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    • Archive for July, 2011

    A fresh photographic epoch: new equipment and the goals of these acquisitions.


    2011 - 07.27

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    Posted in gadgets, musings, photography, technology | Comments Off on A fresh photographic epoch: new equipment and the goals of these acquisitions.

    I have been waiting for today.

    Today a new camera came in the mail!: a very lightly used Canon t2i DSLR I snagged on eBay. Dude.

    I’ve been dreaming of a video DSLR with extended ISO range for years now. Today it’s HERE. That is so &^%!@*# exciting.

    I’m going to be able to make movies now. Sexy, beautiful HD movies that have blurry backgrounds and sharp detail. This is a major technological advance for my artistic tools. The nerd in me is so ready to rock every dial and button on this puppy! We’ll see if the artist in me is capable of crafting something of beauty with it… afterall, that’s what matters. I see a Vimeo membership in my near future.

    This camera also comes with a battery grip that will accept either AA’s or two of the normal canon camera batteries. Hopefully this should spell ample battery life for doing all-night timelapse photography. That’s like a whole extra layer of cake on top of the icing of the previous cake layer which is the t2i video capability.

    So, what do I aim to do with all this hardware?

    Well step one; I’m taking a trip back home to Wisconsin in Mid August. The objectives:
    1. get some sweet video of my favorite places to visit while I’m there: Devil’s Lake, Parfree’s Glen, Durwood’s Glen, the Baraboo hills, etc.
    2. capture video on the boat outings I’ll be doing with my buddies Bill and Rob. Maybe including a music/dance video of the funk mixset due for release on Bill’s boat, in conjunction with the new wide angle Tamron lens
    3. take all night time lapse photography of the sky in Caledonia where I hope to capture the Milky Way moving over the sky, also in conjunction with the new lens.

    Those are the initial ones I can think of. I’m sure lots of little ancillary bits will occur along the way.

    Long term, I want to make some ‘shorts’–little mini-movies that are digestable 10-15 minute affairs, maybe with the goal of shooting enough footage that I could combine it into something feature length. That’s a tall order, and will probably take me a very long time to actualize.

    Anyway, the tools are here, and I am thoroughly excited to dig in and start playing!

    In the pic below I thought it’d be cool to show the evolution of my camera setup.  The Elan IIe at far left was my first SLR and my last film camera, I bought it at the end of high school.  It’s got a 28-105mm walkaround with some great filters, and a Canon 100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 came soon after.  A95 was my first digital, shown here with a fisheye attachment that rocks my socks.  The Rebel XTi was my first DSLR and I got it with the wonderful 17-85mm, my first setup with Image Stabilization.  Next came the Tamron 10-24mm, a bondafide superwide, with 16-38mm equivalence in full frame size.  And finally, today, the Rebel T2i, my first video DSLR, shown here with the 50mm f/1.8, possibly my favorite lens out of them all ;)

    So excited to work with this new capability!

    Primo Vino Art: Snoqualmie. aka ‘combine all the things!’


    2011 - 07.18

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    Posted in Eatin', photography, Primo Vino Art, Trains | Comments Off on Primo Vino Art: Snoqualmie. aka ‘combine all the things!’

    As I mentioned in the last one of these posts, I’m way behind on posting the artwork for cool bottles of wine.  So much so that I’ve got three bottles here that I’ve picked up over the course of the last couple months all from the same vintner, waiting to be drank.  Let’s knock them all out at once, shall we?  The following picture is going to demand a lot of explanation:

    So there’s the three bottles of wine, with some train-themed artwork.  Some background: Snoqualmie pass is a passage through the Cascade Mountains in the the state of Washington, which the Milwaukee Road (my favorite railroad) had an electrified line running through, here pictured in the 1950s.  The large image in the background is a lithograph print of a painting called “Bipolars Over Snoqualmie” by Larry Fisher.  This is also my first attempt at making mattes to frame a print!  I think it turned out pretty solid.  If you view it up close, there are a few imperfections, but seen from afar, I think my work is just a reasonable facimile of the work done at the ultra-overpriced frame-makers.

