Tilt and Shift #2 - DIY

Tilt and shift can be performed using a normal camera by buying a very expensive lens. Instead, us wallet challenged can add a lens baby in between your normal lens and camera giving you the angular and parallel movement a tilt and shift one does. Why spend £1000 on a tilt and shift lens when you can by a gallows device which does the same thing - just slightly crapper? But then again if quality isn't important, why spend £100 notes, money useful for buying other major products like drugs and whores, when you can build your own crapper version using card and a plunger. Thanks Dennison you showed us the light.

In part 3 - see some cool T&S Photography.

Tilt and Shift #1 - View cameras

Large format view cameras (see pic), those which look like there should be operated by a man underneath a blanket in a bow tie, are damn good at allowing you to control every aspect of your image. The fact that the lens and film planes move independently gives you better control of depth of field, focus and perspective. In addition course the larger film offers a huge resolution in comparison to any 35mm camera or digital equivalent. A couple of effects are relevant to the next post. By misaligning the lens position in relation to the film so that isn’t not on axis or parallel produces many favourable effects.

Shifting (moving the lens left or right to the film centre axis) and rising (up down) has the effect the convergence of parallel lines. Rising is important in architectural photography to eliminate the optical illusion that tall buildings are leaning backwards. It thus corrects

In normal cameras the distances between which everything is in sharp focus, known as the plane of sharp focus, is parallel to the film or digital sensor. Anything outside of the plane becomes increasingly out of focus as it gets further from the plane. The depth of field is a way to increase the size of the focal plane from a few inches to near infinity. Tilting (or swinging in the horizontal plane) adjusts the angle of the lens in comparison to the film, which by using the Scheimpflug principle, shifts the plane of sharp focus. This creates an asymmetric depth of field, which allows optimisation of the depth of field.

Part 2... DIY tilt and shift...

Daily Addictions - Sketch Swap

Some of the website best ideas are the most simplest. Navigate to Sketch Swap, draw a picture on the whiteboard and submit your drawing to be presented with someone else’s creation being drawn back at you. Some are abstract; some are a little odd; and some people are just plain too good.

The Paris Hilton zeitgeist

Backpackers often wax boring about how living in a country allows one to tune your mindset to the local one. Understanding the whims and fancies of the people and gaining understanding of the culture. For me the easiest way to do this is to scan Google’s statistics page which can tell you the most popular search terms by country, and by time. I don't have to polute the air by using a plane and I thankfully don't have to talk to foreigners. The most current international statistics (November 2005) give insight into what foreigners like. Many seem to like the same thing – Paris Hilton.

She comes fourth for the horny Aussies, who’s top 15 also includes Jessica Alba, Hilary Duff, and Michellle leslie (yes they predominantly typed three l’s – idiots). There must be something in the air down under, as she only drops a place to fifth for the Kiwi’s. Paris in Poland is also fifth, beating the indigenous blondie Suknie Ślubne by two places. She’s Germany’s highest search for an individual at sixth although one suspects that they’re actually searching for a Hotel in France. Dropping another place in Sweden she at least beats Britney. As the eighth highest search term here in the UK, beating our very own abortion of a celebrity Katie Price. In fact us Brits were more concerned with the Mayo Clinic Diet (our #1) - probably cause we are all fatties. Importantly though, France doesn’t give a fuck about Paris, and if you were to go there you would understand why.

Ugly People are Criminals!

We are all bigots. There are two things which are regularly used to discriminate which are not as fêted as racism or sexism, and yet are still a form of bigotry – those being prejudices of beauty and intelligence. People fail to obtain jobs because they are too stupid and sometimes too clever. Similarly we naturally discriminate against ugly people. Imagine a badly deformed man, hunched and pox-ridden, wearing warts like a kid wears pimples, who wouldn’t pass a judgement. Maybe we were caught of guard but a for split second our unconscious told us to back off. Furthermore its rare to see an ugly bar maid and rarer to see an ugly promotions girl.

The difficulty with bigotry against intelligence, compared with racism, is that intelligence is functional. It is a mark of our capacity to do cerebral work. In activities where more mind power is better than less mind power, surely discrimination can be justified. Beauty bigotry is harder to fully justify. We can understand why it happens, humans being a lascivious and somewhat aesthetic race, have a natural affinity towards beauty. We even have whole centres in the brain which are used to analyse and recognise faces. But here I give you a [quasi] scientific reason to hate them – uglies are more likely to commit a crimes!

Two economists from University of Colorado and Georgia State University tracked 15 000 high-school students in the US between 1994 and 2002. The studies asked them to rate their appearance and asked questions on crimes commited. The study found that cute guys were less likely to commit seven listed crimes involving burglary and drugs that their ugly peers. Similarly attractive girls were less likely to commit six of the seven crimes than there ugly peers.

