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...