Random Processes

The Strobist goes to the LHC

2009-02-24T12:43:00.000-08:00

Here's the gist of a conversation that went down last October-ish:

DH: The Googleplex may have just moved to #2 on my best-ever lighting seminar destinations.
Me: (bristling at the insult) How so?
DH: Received an invite to do one at CERN. The LHC is currently down and can be toured. And lit. And shot.
Me: HAH!, but do they have strawberry mojitos? And, um, holy shit. Need an assistant?
DH: I am sure they would have no problem. Even if he never did seem to do any work.
Me: engfeh... {wobble}... {THUD}

So that's where we were last week. Touring and shooting all four major detectors at the LHC, and getting better treatment than even nibs like the King of Belgium did (who, I'm told, got to tour a mere one experiment --- pah!).

So here's a brief rundown of the fun at CERN:

Day 1: ATLAS and CMS

Started off the day getting retina scans for our biometric passes into the detector. Now since my right retina is currently being held in place with some chewing gum and gaffer tape, I was all prepared for hilarity to ensue: "Please center your eye in the rectangle". "No, your *eye*"... but I was pleasantly surprised when the system actually worked pretty well.

The ATLAS detector was our first stop. As an aside, ATLAS is an acronym for "A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS". Uh-huh. I'm thinking someone was fishing really hard, and should've just gone with the first choice: "A Thingy Like an Awesome Stargate".

Interesting fact: The ring is an average of about 100m below ground, but it's at a slight angle to the earth's surface so that it all remains within the same geological plate. The engineers that built it thought long-term, and knew that if it straddled different layers, then shifts in the earth's crust over a 50 year period would deform the ring. If only we could write software with that amount of forethought :)

From our vantage point, we could see the ends of the huge superconducting magnets that focus the beam and collision debris. They're the orange-striped bits you can see if you click through to the picture above. It's fascinating to hear about how fragile the superconducting state really is; the currents in these magnets are of the order of 7000A, so a tiny loss of superconductivity in the coil would immediately shove a resistor in the path of that current, which would generate an enormous amount of heat, and cascade the loss of superconductivity to its surroundings.

While I went giddy over the machinery, David was busy scoping out the area and setting up a couple of lights... resulting in these shots of Xavier and Doris.

CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) was the next stop. You know physicists have a sense of humor when they use the word "compact" in connection with anything resembling such a behemoth.

Michael Hoch was our physicist guide (and model). He pointed out another cool engineering trick: If you shoot the detector using an on-axis flash and nuke the ambient with a fast shutter speed, you'll see a cool pattern produced by little reflectors.

Photographing that pattern from many different vantage points allows them to precisely model thermal expansion/contraction of parts of the detector (which, y'know, you have to think about when cooling the blighter to a nippy -270C).

ATLAS and CMS are twins, in the sense that if the Higgs boson is found by either one, it will have to be verified by the other (The EU member states that fund CERN, and indeed the physics community in general, would turn a fairly jaundiced eye towards anyone making an ass of themselves by announcing a false positive).

Day 2: LHCb and ALICE

If matter and antimatter were created in equal measure at the time of the big bang, then how come most of the observable universe only contains "regular" matter? One of the goals of the LHCb (Large Hadron Collider - beauty --- since it's designed to study beauty-quarks/antiquarks) is to understand the asymmetries that caused matter to win out over antimatter within just a couple of seconds of the big bang.

Since most of the interesting traces for these particles happen in a thin cone around the beam direction, LHCb is constructed like a giant view camera, with planes of detectors perpendicular to the beam. Each of the vertical slices is separate detector, and can slide out on rails for maintenance.

