So I’m toying with the idea of not using iPhoto except to stream to my iPhone and start just doing files and folders on my Dropbox. Before I left for Macworld I bought an app called Graphic Converter because I have a ton of clip art that I would like to access but I don’t want to have to click through individual images to find the one I’m looking for. Having a virtual catalog would be great. Alas, finder wasn’t really cutting it. We’ll see. I just need something that works better than having all of my images on one computer (the one with the least space & smallest screen), and occasionally backing it up to the other computers. This is such a first-world issue, it’s silly. But I’m tired of not having my media where I want it so that I can work on it, not just to admire. Grhhh!

Sources:
All images by Joe Bustillos

As I recently posted on twitter, I wasn’t entirely successful posting a photo a day on flickr (mostly because I take way too many photos that need some level of editing and insist on posting them in chronological order, etc., etc., etc.). But thanks to an iPhone app called Everyday I’ve been capturing an image of yours truly almost everyday since buying the app in early 2011. I wasn’t as strict as I should have been framing the photos, so it’s a much more jittery video than it could have been. And except for my hair growing out (and being wonderfully styled) the passage of time isn’t as obvious and will probably require a much longer time span than just one year. Oh boy.

On a much more beautiful and celebratory note, Kathy Craven’s boyfriend, Mike Cardwell posted the following video highlighting how they celebrated the coming of the new year. Enjoy.

New Year’s Eve from Michael Cardwell on Vimeo.

This is how my family and I spent the last few hours of 2011. This is an in-camera effect using bokeh. No animation of any kind was used in this video.

Best viewed Full Screen.

Thanks to everyone who helped on this project!

Kathy Craven
The Craven Family
Ryan Nielson
Aidan Cardwell
Kellie Martin
Nick Loring from Digital Graphics Plus
Chris Altsman
Brett Brinkerhoff for letting me borrow his rig

Happy New Year!

Catch Mike’s work at Market Match Media and can be contacted at Michael@marketmatchmedia.com

Uploaded by jonaspfeil on Oct 5, 2011
Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ballcamera

We present the Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera which captures a full spherical panorama when thrown into the air. At the peak of its flight, which is determined using an accelerometer, a full panoramic image is captured by 36 mobile phone camera modules.

Patent pending. More info: http://jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera
Please check our Frequently Asked Questions: http://jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera/faq

A project of the Computer Graphics Group, TU Berlin.

To be presented as an Emerging Technologies demonstration at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2011: Jonas Pfeil, Kristian Hildebrand, Carsten Gremzow, Bernd Bickel, Marc Alexa

Diploma thesis ‘Throwable Camera Array for Capturing Spherical Panoramas’:
Jonas Pfeil. Advisors: Marc Alexa, Carsten Gremzow

Video: Jonas Pfeil, Junny Chen, Qian Qin, Björn Bollensdorff

Voice: Hugh Jeremy

Music: ADO and Wonderland by IZCY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPd_rJZmvLc

Video licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0

We would like to thank Axel Kretzschmann for helpful tips on high speed electronics, Analog Devices, Inc., for providing parts and STMicroelectronics for helpful information regarding the camera module.

Thanks to Hugh Jeremy for providing the voice-over. Check out his awesome channel on Natural Selection 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkgztfuij2w

Patent pending, http://jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera
Category:
Science & Technology
Tags:
omnidirectional camera panorama panoramic ball throwable

This is a vent and a bit of a rant. It’s probably unwise for me to share this, and so I want to offer a blanket apology to anyone who feels that I’m being unfair or that it’s wrong for me to write about this. I guess that’s kind’a what this comes down to: as a writer (and photographer) I’m compelled to share my work with the biggest audience possible. In the pre-Full Sail days, it was the need to share that motivated me to post my musings and photos. But I had little concern about who was watching/reading because the truth was I was probably my own audience of one most of the time. Since then I’ve become aware that I have students, co-workers and the occasional relative visiting. Believe me, that makes me a bit more cautious, but the artist in me still compels me to share.

So, it saddens me when I get the pull-down email from someone who feels that I’m invading their privacy with my work. Okay, it more than saddens me when the email accuses me of being careless or even mean-spirited with my postings. “Really Joe, you should know better!” Here’s what I do know: when I pull out my camera I’m just trying to capture enough of what’s happening so that those who were there can enjoy the memories of a shared experience. I’m not trying to capture embarrassing moments or looking to make anyone look silly. Although, I’m the first to admit that there have been a few whom I’ve consistently caught with food in their mouths (sorry M Haynes). But the point is that I’m just making the effort to capture the moment, not to embarrass anyone.

At the same time I’m fully aware that there is the personal lens by which everyone sees the world such that we’re all drawn to seeing all of our own imperfections whenever we see ourselves in a photo. For example, I see a little kid playing with his toys on the floor possibly thinking about how he’s going to get the stuff behind the kiddie-fence, while someone else sees themselves with their back to the camera and they can only see that it’s not very flattering (to them). I guess I could crop the photo so that the unflattering bits are cut out, but the point of such a photo might be the interplay between the little one on the floor and the one not facing the camera.

So, when I see the photo I see the interplay between a little kid on the floor and the adult and it seems like a reasonable image capturing that moment. If I were in the photo with my back toward the camera would I be uncomfortable? Well, that test doesn’t work because I would see the photo as being about the kid AND me (in this version) and not about my posterior. Now if it were a close-up of the Buddha-belly, I might cringe. But if it told a story about that day and those people or about what happened, I’d find a way to get over myself.

