Brandymore Castle

There is a lot of talk about "blown highlights" in digital photography forums, especially with respect to my camera of choice, the Olympus E-510. I think it needs to be clear what we are talking about. There are two kinds of blown highlights. The first is where highlights are blown in the captured image. These are lost forever to the photographer, even if storing the raw file data from the image capture. The second kind is where highlights are blown in the image developed from the captured image. The first kind comes from incorrect exposure or dynamic range limitations in the sensor, which the photographer cannot do anything about after the exposure is made. The second kind the photographer has more control over (other than getting the exposure right) through the JPEG engine adjustments. Blown highlights in the developed image can be the result of these adjustments, not a limitation of the camera or exposure. To clear up any confusion in my mind over the effects of camera adj...

I recently discovered a wonderful new open source project for creating Flash charts. It is open source, non-proprietary and best of all for a non-profit on a tight budge, it is free. In the last week I deployed Open Flash Charts after integrating the package into our Folkstreams content management system. For users of our system (through their personalized area My Folkstreams), this will be a great improvement in the quality of charts. We make the statistics on visitors and video views available to filmmakers, and the Flash charts are simply beautiful compared to our old ones based on phplot. You can download the code for OFC (Open Flash Charts) from their homepage. It is the work of John Glazebrook and he must be a designer, because the default charts in the tutorial are beautiful and take advantage of the interactive features of Flash. I discovered a few kinks that need working out, but overall, this is an excellent addition to the open source code making up the Folkstreams platfo...

The strangest thing about the web is that I no longer have to look for things. I can just Google them up quicker than I can locate them myself. When I wanted to know the guide number for my ancient Vivitar 215 flash, instead of spending an hour looking through my boxes of equipment stored about the house to find the original manual, I was able to find a scan of the manual online using Google. When I had a question about my camera, the manual was sitting five feet from me on the shelf, but I decided to Google for it. In less time and effort than getting off my duff and tugging it out of my bookshelf, I had the PDF file from the camera manufacturer's site open in my browser. I even had the PDF file on my local hard disk, but it was lost among the ten thousands PDF file's I've downloaded over the years. So it was quicker to stay in my browser and use the power of Google search to find the manual than to use the obsolete and clunky interface to my information the Windows Explo...

The study of bokeh tells us something vital and fascinating about art. In an article on bokeh, the author draws attention to the "cat's eye effect" where out of focus highlights appear as ovals with sharply converging corners (the shape of a cat's eye). The concept is illustrated with a photograph by Edo Engel of a street sign surrounded by what appears to be a whorl of cat's eye highlights. The author states "When there are many OOFH's [out of focus highlights] scattered across the frame, the cat's eye effect yields the impression of a rotational background motion." (http://www.vanwalree.com/optics/bokeh.html 2007) What is fascinating about this, besides an interesting effect? We learn from this phenomena the elongated shape of the disks implies movement. Any elongated shape implies motion, which automobile designers take great advantage of. This sense arises from how the human visual perceptual system interprets elongated forms. These forms, fo...

Cicada song in the leaves—between the roots generations. -sek, Dec 2007

Here is an idea I had recently for a new photo sharing application, which would make it easier for anyone to use photographs in their own context. A site is created where users can sign up. They submit the name of their Flickr photostream. The site pulls in any photos from their stream that have rights set to Creative Commons remix license. Any user of the site can select any image pulled from the users Flickr photostreams collectively. There could be a single photostream "lightbox" used to select images from, I'm not going into details here. The idea is to let any user "reframe" any image contributed to a pool of images by other users. Reframe means to give the image another context. For example, an expert on historic photographic processes might frame an image with a text explaining the history and chemistry of the process that made the photograph and how to identify an example of this type of photographic image. A family historian might frame the same image w...

