Here’s the first IR result. Got the Hoya R72 today. Handheld in front of the ixus – no mount or tripod.
photo: infrared photography using a Canon Digital Ixus 500
I’ve been looking at flickr a lot lately and have come across some amazing infrared photgraphy which, until very recently, I didn’t realise was possible using a digital camera. I suppose I hadn’t thought about it too much, but I’ve decided to try for myself.
The first thing to check is to see whether or not my camera (Digital IXUS 500) is usable, and one way to do this is to point any remote control at the camera, press a button and see if the IR beam is visible. Happily for me, it is – see above.
The next thing to do is find an IR filter, and searching around the web, it seems that a Hoya R72 will do the trick. Seeing that I’d like to share this filter with my other cameras, a 52mm filter seems optimal.
Finally, I need some sort of device to attach it to the camera, and with the guidance of publicenergy on flickr, I ordered one of the adaptor tubes from hkdcplus.
So now I am in wait mode – both filter and adaptor & step up ring are in the post. The results will be posted here.
hardware predicament redux
Last week I wrote:
For the current models, the prices look like:
Eur 1,329.75 ex VAT iBook 14″: 1.33GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)
Eur 1,924.79 ex VAT PowerBook 15″: 1.67GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)Six hundred euros in the difference.
Well, I was incorrect about the rumours, new iBooks came out all right but not the fabled widescreen model, only modest speed bumps and 512 MB RAM as standard. The prices now look like:
Eur 1,131.40 ex VAT iBook 14″: 1.42GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)
Eur 1,924.79 ex VAT PowerBook 15″: 1.67GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)
So for the new iBook: a modest speed bump, faster graphics, the motion sensor thingumajig in case you drop it, the scrolling trackpad, bluetooth (can’t remember if it’s in the previous version).
What concerns me most though about this machine is its resolution: 1024×768 is just too shaggin’ small, considering I’m editing images which are (natively) more than twice the width. That’s a problem for me. From what I gather, the VGA video output is still stuck at 1024×768, so there’s no scope for hooking it up to a bigger external display.
I just want another PowerBook.
chicktion
I was listening to the radio yesterday when someone was interviewing two women who write trashy novels. The novels specifically deal with ordinary women with ordinary lives and ordinary body shapes. The word chicktion came into my mind – a concatenation / bastardisation of fiction and chick. My wife thought it was an apt description and thought I should write it down somewhere in case I forget. Anyway, today I went onto Google and searched chicktion, and indeed there are a few hits, dating back to December 03. So, my word isn’t original.
Bollocks!
Anyway, chicktion.
hardware predicament
My current workhorse is a TiBook 800MHz – a 15″ PowerBook G4 which I’ve had since May 2002. It has been a great machine and has served me well for over three years, but it’s beginning to show its age. Getting a bit chipped around the edges, not the racehorse it used to be (!) and I’m getting slightly electrocuted under certain conditons. I also think it’s time for a dvd burner which I don’t have.
What to do?
I have a limited budget (three kids and a mortgage) and I was thinking of a G5 iMac or, if rumours prove true, one of the new widescreen iBooks. Alternatively, another PowerBook. Basically I have to decide if I’m going to be portable or deskbound. I’m probably going to miss portability, so chances are it’ll be a ‘Book of some sort.
For the current models, the prices look like:
Eur 1,329.75 ex VAT iBook 14″: 1.33GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)
Eur 1,924.79 ex VAT PowerBook 15″: 1.67GHz G4 (512 MB SDRAM)
Six hundred euros in the difference.
editing: 21 Grams
Started thinking about recent movies I’ve really enjoyed from an editor’s perspective, and one that springs to mind is 21 Grams, a fairly bleak piece of movie making but brilliantly edited by Stephen Mirrione.
The first time I watched 21 Grams, I was fairly disorientated for 20 minutes or so, and then the whole non-linear theme became less confusing. In a sense the movie started to wash over me. Brilliant performances by Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro. I suppose this non-linear way of telling stories is a lot like the way memory can work, not necessarily sequential.
The whole non-linear telling of the story can also be likened to the modern editing process – it’s easy to see how chunks of scenes could easily be moved around a timeline with ease. What must have been difficult though, is keeping sufficient distance from the story in order to evaluate the restructuring processes. Objectivity can be difficult to come by in the late stages of a cut, and drastic changes are often hard to assimilate.
Sometimes I need to go and have a good hard stare at a blank wall.
more traditional “about” page
So I’ve put up a more traditional about page, available from the top navigation bar, and on that page I’ve added an email address, an alias to my normal .mac address. It’ll be interesting to see if it’s harvested anytime soon. I also tried doing one of those random imageg php things you can see on the banner above, but with mixed format images – i.e. portrait and landscape, and while the random php script worked fine, the mixed results just looked stupid.
Might try doing one of the random banner things in one of the other templates.
I know I’m a hobbyist and not a professional web person, but it seems to me that the documentation for Movable Type is deliberately obtuse and only after hours and hours of fiddling, have I been able to achieve anything. It seems that you need to know a little php, html and a lot of css to achieve anything worthwhile. Perhaps this is just because mine is an individual non-profit installation, and therefore pretty much unsupported. I guess the folks at Movable Type need to make a living too.
banner navigation
Trying to find out how to use a navigation menu in the banner. Having difficulties with margins and padding in an attempt to get the tiny type aligned.
OK so I realise that it’s just my ignorance of the way stylesheets work. I’ve used the tag “padding-left” to move the text to the right. Must try to find some sort of CSS primer somewhere.
random images in banner
I’ve been trying to figure out how to use the mysql support built into MT to display a random image in a banner, in an attempt to create dynamic content instead of plain old boring, static content. I’ve been able to load images into a database (I think), but when I try to echo them to a page it looks like gobbledegook, must be something weird with my encoding. So I found a php script instead which seems to more-or-less work, but the randomness gets stuck sometimes and images get repeated.
editing: Tourism West “You haven’t lived…”
Director: John Butler
Production company: Fish Films
Client: Tourism West