All I wanted to do was to capture these moments and share them. No malice, no agenda, just wanting to share the moment. And it takes a lot of time and effort to post the photos, so it’s all the more irritating when I get the pull-down email. As much as I probably should publish a lot fewer photos (i’m up to over 11,500 pix) this isn’t the same as saying that I post everything. There is some cropping and image enhancement and selection that goes into this. So, yeah, I feel like no good deed goes unpunished when someone tells me that they don’t want all those photos posted. I’m mean, why bother taking the pictures in the first place if no one is ever going to see them?

There must be something to wanting to share our photos in that many of us exchanged DVDs and CDs with photos from over the years this past Christmas. “But Joe, why would you want to share your photos on the open Internet, I mean, really!” I’ve chosen to post my photos to Flickr because I’ve learned over the years that any barrier to entry, anything that requires passwords or signing up for this service or that service, is enough to make it too difficult for anyone to find the photos, thus defeating the purpose of sharing. Period. I’ve decided that I’m going to make it as simple as possible for the photos to be found and enjoyed. As for the danger of posting things on the “open Internet,” except for those in the photos or close friends, no one cares. Remember, I’m just capturing little moments that only matter to us. The paranoia that posting photos on the Internet might lead to a life of misery or visit from the agency with the black helicopters is just plain silly. Believe me, I know, it’s part of my job to know about this Internet stuff.

Alas, among most of my relations I know that I’m the odd one who has consistently chosen to live my life on the open Internet. It’s frustrating to know that my siblings have the most amazing collection of photos and except for this one time, last Christmas, almost no one has access to any of it. I have tried to be a cheerleader and in the past gave Pro-accounts to flickr.com to the siblings only to have them expire with only two of the sibs taking advantage of the accounts. Sad. All the hours I put into this… funny thing, a co-worker was looking for work-related photos for a project she was working on and ended up spending probably too much time wandering through the family-related stuff and later complimented me, well, us because she thought we seemed to be a very fun group, based on the photos she saw. She seemed to get the point of all of these photos. Yeah, beware of Joe and his camera, he’s nefariously capturing images of us and stealing our privacy by posting the images on the web. Or maybe he’s just making it possible for us to enjoy our brief moments together long after the moments have past.

Sources:

• All images by joe bustillos, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joebustillos/sets/72157625956141627/with/5455875395/

Mountain Time-Lapse from Michael Cardwell on Vimeo.

Fullsail media wizard, Mike Cardwell reports, I recently took a trip to North Carolina and we had a great view in the front yard of our cabin so I decided to try a time-lapse.

I shot it on the Canon 7D with 30 second exposures at 45 second intervals. I ended up with 367 shots and the camera was out there for 5 hours. I wanted to get more, but the battery on my camera died. I guess I will have to get the AC adaptor if I’m going to do anything longer than this.

Images: Thierry Legault

My favorite crazy photo of the past week is by French photographer Thierry Legault, who captured the space shuttle Endeavor docked to the International Space Station as the pair flew in orbit with the Sun in the background. Thanks to Wired Science for the heads-up via Twitter.For more of Mr. Legault’s photograph go to Astrophotography.

Sources:

image:ISS-Endeavour-transit by Thierry Legault, http://legault.club.fr/iss_endeavour_transit.html retrieved on 7/30/2009

Article: Photo: Docked Space Shuttle and Station Cross the Sun by Alexis Madrigal for Wired Science, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/suntransit/?mbid=wir_newsltr retrieved on 7/30/2009

Being the guy wandering any social event with a camera I didn’t think twice about putting my photos on an online website, being motivated to have my pictures available to largest possible audience. Lovely Taco Beach bartender and frequent victim of my photography, Aimee, thought that having all my stuff online was pretty amazing, especially in view of stories that keep cropping up of teachers losing their jobs (or worse) for exposing their private life online. My thought has always been that I have nothing to hide and that having fun with my friends, generally in public places, and posting photos from said fun times does not hinder or compromise my ability to function as a professional educator. But then again that’s me and I don’t live in a place were these things are considered bad and somehow demean my position. Bah! But listening to Megan and Leo made me wonder when it comes to posting pictures of my granddaughter or my nieces.

I’ve always told my students to be aware of not saying too much or putting too much information online, but at the same time, knowing how much energy and time kids can put into a thing, they should claim the Internet as their own and make more places to meet in and put their stuff instead of staying away ’cause there are bad people on the Internet. Within reason I believe that one way to protect them from the bad people on the Internet is to empower them to take it over with their creativity and their energy. Maybe the difference is that in both cases the person posting the pictures is doing that for themselves to share with others. Whereas the problem can be that the other people in the photos might not want to have their pictures posted. I’ve run into that problem head-on before. Some people don’t want anyone else to know what they’re doing and would never post photos for that reason.So it’s a matter of where my freedom of expression conflicts with another’s desire for privacy. And the problem is made all the worse when the other isn’t old enough to know or express whether they want their “baby in the bathtub” pictures on the Internet.

I remember when I first started doing my school’s website and what few photos there were posted were all of the back of kids heads. I thought that completely defeated one of the purposes of having a website, which was to promote student work and “ownership” of the site. So, seeing that the problem was mostly a matter of giving parents the power to choose how their children would be posted I took a Internet consent form and modified it so that parents they could pick whether we could post student work and images, student work only, or opt completely out. That seems to work at school, but what about my nieces and granddaughter?

Most photo-sharing sites have privacy options, but, as Megan mentioned, any barrier put in front of tech-challenged relatives, whether it’s a password or need for membership opt-in to the site, is generally enough to keep the intended audience from viewing the pictures. So the dilemma remains. Argh. I wish it were simpler but I guess it really comes down to your own comfort level AND the comfort level of the others in the picture. Damn. jbb

Music: Jumping Monkeys, Episode 18: Parent Hacks 10/7/07