My friend and partner in developing Farm Foody and project director of the Folkstreams project, Tom Davenport, has opened a store for his From the Brother's Grimm series of films for sale direct to individuals (for institutional use, see his Davenport Films site). Tom is a farmer and filmmaker in Delaplane, Virginia. The films were frequently featured on PBS in the local D. C. area, so they should be familiar to a generation of children who are now adults. They are live action retellings of classic folk tales in an American setting. Some tales are from Appalachia while others are interpretations of European folk tales with strong overtones of Appalachian culture and setting. Willa , a favorite, draws upon traditional medicine show culture, documented in films like Free Show Tonight available for anyone to watch on the folkstreams.net website. Mutzmag is a powerful film in an Appalachian setting, which contains a fair amount of traditional fairy tale violence, but the lessons a...

A single leaf falls--silence of muted strings. -sek, Nov 2007 About fifteen years ago, playing guitar and muting the strings I heard a leaf fall outside, the sound heard through the open window.

The falling rain-- sound comes slowly into focus. -sek, 2007

When an element of color is seen against a larger background of neutral color, the effect is called isolated color. This is a useful technique for isolating the subject and creating interest. The eye is drawn to the subject by the isolated element of color in the same way it is drawn to a highlight. On a gray day, white can substitute for color against a subdued color background (white against desaturated color). Although the image here is an example of isolated color, it is also an example of color harmony, since the browns and tans of the concrete, composed of stone aggregate, harmonizes (shares similar tones) with the leaf. The colorful element should fill a significant percentage of the frame to be effective.

When it came time for me to move to a DSLR camera, I chose a camera that produces images with an aspect ratio of 4:3, which is the same size as older motion pictures and standard definition televisions. It is also the same aspect ratio offered by most digicams. Having done all my previous photography with a 35mm SLR, which has a 3:2 aspect ratio, the new camera prompted me to think about printing 4:3 aspect ratio photographs. Before deciding to go with a Four Thirds camera, I considered what moving from 3:2 to 4:3 aspect ratio could mean for my photography. In the last five years I had made some drawings and watercolors sized 9 x 12 inches. I noticed that I preferred this size to 8 x 10. It had a more "open" appearance despite having nearly the same aspect ratio as the ubiquitous 8 x 10. The 8 x 10 size always seemed a bit "claustrophobic." I occasionally had prints made 8 x 12 to preserve the 3:2 scene I had composed in the viewfinder, but the mats and frames were ...

Reading a book again--drinking flat cola. -sek, Nov 2007 (You can purchase a magnet of this original haiku).

The MD 45mm f/2.0 has an excellent reputation as a sharp prime lens with good bokeh. I wondered how it compared to the "designed for digital" ZD 40-150mm f/3.5 zoom lens that came with the the E-510 two lens kit. I shot photographs with the 45mm and the zoom at 45mm as close to f/4 as I could. The result is in my picasa album. This was shot with the MD 45mm at f/4 using manual focus and Live View to adjust focus. And here is the ZD. Click on the image to get the larger version. This was shot with the ZD 45-150 @ 45mm f/4.1 in manual focus using Live View. If you look carefully at the lower edge of the MD picture you can see "La Plata" is clearer than in the ZD image. It appears the MD prime has better edge sharpness than the "telecentric" and "designed for digital" kit zoom. This despite the 45mm was designed for a 35mm camera and is probably at least 20 years old, that its image circle is being cropped to 4/3 and probably extraneous light is bou...

I've been experimenting with LightZone to duplicate the effect available through a Photoshop action, which I am told employs layers of sharpening and Gaussian blur to achieve a heightened but smooth contrast. The effect is really attractive, beautiful and heightens the sense of form in a color photograph, to give it some of the essence of a black and white photograph. I have a strong affinity for this look. This is my first try, with two pairs of sharpen and blur effects, one for shadow and one for highlight, stacked this way: SH Zone Shadow, GB Zone Shadow and SH Zone Highlight, GB Zone Highlight. The result is a good first approximation to the effect I'm looking for. The sharpening is set to enhance local contrast and the blur layer above it smooths out any graininess and blends the tones together. The action I am trying to duplicate is Midnight Black available from Action Central . I have not downloaded or examined this action to reverse engineer it, because I wanted to see ...

