American in Spain » Experiments

Father and Daughter Dancing

erik — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:40:18 +0000

Today I finally got around to attempting a bit of Photoshop trickery I’ve been wanting to try, creating a photo of me dancing with my two-year-old daughter where our sizes are adjusted, either me down to her height, or her up to mine. It turns out that this is very, very hard to do well. The principal difficulty is aligning the hands, in space and with the proper angles, so that they appear to touch. Of the five or so photos I took to work with, I chose the best two to merge together. The result is a photo where the viewer is never really fooled into thinking that the two people are actually interacting physically.

One thing it does highlight is just how different the proportions of adult and toddler bodies are. The enormous human brain (and cranium) grows quickly, and the body much more slowly. The result of my experiment is worth sharing, but, like I said, it’s not that convincing.

That’s a big girl!

I did, however, get a cute shot and anecdote from my experiment.

This is one of my attempts to capture her in dance pose, but my hand is covering her arm too much.

When I was folding up the tripod to put it away, Nora declared that she was “going to get her camera”, which turned out to be the toy phone from her playhouse. She set it up, leaning against the wall, “pressed a button” to set its imaginary camera timer, and then ran over to me to pose. “You have to be here, like this,” she’d instruct. When we were posed, I would click my tongue to simulate the shutter noise, and then she’d run over and “set up the camera” again. We did this about fifteen times. Do they make toy photography tripods? She already took her first photo with my iPhone last week.

Related Photos

My Eye

erik — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:29:32 +0000

Today I discovered a macro feature of my video camera lens that I had forgotten existed. The first thing I did was pick up a one dollar bill that I have on my desk for some reason and examine POTUS1′s face. Impressed, I decided I needed to record a video of something very close up. Not having an ant farm or a pet praying mantis, I decided the best subject for my first macro video should be my gorgeous greenish-yellow eyes. It took a couple attempts to figure out how to best, without too much effort, keep the camera and my head from moving around too much. I ended up sitting on the floor with the camera resting on my desk. Clearly, this level of intimacy required some creepy background music, so I found some.

If you’re really brave, you can try the 720p HD version.

Can you figure out which of my eyes this is?

Related Photos

Roomba Eye View

erik — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:42:30 +0000

Just over a year ago, in May of 2010, we bought Roomba. We had two recommendations from friends, so we splurged the 300€ and bought a robot to vacuum our floors. Initially it seemed pricy, but it’s some of the best 300€ we’ve ever spent. As my wife said to me soon after we bought it…

I think I like the Roomba. It doesn’t clean as well as I do, but it cleans about as well as you do.

I very quickly learned an important lesson of Roomba ownership: Do not watch it work! It will drive you mad. It will appear to drive right by every little speck that you want it to clean and if you want it to go to a certain part of the room, it will go to the other side. You just have to trust in its algorithms: if you let it run until it thinks it’s done, it will probably have gotten to every last corner of your house. The proper way to use the Roomba, of course, is to turn it on before you leave home. That way you aren’t tempted to watch it work, and it’s also as noisy as any vacuum cleaner. The hardest part about vacuum cleaning now is picking up all the toys that the Roomba can choke on.

For a while now I’ve been meaning to duct tape my video camera to the Roomba to see what kind of “Roomba eye view” video would result. I finally got around to doing it this week, and I must say that I was hoping the result would be more interesting. There’s a lot of stops and spins and very few long stretches as it bounces off all the furniture. The low angle view of our house is pretty neat, though.

It recorded fifty minutes of bouncing under chairs, the view from behind the toilet, and lots and lots of footage of our floor molding. I couldn’t watch more than about four minutes of it, so I cut it off at the five minute mark and uploaded it.

It was an experiment that I wanted to try, and I’m glad I did, but I don’t think I’ll do it again.

Related Photos

No related photos.

Wall Walking

erik — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 20:40:39 +0000

Every kid has done it and loved it. What could be better than walking on top of a wall, holding your parent’s hand, up at grownup eye level, carefully placing each step, enjoying the illusion of danger. Last Sunday, we took a stroll up to Colindres de Arriba, the picturesque village within a town just up a hill past the town hall. We spent about thirty minutes picking blackberries and then continued on to the medieval church. If I had been planning on it before we left, I’d have taken a better camera, but it occurred to me while we were up there that I could take a series of photographs and photoshop them together into a motion composite. I’m fairly pleased with the result.

Walking along the wall by the church.

Heading back home.

A quick clip of Nora walking on the wall, followed by some panning across the above photos.

Related Photos

Maneki Neko

erik — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 20:56:58 +0000

In general, I am very much against knickknacks, a.k.a. crap you have to clean the dust off every once in a while. So perhaps you can imagine my dismay when my daughter and mother-in-law bring home one of those horribly gaudy asian waving cat things. Apparently it had caught my daughter’s toddler eye (and why wouldn’t it?) in the local chinos shop, and her grandmother had bought it for her. “Mimi mimi mimi”, they said to each other mimicking the not-entirely-unlike-the-Nazi-salute gesture. I facepalmed and sighed.