The researchers, Naci Mocan (UoC) and Erdal Tekin (GSU), don’t know why this is so. But we can speculate that there are many sociological and psychological reasons. Since other studies have found ugly people less likely to succeed, less likely to be employed and have worse social skills. The labour market penalty may force those who are as ugly as a block of flats into crime. Similarly low-income households, which are more prone to producing criminals, can’t afford nice cloths, good nutrition and top styling, making them socially ugly (but not genetically ugly). Socio-psycho babble aside the study is rigorous, both scientifically and mathematically. Those used to reading scientific papers can view their manuscript in progress here (PDF document – 240 kB).

This study does reassure this author though. Having never committed any of the seven crimes, or even had a detention at school, I must be one of the handsome set.

And the Wall said let there be light...

The poor old boring walls of New York. Since January 1st, 2006, it is illegal for a person under the age of 21 to possess spray-paint or permanent markers in New York City for the purpose of creating graffiti. Sad for the good artists out there, spraying quirky characters and commentary. But it may stop the surplus crap phrases about war and tax, and the ubiquitous distortion of their own name in some idiot zigzagging font, adorned with so many arrows and stripes that looking at it becomes nauseous.

While the most mundane graffitist piously claims that their art reclaims public space, I can't uphold this argument for most of them. The same artist wouldn’t spontaneously sweep the street, or clean a park - reclaiming it for the populous. There’s just no thrill in seeing a big word in fluorescent letters, much like there would be no joy in listening to someone shout their name (and nothing more) in public. Go do something interesting and innovative. Like formulate a plan to attach hundreds of LEDs to a wall with some mates – social, legal and inpermanent. Check this video of just that, complete with its dulcet José Gonzales track. After that follow the link to see how to make your own LED throwies!
(Thx to Jon Will for this)

St. Valentine and Corinthians

Today, the day we should be reminded of Corinthians 13:4. Every wedding I attend has some smug fusty moralising this from a pulpit. So much so that it’s fast becoming imprinted into my already cluttered mind. But, for a book that’s a couple thousand years old it does get it right.

A few years ago I created a series of images made from fractured text. Often dealing with feelings using pithy clichés, contradiction and stunted asinine sentences, some witty and some blunt. I'm in the process of uploading them to the site. But to whet your palette here’s a one I did for valentine’s day. See it and down load it in hi-res by clicking.... here!

Lakoff, progressives, and framing arguments

In his book Don't Think of an Elephant, George Lakoff illustrates how the US conservatives have dominated every debate in US politics by framing the arguments they represent. Lakoff argues that by controlling the way arguments are perceived, the debate can be swayed your way. The language used evokes a frame of reference in your head. By saying to someone "Don't think of an Elephant!" the mind immediately invokes the elephant, the grey tough skin, the large ears and trunk. The word elephant is associated with that frame. But importantly, even if we negate that frame, we evoke the frame.

Lakoffs first example is a short and tangible one:

"Richard Nixon found that out the hard way. While under pressure to resign during the Watergate scandal, Nixon addressed the nation on TV. He stood before the nation and said, "I am not a crook." And everybody thought about him as a crook. This gives us a basic principle of framing, for when you are arguing against the other side: Do not use their language."

The book is interesting because it gives a plausible insight into how Republican think-tanks have controlled debate, by drawing Democratic politicians into their worldview. By forcing them to use Republican language, even when negating or giving their own version of a frame, the simple of the language frames and reinforces the Republican worldview. Most pertinently for a Brit, it sets out to explain why the majority of US can agree that the war in Iraq is to do with terrorism and worryingly 9/11, even though the justification to go to war was a fabrication and that the moderate Saddam Hussein and fundamental Bin Laden despise each other. Lakoff suggests that the language of Bush invoked language which framed ideas already in peoples head.

I’ll let you discover the numeral examples yourself, but my own example illustrates this context.

Contrast: “Iraq has no weapons of mass-destruction”
With: “Iraq is defenceless”

Mass-destruction and weapons invokes a different image to defenceless. Yet both say the same thing.

The book, although politically written, highlights why many people can support positions which are not in their interest or aren’t specifically true. The issue of framing is not only important in politics. In the recent Skeptic Dictionary newsletter, Prof Robert Carroll surveys area in which rational enquiry has been trapped into arguing within the wrong frame. This includes a personal favorite - Intelligent Design (framed by arguing the theory of evolution). Read the newsletter by clicking here.

New weebl and bob!

One of my favorite web animations is 100. Check out the 100th episode by clicking.... here.
Check the archive for the other episodes!