anyTopic.net

Official Google Blog: Dynamic Views: seven new ways to share your blog with the world

2011-09-27T15:52:00.000-07:00

Congratulations Antin and the rest of the Blogger team! This is absolutely amazing.

Official Google Blog: Dynamic Views: seven new ways to share your blog with the world

Brave, cocky, risky, or lazy?

2011-06-12T06:24:00.000-07:00

How many photos should you take during a photo shoot?

Cropped

During the week I received a phone call from the workshop I trust with my Supra. They're planning on taking out an ad in a prominent car magazine, and needed a photo of one of their cars ASAP.

I arrived on Saturday at lunch time, and briefly spoke to them about their requirements:

Would it be full page?
Landscape or portrait?
Does it need to be cropped loose to allow room for text and other information (cover-shot style)?
What style did they have in mind? Bright and modern or dark and moody? Something else?

I found out it would be one image used as part of a bigger composition with other photos, so the layout and cropping wasn't too important. What they did want was something aggressive - and something "that looks good!".

Lens. With the brief in mind I spent about 10 minutes looking at the car. First without the camera, then with - trying out a few different lenses to see what I liked. Usually wide-angle is the way to go for aggression, but it's a fine line between an aggressive stance and a comical fish-eye distortion. I settled on 40mm (full frame). Decision 1 done.

Angle. Now I had to decide what angle to shoot the car from. This car looks great from all angles, it's very neat and tidy. The back looks good, but the lines are far too smooth and clean for the aggressive look I was after. The sides have decals with the workshop name in huge lettering - fantastic for an ad I thought, but being a four door sedan it was just a bit too boring looking. The front it is then - the perfect mix of angled styling, grill, lights, and carbon-fibre to create that aggressive stance. Decision 2 done.

Location. As it stood, the car was parked in the driveway of the workshop. A hedge on one side, shop front on the other, and a dumpster in the background. It was all a bit busy and distracting from what I wanted. I had in my mind an urban-industrial setting, maybe a factory.... but on a Saturday at lunch time the options were likely limited. Besides, we were already in an industrial district, so surely I could use what was there. I looked around, and across the road I spotted a tight little spot that looked ideal, with just enough detail to set the scene without distracting from the car. Decision 3 done.

Lighting. Being midday the sun was harsh. It's the middle of winter here, so at least it's down a bit in the sky, but still harsh. Aggressive, to me, immediately says the background should be a stop underexposed - so out come the speedlights. My go-to set-up for cars is a light on either side, one on the off-side front for definition, one at the visible wheel for bling. The off-side light is into a white umbrella to spread it and remove the hot-spot, and the wheel-light is bare for some specular sparkle off the wheel. Being midday, full power is the way to go. Decision 4 done.

Now it was just time to put it into practice. The car is positioned. Lights are set up. 17-40mm lens is on. I guess at the settings (200ISO, f/8 - this should be a good enough compromise between the sun and the speedlights).

-Click-

The photo is actually fairly close to what I'm after, with a couple of small issues. The off-side light is slightly overpowering, so I drop it down to 1/2 power. The wheel-light is aimed anywhere but the wheel, so I adjust it. The sun's too bright. I'm already at 1/200 (sync speed on my 5DmkII) so I can't up the shutter-speed, and already one of my speedlights is at full power so I can't reduce the ISO or aperture. I was starting to think about bracketing for HDR and then fixing it in post, when the sun went behind a cloud...

-Click-

Much better. The balance between the three light sources (sun, off-side, wheel-side) is now just what I wanted. I like the look of the photo... I started planning what to shoot next, when I had a thought... why?

Why shoot more photos? I'm fairly confident I have a photo that suits the requirements, so what good are another 20 like it? If it was for a magazine feature, of course they'd need plenty of photos. But for this ad they only need one photo.... I rotated the camera to portrait and took the same photo again, for layout flexibility.

And then I packed up my lights, packed up my tripod, and packed up my camera.

