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July 9th, 2008
02:01 am - Alaska and Canada Pictures
Most of my good Alaska and Canada pics are up on Flickr now, so I'll start reposting them here with stories.
This is Mt. McKinley (a.k.a. Mt. Denali) as taken from a 9-seater twin-engine prop plane at 12000 feet. At 20320 feet, McKinley is the highest mountain in North America. We got close enough to the mountain to see the base camps at 7000 and 11000 ft, and a line of tiny climbers moving up a glacier, dragging sleds behind them.
This is a serious, chew-your-face-off grizzly bear in Denali Park. Doesn't it look soft and cuddly? I encourage you all to go out and hug a bear today! Don't listen to the signs that warn you to stay 300 yards away. This one was asleep. When our busdriver told us to speak only in whispers, the hard-of-hearing man behind Geoff shouted, "What's that? Say, it's a bear!"
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July 6th, 2008
02:35 pm - Marin Headlands
The culture shock of returning from Denali was so intense that I went hiking yesterday in the Marin Headlands.
This time I made it up to Hill 88, then all the way back down to the beach to watch the surfers.
  
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June 8th, 2008
02:15 am - Port of Redwood City
I had no idea that there was a massive metal scrapyard in Redwood City. If you go east on Seaport from 101, towards the emerald city of green glass office parks, you'll pass on your left a massive scrap refinery. Big-rigs hauling flattened cars pulled up every couple of minutes while I was there.
 
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May 25th, 2008
01:59 am - Lake Lagunita
Lake Lagunita is much prettier when there is actually water in it.
I spent three years living across the street in Flo Mo, so I'm very fond of the lake. How many times did we walk around the edge, debating the afterlife? How many times did we stand in the middle and sing songs from the Phantom of the Opera? How many bonfires did we throw at the firepit, drinking Drambuie flamers and singing Monty Python's 'Philosophers Song'? Good times!
Campus makes me nostalgic, but it also reminds me that I'm glad I got out of there even partially sane. I say, let the pirates have it.
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May 11th, 2008
11:37 pm - Castles
I've always been fascinated with castles. David Macauley's Castle is one of the first books I can remember. They were a gateway drug that led me into King Arthur and his Knights, fantasy, D&D, Chaucer and Mallory.
I've been to Heidelberg, Edinburgh, Neuschwanstein, Hohenschwangau, and Himeji. I've sighted down gun-barrels from the Portuguese fort atop Macao. I've been to the McNaughton family castle on the shore of Loch Fyne, and visited the Campbell castle next door that dominates it. I love them all.
The United States, because we are so young, for the most part sadly lacks in castles. That's why I am attracted to the Marin Headlands. Along the tops of the cliffs overlooking the Golden Gate are a network of WWI and WWII naval fortifications. Most have been abandoned since the mid-1940's and are now in ruins, overtaken by graffiti.
  
P.S. The astute reader might deduce that my father being a military historian may have had some role in this.
P.P.S. Graffiti in San Francisco is a treat. One picture shows "All Your Base" scrawled on a plank in a spotting tower. Another wall read "Kill all the heteros".
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March 31st, 2008
11:57 pm - Japanese Tea Garden, San Francisco
These pictures come courtesy of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) doublefeh, who suggested that we go out on a photography expedition to SF last weekend.
We used it as a chance to swap cameras (Canon D20 for Nikon 40D), walk around the Japanese gardens, and explore Golden Gate park. One hill (dubbed meta-hill, though apparently it has a name) is a giant hill in the middle of a lake, which in turn has a smaller lake at the top. One imagines that this lake itself has a tiny little hill in the middle with ants taking HDR photos.
  
Also see doublefeh's Flickr stream for more pics.
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March 22nd, 2008
11:26 pm - Venice Beach, Half Moon Bay
Photos from Venice Beach, Half Moon Bay. Polarized filter + polarized sunglasses = trippy view through the viewfinder.
And a couple that look like they should be backgrounds for an inspirational calendar of tacky religious poems:
  
