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This weekend, I made another attempt at photographing fire, and this time got much better results. I have seen some really cool burning beverage photos on flickr recently, and I wanted to try one of my own. Conveniently, I have a whole bunch of martini glasses laying around. When I put one in front of a white background and illuminated the background, it looked awesome, and I knew I was on to something. A key difference from the previous flaming ice shoot is a change of fuel: I used white gas that I had for my backpacking stove instead of the vodka I used last time. It burns MUCH better. I was an idiot for trying to do this with vodka. I have feeling that when I go buy some lighter fluid and try that, I may find that I am an idiot for using white gas, because the camp stove fuel burns DIRTY. It leaves a sooty grime very quickly, and I was constantly cleaning the glass. I hope (though I haven’t tried yet) that lighter fluid will burn cleaner.

This is the setup in my living room:

You can’t see it in the setup shot, but on the floor behind the glass is an SB-600 flash, with a blue gel, pointed up at the white background. Except for the flames (which were surprisingly bright) this was the only illumination. Because the pop-up flash fires in order to trigger the remote SB-600, I had to tape a piece of glossy white paper over the pop-up. The paper stood out an inch or two in front of the pop-up, at a 45 degree angle. That way, the pop-up light was re-directed so it didn’t shine on the martini glass and reflect back to the camera, but the light from the pop-up could still reflect off floor, walls, etc enough to trigger the SB-600.

When I started friday night, the only thing I  had on hand for a table to put the glass on was a  piece of white foam board. This worked OK, but the fire reflections on the foam board kind of bothered me. So Saturday I ran some errands and bought both a black foam board, and a mirror. Both of these worked better than the white, but I really liked the shots with the mirror.

A shot from the first set with white foam board:

Then, with the black foam board:

Then finally, with the mirror as table:

While I was shooting these, I really liked the blue. Then while processing the photo above, I tried getting rid of the blue by selectively de-saturating the image, and I REALLY liked it. So, now I’m a bit torn, but I think if I had to pick only one flaming martini image, this is it:

I set out to capture a cool fire and ice shot tonight. I didn’t have a lot of success with that; I think I need a better burning surface, and maybe a better fuel. However, I thought the melting ice made a cool animated gif! The last chunk of each cube really went out in one quick pop. Not sure why that is.

That’s a plate of vodka, in case you were wondering. I had several problems getting a decent shot:

1) The plate is kind of convex, so the vodka wanted to be on the outside, not with the ice. I really want the opposite.

2) The plate is not ideal for a background. I think I want a piece of glass on black background…maybe? ‘

3) Vodka just isn’t that great a fuel. It has to have sufficient quantity, and be warmed in order to burn at all.  Two bad it wouldn’t burn cold, because when I pulled it out of the freezer it was nice and syrupy and would actually stay where I poured it.

For a brief moment the thought, “Can I build a still out of what I have in my kitchen?”,  did cross my mind.

I’ve jumped on the e-reader bandwagon. I bought a kindle 3 a few months ago, and it was totally worth the $140. Compared to the traditional paperback, it has some downsides, but it also has some serious upsides. I guess I’ll start with the negatives:

Cons

1) Cost. First you have to buy the kindle, obviously. Then, sometimes you have to pay more for the books. There are often books which can be had for $4 shipping from third parties on amazon, for which you must pay $10 (or sometimes a bit more) to get the kindle version. On the flip side, if you do have to buy it at the new price, sometimes the kindle version is a bit cheaper, but not much.

2) Tactile navigation. Sometimes you just want to flip through a book: jump back 20 pages, read a second, then jump back 10 more, etc. Or, you just know by feel about where in the book something is, and you open and start searching. You lose this completely with the kindle. You can go the the table of contents and jump to a chapter, and you have the added ability to do a text search instead of random flipping, but sometimes you just want what I call tactile navigation.

3) Resale/lending. I can’t sell a book after I’m done with it, and I can’t really loan it to a friend. Amazon has just started a new loaner feature, but it is pretty restrictive, and only available on some books (as the publisher wishes). Basically, you can’t do it. Honestly, the only book I’m going to want to sell is the rare high value one.  Loaning is a bigger deal – I’ve already wished I could do this – but still not something I would do enough to really deter me.

Pros

1) Size. Some books are OK to carry around, some are big. More than one is almost always too much. With the kindle, any and all books fit into one slim package, which fits nicely into a cargo pocket, or is light in a backpack.

