Because I can...

So Mum and I went out to Friendly's for lunch.  We both had the seafood platter.  Not unusual for Mum, but unprecedented for me.  You see, I know a little too much about some of my meal's place in the food chain.  I may have to revise my position regarding what things I won't eat.  Just maybe I might be a little more inclusive in the future.  It was good!

Anywho, the service was also good.  So naturally I left a nice tip...

Because I can...

Sorry the picture is so fuzzy.  I'm still getting the hang of the camera in my new cell phone.

Playing with new toys!

So this afternoon I downloaded a copy of GIMP and I’ve been playing with it ever since.  Thanks Wolfman for the tip!  This looks like exactly the kind of tool I’ve been hoping for since PhotoShop is out of reach for my budget right now.  I expect it to take quite a while to even discover all the tools this program offers, much less to master them.  So far I’ve been messing around with the perspective adjustment tool. 

Here are a couple of samples:

I call this first picture ‘The Motor Pool dun Froze!’

Here is what the camera saw:

Here is what my eye wants the picture to be:

Had I taken the time to set up a view camera I could have achieved that image on film.  (And then would have had to find someone who could process it for me since all my darkroom gear is in storage…)  Being able to make the adjustments electronically is much simpler and doesn’t require waiting on the negatives getting back from the lab.

Comparing the two images:

In the first all of the supports for the awning seem to be converging as they get closer to the ground.  In the background my neighbor’s home seems to be down by the stern and listing badly to port.  It just doesn’t look right.

In the second version made from the same camera original the verticals have been corrected and the neighbor’s house is sitting level as it should be.  I had to crop the image slightly because the edges became keystoned as the image was manipulated.  This version looks much better to my eye – even though it is not exactly what the camera originally recorded.  It seems to me to be much truer.

The ‘verticals’ that aren’t in the railing in the lower left that your eye wants to make vertical but can’t are actually out of plumb.  The railing was installed parallel to the slope of the ramp so the top railing is not actually horizontal and the uprights are perpendicular to the angle of the ramp.  So even though it looks wrong it really isn’t.

This second image shows a much more drastic correction.

Here is what the camera saw:

Here is what my eye wants this picture to be:

Same kind of thing.  The camera was not square to the very rectilinear subject and the parallax in the recorded image really shows it.  But after a bit of ‘tweaking’ with GIMP it looks at least a little bit more like a catalogue photo for my recently acquired file cabinet.  There is still a bit of barrel distortion and I may have scrunched it a bit vertically, but I’d say it’s not too bad for my first time playing with this software.

BTW: In that first pair of photos the retired phone company van’s given name is Mabell (though she prefers to be called Butch…), the Westy is Thunder (the very first Vanagon to have his Floppy Mirror Syndrome cured by my open source and free for anyone to use rubber washer technique), and hiding in the background doing a very credible imitation of a snow drift is my world famous Punch Buggy, Galileo.

Playing with the big camera this weekend...

Up in Franklin New Hamster: (Click on any picture to view much larger...)

Wild flowers beside the WinnipesaukeeRiver

An interesting shadow

Center span of the Franklin railroad trestle

Under the trestle

Detail

Trestle footings in the river

Obsolete Technology

More Steadicam: the JR

The goodies I ordered came in so I spent the evening playing with my Steadicam JR.  The first order of business was a little clean up.  It had been stored in it’s camera bag for several years.  I removed the Ricoh R-808H Hi8 camcorder that was on my JR when I bought it used from a friend who used to work for what was at the time one of the best local mom & pop camera shops around.  Sadly, those are now a thing of the past.  Or so it would seem.  So is this camcorder.  It’s so old that the only thing I can find spending just a couple of minutes Googling the make and model are a ton of sites selling replacement batteries. 

After replacing the cork and cleaning up the connections in both battery compartments it was on to the tough part.

Mounting and balancing a camera on a Steadycam JR is not easy!

To work properly all Steadicam systems need to be properly balanced.  My rig came pre-balanced since I bought it used.  Mounting my fairly new to me Sony DCR-TRV310 NTSC camcorder was more of a challenge than I expected!  It took most of the evening to get everything to work together to the point where the camera actually floats the way it is supposed to.  But I finally got it.

Even this camera is old.  According to Amazon.com they first offered it on September 4, 1999.  Right about the time the Moon was supposed to have been blown out of Earth orbit according to the timeline from the even older TV show Space 1999.  Both the “new” camera I just mounted on it and the Steadicam JR itself are discontinued by their manufacturers.  I don’t really mind not having the absolutely newest gizmo on the block.  This camcorder works better than the one it’s replacing and the JR still works.  Even it’s monitor still works after sitting unused for so many years.

Digging around in the JR’s camera bag I came across an unopened regular 8 video tape that works in the Sony camera even though it really wants Hi8 or maybe Digital 8 tapes if such a thing even exists.  The camera came with two Hi-8 tapes from the yard sale I got it at.  It was actually free since they didn’t have a charger for the batteries.  I bought one through Amazon that does the trick quite nicely.  So with a charged battery and a fresh tape it was finally time to play.  Most of what I shot tonight consisted of fine-tuning and testing.  I did a little flying just to get back in the swing of it.  I didn’t actually shoot anything I’d be inclined to share.  But I did prove to myself that the “new” camera works mounted to my Steadicam JR.

To give you a better sense of what the JR is all about here’s an extended clip from the video that came with these rigs.  Enjoy!

I will post some video I shot myself with this rig eventually.  As soon as I have something worth sharing…

Krazy Kontraptions: Steadicam®

One of my favorite toys is my Steadicam® JR (pronounced “Steady-Cam Jay Are”).  I haven’t used it in a long time because I was having problems with the camera that’s mounted on it.  This very afternoon at lunch I ordered a few things from Amazon.com that will let me referb my rig and mount my much newer and better camera.  (Since it’s now discontinued I figured I’d better grab the stuff while it’s still available!)  Hopefully I’ll be posting some cool videos of my own before too awfully long.

In the mean time, here’s an interview with Garret Brown demoing a couple of the big rigs:

YouTube can be such a fun place to loose an entire evening!

PS: Just out of curiosity: Can someone please explain to me how the New & Unproved interface and composition tools (that make it damn near imfuckingpossible to do ANYTHING creative – even simply embeding a couple of YouTube videos – without resorting to raw HTML coding) is an improvement?  Cause I ain’t seeing it!  Word to the wise, guys, I already bailed on LiveJournal when their interface became unusable.  You need to fix this yesterday!

Playing with the camera tonight

Orion, the Moon, the Pleiades & Venus, which is about to duck behind a tree.  
Jupiter has already set.  Nipping at Orion's heals is our rhododendron. 

(Click for larger image)

The western sky looked really cool this evening so I tried to capture it with the good camera.  I even dragged out the tripod for the occasion.  This shot is from the second group.  The first batch were shot at ISO 400.  Oleg mentioned a while back that image quality is better with the camera set at the lower ISO so I thought I'd give it a try.  It seems to have helped.  This is from the JPEG version because I still don't have any editing software that can work with RAW images.  As you can see in the enlarged version, I was fighting a high haze that could hardly be seen with the naked eye.  That thing that looks like a scratch underlining Orion and disappearing into our rhododendron is actually an airplane that flew by during the exposure.

Canon Rebel XT, Canon 18~55mm at 18mm, 30 seconds at F5.6, ISO 100
The camera was mounted on a Slick Master Series tripod.
The only post processing (in Microsoft Photo Editor) was to increase the gamma slightly.