Naquada

So its time for the long trip down to Cornwall to see Jeff McBride and Eugene Burger, I’m actually really excited about it as well as all the other things that are planned for the weekend.

Friday we’re heading off to Lands end and the Minack Theatre, before heading back to Falmouth to see ‘The Secret Art’, and should be able to meet up with Jeff and Eugene after the show (thanks Kernow !), Saturday I plan a little shopping at the Kernow Magic shop in Falmouth, and visiting the Eden Project, and on Sunday its Tintagel Castle on the way home. The Minack Theatre looks very good from the views from the WebCam, and the weather doesn’t look too bad so far…

This is actually really the first weekend away I’ve had for years.. every trip away has always been for business, rather than pleasure, this means that I can actually relax about what to pack, stuff the suits and ties, the shiny shoes and corporate rubbish, and just pack what I feel comfortable in.

I was reading Jeff McBrides Muse Letter the other day and he was talking about being very practical about what they take with them on tour, comment on how Eugene is the master of simplicity. The Zen aesthetic of simplicity in his magic and life, his magical scripts refined to just the essential words to fit the action, and his travel packing a science, travelling the world with just carry-on luggage.

I ordered one of Eugene’s favourite books “The Packing Book: Secrets of the Carry-on Traveler” by Judith Gilford since I always have wardrobe issues when going away..

Now where did that big suitcase go…!?!?

Spent the day today wondering along the Long Walk in Windsor Great Park, and as well as being some leg achingly good exercise, I took some more HDR photos.

Although very nice in colour, I wanted to see what they looked like in black and white. So after a bit of black and white channel manipulation in Photoshop, I’m quite pleased with the results. They seem to have a nice balanced exposure, and both photos are growing on me.

I also took some more panoramic shots from the top of the hill at the end of the Long Walk. They will need a bit of stitching together in the next few days, but the thought of how to do HDR panoramic shots did cross my mind. I guess I’d need to take a number of exposures for each part of the panorama, combine each set into a HDR image and then stitch them together, more work to do on DoubleTake and PhotoMatrix I guess.

I’m generally getting much happier at the photos I’m taking. Still not quite the photos I want to be taking, but getting closer with each set..

I’ve been playing with a number of different photo techniques recently, HDR is great fun, as are taking panoramas.

I found this fun little technique for doing pseudo ‘Tilt and Shift’, making aerial photos look a bit like miniature models, much like the old photos of model villages or train sets.

The method is really simple, and doesn’t actually need a real tilt and shift lens (which would probably set you back a fair amount of cash). I’ve used a Lensebaby to get some nice ‘off beat’ type photos, and I think the baby could do the same effect as this, but I haven’t tried yet.

The tilt-shift fake here was done in Photoshop, and there’s some quite nice photos in the Tilt-shift miniature fakes flickr pool. The trick really is getting the right lighting and angle on the photo to get a convincing end result, that doesnt end up just looking like some weird Photoshop mishap.

Christopher Phin has a great tutorial that does a good job of heading you on the right track to get some nice shots. I’ll be playing with some more, and the lensbaby in the next few weeks..

Way, way, way back when I was younger (and living at home) I got myself subscribed to the invite only online magic email digest Electronic Grymoire (or EG). I used to use it so much to understand what else was happening in the minds of other magicians, what they were playing with, and was an amazing sounding board for bouncing ideas off.

A few weeks back I reinstated my subscription and have started to get the EG again on a daily basis in my inbox. Its still as rich as it ever was for ideas and as a boiling pot of ideas and thoughts on magic. I looked back through the archives and discovered a lot of long forgotten posts I made during the time I was on the list.

I’ve also dug out some really nice old effects I was playing with almost 8 years back, and its time to dust them off and complete the effects I think… Having now had a break from doing what I would call ‘intense’ magic practise for almost 7 or 8 years, I’ve decided that I’m really going to get back into it again. Its a wonderful pastime, and just one of the many many things I’ve promised I’ll do this year.

.. now I wonder if I have enough packs of cards ??

So I took a quick shopping trip into Reading on Saturday and came back with a few new iPod accessories. Apart from the the AV cable (so I can run video in the bedroom), I saw that Alan had got himself an iPod Radio Remote.

I’d toyed with the idea for a little while, since the occasional trip into the IBM Southbank office would be slightly nicer being able to still listen to the radio. So I decided to pick one up.

It’s a pretty nice little unit, and I’ve missed having the iPod remote with the video iPod (they changed the connectors from the old iPods). It plugs into the dock connector on the bottom of the iPod, and brings up some additional items on the iPod’s menu.

Generally I’ve pretty impressed, although you seem to have to use headphones plugged into the remote itself to pick up a decent radio signal, since they become part of the aerial. The interface is OK, its not stunning, but does the job (I’m hoping they will do a bit of work on this in future upgrades to the firmware).