The ultra-cool part? Niko took us to within spitting distance of the section of the beam-pipe that sees the actual collisions:

Most of the beam pipe that runs around the tunnel is made of stainless steel (which is pretty cheap to manufacture) and can handle the pressure differential of the near-vacuum that the beam must travel through. Steel however would cause too much scattering of the collision debris, so this bit (at the collision point) is actually made of beryllium. This is a bit more problematic to acquire since there are only a couple of places in the world that can machine beryllium (being quite fragile and a strong carcinogen in dust form). Right now, while the repairs are under way it's in its protective plexiglass casing, and is pressure-balanced by being filled with neon.

Here's our intrepid chaperon Niko, caught from my vantage point where I leeched off David's light setup. David's shots are here.

Our last stop was ALICE (A Large-Ion Collider Experiment). Besides being able to analyze proton-proton collisions, ALICE can also analyze collisions between much heavier lead-ions. Our crazy kart-racing, horse/jellyfish-eating friend Fons likened it to the difference between smashing a couple of tennis balls together versus a couple of Steinways. There's a lot more debris to analyze in the latter, and part of his work is building out the software infrastructure that can make sense of it all.

Some more pictures from ALICE:

The next day (Saturday), David did the Strobist seminar, and I got to hang out with a bunch of awesome people from all over the place. And on Sunday, Péter & András (the organizers of this entire trip) gave us a choice of driving up a stunningly beautiful mountain, or visiting CERN's compute-center and taking more cool pictures. So, of course we chose the compute-center (besides, it was snowing like crazy).

As of this writing, they have about 15PB of spinning disk storage that is used as a cache for 18PB of tape storage. It was cool watching the little robotic arms shuttle tapes around, so we had to stop and take a shot of that as well.

Huge, huge thank you to Péter, András, Fons, Doris, Niko, Michael, and all the folks at CERN who gave us the unprecedented access. Péter, thanks especially for all the early mornings you had to endure. You can now go back to your regular schedule waking up at the crack of noon :)

DH, I owe ya big time for letting a drooling geek tag along, although I know the really hard bit was parting with half your last 5-hour-energy shot ;)

Dust Puppy Goodness!!

2009-01-12T21:08:00.000-08:00

My copy of Ten Years of UserFriendly.org arrived in the mail today!! 1057 pages of every strip published from 1997-2007.

It arrived at the office today morning (where I have all deliveries sent --- ones that make it to the apartment tend to wind up flung into the patio and chewed by rabid squirrels that lurk about the complex with an evil look in their eye), and I was shocked (shocked!!) to find out that none of my three office-co-inhabitants had even heard of this jewel of a comic-strip.

If you, like them, have not yet discovered the joy of life in the little Canadian ISP that is Columbia Internet, then I envy you with every fiber of my being. For you, dear reader, have it all ahead of you to discover. Go now to the very beginning, and enjoy!

5 Friends

2008-10-03T20:30:00.000-07:00

So *I* can't really vote, but there's gotta be 5 of you out there that can, right? Right?

Yoshi's in September

2008-08-13T20:52:00.000-07:00

Awesome concerts coming up next month. I'm hitting them all! :)

At Yoshi's Oakland:

Friday, September 26 - Sunday, September 28
Dave Holland Sextet
(w. Eric Harland & Robin Eubanks)
Tuesday, September 30 - Sunday, October 5
Wayne Shorter Quartet
Featuring Brian Blade, John Patitucci & Danilo Perez

At Yoshi's SF:

Tuesday, September 9 - Wednesday, September 10
The Bad Plus
Monday, September 22
Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band
Tuesday, September 23
Antonio Sanchez and Migration
featuring Miguel Zenon, David Sanchez and Scott Colley

Protocol Buffers Open-Sourced

2008-07-07T15:47:00.000-07:00

One of the very few drawbacks of working at Google is that I can't really talk about any of the frighteningly cool pieces of technology that make us hum.

Well, now I can mention one more :)

We use these everywhere.

Reinforcing my general dislike of the population at large...

