scratchpad

I went to B&H Photo when I was in New York. It’s a Mecca for photographers (funny simile), and I thought they might have a lenscap for the old P. Angenieux lens. The business end of the lens is very small, with a 44mm outside diameter, and I hadn’t been able to find a lenscap to fit it.

I went up and got in line for the next available helper at the SLR counter, which is a row of maybe 25 clerks seated behind a counter that runs the length of the store. The person directly in front of me became available, and I explained that I wanted a lenscap that was much smaller than normal, and hard to find.

He said, in a light Eastern European accent, “For SLR?”

I said, “Yes, it’s an Angenieux,” and started to pull it out of my bag and unwrap the balaclava and cycling cap that was protecting it.

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” he said, taking the lens. “You will never find a metal cap for this lens.”

“Pinch-cap is fine,” I said. The Angenieux caps I’ve seen on eBay are always about $90.

He rotated the barrel of the lens, racking it out, “Mm. That’s actually pretty smooth.”

I said, “It’s a little beat-up, but it’s a good lens. It takes nice pictures.”

He looked at me. “Takes nice pictures.” He paused, and I thought he was going to lecture me on photographers taking nice pictures, not lenses, or something. Instead he announced, very distinctly, “This is the best lens on the floor.”

What? Behind him, I could see giant multi-thousand dollar Nikon lenses. I knew there were legendary lenses down in the used department. This was the best lens on the floor? It turned out that the clerk was the biggest Angenieux fan in the entire world, and I had randomly walked up to him and pulled out one of his favorite lenses.

Over the course of finding me a $12 plastic push-on cap, and getting it sent up from the basement (“have you ever seen that place? It is more impressive than the rest of the store put together”), he told me about the unique color properties of the Angenieux lenses (which I’d noticed), their semi-affordable c-mount movie camera lenses, and the Optimo lenses they now make. B&H can order them; they cost $20,000. He was pleased to see the Zeiss Biotar (“Bee-otar”) on the Nex, and we talked about the new Sony Nex cameras, too.

My little lens cap errand made my day.

The last time I saw this graphic, it was on a tape gun.

My 10 year old son downloaded the free “Pivot” stick figure animation program, and I started playing with it this morning. This is my first go at using Pivot, but Max has been animating dramatic fight scenes with Halo guns and characters he created.

As soon as I started making a ‘walk,’ I turned it into a run, and then I had to smack him off the side of the frame. I kept making the bounces bigger, and for some reason the twitch at the end cracks me up.

Here are the lyrics to Surf City by Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash band the 101ers, formatted to replace WordPress’ “Hello Dolly” lyrics.

function hello_dolly_get_lyric() {
/** These are the lyrics to Surf City (by Joe Strummer / the 101ers) */
$lyrics = “I knew was broken
but I was still hopin’
You knew I was prayin’
that you were still waitin’ all up now
but I knew there was no hope at all
for a fool like me
baby
I wish you were stayin’
but you’re not and you’re all I’ve got
here I am
skippin’ surf city
wonderin’ how I can
skippin’ surf city
but I can’t
so I’m headin out to the coast
for a ride on the ocean waves
and baby I wish you were stayin
but you’re not
and you’re all I’ve got
leavin’ surf city though you know you’re the only pretty one
you’re leavin’ surf city
leavin surf city
you’re leavin surf city
leavin surf city
you’re leavin surf city
leavin surf city
you’re leavin surf city
leavin”;

I typed these up myself, since every internet source for the 101ers Surf City lyrics actually shows some other band’s lyrics for a song of the same name.

This is how I prefer the lyrics to appear:

#dolly {
position: absolute;
top: .45em;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
$x: 400px;
font-size: 22px;
color: #fff;
font-style: italic;
}

I have an idea for a music video about a 1979 British Mod who is also a Nepali rinpoche – the reincarnation of a Buddhist saint.

Set to this: Surf City by The 101ers, Joe Strummer’s band before the Clash.

:00 A thin asian boy on a vespa turns into an English street of brick fronts and short steps.
He parks and runs up the steps to ring a doorbell.
He waits, agitated, but no one’s home.
:20 He’s in full mod drag – fancy clothes, nice shoes, overcoat.
Walking back to his scooter, he flashes out a kick at a trashcan.
He vrooms off.
:30 snogging in an alley, he fumbles at her breast.
She slaps his hand,
but kisses his hurt look away.
:37 He watches a double decker bus pull away from the curb.
:45 Lighting incense,
prayer flags on a London balcony.
:56 A prayer wheel spinning round fades to
Nepali characters painted on his Vespa wheels,
and he’s riding again, through the countryside.
1:12 He’s standing on a stone balustrade,
looking at the sea,
the wind whipping his air force parka.
1:30 He’s throwing things into the sea.
Prayer wheels, stones,
1:40 He’s walking with the girl,
and three skinheads in suspenders and boots approach.
She watches them defiantly,
but he turns his head in the parka hood so they can’t see his face.
She’s pale and English. He is not.
1:48 Tea in a cafe, just the two of them.
smiling
1:53 They’re on the Vespa, she’s behind him, arms around him.
She’s standing on the same steps as the beginning.
Suitcases.
A black London taxi pulls away from the curb into traffic
He’s riding.
2:04 He’s standing on the beach, wind whips the foam off the storm waves
2:15 He’s kneeling in red Tibetan/Nepali robes. Men in red robes are moving around, lighting candles.
2:28 The girl is in a library, a big book in front of her, with pictures of mountains and monasteries.
2:35 She opens a travel brochure with an airline ticket inside. One way to lukla nepal LUA.She stands up.