On the way home I'll admit I started stressing a little. I'd turned up to a shoot and taken one photo before packing up and going home. If they didn't like it, at best I'd have to come out and shoot it again, but worst case they'd never even give me the chance.

One photo is either brave, cocky, risky, or lazy.

Perhaps it's all at once.

The photo.

Fwd: Dad's track bike...

2011-05-13T23:21:00.000-07:00

My Dad just finished painting his track bike, which is the last part of repairing it after his high-side a year ago (video here, or slow-motion). I thought I'd show you what it looks like now, and what it looked like before...

This is it just before he crashed at Wakefield - it's what the bike looked like when he bought it.

This was during.... It smashed all the right side bits (brake lever, rear-set, clip-on, and smashed the side fairing, tank, nose-cone, windscreen, and duck-tail). He repaired it all himself, including all the fibre-glassing and painting.

Stripping it down after the crash (new tank already fitted, some fibre-glassing and filling done on the duck-tail, and many of the bolt-on replacements fitted)...

And this is what it looks like now!

I think he's done a really amazing job. Not just of the repairs, but also in designing and painting the fantastic livery - to me it's a stylish combination of modern aggression and classic racy colours, and the design fits with the lines of the bike very well.

The reborn bike gets it's début today actually. Dad's at Eastern Creek Raceway right now!

Un bon dîner pour un shérif

2011-05-12T05:49:00.000-07:00

Those who know Tegan, know she rarely cooks. Well that's not true... she is an expert truffleer once a year at Christmas, and she constructs a sandwich that would make Gustave Eiffel proud. That said, in the 8 years that we've now been good friends, I don't recall her ever cooking me dinner. She's certainly assisted others from time to time (there was a macarooni cheese meal 7 years ago that I won't soon be trying again), but I've never actually had her cook me a meal.

Last night that changed! For a while now, she has been telling me about a secret recipe; A combination of ingredients so ingenious and so delightful that the mere thought of such a feast tastes good. And so it was that last night I was treated to perhaps the best meal of my life (sorry Mum!)..... I shan't dare give out Tegan's secret recipe, but I will share a photo or two....

Delicious!

Google Backgrounds

2011-05-06T18:13:00.000-07:00

I decided today to try out an often ridiculed feature, Google backgrounds. If you haven't seen it, and I wouldn't be surprised if you haven't, Google.com has a feature that allows you to set a custom background image. I can only assume Google felt a (brief) pang of fear after the Bing launch and was desperate to ensure Bing didn't out-feature them... apparently their solution was to copy the most pointless and ridiculous feature of Bing.... But hey, that's ok, because Bing copies Google sometimes too.

Anyway, I happen to enjoy eye-candy, so I thought I'd give it a go. For my initial test I thought I'd try these two photos from my most recent shoot. In the future I might be ultra-lame and go with a photo of my car or something :)

Google Sydney

2011-04-24T17:47:00.000-07:00

I've spent the weekend in Sydney, and while here Antin took me past Google to show me his new desk. Google Sydney is growing, and they've taken over another floor within their building to cater for this growth. They just finished the fit-out, and Antin's moved in to the new area.

Here are some (iPhone) photos of his workspace...

This is the view from Antin's desk

The view out the window near Antin's desk

These small meeting areas are a fantastic idea

There's speed, and then there's Google Speed

What a fantastic space to work in

Somewhere to sit - it overlooks the harbour

One of the many picturesque meeting spaces

It's a tough life for Googlers

Creative meeting room names

Yo Dawg, I heard you like...

Helvetica makes any name look official

One of the cubby work spaces

A 'micro' kitchen... larger than most office's kitchens

Engineer fuel

Studio Sessions (Part 1)

2011-04-23T19:08:00.000-07:00

I recently bought a fair amount of studio lighting gear - well, a fair amount by my standards, but not much at all by other's!

Having recently started experimenting with some more structured and lit photos, Tegan and I decided to test out my new lights with a big photo session. In the end we spent 13 hours taking photos (minus a few breaks). To be honest at first I was slightly dejected, failing to construct setups that I was entirely happy with, but after much experimentation I was really happy with the results in the end (the subject of a future blog post).