At least one or two of these Mimis – as they are now called in my house – has shattered into ceramic feline oblivion on our floor after being dropped by my daughter. I must admit that it’s not all bad. She has learned a little bit about loss, and also about what batteries are for. And I learned a bit about how these cheap, cheap devices are constructed (the counter weight inside is scrap metal!). It’s amazing how little energy need be given to a pendulum to keep it going forever.

Curious as to what the heck this thing was invading my domestic domain, I did a little research. The stories are actually pretty interesting, albeit laden with post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacious reasoning that our species is so prone to. First of all the cat is called Maneki Neko, and my favorite of the stories goes like this:

A long time ago, during the Edo period (17th Century) of Japan, there was a poverty stricken priest, who was the keeper of a run down Temple in the Western part of Tokyo. The kind priest shared what little food he had with his pet cat and companion Tama, whom he cared for despite his poverty. Life was very difficult for the priest. The cold winds whistled through the Temple and chilled his old bones, rain poured in through the dilapidated roof, and he ached with hunger and exhaustion, yet he always remained dedicated to his duties, and grateful for what little he had.

On one particularly dreary day, the cold was cutting through his damp clothing like a million tiny knives. He went to make himself some tea, in hopes to warm himself, when he was crushed to see that he had no tea to make. His good nature turned to utter despair and sadness, and he slumped down in a corner and began to weep.

Concerned, his beloved companion Tama went toward the man to see if he could possibly comfort him. The priest exclaimed in frustration “Oh Tama! I am so very poor, and yet still I keep you! Could you not one day, do something for this Temple? Do something for me?”. His head fell into his hands and he wept quietly until he went to sleep.

Tama was puzzled, and decided to go to the outside of the temple for a while. He sat in front of the door and began cleaning himself, as cats do, licking his paws and rubbing them on his face.

Just then a very wealthy and powerful man was passing by the Temple as the gentle rain grew stronger and a violent thunder and lighting storm erupted. Large droplets of icy rain poured down and pelted him as he took refuge by a large tree. “This place will provide adequate shelter until the storm subsides” he thought. At that moment, he noticed a cat in the doorway of the old temple, cleaning his face with his paw, gesturing as though he were extending an invitation. This gesture puzzled him so, that he just had to have a closer look at this cat, who seemed to be beckoning him forth.

Cold and wet the man quickly approached the cat and entered the building. Moments later, the tree he had been using as shelter was struck by lightning and caught fire. The tree broke with a loud crash and flaming pieces of it’s shattered trunk fell precisely where the wealthy man had been standing.

The man was extremely grateful to the cat, for having saved his life. He was immediately compelled to find the owner of the cat and reward him. He entered the Temple, looking to find Tama‘s owner, and found he old priest, living in such deplorable conditions. He soon befriended the priest and showered him with gifts. The wealthy man used his influence to bring many wealthy people to the Temple, and it soon became very prosperous.

The cat had not only saved a life, but also relieved the priest of the burden of his poverty. When he died, the cat was honored by being buried in a special cemetery, and a statue was made in his likeness, reflecting the beckoning, raised paw that had brought so much good fortune and prosperity to his owner. As word of the events spread, people began placing figures of cats with raised paws in their homes, shops and temples, believing it would bring the same kind of prosperity into their own lives, that Tama had brought to the Priest.

Cool story, huh? Not entirely unlike our western oral stories than end in, “And that’s why we believe X!”

The other interesting thing about the Maneki Neko is that the gesture is a cultural difference between the East and the West. In the East, an arm movement like that of the cat, with palm down, is actually a beckoning “come hither” gesture, whereas in the West, that’s a “go thither” gesture. As a result, some Maneki Nekos manufactured for the West actually flip the paw around…which seems like a bad idea, as that makes it resemble another insulting western gesture, but the Chinese manufacturers probably don’t know that.

In the end, the damn thing is somewhat growing on me…at least to the point where I don’t actively want to throw it into the dumpster. We have it sitting on our bookcase next to my golf trophies. The other day it caught my eye, reflecting off of my pewter golf trophy mug, and it dawned on me that it would make a great cinemagraph subject, especially with the reflection.

May this animated gif bring you prosperity…or at least relief in the knowledge that your house is free of perpetual golden cat gestures.

Related Photos

Motion Composite Dives

erik — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 22:46:02 +0000

Recently, when I was with my family at a swimming pool, I had the opportunity to use the fast shutter rate of my DSLR camera to take some quick photographs of them. I took the photographs specifically with the intention of practicing a Photoshop technique called motion composition or motion multiplication. The idea is that you make a composite photograph of a subject that is in motion by combining various copies of the subject in different positions.

Enjoy!

Marga does a back flop.

Paul belly flops swan dives. This one is actually worth viewing a little bigger.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the results of my first attempt at this technique. I will have to keep my eyes out for other subjects apt for this process.