I get Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox newsletters on usability design (as everyone should). He invented cheap UX prototyping, and is partners with Donald Norman in the Neilsen/Norman group of usability consultants. Donald Norman wrote “The Design of Everyday Things,” among other seminal works on creating things well for humans to use easily.

The other day I clicked a link from Jakob’s newsletter, to a page on his Useit.com site, to a page on Donald’s site about UX design for the iPad. Halfway down the page I tried to use a search box that didn’t work. Figuring a usability site would want to fix a busted search box, I emailed the “contact” address to report problems, since it was the least I could do.

Reporting broken links on a valuable site really is the least you can do. It’s like closing gates when hiking across someone else’s land.

To my slight surprise, Donald Norman himself wrote back, and said it was an old page with a bad layout. “Yikes! I didn’t realize Jakob had linked to that page!” To my greater surprise, he wrote back the next day, saying it was a bigger problem than he’d thought, but it was going to get fixed.

For me, it was a little like saying, “Hey, Tom Waits! Your shoe’s untied,” and him stopping me later to show me his new zippered boots.

I had an idea for a comic (based on this craigslist rant) about a monkey with a jetpack who befriends random men and provides a secret identity and a jetpack. Cause all men desire three things: a jetpack, a secret identity as an action star, and a monkey. Possibly with his own jetpack.

Each story would be about a different guy and what happens to him with the jetpack and the secret badass identity. Then I was like “if I was that monkey, I’d just keep the jetpack and secret identities for myself.”

The day after I drew this guy (“all right, spy monkey with a jetpack!”), I saw Space Chimps, which was truly awful featured like 20 minutes of jetpack-wearing monkeys.

Crud.

What if you built a QR code city that was phone-readable from the air, and told a story? The idea reminded me of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

 

Breaker Door – crosseye-3d-sculpture, originally uploaded by BikeTinker.

This turned out pretty well using a short lens (35mm), and keeping the camera parallel to the piece.

Cross your eyes until you can bring the combined “middle” image into focus. I thought the cross-eye 3D images I’ve been seeing on Flickr would be perfect for communicating the physicality of sculpture on the internet.

I really like the effect – suddenly there’s a tiny sculpture in your screen! You can get a similar effect by focusing past the images, but you need to switch the images to make them work. If you try the “long-view 3D” on this image, the door appears cut into the panel in a weird way.

My son wanted me to make him a drawing or a painting. He’s 10, and very very focused on stick figure battles as fine art, but likes my drawings okay, too. Since I wasn’t that interested in drawing him an epic battle scene, and I make my stick figures “too fat,” I thought I’d draw him a cat.

I did a preliminary sketch of a cat, flat orange and cartoony, using a photo of our old cat Ozark as a reference. “Oh, that’s cute, Max likes cats.” For the final painting on the dictionary page, though, I actually painted the actual cat. This cat was a hellion, but slept on Max’s bed every night, and was just really sweet to him. He loved Ozark, and whenever we get too effusive in praising our current cats, Pippa and Penny, Max will always point out how cute Ozark was, or sweet, or brave.

Then we’ll talk about what a shit he was, too.

The page has the words “unpredictable,” and “unpopular,” which amuses us. He made our dog’s life hell. She was scared to pass him in the hall. He rode another Lab around the yard, claws dug in, while she yelped in fear, then sat behind the sliding glass door and smacked it with his paw whenever she came close. He had orange DANGER stickers on his folder at every vet he ever went to. I would offer to hold him for his shots or examinations, and the vets assistants would say, “no, I don’t think that’s necessary,” and then five minutes later they’d say, “Mr. Williamson, can you come hold your cat?”

Oddly, every vet we took him to (we’re pretty loyal, so it was only like 5 vets in the 14 years we had him from abandoned 5 week old sickly kitten to crotchety old geezer), had someone working there with the exact same cat: Orange tabby, super-sweet to them, but at war with the rest of the world. Ozark.

A photograph of a sculpture is not the sculpture.