Tegan, who normally sports lovely curly/wavy hair, decided to straighten it for the occasion. It would seem that after ironing her hair, ironing her dress was an afterthought...

Tegan irons her dress... the lazy way.

This would also be the first real time using my new seamless-paper backgrounds. Unfortunately the only 'studio' space I have is on carpet, which would lead to creases in the paper, so I had to construct a temporary hard-floor out of MDF. Two sheets of 9mm MDF, 2400mm x 1200mm gave me a 2.4m x 2.4m workspace, giving Tegan plenty of room to move around and try different poses.

My makeshift hard-floor.

Tegan did a fantastic job of her own makeup, after her Mum spent the morning straightening her hair.

Tegan prepares her makeup.

Throughout the day we shot on both white and black backgrounds. This was the setup for the black background. That's a 2.7m x 11m roll of seamless for the background and floor, with a square of black perspex to add clear reflections. Also visible is a black screen I hung over a white wall to control unwanted spill (the downside of a cramped space!). The light is a gridded Paul C Buff Einstein, and just visible on the left side is a white reflector card. The main light, an Einstein into a 22" white beauty dish, is not visible on the right side of the frame. The gridded light in the background served a dual purpose; principally as a rim/hair light to separate Tegan from the black background, but it also bounced off the reflector onto the shadowed side of Tegan's face to act as fill. In this way I was able to use my 2 lights more like a 3 light setup.

Part two will follow with more setup and some results....

Easter Thursday

2011-04-21T18:34:00.000-07:00

Today at work we had an Easter afternoon tea, mainly as an opportunity to catch up before everyone disappears for their Easter break. The Social Club did a fantastic job of setting everything up, providing food and drinks, as well as staging an Easter Egg hunt around the office!

It was a wonderful way to end the (short) week, and a few alcoholic beverages was enough to convince me to have an early mark rather than risk a CUI (Coding Under the Influence) related mistake.

The Race

2011-04-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

The race is on. I have a huge photoshoot planned for this Friday, and last week I ordered some lighting gear that I need. Currently the tracking info tells me it's en-route, travelling road freight, on a truck somewhere between Brisbane and Canberra (some 1300km).
With the Easter Weekend approaching and tomorrow being the last postal day, I'm starting to get concerned that it may not arrive in time...

Buckwheat Pancakes

2011-04-17T16:05:00.000-07:00

This morning I was woken by a pleasant surprise... I was startled by my phone ringing at 9:30 - it was Tegan, saying that her Mum was cooking buckwheat pancakes and I should come around!

You don't need to invite me twice; 5 minutes later I was on my way.

I'm not sure if they're technically any healthier for you than regular pancakes, but they sure tasted good! Served with natural youhgurt, berries, and maple syrup; they were a delight to eat!

What a wonderful way to spend a lazy morning...

Lost Photos

2011-04-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

Well, my backup server is complete and running, but that didn't save me from losing photos today...
Last night Tegan and I did a few test photos for a new technique I'm interested in. Today I reinstalled Windows, and had difficulty getting my camera to connect to the new install, so I elected to download the photos using a card reader instead.
Unfortunately for me I moved the photos off the card instead of copying the photos. For unimportant reasons I deleted the photos from the computer assuming they were still on the card...

Now, I could probably retrieve them using some recovery software, but they weren't anything spectacular, just some lighting and prop tests so I won't bother. The important lesson is to never assume anything when it comes to valuable data, and make sure you have a rock-solid workflow which includes immediately backing up photos upon import, and stick with it!

Grunge

2011-04-12T17:58:00.000-07:00

It's been over four months since Tegan and I last did a photoshoot, so we decided it was about time we do one! We decided to do things a little differently from what we've done in the past, and approach it more seriously than usual. What I mean is that usually our photos are more or less spur of the moment affairs, and we just start doing something and see where it ends up. This time we came up with a concept, planed out the location, lighting, outfit, and even to a degree the poses, and we had a very clear idea of what we wanted to achieve.