During the summer, I bought an Olympus E-510 digital single lens reflex camera. The 510 is a FourThirds camera and because of the of shallow flange of the 4/3 lens mount it is one of the most flexible cameras on the market when it comes to mounting legacy optics (lenses from traditional film SLRs). A 4/3 camera can mount "legacy optics" or lenses from several other manufacturers made before the DSLR era. Although unintended, this makes FourThirds a revolutionary mount. For the first time not only can a photographer mount lenses from different manufacturers who produce lenses to the "open" FourThirds standard, with inexpensive Chinese-made adapters lenses from nearly any manufacturer from the golden age of SLRs can be mounted as well. Third party adapters can be found for Olympus OM, Nikon, Pentax, Zeiss and Contax. The only one missing from the party was Minolta. I purchased an inexpensive OM to 4/3 adapter from ebay and mounted several OM lenses, a 50mm f/1.8, 50m...

Andy Warhol could have expressed himself in any medium. He chose painting (or at least a medium that appeared on its surface to be painting), perhaps by accident or by design, but whether he chose painting for this reason or was merely successful because he chose correctly, we may not know, but at the time he worked painting was the one medium where an artist would be taken seriously, what they had to say about society would be taken seriously in the medium of painting. He could have expressed his prescient views on celebrity and mass media by carving little dolls or collages, but he chose painting, I believe because that is the medium society would take seriously and pay attention to. If he didn't understand that, he was ignorant of the art world and society from the mid-twentieth century to the end of the twentieth-century. Only now with the information age are new art forms emerging that make painting, novels, movies obsolete. A great artist does not care what medium they work i...

Looking at something old, I made--looking in the mirror, looking away. -sek, Aug 2007.

All the eggs in one basket-- running downhill. -sek, Aug 2007

There's something to this being psyched up for the fight, this false confidence contrary to reason has some ability like a catalyst to transform, to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. -sek

Clouds floating on leaves squirrel quietly eats. -sek, Aug 2007

Woke up to PC-- silk brushes against my face walking between trees. -sek, Aug 2007

A book gathers dust, an award for his father, an award for my father. -sek, Aug 2007

Eye to the peep hole a face back out of here now. -sek, Aug 2007

Antique rose, out of the Florida room- close encounter. -sek, Aug 2007

Voices raised, listening... voices raised, listening-- flickering light of television. -sek, Aug 2007

I've been reading Haiku Handbook, by Higginson, published in 1985. This is a truly wonderful book, which does much to dispel the nonsense taught about the nature of haiku in Western schools. It explains the purpose of haiku is the recording of experience in a way that makes it possible to recreate the experience when shared with others. I believe this is why I am attracted to haiku, since photography is a significant part of who I am, and imagery is central to both haiku and photography. I am particularly fascinated by the teaching of the haiku poet Basho, who once said a unity between poet and subject is necessary to haiku writing. When we say something like the Zen master can achieve oneness with with world around him, that the separation between objects and his self break down, as if he is "one with the universe" that there is no boundary between the objects and the self, this sounds like unscientific nonsense, it sounds crazy. It is either metaphysical or bullshit. Wh...

Still alone-- I write your name in the frost. -sek, Aug 2007

Night descends at the end of a walk home-- in a pool of light ascends dogwood blossoms. -sek, Aug 2007

A pear from the tree after lunch-- past the old sandbox. -sek, Aug 2007

Footfalls across the sand suddenly stop-- stranded jellyfish. -sek, Aug 2007

I have been strongly in favor of what I have called, for lack of a better term, "in situ preservation" of vernacular photographs. The idea for this slowly emerged out of my experiences with my own family photographs. There were several generations of photographers among the branches of our family tree, starting with my grandfather, my grandmother attended photographic school and worked in the darkroom at her husband's studio and had an early fascination with photography as a child, her favorite uncle was a photographer. Her father's mother's brother was a well known and successful 19th century photographer and stereoview publisher, whose three sons went on to become photographers. We inherited a wealth of photographic heritage and a vast treasure of old photographs. I grew up around photography as a child, not intensely as perhaps a child of a concert pianist might grow up around constant music and the grand piano in the living room, but absorbed this heritage by ...