2) Convience. I never appreciated until I had it how nice it is not to have pages. You can set the reader down in front of you, without having to hold it open to your page. Outdoors when it is windy, there are no pages to get blown around. Page turns are just a button press (on either side of the device). There is never any excessive force required to open the book flat enough to comfortably read near the inner margins. I was surprised just how much nicer the kindle is to read.

3) Display. The e-ink display on this thing is awesome. I wouldn’t even consider an LCD display over this, color be damned. Easy on the eyes, comfortable in any lighting you could read a book in, never have to adjust screen brightness; it is also fine in sunlight. Not to mention the power savings. Interestingly, the display is never off. When you turn “off” the kindle, it just puts up a screensaver image until you turn it back on. You could remove the battery, and that screen will holds its display indefinitely with zero power. The only thing it really needs is color…but most books aren’t printed in color anyway.

4) Battery life. If you leave the wifi off, you can charge it every 3 or 4 weeks. You can travel with it, forget all about charging it, whatever. It is hard to run the battery out.

5) Dictionary. I’ll admit it: My vocabulary is so-so, and I don’t like having to find a computer to look up a word. With the kindle, I just put the cursor on a word I want to look up, and it searches for it in the installed dictionary, giving me quick access to the definition. I use this a lot. It’s handy.

6) Highlighting and search. Also handy is the ability to go back to interesting sections quickly. There are two ways I do this: a) Search the text or b) Save highlight sections. While reading, you can highlight a section, or add a note, and then recall those your notes/highlight sections later. It is kind of nice for someone with a bad memory, like me, to be able to finish a book, then look back at highlights to remind yourself of the interesting bits.

7) Preview.  It’s easy to download the first part of a book, and read that before buying it. This is probably as good a marketing technique for amazon as it is a convenience for me.

Overall, it has been great to have. I’ve played with the sony e-readers a bit, and they just don’t seem as polished. The browsing is not too hot, but it can work in a pinch, and it can even be useful for reading heavily text based sites..news feed, etc. You could also use it to look up a wikipedia page…if for some reason you don’t have your phone.

Hacks

If you do have a kindle, and are feeling a bit adventurous: Install this jailbreak for custom screensavers, fonts, etc.:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88004

I spent Thanksgiving with Mary and her family at Zion National Park in Southern Utah. It was quite cold while we were there, and we had a really good time. It snowed the day before Mary and I arrived, so everything was still covered in a dusting of snow, and it was cold enough that wherever there was water to freeze, there was ice!

On Friday, Mary, her father, and I hiked up to Angel’s Landing. This is probably a really awesome hike any time of year (although I bet it is ridiculously crowded at peak season). With the snow and ice when we were there, it was the most fun I’ve had on a trail in a while. First the trail goes through a canyon, and then up two sets of steep switchbacks. Then you double back on the ridgeline above. This is where it gets awesome. It is a fairly technical trail with a lot of scrambling along a sometimes narrow ridge.  However, there is  a chain installed along all of the sketchy parts, so it really isn’t that bad. With the ice, it was still a bit of a challenge in spots even with the chain (just enough to be a lot of fun, as long as you are in reasonable shape, and not terribly scared of the heights).

The first really interesting part of the hike was at “Walter’s Wiggles”. This is the second, and the steepest, set of switchbacks, which take you up to the ridgeline. For us, they were completely covered over with snow and ice. The best part though was actually on the way down. On the way up, it was passable. By the time we had come down, it had re-frozen, and was super slick. The whole canyon was filled with hilarity. I thought it would make great inspiration for a mario kart track. The canyon echoed with people laughing, owws!, and general chatter. A group of kids was having a great time sliding down each segment. One of them was a strong supporter of the “penguin style” belly slidel. Adults were falling constantly, some stoically insisting on getting back up and walking again (until they fell again), and others just giving in and sliding down. It was all out comical.

After getting up the wiggles, there is a bit of up and down along the ridge line, out to the landing. There are some flat part, some steep parts, and a lot of good views!.

This is taken while climbing of the last bit of ridge, looking back along where we came:

Now I will leave you with a quick video clip of the wiggles:

My new musical discovery: The aptly named Explosions in the Sky. I’ve only listened to one album so far, The Earth is not a Cold Dead Place. Love it. Epic rock instrumentals.

First Breath After Coma (via YouTube)

This American Life, from a couple of weeks ago: Toxie. It’s an interesting story of a group of reporters who set out to buy a toxic mortage backed security, and then track down its history.