The design brief was to take 'grungy' photos. They should be contrasty, dark, set at night. The location should be a bit dirty and have plenty of texture, maybe an industrial setting or a street alley. Tegan should have plenty of attitude.

We started preparing the night before, by shopping for jeggings (leggings that have a denim print to look like tight jeans) and singlets (at this stage we were undecided about white or black). Later we got together to test out some lighting ideas.
The following are three photos, taken at the beginning, middle, and end of our test session, that show the progress in lighting - the changes are a little subtle, but you can see that the first idea was for a strong single light from above, then I moved more towards a even smooth lighting, and by the end of the test we'd moved back slightly towards a stronger and more contrasty light, but with an important difference....

The first lighting setup was a softbox from directly above. I was actually happy enough with the direction this was taking, but realised that, thanks to the inverse-square rule, the light dropoff between her head and feet would be far too extreme in anything other than a sitting position.
The middle setup kept the softbox, but moved it to the side and balanced it with a bare flash on the opposite side - I wasn't happy at all with this look - it just didn't have the edgy feel we were going for.
The final setup saw the softbox swapped out for a 7" reflector to give an 'almost bare flash' harshness to the light, and kept the 2nd flash for fill.

It was this last setup that gave me the idea for the lighting you see in the final photos. I thought the fill was still too bright and reducing the contrast too much, but I also didn't like the harshness of the 7" reflector on it's own. The 'ah-ha!' moment came when I realised that in the on-location setting Tegan would be standing next to a wall, and we couldn't use a fill flash on the wall side anyway..... but, the wall would act as a giant reflector of sorts. This would allow me to go back to the smoothness of a softbox, and by using a single main light we'd get back the contrast we needed. Later on I added a 2nd bare flash from slightly behind to give a bit more kick to the edges.

So the final lighting setup was as follows:

A speedlight into an 80cm x 120cm softbox as the main light, using whatever came back from the wall as fill. This light would be side-on to Tegan with regards to the camera, so there would be a fairly strong contrast between the lit-side and the unlit-side, however the size of the softbox would soften the edges a little and give plenty of spill-back from the wall to fill in the deepness of the shadows a bit.
A 2nd speedlight on the floor (for want of a lightstand) from the same side as the main light, but behind Tegan, to create a strong edge-glow to add some attitude and separation from the dark background
I also added a 3rd speedlight in a similar position to the 2nd (edge) light, but aimed away from Tegan and the camera (so pointing towards the background). This was turned down until the light it added blended with the edge of the light from the softbox, to 'stretch' the falloff out along the wall (without it it looked like Tegan was in a tight spotlight (as in the next photo).

With the location and lighting dialed in we were really happy to be seeing results that matched what we'd planned for, so the final step was to get the outfit ready.... Tegan had thought of ripping the singlet to really give it that grungy look. So We had a lot of fun with a box-knife cutting and tearing at the singlet to get it just right!

Finally a special request for Tegan - a closeup of her new shoes!

Not in my job description.

2011-04-12T01:12:00.000-07:00

One of the advantages of working for somewhere like the ATSB is that I often have interesting little side projects come up which help to break up the sometimes-monotonous job of computer programming. We're a very small organisation with a very diverse set of skills and experiences amongst our staff (the sum of knowledge and skills in this place always amazes me - we have engineers, pilots, mariners, mechanics, and even a clergyman). Because of this it's quite common for someone to be asked to help out with something outside of their usual role.

Today was just such a day for me. We're trialing a product called m-View from Momentum Technologies. It allows you to stream and live video across the 3G network from multiple devices such as mobile phones, laptops, or dedicated video cameras. We're interested in using it to allow our on-site investigators to better communicate with our base of operations back in Canberra.

Tomorrow Sydney Airport is running a 'Major Incident' training exercise, and we're using that as an opportunity to test our response readiness for such an event. We're also going to use it as a test for m-View to see how well it works and how it fits in with our work flow. Momentum has sent us one of their standalone cameras, a fully 360° remote-controllable camera system. It unpacks from a suitcase and runs a small computer and 3G modem from a 12V SLA battery. Unfortunately we were faced with two issues... firstly we had no way to mount the camera, and even worse the camera did not seem to work at all when running on battery power.

