talino.org

I finally got to designing a unified photo gallery which exists independently of the posts. Some photographs are taken from the posts, while others can only be found in the gallery.

In order to make the gallery as flexible and automated as possible, I got to writing a custom PHP function which finally developed into a Wordpress plugin called Simple Lightbox Slideshow or SLS. Like most of the images on this site, it relies heavily on Lightbox 2. The plugin automates slideshow creation by simply scanning for files inside a specified folder. It was written for use on this site but it is flexible enough to be included in any Wordpress installation. You can try it out on the plugin page.

Lately I’ve spent some time experimenting with HDR tonemapping using Photomatix Pro and Photoshop. I find that most examples you bump into on the web demonstrate the ability of tonemapping to create very striking and surreal images. But actual benefit of this technique, in my opinion, is that it allows a photographer to capture a scene exactly the way it looks in real life. Granted, it is very gratifying to use tonemapping’s dynamic range compression to manipulate light in a creative manner, with results like the photograph above. What seems like an infrared shot of a snow-covered park is actually a photograph taken on a sunny day which presented lots of variations between lights and darks. Different exposures were assembled into an HDR image which was subsequently tonemapped. The resulting 16-bit image then went through some funky monochrome channel mixing in Photoshop.

However, it is interesting to see what happens when you use tonemapping in a more discreet fashion. With everyday subjects and settings, it is possible to obtain images which otherwise could not have been captured but which do not present that “in your face” effect. For a low-resolution medium (such as a web page), you can get by with bracketing the exposure using fast continuous-shooting mode and keep the camera handheld. If people don’t move too much, the artifacts associated with HDR misalignment are reduced to a minimum. This results in ordinary-looking photographs which correspond a lot more to the scene as it was originally framed in the viewfinder. The following images illustrate the point.

The following photographs are some basic experiments I did with HDR tonemapping vs traditional masking techniques in Photoshop. The view from atop the Châteaux de Lastours, brightly lit, had obviously a very high dynamic range in terms of light energy. I have tried capturing it using two methods. The first one simply involved shooting two exposures, one for the highlights and another one for the shadows. They were then layered in Photoshop and masked with a simple linear gradient (similiar to what a gradient-density filter would have done had I had one in my bag). The second method consisted of shooting seven auto-bracketed exposures, 1 EV apart, combining them into an HDR image and then tone-mapping that in Photomatix. Since the composition is basically horizontal, the results were very similar. All images were shot RAW on a Nikon D200 and developed in Lightroom.

The following image is the result of layering two exposures in Photoshop:

This is the image resulting from tone-mapping a seven-exposure HDR file:

The main difference between the two is obviously the horizon, which has much more detail in the tonemapped image. Blowing out the horizon highlights in the layered version was a necessary compromise in order to avoid darkening the top of the tower too much. But apart from that both methods achieved similar outputs. Tonemapping would win hands-down, though, in a more complex composition.

On a final note, the same subject from a different viewpoint later in the day, using with a single exposure and no Photoshop editing. Just to point out that sometimes simplicity can also be a valid solution.

I never thought that getting a brand-new USB key to work could turn into a configuration nightmare, requiring trips to four separate utilities and two operating systems. This is what happened last week with the SanDisk Cruzer Micro 2GB USB Flash Drive. This USB key uses a SanDisk-developed technology called U3 (obnoxiously marketed with the slogan “It’s what’s next. It’s what’s smart.”) What this piece of code does is allow Windows XP users to launch applications directly from the USB key, therefore allowing them to "leave no personal data behind". Unfortunately, not only is this a Windows-enhanced technology, it is actually incompatible with Mac OS X. And getting this thing to work on Apple’s OS is an exercise in frustration. The whole idea of a USB key was to replace portable rewritable media like floppy disks, which were universal in their hardware implementation (regardless of OS-specific formatting and file-system). This was true for USB keys as well, at least until U3 arrived.