2008-07-03T19:48:00.000-07:00

My camera backpack was just stolen. Right off the luggage trolley as I stood in line to check in. I must've had it out of my sight for just a couple of minutes as I was chatting with Jayita, and we suddenly noticed the conspicuous absence. It had (reading from top to bottom), my E-330 DSLR body, two Zuiko lenses (including the beautiful 50mm f/2.0 macro), a Nikon SB-800 flash, and an Acratech V2 ball-head.

Filed a report with the SFPD desk at the airport, and hopefully next week we might be able to get at the security tapes to see if anything useful pops up. Probably no chance at getting the equipment back, but if there's any hope of catching the blasted worm who did this, that's something.

So while I'm not gushing with warmth towards the human race at large, I take consolation in the fact that it could've been much, much worse. If they'd taken the laptop bag instead, that would've been goodbye to a bunch of visa documents that would be really difficult to replace, and would've effectively cancelled my trip to India.

The other silver lining? Now I have a good reason to upgrade to the E-3 :)

Light Painting

2008-06-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

Someone on the Google photography mailing list sent out a link to lightmark.de, a simply phenomenal example of the technique of light painting.

Reverse-engineering some of these pictures is immense fun. For example, how would you accomplish this one without getting footprints in the snow?

First of all, figure out where the light sources are. Clearly there's some light coming in from camera-right and illuminating the foreground of the scene. There's also the ambient light that's giving some tonality to the background trees. And then there's the little painted squiggle. How would we create this? Let's say your exposure is 2 minutes, and we're doing this in near-darkness (with perhaps just starlight or faint moonlight). Open up the shutter. Fire the foreground flashes. These light up the foreground (with no footprints) and create the exposure. Wait until you've got about 15 seconds left on the exposure, and then walk over and create the squiggle. By then the background light has burnt in, and the just-created footprints won't have time to register before the shutter closes.

Gotta try this stuff :)

Like Hot Cakes

2008-06-02T20:27:00.000-07:00

They're sold out!

Just as I thought when he mentioned that he had only 1000 copies ready to push out, David Hobby's much anticipated Strobist Lighting Seminar DVD set is all gone. He's busily printing new copies, and backlogged orders get priority so you might as well reserve yours now.

I watched my copy over Memorial Day Weekend, and I'm already on my 3rd review of the location shoots :)

Joe McNally @ Google

2008-05-23T13:02:00.000-07:00

The awesome Joe McNally spoke at Google last week. Of course, I missed it since I was in NYC, but we do have the video up on YouTube:

B&H Store, NYC

2008-05-16T15:38:00.001-07:00

Those near and (even mildly) dear would have heard me wax eloquent about how Fry's Electronics is the ultimate geek's paradise, and how entering the place is like an instant lobotomy of all restraint.

Well, I now stand corrected.

I've been in NYC all this week. I'd mentioned the fact to David a few weeks ago, and he quite innocuously said "You should stop by the B&H store". I trusted the man. Thought he was a friend and all that sort of rot.

The place is in-effing-sane. Besides the (slightly surreal) fact that you couldn't swing a TTL-cord without hitting someone sporting a yarmulke and payess, clattering overhead was an assortment of rails on which large green crates were being flung about. This apparantly is their distribution system that gets the actual items from the bowels of the store to the pickup counter where you pay for them when you leave. This also means that you don't have to schlepp stuff around in shopping carts; you simply wander around the store and point at things, and the staff keep adding it to a list that's shoved into your hand. Walk out to the checkout counter, and with the magic of the clattering roller-coasters above, all will be waiting for your plastic.

Only the insistent buzzing of my phone (Google Calendar sends these helpful text-messages reminding me of meetings I'm supposed to attend) prompted me to finally leave. That, and the fact that they wouldn't accept my right ~~testi~~ arm as collateral when the plastic ran out.

Another side-effect: Given the way reinforcement learning works, I now slosh to the gills with the milk of human kindness for anyone wearing a yarmulke.

Dumb Luck

2008-02-14T11:31:00.000-08:00

It's a rummy thing.