Some of the techs here got to work Frankensteining a projector ceiling-mount and tripod into a platform, and Angelo and I set about sorting out the power issue. Finally my ½ an Electronics Engineering degree was put to use.... turns out it was a dead battery, so Angelo and I spent the afternoon out looking for a suitable replacement, and then back at the office I wired it all up again ready to go. We finished at about 4:30pm, just in time for the team to pack the gear in our van ready for the trip to Sydney.

Google Fireworks

2011-04-07T05:37:00.000-07:00

Tegan and I travelled up to Sydney to visit my brother for New Year's. Thanks to Antin's work, we had the pleasure of watching the fireworks from the roof of the Google offices in Pyrmont.

My storage solution

2011-04-07T00:14:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in my previous post that I had somewhere around 4TB of data I wanted to protect.
The aproximate breakdown of my current data is as follows:

300GB of critically important data (Photos - irreplaceable) - Growing by around 60GB+ per year
150GB of moderately important data (documents and music - a big hassle to replace it it was lost) - Largely static
200GB of low importance files (processed photos and photoshop files) - Growing by around 20GB per year
3TB of very low importance media (TV shows and Movies) - Growing by around 1.5TB per year.

Currently the only data I have backed up is what I consider my critically important data (photos). My current backup procedure is to download photos from the camera to the computer but not wipe them from the media card. I then use Microsoft SyncToy to mirror my photos folder onto an external drive, which is only ever powered on or connected to the computer during this process (in case a power surge were to damage both devices at the same time). At this point I have the photos on two disks, so I can safely wipe the media cards. A few times a year I will create a third mirror of the photos which I store at an off-site location. I never ever have all copies of my photos on the same premises at the same time, so I'll fill a new hard disk with photos to drop off at the off-site location before I bring home the old hard drive.

I consider this system to be very safe against overall data loss, but the process is far too manual and involved, and the backups are often up to a few months out of date. I tend to make a special effort to do a backup immediately following any major photoshoot, but it's still not ideal.

The new UNRAID system will allow me to have my photos immediately backed up with redundancy. It still won't replace the need for separate off-site backups of crucial data, but it will mean that my data will be backed up at least to some degree at all times. It will also allow me to backup my less-critical data, which until now has been cost prohibitive.

The initial configuration I'm using will have the following drives (re-purposed from my current workstation and media centre)

3 x 2TB Western Digital Green drives (data)
2 x 1.5TB Western Digital Green drives (data)
1 x 2TB Western Digital Green drive (parity)
1 x 500GB Samsung Spinpoint drive (cache)

This will provide me with around 9TB of storage space, which should see me through for the foreseeable future (current usage plus 3 years of expected growth). UNRAID makes it easy to add extra drives or upgrade drives in the future, and with the current price of a 2TB drive around the $95 mark (and getting cheaper), it's very cheap to expand the space should I need it.

Becoming more serious...

2011-04-06T22:47:00.000-07:00

After many years of thinking about it, I've finally decided to build a proper file backup and storage solution. By my estimates I currently have around 4TB of data, of which only a very small amount is backed up, and at the moment that is a manual process that I only do around once per month. My uneasy concern over a potential hard disk failure has finally reached the point that I feel obligated to take action.

The main reason I haven't taken this step earlier is I haven't been able to decide on a solution that fits my specific requirements. I need something that is relatively cheap, robust enough to survive at least one hard disk failure, and simple enough to not be dependant on specific disk controllers or other hardware.

RAID5 (striping with parity) appears the obvious choice, however that is primarily designed for uptime, not data protection. RAID5 is great for ensuring a disk failure doesn't take your server off-line, but it's highly venerable to a controller failure, and if you're unlucky enough to have multiple disk failures you will loose 100% of all data. In my mind, that is a risk too big to bear.

RAID1 (mirroring) is simply too inefficient for the volume of data I need to store, consuming twice the disk space as it provides storage space.

