Meatless Like Me
Slate has a great piece called Meatless Like Me. Now, before all you omnivores run away, I want you to know it isn't the typical smug, holier-than-thou, tree-hugging vegetarian diatribe that we've all heard too many times before. It is simply trying to explain that the vast majority of us vegetarians are really not that weird:
To demonstrate what a vegetarian really is, let's begin with a simple thought experiment. Imagine a completely normal person with completely normal food cravings, someone who has a broad range of friends, enjoys a good time, is carbon-based, and so on. Now remove from this person's diet anything that once had eyes, and, wham!, you have yourself a vegetarian. Normal person, no previously ocular food, end of story. Some people call themselves vegetarians and still eat chicken or fish, but unless we're talking about the kind of salmon that comes freshly plucked from the vine, this makes you an omnivore.
Fortunately, at Stanford and here in New York it's not as much of an issue, but I can tell you that in Indiana, and a little in New Mexico, I got some strange looks and reactions from people when they found out I was one of those.
Posted May 8, 2008 - One Comment
Why Acid 3 Doesn't Matter
Mark Pilgrim recently posted an article bemoaning Mozilla's lack of attention to the Acid3 test. While I agree that it would be nice if Firefox passed Acid3 with flying colors, his article bothered me because it failed to take one thing into account: Acid3 doesn't matter. The proof is in the numbers. Over 75% of Web users are still using Internet Explorer, despite its dinosaur of a rendering engine. Meanwhile, the browsers that have passed Acid3 (at least in development builds) can't even break 7% of market share.
When all the hubbub about Mozilla not putting enough effort into Acid3 came out, Mike Shaver wrote a response that, while possibly coming off a little whiny, explained Mozilla's reasoning. And they got it right. As Rob Sayre points out, Firefox's failed Acid3 tests are corner cases that everyday users will not see, like SVG rendering (who uses SVG?), or won't care about, like dynamic title updating, and therefore deserve to have lower priorities. What they have been spending time on is getting Firefox 3 out the door. Firefox 3 is significantly faster, has an improved user interface, and uses less system resources, all things that very clearly impact the user. In fact, it's so good that it's making Mac users leave Safari, for a beta no less.
Commenting on Mark's post, Thor Larholm snidely remarks that Mozilla is no longer a leader in web standards due to its maturity. In part he's right: Mozilla has matured. But this isn't, as he tries to suggest, a negative. Mozilla is doing what any good software organization must do: it is prioritizing. There are bugs that need to be fixed now, and there are bugs that can be fixed later, and according to their Acid3 bug spreadsheet, I can see no bugs left that are worth holding Firefox 3 back for. On the other hand, Opera and WebKit are hastily fixing bugs in an attempt to be the first to fully pass Acid3. The problem is that in the process they changed the priority of the bugs away from the users and towards themselves. I find it troubling that these projects would do that just to chase an arbitrary target for bragging rights, because in a world of limited resources, that translates into less time spent on useful features.
Software development is all about prioritizing, and the sad fact is you can't always be working on the interesting bugs or the bugs that will win you acclaim with your fellow developers. You have to be working on what the user needs and what the user needs first. Mozilla has made a good compromise. As a user, I am thrilled about Firefox 3. I can't wait for the final release; I never knew the Web could be so fast. As a developer, I have no problems with Firefox; my code renders the way I think it should and I've never had to spend time debugging a Firefox-only bug.
So while I appreciate Mark so unselfishly feeling embarrassed on Mozilla's behalf, I, personally, am proud of them. They are still making inroads into one of the most entrenched markets in software today, and they are doing it by writing software that focuses on their users, by making the Web an inviting place for everyone.
Posted May 7, 2008 - Comments
Middle East Envy
There have been few times in my life when I've thought "wow, I'd really love to be in right now." Even fewer of those times has the blank been replaced with "Dubai". Sure, I'd like to go there someday, but I've never had a driving urge. Until now. Man, do I wish I was in Dubai right now...
Why?
Because right now I am missing what can only be the greatest meeting of the biggest photographers on the internet today, Gulf Photo Plus. David Hobby of Strobist, which I eagerly await reading each day, is taking pictures of David Nightingale of Chromasia, who shoots some of the most beautiful landscapes and portraits I have ever seen.
One of my most recent heroes, Joe McNally, is also there. Joe has shot for The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, and was the first staff photographer at Life in over 20 years. He recently published the fantastic book The Moment it Clicks, and he writes on his blog about who lighting up all of Ellis Island and shutting down New York TV stations numerous times to [get a shot from the top of New York City]. He is joined by superstar Chase Jarvis, who is probably most famous for his ninjas.
They are all there, the guys I read and learn from every day, and they are teaching people how they do it. Yeah, I'm a fanboy. And I am so jelous...
Posted April 30, 2008 - Comments
Look Smart
I've recently started trying to participate in Strobist Bootcamp 2008.
Strobist Bootcamp is a great set of practice exercises set up by Strobist, a.k.a. David Hobby. He hands out assignments as a photo editor for a magazine or newspaper would, with some lighting lessons to help you out. You do the assignment, submit it to Flickr with a couple of tags, and get comments and critique from other participants. The first Bootcamp was run a couple of years ago, but some Strobist followers periodically revive it.
I missed the first two assignments, so I really wanted to get in on this one. The idea of this assignment was to use light to make someone look smart. Being that my favorite model happens to be extremely smart, I though she'd be the perfect subject. Originally, I was thinking of puting her in front of a couple of server racks, maybe get a screen reflecting off her glasses, something like that. But when I scouted out the area by the servers here at work, I couldn't come up with any good angles. I thought about it some more, and decided it would work better to shoot through the window in my office and back into Ben's office. I figured I could bounce a couple flashes off our pretty blue walls to get a nice cool "ambient" glow, and then use the screen, or more likely, a flash hidden behind th screen, to light her face.