Once in a while, I'll sit back and the realization will dawn that I have this Supreme Being who has chosen to take the plunge off life's dock holding my hand, and I wonder: "How the hell did I pull this off?"

Happy Valentine's day love <3

Doubtsourcing

2008-01-14T11:10:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Nacho for pointing this out; brand new comic strip awesomeness. And there are only a couple out so far, so you can go back and read all :)

Your Rights Offline

2008-01-10T19:28:00.000-08:00

With the number of violations of photographers' rights making the news these days, this little jewel is worth laminating and stowing away in the wallet.

There and Back Again

2007-12-28T19:48:00.000-08:00

I was back in Bombay for the holidays which, don't you know, is always a smashing time to visit. Firstly, it's the coolest weather one can expect (clocking in at a marrow-curdling 85F), and secondly, it's the one time of the year when the snappy "Jingle Bells" ditty belted out by the building elevator (to signal that you've neglected to close collapsible grate), is actually appropriate.

Primary purpose of the trip of course was to hang out with the old hive over Christmas-break, but as a side-benefit, I got to celebrate a dear old friend's (Michael's) decision to feed for life out of the same bucket with the lovely Fiona.

While the wedding itself was awesome, the part I enjoyed most was chewing the fat with all the old school friends that I hadn't seen in almost a decade (sometimes more!). What's interesting about a large part of that crowd is that they have practically no internet presence to speak of, and I've had no easy way of getting in touch with them.

Except, apparantly, for Facebook.

While I've heard rumors that Orkut is all the rage in India, everywhere I met up with old cronies, I was presented with the question: "Are you on Facebook?" So there, suddenly, was the "one good reason" I'd been holding out on signing up with Facebook for. And I have to admit, it's pretty scary how many denizens of the old haunts I've been able to find on there.

I still think the site is not all it's cracked up to be, and most of the "applications" are an utter waste of time (send me another stupid "gift" and by Apollo's bronze behind, I'll un-friend you, I swear). But the potential for connection discovery is awesome. Somewhat similar to LinkedIn, but for the non-professional side of your network.

But that brings up the question of social context. I'm part of something like a social network on Flickr/Blogger because the sites are particularly suited towards sharing of ideas within the social context of the photographic community. It'd be hard for Facebook to be the generic social platform for every social context: photography, basket-weaving and physics? That's why I think 2008 will be the year that the industry realizes this and sprouts an eczema of social aggregator companies that claim to unify the experience across properties. This will be an interesting circus to watch...

Playing Hookie

2007-12-16T17:47:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be on a solo trip to India next week, and consequently will be separated from Her Radiantness on our anniversary.

So as a substitute, we decided to take last Friday off to loaf about in San Francisco, and paint the town a frivolous shade of 0xff0000. After mangling a spot of dim-sum, and wandering about Chinatown during the afternoon, we caught some nice late light up at Coit Tower, on Telegraph Hill.

Dinner was at this little Senegalese restaurant that we've been dying to try out for the longest time. And since we'd planned to spend the night in SF, it provided the perfect opportunity to grab tickets on Saturday morning for SFJazz's 2008 Spring Season. Here's what's on the agenda:

March 8: Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, & Jack DeJohnette
March 14: "Tyner & Taps"; McCoy Tyner Trio with Savion Glover
March 15: SFJazz Collective
April 11: Wayne Shorter Quartet with Imani Winds
April 13: Ana Moura
April 17: Bobby McFerrin, Chick Corea, & Jack DeJohnette
May 31: Miles from India
June 8: Fiesta Venezuela

We've even got Coeman coming up for Tyner and the Collective, which means I've inadvertently contributed to The Grand Procrastination...

Wingsuit BASE Jumping

2007-12-09T14:59:00.000-08:00

Ok, that is just scary shit.

xkcd @ Google

2007-12-07T13:24:00.000-08:00

Randall Munroe (only the creator of one of the best comic strips in the world) gave a talk at Google today. Among the highlights:

Guido van Rossum asking him "Do you expect me to fly?" (you'll need to have seen this.)
Randall only discovering that the guy who asked that question was Guido after the talk was done.
Donald Knuth (yes, that Donald Knuth) asking him "What's the name of my O(log log n) search algorithm?"
Randall sketching (on a sheet covering a projector) an impromptu Google logo created out of his xkcd stick-figures.