So far the only downside, and I’ve not tested this extensively yet, is that I don’t seem to be able to pick up RDS information. Although the remote should pick up RDS information (so I should see the radio station name and song information) I don’t get any information when I’m sat at home. Even when I tune the iPod to the same frequency that I get using RDS at home, there’s no station info.. Slightly annoying.. but I’ll be able to give this a decent test on Tuesday when I head into Southbank..

I was sent this today, and its just so true, the clean, no-nonsense design of Apple Products verses the bloated, full on, we’ve got more widgets, gizmos and doofers than anyone else Microsoft design philosophy.

As you might know, I love Apple stuff.. Its simple.. I know how it works without wading through masses and masses of manuals and reference materials. I can turn it on, or plug it in, or insert the CD, and it just works.

Its intuitive, doesn’t pretend to be something its not, does exactly what it says on the tin. Apple don’t need to put masses of bullet points on the box to describe what the iPod (or whatever it happens to be) does.

In fact, unless you look really closely at the underside of the iPod box at the ‘what’s included’, the only words you’ll find on the iPod packaging is iPod and 60GB 15,000 songs PC + Mac.

The point is with Apple is that they actually care about the packaging, an Apple PowerBook comes in this really quite beautiful sleek black box with small elegant typeface and gorgeous subtle graphics and a strange and obvious attention to detail.

Lifting the gorgeous black box, allows you to lift the white cardboard inside flap, itself adorned with clean offset typeface declaring it’s Designed by Apple in California. Inside is what could quite possibly be the most thoughtfully designed and pleasing packaging you’re ever likely to see.

Am I quite perverse and geeky for thinking this stuff is actually quite sexy?!?! As I can relate to what Askpang says, since I’ve done this with my (numerous) iPods;

“When I got my iPod, I hesistated for a moment to open it up and take it out, because the packaging was so elegant. Then I just ripped into it like a Labrador going at a wounded bag of kibble.”

..the packaging is almost as exciting as the content!!

I posted the other week about High Dynamic Range Photos or HDR Photos. After a few test shoots out at Dinton Pastures last week, I headed off to Virgina Water with my camera.

Its a pretty simple task to set up to capture the images for HDR processing. You need to set up your camera for AEB or Auto Exposure Bracketing. I normally set up the continuous shoot as well so the camera takes three consecutive exposures. You need to set the bracketing for the camera at about 2, so it will take a -2, a 0 and a +2 exposure compensation.

Ideally you want to try and take the photos with a tripod, but so far I’ve managed to take pretty much all of the photos with bright lighting and a steady hand. This will give you three photos (one normal, one under exposed, and one over exposed), you can actually use as many exposures as you like. With a steady scene and a tripod you could take five exposures in a compensation step of 1. Basically what you’re looking for is a good range of exposure of the scene your interested in.

You then need to put these images into software that will combine these images, I brought PhotoMatrix on MacOS (although its available on Windows as well), at $99 its fairly expensive, but, personally I’m finding it great for the price. You can then create a HDR image from these images, which will give you the high dynamic range image, which is saveable as a HDR format (or Tiff floating point).

To get something useable, you’ll need to tone map the image down to something that can be saved into jpeg format. Really in the tone mapping you can play with your artistic side. The default value for ‘Colour Saturation’ sits at about 42%. I normally bump this up slightly to about 60%-62%, which gives a bit more of a vivid and rich colour.

You’ll see from the images I’ve started to put up onto flickr that they look quite surreal. I absolutely love this technique for photos, its so simple to take, but the images really are amazing.

I have about another 50 shots that I’ve still yet to convert into HDR, and I think that will be the time when I really play with the tone mapping controls, just really to see what effects I can get.

There are some amazing shots coming out of the Flickr HDR pool, and people seem to like my first attempts..

So look what turned up in the post this morning..

Call me sad, call me geeky, call me strange, but five bricks of US Playing Card Company Bicycle 808 Rider Back Playing cards (All blue!).

Each brick having 12 decks in them, making a grand total of 60 packs of playing cards (or over 3000 individual cards).

There is some reasoning behind my madness, which to be honest I can’t really see myself at this point, but I’m sure I will at some point!!

I’m not so much looking forward to opening every single pack this evening, but hey I have wine, curry and excellent company…

So what is it I’m actually doing with just over 8 kilograms of cards.. suggestions…

Some feat of memory?

Secret plan to annoy my local postman?

Who knows…!!

But as long as nobody does work it out.. I’ll be fine!!

‘There are two types of magicians, professional and amateur.

Amateur magicians wear suede cardigans and enthusiastic smiles.

They aren’t violent, but they might stop you in an alley and borrow your wristwatch.

Professional Magicians are the ones that can hold sensible conversations whilst pulling ping pong balls from their mouths’