    Speaking of viewing up close, this photo is included at 100% original size, unlike most others on here.  You may want to use CTRL and + or – to zoom the web-browser in and out to make it easier to view.

    In setting up the shot, I tossed in an assortment of stuff I like: my trumpet, a couple old rolls of film, a spare loudspeaker that I’ve got lying around, a book about stars that I found while rummaging through the closet today, the number Pi, and my piano along the bottom!  There’s a balsa wood trestle I scratchbuilt in the background holding models of the same two train locomotives as in the painting.  A goal of mine is to eventually recreate the scene shown in the painting as part of an HO scale model railroad.  That’s gonna take years.

    There’s also a big white arcs in the glass which are present because I “light painted” a 5 second exposure (f/8 @ ISo100 on the Canon 50mm).  The path I traced with a small desk lamp is also visible in the tops of the wine bottles themselves, along with the dark outline of where the photographer stood, just to the left of the arcs.

    The last thing of interest besides the wine is the Tamron lens, a new acquisition for me, which I’m super friggin stoked about!  It’s a 10-24mm, which translates to 16mm-38mm in traditional 35mm (film) parlance.  SUPERwide!  It’s going to be way cool to have access to those mega-wide angle shots now, oh yeah!  I remember many-a-situation in which I wished I could back up more, but just couldn’t.  This lens will be incredible for landscapes, indoors, and close-quarters shots.

    Ok, but back to the wine!  I believe it is actually made in the Snoqualmie region of Washington state.  Tonight I opened up the Cabernet and I’m pleased to report that it’s actually quite good!  Nothing to totally freak out over, but a very solid cabernet.  Hmmm.  If that Whistle Stop Red is decent, I could see myself drinking a lot of it.  I wholly approve of the label. Lastly, there’s three close shots of the wine labels for those who might read the vino posts as a series.  Here they are:

    Old schoolin! – The NAD 6130 Cassette Deck


    2011 - 07.17

    Tags: , , , , , ,
    Posted in amusement, gadgets, Loudspeakers, Music, technology | 2 Comments »

    So a few months back I bought a turntable and now I’ve technologically regressed even deeper–Cassette tapes!

    Okay, okay, there’s an explanation for this. I’ve been really digging on the finds I’ve been picking up in the local $0.97 record bins (seriously, 97 cents!) and accordingly looking for a way to share them with some fellow funk and soul addict friends of mine. My buddy Bill has recently acquired a boat. I’ll be heading back home to Wisconsin for a week in mid-August and we’re gonna go out for a day on the lake. I asked him, what kind of musical playback formats does your nautical stereo accept? The answer – cassette tapes, dogg.

    Jeez, cassette, wow. I’m not sure I remember the last time I used a cassette tape, or recorded one. I think it’s been since like junior high. Well over a decade, whatever it was. So I needed to dig up a cassette recording device to bring along some hot jams I excavated from dusty 1970s vinyl obscurity. Enter craigslist! Some dude was unloading this NAD 6130 tape recorder which belonged to his father-in-law who recently passed on. Like a lot of good transactions on CL, the vibe I got from him was pretty much, ‘whatever man, I don’t care what this is, just get it out of here’. That’s the attitude I’m looking for! Twenty bucks, yeah that sounds cool.


    Kind of a funny thing about reading up on the Dolby NRs; I learned that there are a lot of variations in cassette tape technology! There’s Dolby A and B types of noise reduction, and then there’s Dolby C, which actually sounds WORSE if you play it back on a deck that doesn’t support Dolby C. There’s different types of cassettes too, metal ones, ferric oxide ones, Type II, etc. Whoa. This is all way more complicated than I expected. Fortunately, thanks to it’s utter obsolecence, I was able to pick up a Cadillac of a cassette recorder that should handle all of the above for dirt cheap!  Yay antiquated technology!  Check out the green reel to reel style cassette loaded in :D

    You ate what?


    2011 - 07.15

    Tags: , ,
    Posted in amusement, Eatin' | 2 Comments »

    Proudly presenting, for the berry connoisseur who has tried them all: tayberries.

    Wait, what?

    Yes, that’s right,

    They’re very similar to raspberries, with a few subtle but important differences:

    -they’re not hollow inside.