When you plug a U3-enabled USB key into your Mac, what you get is the (expected) disk image, accompanied by a second icon, a CD image, called "U3". If you’re like me, you buy this thing to quickly get a couple of portable gigabytes of storage, and the last thing you want to care about are "enhancements". It’s like buying a hard drive (or, if memory serves, a floppy disk): you just want to connect it and format it for the file system you’ll be using. But what happens after a quick formatting trip to the OS X Disk Utility is that you’re left with an unusable piece of plastic. No matter what you do, you’re stuck with a drive that won’t mount and, more annoyingly, can neither be erased nor partitioned. The USB key is now read-only. Plugging it into a Windows machine, downloading "uninstallers" from the SanDisk website, cursing the innovation-obsessed IT market, whatever you do, the key is dead. Even the Launchpad Remover, distributed on the U3 website, won’t be able to do anything with it. It’s important to note that this is not a SanDisk-only problem; it happens on several (maybe all) models of U3-enabled keys.

The outrageous part of all this is that while the packaging clearly claims Mac OS X compatibility, as you can see on the left, an angry trip to the SanDisk support website is all that’s needed in order to find out that the very same manufacturer actually states the opposite. This is an ancient way of making quick money: sell something which you acknowledge doesn’t do what you say it does. I wrote an email to SanDisk customer support about this glaring inconsistency between their own two statements. Their reply, which arrived surprisingly fast, suggests that they might rethink either the technology, the packaging or their marketing information in the future, which is a good thing:

The U3 part of your Cruzers are not supported on MACs, but the removable drive part will work and is supported on MAC computers. We would like to thank you for pointing this out to our attention. We have already forwarded this information to the proper personnel for review.

As of now, we cannot give you a definitive answer concerning the matters you have presented but rest assured that the personnel for this matter will greatly consider it for our product improvement.

And since I’d rather not wait for the SanDisk product improvement team to fix this, I searched the internet again, and again, and finally found a post on the Canadian ehMac forum. The author, Mark Rushton, had the exact same problem with the GXT Mobile Disk USB 2.0, and posted a quick and (almost) hassle-free solution. All you need is a Windows machine (I found one which had Parallels Desktop installed and it worked fine) and the Drive Key Boot Utility from HP (45mb download, no registration required). Just plug your dead USB key into a Windows XP machine (real or virtual), run the app, click through all the recommended options and let the software pulverize the drive’s U3 enhancements into oblivion. Don’t worry if it takes several minutes (with no progress bar) or if the program stops responding; just wait until it’s finished. Go back to the Mac OS Disk Utility and do whatever you want with your new, fully functional USB flash drive (which is what you wanted in the first place). Thanks Mark.

UPDATE: Apparently it’s possible to accomplish the above using Terminal without downloading anything, as suggested by Damien in a comment to this post. I haven’t tested it myself but it does seem to be a very simple solution. Thanks Damien.

Two shots taken during a recent trip to the south of France.

Friday night on the banks of the Seine. Many thanks to performers Isabelle and Guillaume for their permission to post these photographs.

I’m starting to add a few posts showing some of the work I did which involved shooting and special effects.

The following clip shows some of the visual effects I created for Marie-Pierre Jaury’s documentary on Wayne Shorter. The idea behind all this was to present Shorter as an infinitely-wise alien bringing love, music and originality to the planet Earth.

None of the effects shots were planned during shooting, so all compositing was done by hand in After Effects.

My favorite shot is the one that nobody notices when watching the film (which is unfortunately an indicator of a successful effect): the disappearing orchestra behind the bass player, John Patitucci. The idea here was to cut between two performances of the same composition (Over Shadow Hill Way), starting with a full-orchestra rendition and transitioning smoothly to the quartet-only performance. This was achieved by masking the foreground by hand, frame by frame (a couple of days’ work), and then carefully cutting to the close-up shot of Patitucci.