Finally I found a product that suits my needs perfectly - UNRAID. UNRAID is similar to RAID5 without striping. It essentially stores data on the disks as usual, but adds a parity drive on top of that. This provides protection against a single disk failure, but also if there're multiple drive failures the data on the remaining drives is still safe, minimising the data loss. It is also a purely software based solution, eliminating the risk of a hardware controller failure. The fact that the data is stored in a standard format on the drives is very attractive because it means even if you have a system failure and cannot restore the OS, you can read each drive in any other computer.

The downside of UNRAID compared to RAID5 is reduced performance, but for my requirements as a backup and media server this is not a concern.

Once I am up and running with UNRAID I'll blog about my thoughts and impressions. In the mean time, more information about UNRAID can be found here.

The specifications of my server will be the subject of a future blog post.

Happy Birthday James!

2011-04-02T23:13:00.000-07:00

Today Antin and I caught the ferry to Mike and Shannon's to celebrate James' 1st birthday. It was a magical day, with great company, fantastic food, and mostly perfect weather.

Happy Birthday James!

Ryan's new bike

2011-04-02T06:20:00.000-07:00

Beauty and the Bass

2011-04-02T06:11:00.000-07:00

Eye

2011-03-31T20:57:00.000-07:00

This is a still and short video taken as a test for a new project I'm working on.
As usual it was shot with my trusty Canon 5DmkII, this time using the Canon 100mm f/2.8L Macro. I haven't used this lens much, but I can tell I'm going to love it!
For the video the camera was mounted on my slider dolly, with the focus set to minimum distance (1:1 reproduction). I started with the camera positioned so that Tegan's eye was totally out of focus, and then slowly slid the camera forwards to bring her eye into focus, while instructing her to blink, open her eyes, etc. It took as a few attempts for us to get it right, but I love the result.

Camera: Canon 5D mark II
Lens: Canon 100mm f/2.8L Macro
Settings: f/2.8, 1/100, 400iso
Lighting: Fluorescent continuous light into 80cm x 120cm softbox, direct on
Dolly: DIY igus based rail

Fire

2011-03-06T23:21:00.000-08:00

A really quick photo taken at Bill's BBQ. Dave was playing with a weed-burner, getting it to flare up into flames.

By upping the shutter speed until just the flames were exposed, the background disappeared into blackness. I then layered three photos together to create this image.

Camera: Canon 5D mark II
Lens: Canon 50mm f/1.4
Shutter: 1s/2000
Aperture: f/4
ISO: 800

Self Portrait

2011-02-05T18:19:00.000-08:00

Trying out a new style, inspired slightly by Martin Schoeller's portraits.
The lighting setup was a single 80cm x 120cm softbox, with the centre covered by a strip of black cardboard -essentially creating two 120cm tall strip-lights (look for the catch-lights in my eyes). A single 580exII flash provided the photons.

Camera: Canon 5D mark II
Lens: Canon 24-70 f/2.8L @ 24mm

DC Shoes

2011-01-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

A mock 'Product' shot I did of my collection of DC shoes.

This is more or less as it was in the camera, which I'm really happy about. The shoes are sitting on a sheet of black perspex, with a large (2m) octobox as the background. The foreground was lit with a bare flash.

Camera: Canon 5D mark II
Lens: Canon 100mm f/2.8L Macro

DC Shoes

Dyson

2011-01-09T16:01:00.000-08:00

Dyson

I bought a new vacuum cleaner, and thought I'd take some quick product shots before getting it dirty!

Strobist Info:
The lighting setup is super simple - just a single flash into my biggest softbox (2m octa) behind the vacuum, aimed straight at the camera, black cardboard to cover the part of the softbox that's visible in the frame, and a black sheet of perspex underneath for the reflection. Any light on the front surfaces is spill reflecting off the walls.

Christmas 2010

2010-12-25T22:03:00.000-08:00

Some photos from Christmas. The day started with breakfast at Tegan's, followed by a big lunch with my family. Such a great way to spend a day :)