I try to shoot my portfolio images in RAW format, because jpegs from my camera tend toward the blue and cold. Using the RAW importer in Photoshop lets me choose the white point, which controls the color of the image.

To get the most out of an image, I open two versions in Photoshop: a warm and a cool. I stack the layers, adjust for contrast, and use the warm image for the piece, and the cool for the background. This creates tension, and makes the background recede and the object come forward.

The lighting is flat (I shot this on a covered porch on an overcast Oregon day), and the RAW and the JPG images are both soft, low contrast pictures.

To increase the contrast and sharpness, and make the image more appealing, I layered a warm and cool image together. I played with the Blend Modes, setting a copy of the image to “Hard Light” to bring in more contrast.

The thumbnail images show the layers and settings. From the bottom-most layer:

1. COOL image as the background layer.
2. WARM image above it, set to Hard Light, at 90%. It has a layer mask to show only the box.
3. WARM layer copy, including mask, set to Lighten, at 34%.
   
4. A Curves layer, with a simple “S” curve.

Save the large, layered PSD file, and save flat copies at web-resolution.. Later, you can go back and shut off the mask on the “Lighten” layer, or tweak the Curves, and save another copy. Non-destructive photo editing is good.

This “Workbox” sculpture is for sale in my Etsy shop.

I developed this character, which was used for a demo of an interactive comic for the PlayStation2. I plotted the comic, designed the characters and drew the storyboards.

More art from this project here: PS2 Interactive Comic.

It was a pretty cool project, using 3D scenes in the PlayStation2 to tell a comic story. There were pages and panels, effects and animation. “Choose your own adventure” choices threaded through the story.

The Plot

The story opens with a young woman, Maya, making her way across the still-hot scene of a futuristic battlefield. She has, until recently, been a privileged engineering student at the elite technical college that was the focus of the short-lived war.

While stripping parts from a personnel carrier, she is attacked by a suit of mechanized armor. The body within is dead, but the combat programming will attack anything that moves. With the help of a “Spirit Cat,” a holographic blue animal guide, she defeats the armor. After removing the mummified corpse inside, she repairs it for her own use.

She can now cover more ground and protect herself from the broken war machines she encounters. The spirit cat disappears, in the way that they do.

She repairs the suit’s long-range sensors and communication gear, and picks up distress signals from the mountains around the plain. A young soldier, about her age, has been badly wounded in an attack on his base. He can’t move far, and has bouts of confusion and disorientation. His situation gives her a destination, and his base is stocked with food and water, with defenses that might be repairable.

Maya starts to bond with this him, as she makes her way towards his position. Right after they admit to really liking each other, she’s attacked, and his base comes under fire. She can hear heavy guns on his end, and communication is cut off. She hurries on, desperate.

She reaches the base at the narrow end of a steep wooded valley. It’s empty, though, with no sign of her soldier, and it appears abandoned rather than overrun. As she’s standing in the empty base, she receives communication contact from her injured soldier again. He admits he tricked her.

He isn’t really a soldier, and he was only at the base briefly, a few weeks before. He is, in fact, the artificial combat intelligence built into her own suit. He’s been right next to her the whole time, and he isn’t even human. She freaks out.

She disables the suit, strips it off in a panic, and locks it behind the hardened blast doors of the abandoned base. She sits the concrete landing apron in front of the bunker, as far from the suit as she can get. Looking over the valley to the plain she just fought her way across, she trys to make sense of the last week of her life. What was a lie? What was real?

She doesn’t hear the suit’s sirens trying to warn her as large airships move silently up the valley to capture her…

I’ve been fooling around with WordPress as a total noob. It’s fun and frustrating, like learning anything new.

Something that made me smile was discovering I could replace the lyrics in the default “Hello Dolly” plugin to display the lyrics of any song I want. Getting new lyrics is as easy as Googling the song title and closing the ad for the ringtone.

WordPress has apparently always shipped with a demo plugin called “Hello Dolly” that shows a random line from the Louis Armstrong song in the admin backend of your site. WordPress people seem to favor removing it, by a ratio of almost 4 to 1. Some seem compelled to delete it every time it reappears after a WordPress update, or resent it cluttering up their plugins directory.

You don’t have to delete it or use it. You can make it display anything you want.

Let’s say you’d rather have Take This Waltz to inspire and amuse you while working on your WordPress site. All you need to do is edit the plugin and replace the lyrics with a new song, Beat poetry, Bible verses, or Simpson’s quotes.

If you’d like to change the way the lyrics display, you can edit the CSS in the Plugin, as well. I made the text a lot bigger, and moved it to the blue bar. The layout will probably revert when WordPress is updated, so I’ve copied my tweaked CSS here:

#dolly {
position: absolute;
top: .45em;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
$x: 400px;
font-size: 22px;
color: #fff;
font-style: italic;
}

When it reverts to Hello Dolly, I’ll probably choose a new song.