Merely Coincidence

That Isaac's choice of university is also near one of the best skate parks.

Mystery

@ MOMA, NYC

Many Unreasonable Apples

SFO

Another, more-recent Paul Graham lament about the lack of respect afforded "straight" photography. and a discussion(?) of the same essay/address, which oddly attributes a review of Jeff Wall photos to.. Jeff Wall? Misreading aside it has an interest list of conflicting viewpoints, like these:

• Conscientious: “hyperbolic, overblown, risible”
• la pura vida: OpEd: The Beautiful Burden
• Conscientious: “Continuing the debate about photography”
• Adam Bell: The Unreasonable Apple
• Touching Harms the Art by Luke Strosnider: Paul Graham – The Unreasonable Apple
• We can shoot too: “Quote of the Week – Paul Graham”

Now, this all got rolling back in February. How dare I blog about something so.... ancient?

I'm increasingly thinking that this is exactly what I should do -- like Garry Winogrand's delayed-processing piles of film canisters, which he left in storage deliberately so that he wouldn't mistake his immediate feelings about the experience of shooting for the experience of seeing the picture. So to, perhaps, it's better to give others the opportunity to shout each other down, mistaking contention for criticism. YMMV.

(And yes, I realize that pointing out a fight is not participating either -- I'll collect some opinions later, though frankly Graham seems to be just pointing himself. There is a problem. That recognition is easy. Solutions and sense about it is harder.)

Less Net

Key Largo, 2010

I hear that del.icio.us and perhaps even flickr may go away soon. The new joke around the valley is: "if the US really wanted to kill Wikileaks, they'd have Yahoo acquire it."

In the mean time, you might like this.

Silicon Valley 2010

Parallel Developments

Color study shot for Rift: Planes of Telara

Earlier this week we were privileged to have painter & storyteller James Gurney visit the art department at Trion, both to have him speak with us and also for us to get a chance to show him our game. He's best-know to the public for the Dinotopia books (favorites at our house for many years -- See See & I were also lucky enough to see the Dinotopia show at the Norton Museum in Palm Beach a few months back), and known to a lot of artists for his blog and several art technique books, including the new Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter.

We got the chance to look at some advance copies of the book and also hear him talk a little bit about (among many other things!) how the brain processes color and luminance separately -- which of course reminded me of this old post on the Black and White Brain. It's exciting to me to see someone as accomplished as Gurney coming at the same ideas from a different direction and for different purpose.

It's been several years now where I find that some of the biggest sources of information for my work in computer-graphic coloring and shading come not from computer scientists or even other people doing similar work -- instead, they come from painters. Not just realist painters, either. Gradations, highlighting, punctuation, contrast, shape -- increasingly I think of shading as a sort of painting-without-drawing.

San Francisco, 2010

Silicon Valley, 2010

ChartThrob 1.08

I've updated ChartThrob, my little tool for creating digital negatives. The latest edition has some subtle internal tweaks that should enhance its compatibility with Macs (and users who have radically different default Photoshop preferences than my own).

You can find a nice description of how to use ChartThrob in a complete alt-process workflow here on inkjetnegative.com. Props to Michael for creating that page!

Minneapolis

Hitched, Watsonville

P1050253, Brooklyn

For the streetphoto salon....

P1020045, Redwood City

P1000264, Tulips @ Home

Junkpiles

What a difference a day makes as I start assembling all the real components and trying to sort them out -- even doubling the size of the chassis the whole thing seems... smaller. And it's definitely slower. And I still haven't added the USB router or the second power supply for the linux portion. Or the lasers.

But really, I don't want to make Wall-E or Huey/Dewey/Louie or K-9 or Johnny-5. All those designs have a similar feel, I think, because they are dominated by components. This seems like a dead-end for the physical design, I'm moving back to my "expressive tentacle-like eyestalk" plan.

Imagine if animals were designed this way. Ugh. They all have similar components, but how different are even the various vertebrates and chordates, much less the wide variety of other creatures...

Did some computer vision tests this evening and it was taking eight seconds a pop to analyze images. Realtime, yay.