Related Photos

Wilting Strawberries

erik — Wed, 25 May 2011 07:01:37 +0000

Strawberry season is about to draw to a close in Spain. Although I’ve consumed several kilos this year, I’m sad to see them go. The thing that most annoys me about strawberries is how long they last after I buy them. In my experience, if I don’t eat them within 48 hours, they all turn to mush and they get all fluffy with mold. This is especially a problem since I normally can’t stop myself from buying a whole 2 kilogram box of them. So I decided to turn my frustration around and use the rapid growth of mold on my strawberries as the subject of a timelapse video.

Over the course of three straight days, I left a plate of strawberries under a lamp – for consistent lighting – in the corner of my office. Unfortunately, I can’t plug my Canon 40D into the wall, so I had to keep changing the battery, which is frustratingly inaccessible when the camera is mounted on my tripod. Therefore, I had to take the camera off the tripod twice a day to change the battery, which, no matter how careful I was, resulted in the tripod shifting slightly. Luckily, most of these jolts could be rectified by my mad Adobe After Effects skills in post production. The other inconvenience was that it took 20-30 minutes to download all the photos off my memory card (I need two memory cards like I have two batteries), resulting in a slight break in my pattern of “one shot every thirty seconds” timelapse scheme.

Nevertheless, I’m quite satisfied with the outcome. One unforeseen, but obvious in retrospect, consequence was that the lamp immediately dried out the strawberries, causing them to shrink, and also provided the mold with a less than fungi-friendly environment. Oh well. Perhaps next time I’ll try using a flash like I did with the larger fungi.

For full berry-rotting excitement, it can be viewed at 1080p on YouTube or Vimeo.

Related Photos

First Cinemagraph Attempt

erik — Wed, 11 May 2011 21:03:36 +0000

Just this year, as far as I’m aware, a new sort of digital photography art form has emerged, called cinemagraphy. It’s so new that there’s still no Wikipedia page for it! The general idea is that you create a photograph with some bit of it that is not exactly still. It’s published in the infamous “animated gif” format that plagued “world wide web” pages back in the 1990′s. The trick is to get the file size down below a megabyte so that it can be downloaded more or less as instantaneously as a regular jpeg photograph. As I have discovered, this is not easy.

I made my first attempts without reading any tutorials. I just figured out what had to be done and attempted it. I tried about six different subjects, and most of them came out terribly, terribly wrong, so I’m only going to share my best two. The trick is to record a video of something where only a small portion of the viewing area is moving, the movement has to be such that it returns to the exact original position after only a second or two, and it has to be something that can repeat over and over again somewhat believably. Some of my failed not-good-enough-to-share attempts included my hand tapping on a table, a lone car driving down the street, and several shots of my eyes. It turns out to be damn near impossible to keep your head perfectly still for five seconds. It’s totally unclear to me how people can manage to make cinemagraphs of a model’s hair blowing gently in the wind.

Okay, okay, if I’m to be perfectly honest, this was really my first attempt, which turned out to be very educational about how A) absolutely zero camera movement is allowed, B) the subject needs to be very, very simple, and C) the background can’t be moving at all.

This one is not perfect. My head moved quite noticeably in the original video. I made it by taking a still frame and cutting eye holes in it to show the video behind. It’s by far the best of my eye movement attempts, but you can still see a little movement of the area around the eyes.

I can’t think of an easier subject than a dripping faucet. Even at 720p HD, the gif is only 2.5 MB, so sized down for the blog is safely in the “under 500 KB” goal range. There are no artifacts from a moving subject or camera. I’m very happy with this attempt.

Like with most photography projects, I will now be doomed to run every event I see through a “would this be good for a cinemagraph?” filter.

Related Photos

No related photos.

Toy Animals

erik — Mon, 09 May 2011 14:32:12 +0000

For her second birthday, Nora received, from my Godfather and Godstepmother, an assortment of plastic animals. To me, these are way more interesting than dolls. The detail is absolutely exquisite. I applaud whoever designed the molds in China and the factory workers that painted them. I thought they would make an interesting subject for some practice at inanimate studio photography. I used my “tinkerbell lighting” technique of a long exposure and a moving LED point source of light.

There are a few more, including a kangaroo, but these were the only ones I could find at the time I decided to take these photos. The “studio” is two pieces of white paper, one on the table, and the leaning against a box.

Even-toed ungulates.

Mammoth.

Mommy and baby panda.

Red-eyed ewe.

Stallion with shoes.

And then I started to get a little creative. Most of my ideas were complete disasters, but I kind of liked this one.

Related Photos

No related photos.

Princess William and Prince Kate

erik — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 09:32:09 +0000

As much as I’ve been trying to avoid it, I’ve been unable to avoid seeing pictures of these two British faces around the news. There was something about this one photograph that struck me as being perfect for a Photoshop trick I’ve been wanting to try, called face switching. Sure, enough, their faces were angled just right such that it was really quite a trivial operation for someone with a rudimentary understanding of layer masks. If the royal wedding coverage gets too annoying, just imagine it’s this lovely couple instead.

I had to double check that I hadn’t pasted one jawbone over another because they look so identical, but I hadn’t. The shape of the jawbone on each belongs to the body.

Related Photos

No related photos.