I work at a surreal company.

Zion: Evening Light

2007-11-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

For those of you in the know, I'm spending 3.5 days in Zion National Park as part of a workshop on landscape photography. Today's assignment was to capture the "golden light" of sunset, while playing with interesting compositions. Here therefore, are the results of scrambling up 600 feet over 40-degree inclines, getting stuck like a pincushion by some fine-thorned cactus, and grazing a much-loved elbow.

While technically correct, this one is actually not a very good picture since the composition is dead boring (Uh-huh. It's a mountain. We get it.) Still, it was pretty for a cliche, and a good example of the quality of the last rays of sunset causing the top of the mountain to glow. I also had a polarizer on which shifted the sky behind to a slightly deeper blue.

I'm happier with this image. It's a stretch for me to be composing landscape pictures with a narrow lens, so I was pushing myself into somewhat uncomfortable territory at this 300mm (35-mm film equiv.) setting. The idea here was to have the setting sun cast a glowing warm rimlight on the tree and the rock ledge, while the background rock face contrasts with a cooler in-shadow look. Personally, I also like the lines of the background rock striations and the foreground ledge that lead your eyes over to the tree.

Other lessons learned:

This takes time. It's not about cranking out 30 different compositions. It's about looking around and carefully picking a composition (or three). And then it's just a matter of waiting till the light looks right. Sometimes that means coming back another day to get that one shot that looks really evocative.
Timing is everything. The light changes quickly. You need to have your filters in place, and the camera in position on the ball-head so that you're ready to crank off those 3-4 pictures that you'll have time for in the few seconds that the light peaks. If you're fumbling around trying to screw on that polarizer at the last minute, you might as well come back tomorrow.
Don't pack up as soon as the light's gone. Sometimes your best picture is the one you see over your shoulder when you're putting your gear back in the car.

Silicon Valley 5k

2007-11-04T17:29:00.000-08:00

The wife and I did the Silicon Valley 5k this morning. Lots of fun, and absolutely perfect weather for running. This was my first 5k, so I was really kicked, and I'm all looking forward to the next one. My time was 32:47, and Jayita did 44:16. Woot!

3d Lenses & Focus Correction

2007-10-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

This post has been making rounds recently. It's in French, but if you scroll down you'll see a video by a guy from Adobe (speaking English) showing off a prototype compound (as in, insect compound versus human simple) lens which allows one to do some pretty amazing stuff:

Selectively change the focal plane
Move the camera viewpoint by a few degrees

All from a single image capture. It's probably several years before the big hardware manufacturers start to take notice, and he says that the compute time to render that image was of the order of a week.

If you could throw a couple of thousand machines at it though...

SearchLight

2007-10-02T16:45:00.000-07:00

I mucked around with Custom Search Engines today, and created SearchLight, a mini search-engine restricted to retrieving results from websites about off-camera photographic lighting.

Give it a whirl, and let me know if there are sites you'd like me to add.

Another reason...

2007-09-15T10:02:00.000-07:00

...to find an iPod alternative.

Warning: More of Yours Truly in the Offing

2007-09-04T20:49:00.001-07:00

One of the drawbacks of being an amateur photographer is that there never is enough opportunity to hone the old skillz. Now I freely admit that I'm married to a woman whose unbridled joy at being at the business end of a Zuiko 50mm f/2.0 is second only to the pleasure she takes in her 8-hours-of-the-dreamless each night. But even so, having to stand for hours on end while her photog. spouse makes ever-so-slight adjustments wears somewhat thin.