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For multiple reasons, I’ve always been opposed to people attaching historically-charged terms such as “Nazi” to Israeli policy. However, this little gem published on the very popular Israeli news portal ynet (which also maintains an English version) is so dramatic that it made me question the validity of my traditional arguments.

The item in question is one of those “opinion polls” that ynet — like other sites — publishes on a regular basis. Now, these usually aren’t what you might describe as left-leaning. I’ve often been shocked by the wordings chosen for some of them. This one, however, is an example of a state of mind which can very safely be described as exterminatory. Because of their web-based and random nature, these polls are obviously not representative of the true state of Israeli opinion, and the ynet staff dutifully mentions this in their results. However, the very fact that something like that gets published is no small cause for alarm, especially when it concerns a highly popular news portal which likes to present itself as a serious and unbiased source of information.

In connection with the recent takeover of the Gaza strip by the Islamic militants of Hamas, ynet asks its readers: “What should we do with Gaza?”. Here are the (only) three possible solutions:

1. Go into that nest of vipers for an unlimited time and clean it up.
2. Attack from the air with only a few pinpoint ground strikes.
3. What can we do? As long as they kill each other, everything’s for the best.

I can only assume that some subversive element in ynet is trying to see how far he or she can promote fascist thinking in the mainstream media without getting noticed. Very far indeed, it would seem. If it’s a serious poll — and it very well might be — then it’s also an interesting insight into the Israeli collective consciousness: we either burn everything around us with the help of an oversized military machine, or raise our powerless arms in the air with the hope of seeing the problem disappear by itself. It’s a depressing illustration of what Doron Rosenblum, the ingenious Israeli commentator and writer, once wrote about the Israeli soldiers in the first Palestinian Intifada: on foreign TV it looks like we’re beating teenagers with bludgeons, whereas in reality we’re being led like lambs to the slaughter.

By the way, last time I checked, the third option got 60 percent of the votes.

The assault of corporate copyright on the free circulation of information continues with the recent demand by the National Music Publisher’s Association to basically shut down Guitar Tabs, a site which offers free guitar tablatures of popular music. These tablatures are transcribed by passionate lovers and players of music, who listen time and time again to favorite licks and riffs in the hope of figuring out the magic performed by an inspiring guitarist. Peter Allen, the publisher of Guitar Tabs, has posted the letter sent to him by the NMPA which essentially treats as a criminal any teenager who patiently discovers the introduction to Stairway to Heaven and posts his or her interpretation of it on the Internet.

This is a short clip I shot of two people sitting in a street of Beijing and playing a game of Go (in China, the game is called Weiqi [pronounced, more or less, “way-chee”]). Although originally a Chinese game, Weiqi isn’t played very often by Chinese people (it has evolved into its current form after being introduced into Japan). The Chinese seem to prefer Mah-Jong or Chinese Chess and, whenever asked about Weiqi, they dismiss the game as being “much too complicated”. I had stopped hoping to see anyone play it until, a few days before leaving China, I came across two men sitting in the middle of Dong Si Shi Tiao street and negotiating the Endgame (Yose).

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In the Zhejiang province of China there was a mountain inhabited by faeries. One day, an uncautious carpenter, Wang Zhi, went up the mountain in search of wood. Coming over a group of people gathered round a Go board, he joined them to watch the game. Sitting down, Wang Zhi gently leaned his axe against a rock.

One of the company gave him a prune to eat. The moves made during the game were of unsurpassable beauty. Wang Zhi lost himself completely in it. Suddenly, one of the spectators turned to him and asked if he shouldn’t be thinking about getting home at some point.

Startled, he reached for his axe, but it crumbled to dust at the touch of his hand. Returning to the village, he came across a man he had never met. The man pointed to a statue and said: “This is a statue erected to the memory of Wang Zhi, who disappeared one hundred years ago.”

(The legend of Ranka mountain)

A few photographs of Beijing at night, mainly around the Forbidden City.

A short series of photographs from my recent trip to the Chinese capital.