Dispatches from District 48
Archive for the ‘photography’ Category.
Scouting New York is coming to an end, as the proprietor appears to be moving up from film location scouting to perhaps writing and producing his own films in LA. For which I wish him luck. But I will miss his long posts on quirky and interesting New York City locations. His archives are still there, and fans of NYC or urban architecture in general are encouraged to look at his past work.
But of course, he just started Scouting LA
Hey, Glenn Reynolds blogs about cameras, and he sets the standard, right? I just looked at a few of the pictures I took at the Aerosmith concert last week and I thought they came out surprisingly well for a pocket camera. I was using a Canon PowerShot SX260HS that I actually own to take pictures of campgrounds for my business web site. These pictures were not from close up, they were zoomed all the way out to 20x (I was up in the seats on the side, not on the floor or right by the stage). I shot with a no flash night mode the camera had that I had never played with. Given the time it takes to process each shot, it must be some kind of HDR thing but I was impressed it caught fast action pretty clearly.
Loved that Joe Perry guitar, by the way.
I am not very comfortable with heights, so these photos tend to induce a panic attack in me.
This is kind of clever. Surprised no one has tried to make a movie based on the board game. Though perhaps since this gentleman is a Hollywood location scout, someone may be.
I was at a couple of art shows during my vacation, and saw a lot of photography. A staple of photography are the shots of Italian allies and colorful sea villages. I have one on my wall that I shot myself, the classic view you have seen a million times of Vernazza, Italy. My wife observed that these photos at the shows looked different than mine (she said "better").
The reason was quickly apparent, and I am seeing this more and more in the Photoshop world -- all the artists have pumped the color saturation way up. I had to do this a bit, because the colors desaturate some when they get printed on canvas. But these canvases friggin glowed. I see the same thing in nature photography. Is this an improvement? I don't know, but I am a bit skeptical. It reminds me a lot of how TV's are sold. TV pictures tend to be skewed to over-bright and over-vivid colors because those look better under the fluorescent lights of the sales floor. TV's also tend to have their colors tuned to the very cool (blue) color temperatures for the same reason. None of this looks good in a darkened room watching a film-based movie. Fortunately, modern TV's have better electronics menus and it is easy to reverse these problems, and my guess is there is less of this anyway now that many TV's are sold online based on reviews rather than comparison shopping in a store.
I am left to wonder though how this new super-vivid, over saturated photography would look in a home, and how it wears with years of viewing. Am I being a dinosaur resisting a technological improvement or is there a real problem here?
The first time I ever saw one of these coming at me, my first thought was to a Steven King novel (the Mist). I had a moment where I honestly thought to myself, "I wonder if, five minutes from now, I am going to regret not jumping in my car and driving like hell to stay ahead of this thing." More here
Basically an enormous dirt tsunami once inside of it things are not as bad as they look, with it being like a medium-dense brown fog. Of course, absolutely everything one owns outside or with the smallest non-airtight seal to the outside has to be hosed off afterwards.
I am just about to enter my ninth year on this blog and I realize that I have not participated much in the primary purpose of the Internet -- posting cute animal pictures. So here is some catch-up, via a recent trip to the San Diego zoo.
I find these photos surprisingly compelling
I've already told the story of being in Manhattan on 9/11. Through the day, vehicles could leave the city, but they could not come back (even taxis). That evening, most people who could leave Manhattan had done so. We were stuck until the next day. We ended up finding a restaurant for dinner in Times Square that was open.
Times Square was just totally bizarre. There were no cars at all. Perhaps one car would pass every five minutes. A couple of guys were roller skating around the streets, I supposed just because they could.
I was reminded of this experience by this photograph by Lucie and Simon, who take pictures of cities and digitally remove the cars and people.
My readers recently taught me this trick for trying to identify an image. Go to this link:
Click on the little camera in the right-hand side of the search box. This brings up a sort of reverse image search, where you can upload an image or put in an image URL and it will give you a guess as to what it is.
The thumbnail does not look like much, but the detail is incredible. I can't remember a photo this old that one could zoom down so far in and look around. Click to see the full version, via Shorpy
Nice work with the colorizing, though its maybe a tad saturated for my taste. Source
This is a bit old, but Radley Balko linked this story about a many busted for taking pictures of a refinery
Police Chief Jim McDonnell has confirmed that detaining photographers for taking pictures “with no apparent esthetic value” is within Long Beach Police Department policy.
McDonnell spoke for a follow-up story on a June 30 incidentin which Sander Roscoe Wolff, a Long Beach resident and regular contributor to Long Beach Post, was detained by Officer Asif Kahn for taking pictures of North Long Beach refinery.