It is generally believed that order is preferable to unplanned development. The first villages to emerge with agriculture developed without any plan or structure. In time, people would learn to plan towns on a grid of streets and this became the normal way to develop a town or city, along a rigid grid of streets. But we know better now, after observing the formation of towns for over two hundred years in America, according to city planners, that street plans which emerged organically from the seemingly haphazard choices of many individuals over many years, produce the most efficient street plans which help alleviate and avoid gridlock. If you look at an English countryside village, you can see how the streets and paths are laid out efficiently to follow the activities of actual people. The preexisting activities and their most efficient paths determine the layout of streets. This also interestingly creates a plan of homes and buildings that people find pleasing, or "picturesque....

Everybody wants to buy something on ebay-- war of the pennies. -sek, Aug 2007

White sheets on the line billow, graceful in the breeze-- Today is wash day. -sek, Jul 2007 Remembering my grandmother Tyrrell's backyard on a wash day.

The clock ticks away the time you spent winding it-- proportionately. -sek, July 2007 My grandmother wound the mantel clock each day.

Along the seashore they follow the coastal road-- Monarch butterflies. -sek, July 2007 Inspired by watching Monarchs follow the coastal highway along the Delaware seashore.

Beneath the white oak mist blankets the old tire swing-- children are sleeping. -sek, July 2007

Video cable with six golden connectors-- sits gathering dust -sek, July 2007

A nondescript tree still lives on the schoolyard fence-- where our class ate ice cream -sek, July 2007

A child plants a seed in a paper cup -- willful nature spirits leave. -sek, July 2007 Edited from-- A child plants a seed in a paper cup -- willful nature spirits gone. -sek, June 2007

Every time I change something here, it breaks something there. Working on code. -sek, June 2007

The things that you own are as cold as stones --a pebble found upon the beach. -sek, 2007 After a song lyric I have been working on for some time.

I wrote a haiku inspired by a photo by Ray Kinnane that I saw posted to dpreview forums. A simpleton's delight in fireflies flight --every child a true artist. I wanted to express the haughty intellectual's view that enjoying fireflies is like being fascinated by shiny objects and then turn the tables on them. To show if we looked at fireflies they way children do, we would understand the importance of looking, and the origins of true art. And as long as we are human, there is nothing wrong with being human, and that includes our arbitrary, fixed response, unconsidered feelings.

I received Bashō, The Narrow Road to Oku , yesterday (the 19th of May), a poetic and anecdotal chronicle of the celebrated poet's journey in 1689 to the northern end of the island of Honshū. The book itself is beautifully made of high quality materials, typical of a Japanese paperback. I sent for Bashō after enjoying his poetry while studying haiku and having read the jacket cover blurb by illustrator Miyato Masayuki online before ordering. I was captivated by the description of Bashō "drifting with the clouds and streams" and "lodging under trees and on hard rocks," in his long journey to Oku. I felt a sensation of deja vu wash over me as I read the blurb. I looked up to one of my drawings on the wall behind where I sit at my computer, which depicts a poplar leaf caught up in the flow of a stream and about to run aground on a rock. I had seen many a leaf in this predicament, turning and twirling with the current until it snagged upon a rock, in my explorations ...

I dragged my parents to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey for its original theatrical release. I was five years old and in love with the Apollo program. I had seen advertisements on television for the film and insisted I go. We saw the film at the old drive at Bailey's Crossroads right across from the airport (legend has it one pilot scraped his wheels on the screen making a landing) that has been gone for many years. I fell asleep halfway through, what I have always since called the most boring film ever made. I did wake up in time to see Hal get his comeuppance. It was years later before I began to understand the film's subtleties. My parents didn't get any of it. The film represented the epitome of realistic depiction of space and space travel within the solar system. The praise it won for special effects was justified and was in strong contrast to the usual science fiction fare in the cinema. As I grew up, I began in my teenage years to read science fiction. I fell in lov...