    -the shape is a bit longer and skinnier

    -the flavor is similar to a raspberry, but more tart or sour maybe (but not in a bad way), and also a bit stronger.  Their taste is a bit more potent, although not dramatically so.

    For comparison, here is a bunch of raspberries (left) next to the tayberries (right).

    Basically it’s like a raspberry variant, which still has the seeds that get stuck in your teeth, but a bit more of an exotic twist in the taste.  I’d never once seen these in the grocery store before this weekend, and I will say that if I ever see them again, there’s a 100% chance that I’ll be buying more.  I loves me some berries, and these are a treat!  Interestingly, if you let the berries ripen in the fridge for a few days, they turn even darker and the flavor gets less piquant, also changing character a bit, with a hint of what tastes like grape in the over-ripe berry.  Wierd!

    And awesome!

    Vinyl review: Goldfrapp ~ “Ride A White Horse”


    2011 - 07.10

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    Posted in Album Reviews, Music | Comments Off on Vinyl review: Goldfrapp ~ “Ride A White Horse”


    Direct from Greece comes this awesome 12 inch with only 2 songs on it.  I believe this record is out of print, although I don’t think it’s really what you’d call rare.  The Greeks had the lowest price on this single that I could find, so I took the plunge.  Good move… although I knew this in advance!

    Side A is really the main attraction here, and it bears a title as gigantically long as the track itself: Goldfrapp – Ride A White Horse (Ewan Pearson’s Disco Odyssey Parts 1 + 2).  Ewan’s remix of the Goldfrapp tune is worthy of the ‘Odyssey’ in it’s title, as well as the divider into two halves.  The affair begins with a simple 4 on the floor accompanied by hits from a stiff square wave-synth that forecasts the direction we’re headed.  There’s a smattering of sounds throughout the mix that have an 8-bit/lo-fi videogame bent, however the combination with the Goldfrapp vocals and some dance-oriented drums keep the tune club-friendly.

    What makes this such a standout track is what happens halfway through: the mix has appeared run its course, having already used the full palette of vocal samples and drawing things down, WAY down to a simplistic beat that would seem to indicate a conclusion is at hand.  But that’s not what happens.  The energy simmers on it’s lowest setting for a good stretch of time, and slowly, parts of the track that dropped out long ago begin to return, some with a different rhythm, and a limited number of new but similar sounds begin tracing out a very slight shift in direction.

    It IS subtly different, yet it’s enough the same that you feel like we’ve unlocked some secret bonus stage of the original track.  Indeed to carry the videogame metaphor, the second half of the mix has that same triumphant feeling of almost meeting your end–narrowly avoiding death–and then returning from the brink to explode your high score and squash lots of bad guys!  Indeed at about 13 minutes when the vocal samples come back in, it feels like fireworks should be going off in the sky.  The second half never quite climbs to the same heights that the first half does, but

    What makes this track so hot is that it embodies what a lot of long-winded electronica is supposed to be all about: taking you on a massive journey that feels like a celebration, with highs and lows which stretch to uninhibited lengths.  A ton of stuff out there attempts this, but it’s rarely achieved convincingly or authoritively.  For that reason, Ewan’s Odyssey’s been something of an instant classic for me; it’s a remix with a quality original vocal, and he uses that vocal in some creative ways, letting Goldfrapp’s high notes stretch out long and wide.  There’s a ton of neat, bubbling synth sounds complete with warble-y basslines, cascading laser sounds falling from above, and buzzy punches festooned throughout.  The percusion is lively with good use of clave and tom samples, and the beat is a club dancebeat, although it’s not really your stereotypical “uun-tss uun-tss” typa beat.

