citation in my thesis

2007-06-18T02:42:00.000-07:00

I was pleased to discover a neat powerpoint presentation on one of the most important piece of work cited in my thesis.

I've provided a complete bibtex citation below; see here for the original source.

@Article{zongker06,
Author = {Zongker, Doug},
Title = {Chicken {C}hicken {C}hicken: {C}hicken {C}hicken},
Journal = {Annals of Improbable Research},
Volume = {12},
Number = {5},
Pages = {16-21},
abstract = {Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken
chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken
chicken chicken chicken chicken.},
month = sep,
url = {http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/improb/air/2006/00000012/00000005/art00006},
year = 2006
}

edit: I should probably also mention the other important piece of work cited - see Avildsen et al.,1984.

Thundercats.. whaaaa?

2007-06-06T17:49:00.000-07:00

Looks like another cherished 80's cartoon is in for the Hollywood treatment. Thundercats is making its way to the big screen via Warner Bros. Could this be one of the titles that may well be produced in Australia by Animal Logic? Avid celebrity spotters should keep an eye out around Fox Studios looking for a man in a spandex suit with a clown face and red hair (link is scary, open with caution) that looks a little like a cat.

Snarf. Snarf.

Still on the production front, looks like Battlestar Galactica is actually going to wrap up at the end of season 4, on "their own terms", so to speak. Its pretty cool to see that they're not going to try to drag it out till its painfully overdue for an ending.