“If an officer sees someone taking pictures of something like a refinery,” says McDonnell, “it is incumbent upon the officer to make contact with the individual.” McDonnell went on to say that whether said contact becomes detainment depends on the circumstances the officer encounters.
McDonnell says that while there is no police training specific to determining whether a photographer’s subject has “apparent esthetic value,” officers make such judgments “based on their overall training and experience” and will generally approach photographers not engaging in “regular tourist behavior.”
This policy apparently falls under the rubric of compiling Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) as outlined in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Order No. 11, a March 2008 statement of the LAPD’s “policy … to make every effort to accurately and appropriately gather, record and analyze information, of a criminal or non-criminal nature, that could indicate activity or intentions related to either foreign or domestic terrorism.”
Among the non-criminal behaviors “which shall be reported on a SAR” are the usage of binoculars and cameras (presumably when observing a building, although this is not specified), asking about an establishment’s hours of operation, taking pictures or video footage “with no apparent esthetic value,” and taking notes.
First, I think refineries are enormously interesting photography subjects (disclaimer: I used to work in the Exxon Baytown refinery) and I think they can be downright beautiful at night.
Second, I take pictures of industrial subjects all the time as potential guides for my model railroading. Incredibly-boring-for-most-people example here.
Often ranked among the best beaches of the world, this is the beach at the Mauna Kea Resort on the Big Island of Hawaii. I don't usually take summer vacations given the nature of my business, but we are celebrating my wife's 50th. Yes, that is the view from my room, thanks to our awesome cousin who is a manager at the resort.
If you can see what's on the screen, you can see this was from 32 years ago (as of tomorrow). My sister and I, in Florida on vacation, watching the moon walk.
This is pretty cool, if they can pull it off. Though I am not sure getting focus right is really the issue with most photographers any more. It would be interesting if you could change the depth of field, though.
NSFW: Big Book of Breasts, now in 3-D
Had to laugh when I saw that. I was actually looking for this book on Case Study Houses.
Via Maggies Farm, I found these animated pictures really terrific. I know what you are thinking -- cheezy animated smiley gif's people embed in their emails. No, this is something entirely different.
Before he made movies, he apparently was a really good photographer.
If there is anything creepier than weird children's art on the walls of an abandoned mental institution, I am not sure what it is. From here. (for those who like urban architecture, urban archeology, and/or New York, this is a great site).
Some cool pictures of abandoned buildings in Detroit. How do you abandon a public library and leave all the books? All these buildings appear vandalized. Could it be a sign of Detroit's problems that no one bothered to even steal the books?
I can't find the link right now, but these pictures remind me of ones posted a few years ago of Russian towns abandoned after Chernobyl.
I am still trying to figure out how traditional film photographers got great outdoor photos. I struggle with haze and a loss of vibrancy in distant photos, as if the images were photographed through dirty glass. Maybe filters? More vibrancy in the film (I know that drove a lot of Kodak users to Fuji)?
Anyway, I don't have to rely on film, and can fiddle around with Photoshop until I get things right. I used it in this image to lighten some dark areas and then eliminated the haze effects by painting the whole image with a low-opacity color burn (I used to use a neutral gray for this but I have had better luck using a color with much of the blue taken out (using the RGB sliders in the color selection)). I gave a second helping of the color burn to the buildings only, to make them pop a bit. I try to stay far away from the contrast controls - every photo I have ever ruined started downhill with the contrast control. Instead, I went into each of the R-G-B channels in the "levels" section and fiddled with the distributions a bit, in effect widening the distributions (only a little) to get a tad more contrast.
I think it came out pretty well -- I was at an art show with a guy selling almost this exact same photo from the exact same spot and I think mine compared favorably with his art shot. The only thing I think might have improved it was to get morning light, but I was not going to camp out for 18 hours to do so.
Anyway, this is Vernazza, one of the five towns of Cinqueterre on the Italian Riviera, taken from the fabulous walking trail the connects the five towns. As usual click for enlargement.
On the monitor screen, the colors are perhaps a bit over-saturated but by trial and error it looks great on paper (at least with my printer -- the color variation among printers and papers is really astonishing once you start paying attention to it).
Below, by the way, is the original digital image. If someone can tell me what I am doing wrong (filters, camera selection, etc) to get such crappy original images, I would be appreciative. It looks like I haven't cleaned the lens or something. All I am using is a pretty good quality UV filter (mostly just to protect the lens) on a Nikon D50 with the stock Nikon lens.
San Francisco City Hall, after the 1906 earthquake. From Shorpy.