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March 18th, 2008
12:08 am - Santa Teresa Park
The second half of my haunting this weekend was south of San Jose. These pictures are from Santa Teresa Park, south of the city by the confluence of Highway 85 and 101. The park is only open until sunset, which is a shame because I would love to take night photos from here.
(That's San Jose there on the right... all of it.)
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March 17th, 2008
12:33 am - San Francisco
I drove up to the Marin Headlands this weekend to take a few photos.
I got caught in a rainstorm halfway back across the bridge. There's no cover out there other than hiding behind a pylon. After drying off, I drove up to the headlands, where I darn near froze stiff in the wind.
Moral of the story? Time lapse photography takes time! Bring gloves.
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January 7th, 2008
02:50 pm - High Dynamic Time Range (HDTR)
"...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one." - Einstein
Following up on my post about time visualization, I found out that this technique has a name: High Dynamic Time Range (HDTR).
Though the name is somewhat of a marketing ploy (riding the coattails of HDR/High Dynamic Range), the concepts are similar. Whereas HDR is a technique for compositing multiple photos to capture a wide range of light, HDTR uses multiple photos to capture a wide range of time.
An HDR image is the result of two operations: HDR + tone-mapping. The composite HDR image can't be shown directly on your monitor (which, luckily, isn't bright enough to accurately display the sun). Tone-mapping picks the best-exposed part of each image and stitches them together into something your screen can display.
Similarly, HDTR can also be broken into two parts: HDTR + time-mapping. The composite HDTR image is the entire photo stack, with values for each pixel at each time index. This can't be displayed directly on your screen because of the "convincing illusion" of linear time (you have to play it like a movie). Time-mapping picks a time index to use for each pixel in the final image.
Where the HDTR author breaks down is that he has limited himself only to 2-dimensional time gradients, and he hasn't tried to do 3-dimensional time surfaces yet. I assume that's coming though.
Now that I have all my time-lapse gear (timer, tripod, etc.), I hope to start working on TimeComposite again soon.
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November 24th, 2007
04:39 pm - Black Friday, 7-Eleven
This is the next photo in a series (which I didn't know was a series until just now) that starts with Best Buy Narnia. I call it "normal stores with giant skies".
Edit: If you haven't played with Rsizr, you should give it a try! It's a flash tool for content-aware image resizing.
Edit 2: Big ups to Keith Kerlan for exposing the truth: 7-Eleven is a gateway to hell! (He calls this "Viewing the world through 'Keith Goggles'")
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November 22nd, 2007
08:27 pm - Time Visualization
Time visualization fascinates me. The idea is simple:
- Take video footage, or a series of time-lapse photos from a camera.
- Stack the frames one on top of the next. This creates a 3-dimensional [2D + time] space.
- Cut a slice (or curve, or shape) out of that space.
- Project it back onto a 2D surface.
Voila! You have a 2D projection of a 3D surface in [2D + time] space. It's like a long-exposure photo, only with each part of the image coming from a different point in time.
Here is a sample from my TimeComposite program, which allows curved surfaces in T (painting forward/backwards in time):
And here are samples from Recreating Movement.
Is anyone out there good at sculpting? Imagine making a sculpture of one of these!
Found via Infosthetics.
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October 29th, 2007
12:32 am - Skyline Open Space Preserve
Some HDR photos from the Skyline Open Space Preserve. It's just south of Page Mill and Highway 35, next to the Russian Ridge and Montebello preserves.
(For Homesteaders - my pedometer registered about 2000 steps per mile. YMMV! Of course, even wearing it on my belt it got accidentally reset every hour or so.)
  
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August 28th, 2007
11:50 am - Content-Aware Image Resizing
I've been fascinated with content-aware image resizing since reading about it on Thai's blog. It's like HDR for image resizing (if that makes any sense).
Here's the problem: how do you scale an image to a different size while retaining the "interesting" parts? Watch the video to find out.
The reason it reminds me of HDR is that HDR is a lie. You are making a false image, one that looks like nothing your eye ever saw at any time. But the lie is convincing; if anything, it looks more real because it simulates what you experienced and remember - the stitched-together gestalt of perception.
Content-aware image resizing works the same way, resizing the image by removing the bits that your eye skips over anyway.
Another approach is non-linear resizing, which does progressive stretching towards the edges of the image, where you're less likely to notice it. Another Neat Trick exploiting edge cases in human perception.
Edit: looks like Adobe snapped this guy up. Hopefully this will show up in Photoshop soon (though I'll have to wait for the Gimp).
Edit 2: check out Rsizr! It's a flash tool that supports this.
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August 15th, 2007
11:57 pm - Homestead
A couple HDR pics of the 'stead. We're rolling with mad PHP now. We're even getting our .htaccess on under IIS.
Bonus: Ghost Chuxes don't like being photographed. Only HDR photomatography can pick up their strange ectoplasmic residue.
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June 17th, 2007
02:38 am - Russian Ridge Photos
HDR photos from Russian Ridge, plus photos of my visiting parents and of my Uncle Jay. Click the pics for more!
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March 25th, 2007
10:58 am - BestBuy Narnia
It's a well-kept secret, but there is an entrance to Narnia inside every Best Buy. It's behind the PSP games, which is why no one ever finds it.
You push past racks and racks of CDs, bump into a plasma tv, feel your way past the cell phones, and eventually find yourself here:
If the Ice Queen offers you a Red Bull, don't drink it.
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March 17th, 2007
11:31 pm - Crystal Springs HDR
More HDR photos from Crystal Springs. I'll get photos from some new places soon, I promise!
It's just that Crystal Springs reservoir is so picturesque, and is only a few minutes from my apartment... if it looks like a pretty sunset, I can just duck right over. (Beat that, city folk!)
( More pictures from Crystal Springs )
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March 7th, 2007
10:43 pm - HDR Before and After
stiill asked for some before-and-after photos, so here you go! This is the series of images I used to create the HDR image posted in the comments yesterday. From these you can see how the final image is made by merging the various exposures:
Original exposures:
  
Intermediate HDR
Unfortunately I didn't save this, but imagine there's another image here that looks like the contrast is blown out because the monitor can't render it.
Final tone-mapped jpeg:
I'm gonna need an external hard drive if I keep this up... each source image (RAW) is 7mb, and each combined HDR is 26mb!
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March 6th, 2007
01:42 am - Photomatix
I broke down and bought Photomatix last night, because it was recommended so strongly by the Stuck In Customs HDR tutorial.
For comparison, here is the same shot I posted yesterday, only processed using Photomatix instead of QtPFSGui. The color and detail are good, and the weird otherworldliness is almost gone.
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