    The B-side to this record was a nice surprise.  It’s a François K remix of another Goldfrapp track called “Disco Whores (FK Dub)”.  Being a big Grand Theft Auto fan, his name was recognizable to me from his DJ work on the “Electro-choc” radio station in GTA IV.  I’m sure someone  out there will laugh at that comment, seeing Mr. K’s giant legacy in the early days of House.  Anyhow, the track itself is sort of a creepy St. Germain thing almost.  A slowed down house beat with a long, grinding riff on the vox from the original.  Nice.  (but this was just a bonus cut for me)

    Some unedited, stream of consciousness thoughts on the final space shuttle launch


    2011 - 07.08

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    Posted in cosmology, musings | Comments Off on Some unedited, stream of consciousness thoughts on the final space shuttle launch

    Watching NASA TV in the moments before the space shuttle launch, a brief video of the orbiter Atlantis rattles off a few facts: it’s travelled 115 million miles, was the first shuttle to dock with a space station, and first shuttle to launch a probe to another planet.

    I wish I were there.

    Although the camera views I’ll get from the online video will probably show the action closer than I’d see with the naked eye, there is definitely a lot to be said for ‘being there’ and feeling the energy of a crowd of people united to witness history.

    NASA TV has sort of a PBS/C-SPAN feeling where they will have an announcer list off a few factoids, then cut to a feed of the tower chatter, with long periods of silence. I like this better than having a constant stream of opinions and banter. It lets you think and reflect on your own thoughts.

    They’re showing a closeup of the engines with some kind of white clouds billowing off them as they await launch. It kinda reminds me of a steam engine. Some engineers used to say they preferred steam engines over diesel because they ‘felt alive’ with the rising and falling of pressures, the need to monitor it and adjust, instead of just setting a level and kicking back.

    I like watching the birds fly around the swamps as NASA gets ready.

    Although they don’t show them, there are fighter jets in the air protecting the launch. That’s pretty sweet. If you google search, you’ll find photos of this. I’m a fairly devoted dove, but this is one use of “defense” funds I approve of.

    After this, it’ll be up to the Russians to keep the International Space Station running. I sure hope they’re up to the challenge.

    I can’t believe this is the LAST one. It just doesn’t seem real. They’ve been launching the space shuttle my whole life.

    Astronauts get their go-ahead and reply (among other awesome words): “let’s light this fire one more time and witness this nation at it’s best”. It elicits feelings of deep admiration, wistfulness… huge pride, despair.

    They keep saying “godspeed.” I wonder how many of these people are actually theists?

    The camera shows a shot of the boarding walkway pivoting away from the shuttle “ATLANTIS” in big letters moving past the doorway, then a view of the coast, so far away. It’s almost eerie to think that walkway will never be used again.

    Shots of the crowd, a guy kneeling with a compact camera in a shirt completely covered with an American flag. Something about him with that shirt and his tiny camera is moving. How many pictures will be snapped today? T-minus 5 minutes.

    “firing chain is armed” BOOM–off it goes! And just like that they’re up in space! It all happens so fast. Less than 2 minutes later they’re 35 miles high. In the SRB camera, I love seeing the shadow of the smoke trail creep along the tops of the clouds as they escape the atmosphere. Go Rocketdyne.

    7 minutes in, “travelling more than 15,000 miles per hour” hooooo! They separate the main fuel tank “for the final time”. As huge as it is, that tank will completely disintigrate when it falls back into the atmosphere. Jeez.

    NASA TV shows a view of the crowd watching the launch. With +10 minutes on the big clock, everyone is packing up the tripods and the giant lenses. Maybe a million people showed up to watch the incredible spectacle which lasted (for those on the ground) maybe a minute or two. It speaks to the significance of this.

    Dudes in the control room shaking hands and slapping high fives. That’s right fellas. One hundred and thirty five flights. The footage speaks for itself. The hubble telescope, the space station, the dreams of innumerable schoolkids. Velcro, computers, advanced telecommunications, avionics, the best and brightest minds uniting our highest technologies for our largest achievements. Where do we go from here? Who will do the ‘big things’… now that NASA watches from the shores of the cosmic ocean, without a ship. Without a plan for another ship.

    Bon Voyage, American Exceptionalism! We had a great run!

    Primo Vino Art: Seven Daughters


    2011 - 07.06

    Tags: , ,
    Posted in Eatin', photography, Primo Vino Art | 2 Comments »

    It’s a very simple design, but I have admired the looks of this bottle on the grocery store shelf for long enough.  Incidentally, I am way behind in posting pictures for this series, so expect a lot of wine bottles in the near future!