On March 11 2007, the audience of the AFI Silver in Silver Spring Maryland was treated to live music from a group of young musicians after the screening of the documentary film on Stephen Wade, Catching the Music . I attended as a member of the Folkstreams team (we had to sprint to the local Office Depot for a ethernet cable or the Folkstreams presentation would never have made it to the silver screen) and we enjoyed the music afterward very much, as did the audience. The musicians Stephen brought with him played wonderfully, each featured on their own and along with Stephen's magical banjo playing. My favorite was Liberty Dawne who sings and plays the fiddle. She has a CD available, which I purchased from her at the show and that you should give a listen to. A favorite of mine is Pass that Burley Down, a standout song of the set and one of two songs written by Liberty from an experience stripping tobacco. It is reminiscent of work songs and field hollers from African American mus...

I've been reading Elaine Lawless's book, God's Peculiar People , which arrived here in good condition today. She explains how Pentecostals are in daily contact with the paranormal. They keep one foot in the spirit world, to place it in context with the notions of pre-literate cultures. The "willfulness principle" was observed by Lawless operating in these communities that held strong beliefs in the power of "witches" to influence events. The willfulness principle was coined by Barber and Barber to explain the notion that in pre-literate cultures, natural effects have supernatural causes, principally the actions of willful spirits. It is worth noting that in Miyazaki's films (Spirited Away and My Friend Totoro notably) there exists the same close association between the natural world and the spirit world Lawless discovered in her observations of Pentecostals. His films express this notion of a spirit world parallel to and mirroring the natural world, ...

Although I am not a folklorist, through my work on the Follkstreams website, I have come to appreciate the study of folk culture and understand how expansive a field it represents. Folk culture is the culture people make for themselves and share with others. Web 2.0 is a folk culture, it even coined a phrase "folksonomy" to denote a system of categorization that replaces a vocabulary controlled by an authority or group of authorities with a vocabulary created ad hoc by the people involved in using the system of categorization. The media sharing sites like YouTube and MySpace and "mashup" systems like Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly enable a rich shared folk media culture to arise. Increasingly, as we head into the 21st century, it is a supreme irony that folklore is taking on greater importance as nearly everything is democratized and individualized, and is poised to become perhaps the most significant field of research in this century, after having for centuries r...

Subversive content in photographs. No, I do not mean politically subversive, but details in the image that subvert or comment on the image's subject. For example, you may be attempting a very serious image of an important landmark, let's say the Iwo Jima memorial in Arlington, Virginia, but in the foreground are parked a string of dump trucks or perhaps a string of circus vans. The presence of such contradictory details undermines the meaning and mood of the image. Of course, it can also be used by the photographer in a controlled manner to create commentary. Here is an excellent example where subversive content is used to enhance the image. The graffiti in the background becomes a compositional element leading the eye to the hugging couple frame right and the joyous dancing figure of the iPod advertisement directly behind them communicates what the photographer "mind reads" or imagines is their inner feelings. Hugs (San Francisco Streets 2007, godfrey digiorgi 2007...

I somehow doubt CSPAN is running an all day celebration of televangelist Gene Scott, but for some reason all afternoon CSPAN 2 has been showing Gene Scott video on the Real Video stream. I discovered this when I switched from tv to CSPAN 2 video to see the Book-TV Marvin Olaksy interview live. The Windows media strean is showing the Olasky interview. http://www.c-span.org/watch/cs_cspan2_rm.asp?Cat=TV&Code=CS2 What do you think?