I've often considered practicing portrait lighting on myself of course, but the drill is awful: Press, run, get in position, <click!>, run, gawk at botched picture to figure out what to adjust, press, run... well, you get the idea.

First, the good news...

A fellow strobist reminded me of this little feature that I remember glossing over in the camera's user manual (yes I did RTFM --- just not that carefully): Video-out. Simply put, God's greatest gift to narcissistic photographers.

Most recent LCD monitors have a composite-video input jack, and my E-330's USB output doubles as a video-out line. They've even provided a handy cable for the purpose. Combine that with the its live-view feature (which Olympus was something of a pioneer at with DSLRs) and you've got heaven. Now I can simply connect up the monitor, point the camera at the finely chiseled, and I make composition adjustments right where I sit while viewing them on the 20-incher. This assumes that I've got the lighting parameters (shutter, aperture, flash-power) nailed down of course, but that's getting easier all the time.

All that's lacking now, is to get one of those little IR remotes that I can use to trigger the camera remotely.

Now the bad news... Given my new found freedom, you can probably expect more pictures of yours truly. I know I'm not as easy on the eyes as the beautiful ball-and-c., but hey, you can always volunteer as a guinea-pig, even if it is just to keep me from myself :)

Oh. That was easy...

2007-09-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

I remember trying a couple of years ago to get Flash working on my 64-bit desktop, with not much success. This weekend I thought to myself "Maybe I should give it another go, and throw a couple of hours at it again...". So quick search for [gentoo amd64 32 bit firefox] pulls up this page at the top result which (halfway down) provides the following incantations as advice:


> emerge netscape-flash
> emerge nspluginwrapper

So, I dutifully installed the indicated packages, restarted Firefox and voilà! Instant Flash. Note that the nspluginwrapper spits out this message at the end of the install:


* Auto installing 32bit plugins...
* Any 32bit plugins you currently have installed have now been
* configured to work in a 64bit browser. Any plugins you install in
* the future will first need to be setup with:
*   "nspluginwrapper -i path-to-32bit-plugin"
* before they will function in a 64bit browser
*

Good to know.

Now what do I do with the remaining 118 minutes?

My Prodigal Ogg Player

2007-08-29T21:53:00.000-07:00

Last week I begrudgingly had to send back my shiny new ogg-player for a replacement (you can read more about that story here). To add to the agony, I was out sick yesterday, so when the replacement arrived at the office, I had to sit and pine feverishly (I did have a fever) for it for an extra 24 hours before I could get my grubby hands on the device.

Arriving home with it today however, rather than immediately commence with the music upload, I thought I'd experiment with trying to take one of those fancy product-type shots you see in magazines and such. No time like the present, I convinced myself, before fingerprint-smudges mar the visage. Here's the result:

I knew I wanted a cool blue background, and in lieu of a second flash to slap a blue gel onto, I simply used a blue sheet of card-paper as the base and backdrop. After posing the device appropriately, these are the bits I had to consider regarding how to light it:

The bottom half of the face needs a specular highlight to emphasize the surface indentations where the buttons are.
This should transition to no specular highlight in the top half so that the graphics on the display can shine through.
I need some light as a fill on the right and to emphasize the metallic buttons on the side.
All this, with just one flash.

Here's the ghetto-setup shot, metered for the flash:

And here it is again, metered for ambient (I opened up the windows to get more light in -- hence the splotchy sunlight).

The guts of it is essentially hooking on that piece of cardboard to the top of the flash as a gobo to produce that light-to-dark transition on the paper which is then reflected in the face of the device. That, and making sure that there's enough shiny stuff at the top and at the right to reflect what little available light makes it through back onto the device for a fill.

Another detail: I was working at a fairly tight aperture, so in order to get the display and button lights to register, I had to use a tripod and keep the shutter open for about a half-second.

Stuff I could've done better?

Move the specular highlight producing paper further away so the grain of the paper doesn't show up in the reflection. This would've made the fill reflection on the left dimmer though, so it's tough without that second flash.