Though it sounded like a promising setup, it lacked something in creativity, considering one of David's most famous (and most copied) was exactly the same idea. As I was falling asleep, thinking about it, I had an idea: cheesy hacker movies. It's a law that all cheesy hacker movies must have the screen projected back on the hacker's face. Of course, this doesn't work in real life because a screen is not a focused light source, and just ends up looking like a blob of light. But a couple weeks earlier, I'd seen an example of a photo that projected a $100 bill onto an egg (nest egg). I realized I could do the same with a flash, a lens and a "cookie", or something in the shape of text. I printed out some terminal output, stuck it in front of a flash, put a lens in front of that, bingo! It projected the text on the wall perfectly! I had my shot.
See the shots below for the full setup.
Posted March 13, 2008 - Comments
Shooting Chai
This weekend has not brought the best weather. Saturday it rained and rained, today it was cold and windy. So what's a guy to do? Make a Chai Latte and take pictures of it.
My goal with this shot was to make a clean, photographic white background, without blowing out the mug, and most importantly, the off-white foam on top. To do this, I set up three white foam core boards in kind of a tent. I then set my two Morris maxiSlave flashes pointing up at the two "roof" pieces to bounce the light around and get the overall exposure. Next I put a bare 285HV coming in from the back of the "tent" to blow out the top of the frame, since it was a little dark. Finally, I put a 430EX in a white umbrella, coming in from low left to bring up the front of the mug. Photo's exposure was lowered a bit in ACR to keep the mug from being washed out, the curves were tweaked bring a few pixels at the edge up to true white and dust was cleaned up in photoshop.
I found the biggest problem with the setup was getting a good angle on the mug. I'm starting to learn that if you get too high, cups and glasses start to look distorted, too wide at the top and too short in the body. The other problem was getting the reflections right. This shot would have been easier, and possibly more interesting, on some sort of textured, colored background, but it's good to know how to get white. I had some trouble with bad reflections on the mug, but subtle tweaking got that fixed.
Posted March 9, 2008 - Two Comments
Foray into Film
Recently, I acquired a new camera: a Holga 120N. The Holga is a very inexpensive medium format camera that takes 120 film, exposing either 6x4.5cm or 6x6cm frames. As Min mentioned, it is entirely plastic, including the lens. It is light leaky, has only two shutter speeds and apertures, it's fixed focal length, and mostly fixed focus. By all measures, it is an under performing camera. Its quality pales in comparison to my DSLR. But there is something magical about it. It goes soft at the edges, giving it a very nostalgic feel. It looks and feels like a toy, but is capable of producing serious art.
I got my first roll of film developed last week. The pictures are amazing. I am disappointed in the lab -- they seem to have gotten the processing right, but they cropped my prints and corrected my exposures (shots with the lens cap on should not be medium gray...it's not that light leaky). So I tried scanning the film in on my scanner. Above is one of the results. Pretty good, though a bit dusty.
I'm excited to get around to do shots of the major New York landmarks, especially bridges and subway stations. I'm sure Grand Central will get a visit too.
Posted March 3, 2008 - Two Comments
Revisit and Retouch Response
Ryan, over at CameraPorn (yes, it's SFW), came up with a very cool exercise. He posted three pictures he'd taken of a fuel depot in Grand Caymen. The three pictures are all of the same scene, each 2 stops apart. He composited them in Photoshop, making a very nice image. Now here's the cool part: he's inviting his readers to take their own shot at doing the composite, and he'll post all submissions. Since I'm looking to improve my Photoshop skills, this seemed like a cool thing to try. First, Ryan's composite. And here's my take on it:
As part of the exercise, he asked us to show how we did it. The best way I can think of is to show my layers and explain:
First, the base layer is the 0EV shot. Layer 1 is the +2EV shot, and has some nice detail in the foreground and rocks. Layer 2 is the -2EV shot and has a good sky in it. You can see these two are masked to keep from contaminating each other. Next is a Hue/Saturation layer that just brings the saturation up +50 on the whole image. A Curves layer above that adds contrast with a strong S-curve, masking out the top left to keep the sky from going too dark.
Layer 3 is a touch up layer that removes all the dust spots that got on the lens because of the sea spray. Curves 2 drops the Blue channel slightly and brings up the Green channel to give a warmer cast to the image. Hue/Saturation 2 shifts the yellows more towards red, to give a nice orange glow, but is masked to keep the oranges on the left of the image from saturating too much. Hue/Saturation 3 tones down the Reds by decreasing their saturation. Finally, Hue/Saturation 4 removes a blue cast on the fuel tanks.
I'm pretty happy with the image. It's a drastically different photograph from the base image:
Sometimes I wonder if it's too saturated, but when I tried to tone it down, it lost its punch. My only real problem with it was getting the horizon right. You can see the water is a little dark and the sky a little bright where they meet, but after spending too much time on it, I just decided it was good enough.
You can also check out other people's entries so far.
Posted January 24, 2008 - Comments
Copilot Now Free on Weekends
A few people have noticed that we made a small change to Copilot: it's now free on weekends.
After building up enough data on our bandwidth usage, we realized that we were barely using any at all on the weekends, and since our bandwidth is priced by top 5%, it means that our weekend bandwidth is essentially free. Being the nice people we are, we figured we might as well pass that on to our users.
Go forth and help your friends and family at Copilot.com!