Enthusiasm I saw through enthusiasm like a child sees through the easter bunny to the man walking down the street in a bunny suit I saw through enthusiasm too easily, and dismissing in melancholy realism the love I had, I threw the rare book in the trash it had begun to mold and grandfather had cut a pattern from the cover and no one was ever going to be interested in Craftsman homes again I saw through enthusiasm like a child realizes there is no santa claus bearing gifts, but a man in santa suit I saw through enthusiasm too easily, to be swept up in discovery, as if by the tide, to fall blindly in love with an idea who would come to use it who would not ridicule its simplicity, so I never made anything of it Now, I see through ghosts the past, lackluster years the cost of never falling in love enough to stop seeing through enthusiasm to stop being a con man conned into giving the envelope back to the old fool -sek, January 01, 2006

The Strike high above the earth the stoop begins wings pulled in response to sensing movement on the ground sensors sensing more accurate than human they zero in the prey high above the earth the dive begins dead prey walking the earth now, but soon to be fodder for the superior, the mover, the diver it zeroes the target falling, turning reaching inhuman speeds, moving with inhuman accuracy, seeing with inhuman eyes the inhuman flying machine readies for the strike closer to human ground, revealed the falcon strikes and in front of God's eyes the sparrow falls -sek, May 01, 2005. I wrote this after watching a small hawk or peregrine falcon perched on a tree swoop down after a small bird, whether it caught it I could not see, for the distance was too great by the time they both disappeared across the valley.

The Urchin's Progress One day, purple urchins covered the left side of a great rock jutting into the sea and the urchins remained there until they were pushed halfway back by olive urchins coming up on the right side of the rocks washed by the sea Next day, olive urchins fell back to one side pushed back by the purple ones as if they were never masters over the other and the struggle went on until the day when a great wave washed over the lesser rock and swept away the urchins, purple and olive Years later, visitors would come to the spot and say what a nice empty rock to sit upon, to contemplate the sea and never think once of the urchins purple or olive who once held sway over their domains. -sek (Steve E. Knoblock), Original work July 12, 2005, revised May 3, 2007. This is more of a story and prose poem than a metered poem.

I use compact fluorescent lamps and have on occasion needed to swap one out for an incandescent bulb. If you are worried about the CFL breaking during storage (we did not keep the original packing...a good idea to keep it if you intend to store them) a solution is to fit a styrofoam cup over spiral bulb to protect it from blows and enclose the whole thing in a sealed plastic bag in case it should break. mercury escaping from these lamps has been in the news lately, and it is a legitimate health concern, especially if the number of CFLs in use increase dramatically. Although the amount of mercury is less than in a large fluorescent tube, I would prefer to avoid a hot spot in my home or the mercury getting into the environment, which according to the California state government's Waste Prevention Information Exchange website document on Fluorescent Lamps and Tubes in the year 2000 contributed approximately 370 pounds of mercury to the environment in California "due to the breaka...

I've talked before about the need to accept the inconvenient existence of multiple of truths that exists in genealogy. Incomplete knowledge about the past is unavoidable. The past is gone and we are not getting back to put under a microscope. Even the present is difficult to pin down. We only know what we experience or someone tells us, which is pretty much what we know about the past, only through source material and what someone tells us. We are left frequently with only sketchy knowledge about family history. This leads to different families claiming the same individual, each with their own basket of evidence and story. I've learned to accept this as a reality and moreover, I've learned to accept this as being a Good Thing (or at least the best thing we can expect given the nature of reality). The net it turns out is very good at handling incomplete information as it rapidly emerges and changes from multiple authorities. The applications emerging ont he web are gradually...

The kind of social science work exemplified by Albion's Seed and the kind of work done by folklorists demonstrates the value of vernacular material, the potential usefulness of photographs of ordinary people and places. The scholarship of Albion is based upon two pillars, the first is social statistics and the second is anecdotal. The latter is used to confirm and explore the culture as it existed, such as Byrd's secret diary. The former is used to verify anecdotal and cultural evidence (from the diaries and art of the time). In the eighteenth century photography had yet to be invented. This means that now is the first time we are beginning to use photographic evidence, the documentary tradition, as scholars have used written documents, letters and journals. The photograph, and recorded visual imagery in general, which includes photography, video and any new technologies in the future, such as 3d visualization, present us with both a documentary record useful collectively to so...