While surfing the interwebs tonight, I came across a silly stop-motion video about, well, stop-motion. My first thought was, “That must take freakin’ forever!”. Or does it? How hard is it really? Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to try my own stop motion animation. I really didn’t want to mess with clay characters, or a plot, or a little set. I just wanted to try moving some letters around. So, here it is below (or view it on flickr):

The first thing I did was start cutting paper letters. Actually, I cut one letter. Then I said to hell with this, and set off trying to find a quicker path to forming words. Scrabble! Perfect. I have a letter set right here.

So I put up the camera, a flash, and pointed it at a black foam  board. First lesson: Don’t use a flash, if you can help it. The flash can only cycle so fast, and this limits the rate you can take pictures. I could move things faster than the camera could take photos.

Second lesson: Check your exposure, ON A COMPUTER SCREEN, before you capture the entire scene. I got fooled by the camera LCD into dramatically underexposing. This just meant I had to correct all the shots later.

Third lesson: Set the camera resolution to something lower. You don’t need 12MP images to create a 640×480 video. Everything goes slower with the larger file, so just shrink it down from the beginning.

Fourth lesson: You really do need small movements. My video is jerky as hell. Downright amateurish. I guess I wasn’t patient enough, but I didn’t really have a good feel for how small motions needed to be. Also, I guess I could have made the text a little straighter. And, all of the “letter flying in” frames for the top row failed miserably, because the letters were off the top of the screen.

I cannot imagine doing a full-length stop-motion film, but a few minutes really isn’t that bad. It is strangely satisfying. In fact, I spent a lot more time and got a lot more frustrated with the editing of this clip than I did with the shooting. A lot of that frustration was just figuring out how to do it though, and would go a lot faster on the second try.

iMovie is crap. A pain to use, and it would not let an image in a slideshow have a duration less than 0.3seconds. Further evidence that there is just no reason to use MacOS. I ended up using two things: VirtualDub to piece the still frames together, and Windows Movie Maker for the final editing, adding the end credits, and overlaying audio. It was a somewhat tedious process getting the still images all ready, but virtual dub will quickly take a sequence of numbered JPEGs and combine them to a movie. Irfanview came in very handy for generating these numbered sequence. For example, if I wanted to repeat a frame, say IMG_0527.jpg, I would create copies named IMG_0527_2.jpg, IMG_0527_3.jpg, etc, and then use irfranview to batch rename these into take2_1, take2_2, etc. so that VirtualDub would read them correctly.

The next problem I hit was the sound effects. I used my Blackberry to record the scrabble pieces splashing across a table, and the file was a .amr file format. wtfmate? A little googling, and I found the Moble AMR Converter on free-codecs.com. OK, so now I have a wav file. BUT, Windows Movie Maker won’t allow multiple audio tracks, and I’ve already used the audio track for the music. For this, I had to encode the movie without sound effects (just music), then open that video and add the sound effects in a new project and re-encode the final cut. Easy enough.

Total camera time: ~80 minutes.

Total editing time: ~150 minutes.

Total animation length: ~90 seconds (and the second half isn’t really stop-motion at all, so really ~40 seconds)

Production minutes per animation minute: ~350

That was fun! Now it is quite late, and I should probably get some sleep.

Not news, clearly, since it has become a best seller and has been all over the place, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I picked this book up in Ventura on the way to the beach because I needed something to read. I finished it the next day. It starts out with an interesting first hand account of growing up in a rural farming village in Malawi in the ’90s, then living through a famine year in 2001, before it gets into the events which really led to the book. This kid, after dropping out of school for lack of money, figured out he could build a windmill out of (mostly) bicycle parts to light his house (and eventually to pump irrigation water for his family’s farm).  He learned what little he knew about electricity from library books. Eventually the right people take notice, and he ends up invited to a TED event in Tanzania, where he begins to see a whole new world outside of his village (including his first google search).

Jumping back a bit tonight to the Antelope Valley/Red Rock Canyon weekend. Before we spent the night out at Red Rock, we spent the afternoon in the Antelope Valley checking out the bright, safety-orange colored hillsides of the poppy preserve and surrounding areas. If you are in Southern California, and you haven’t seen these…well, my guess is you’ve pretty much missed it for this year. But next April you should definitely check it out. It is pretty neat.

In the category of “People I Envy”, I would like to introduce you to Tara and Tyler. They are traveling the world by bicycle, visiting cool places, free camping in amazing spots, cooking surprisingly good food on a white gas stove, taking lots of great photos, and even doing software development for work back home along the way. I came across their photos a while back on Flickr, and have been following them ever since. They post frequently, and I would like to thank them for it, as I enjoy reading about their adventures almost daily! They are currently headed into Eastern Europe.