I'd never heard of tilt-shift lenses until Cabel showed me the bit that showed up on boingboing Friday. A tilt-shift lens lets you move the lens elements off-axis for various purposes, the same effect you'd get by moving or tilting the film or CCD. This tilting lets you change the focusing distance across the film plane: to focus both near and far objects, you'd normally need a long depth of field and thus a narrow aperture, but a tilt-shift lens lets you keep the aperture wide open (so you can shoot with less light) and have the focusing distance long at the top of the frame and short at the bottom. Or, as in these photos, you can defocus everything but the middle of the image for an artificial depth of field effect at a long distance.

What's really surprising to me is that people have enough fluency with photographic images that they recognize that a short depth of field implies a short distance without even knowing why—or even knowing what depth of field is. We have an intuitive sense of the mechanics of photography just by being exposed to these images all our lives. If tilt-shift lenses were as common as they apparently used to be, we wouldn't have this reaction, and these images would just look blurry, not tiny.

To try to figure out what the cues are that make these pictures look small to us, I played with faking one up in Photoshop. It's easy enough to blur things out from a center line with the blur tool, but I found that that isn't quite enough: long perspectives give it away, so you have to crop out the horizon, and more. The tighter, the better. The Bittergirls images above work so well because there's almost no perspective at all—it's all parallel lines. I think the shift function of the lens helps there, as far as I understand how that works. It has to be from a high angle, for obvious reasons. Finally, the irony is that the bigger the object is, the smaller it looks. Because we judge the distance at thousands of feet, we know the image should have a uniform focus—if part of it's out of focus, it all must be. Since it isn't, the only way we can resolve the contradiction is to believe that the city is a tiny model. This all happens subconsciously and involuntarily. Even after we know that it's not a model, we can't stop seeing it that way.

This is the last set I've Aperturized, taken at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center south of Austin last March, mostly flower macros:

In the spirit of ridiculous food challenges, I've decided to build up my tolerance for spicy food. I think it's possible. When I was a kid, I was a total spice wuss, and now I can eat like a real man. Maybe that's just the senses dulling with age, but the last few times I've ordered the "hot" wings at the neighborhood wings joint I barely noticed the spice. (Of course, when I took a step up and got extra hot they made me cry.) The goal is to down a five star dish at PeemKaew Thai by July 1st. I knocked it up to four on Tuesday and it was only a little past my comfort level—plenty of snot, but no tears. So my training for this challenge consists only of putting as much hot sauce as I can stand on everything I eat. Can one develop a resistance to capsaicin? Or does it only happen as a child—if you're not born in India you'll never be able to eat real Indian food?

And if I can do the five stars at PK, can I beat El Jefe at the wings joint?

Another old set I dug up, from the Japanese Gardens in November of '04.

I'm burning out a bit on the black and white. The last half dozen or so rolls I've shot don't seem to have many keepers, or I just haven't spent enough time with them to find ones I like. That's not too surprising, I guess—the first roll I shot was my first 12 (or maybe 11, I think I lost one trying to figure out the film advance knob) 6x6 images ever, so every one was fascinating to me. Now I've got somewhere around 30 rolls developed, over 350 images, and each new roll is a proportionally smaller addition to the set. I'm on the verge of developing, filing, ignoring, exactly what I did with the digital photos that made me want to jump back to film.

So, for some variety and a bit of color, I went back and sorted through some old digital sets that I never bothered to before. Not only a break from film, but it was a good excuse to try out Aperture. It's certainly slick and very handy, but definitely not something I'd drop $500 on—especially since they crippled it so it won't run on my 1.6GHz G5 machine, even though it runs on a 1.25GHz G4 Powerbook. Thanks a lot, guys. Seems like the only reason they'd do that is just to spite me for having a machine they don't sell any more. Anyway, here's an image from the set that's also a link to that set!



In other news, there is no news. Had my first Mandarin Chinese class last night, and it was a lot of fun. It's been 10 years since I've been in a classroom, but my favorite part is still where I know something and everyone else doesn't. (Thanks Pimsleur! And thanks, Unison!) Turns out I can renew my passport by mail because, even though it's expired, it's not yet 15 years old. Next I need to find a doctor to immunize me against China. Also, buy plane tickets. Working on new project at work again, which is fun. Old project runs both on the intel mac and under 10.2, which is totally unexpected and baffling and smacks of divine (or unholy) intervention—but, hey, it works! Ship it!

Not one, but TWO humorous images on news.google.com that don't seem to have anything to do with their stories.



I'm surprised this doesn't happen more, actually. Google's image picker does a really good job of finding the right images for stories, considering the amount of junk that it has to sort through.

(Also, yes, this is the very first appearance of color on this weblog. I'll try to keep it under control.)

So yeah, I bought ANOTHER printer, this one just for doing black and white prints. No, I don't have a problem. I can stop at any time, swear. Just as soon as I get a continuous feed system for it, then I'm done. Really.

But here, look at this—here's a closeup on a black and white print with the fancy $400 printer:



Pretty chunky, eh? This new printer was $50 on eBay, and the ink set ran another $60. It uses three different shades of black to smooth out that awful dithering, making it very nearly indistinguishable from a silver print:



Now I need to take more pictures worth printing.

Here's a couple from SF that probably aren't, so I'll put them here instead:

It only took a couple hours to copy the old posts in and fix up the template, and now I've got RSS and comments. Woo!

Most of Panic got back from MacWorld last night; Cabel and Steve stayed behind to man the nanobooth for the rest of the week. Despite the lack of thrilling "just one more thing" announcements, it was a great show. Attendance seems to be up considerably from last year, there were some booths selling things other than iPod accessories, and, as a telling indicator about the direction of the (Mac-centric) economy: booth babes are back.

This was also the first year I got myself to be interested in products and talk to people—mind, most of that was checking out possible competiton to (and features for) future Panic apps, but it was still much easier for me than it's ever been before. In previous years I've been too cynical to have any interest in the show. This year, I caught myself using that cynical brain only once or twice. Thinking about the DSM description of Social Anxiety Disorder, it just doesn't seem to apply any more. Therapy has definitely helped, but more than anything else just remembering to enjoy myself, whatever I'm doing.

Here I'll interrupt the feel-good psycho-babble with a couple photos from my cool new (circa 1937) folding camera:


 


At MacWorld a few people complained that I don't have an RSS feed here. Okay, I'll try out iWeb, and if that doesn't do what I want, move to Blogger. But still, no one actually reads this. Also, Buzz pointed out the obvious solution to my distaste for the work "blog": just call it a weblog, already!

A final, random thought: how much of the grit that comes out of electric shavers is stubble, and how much is skin?

The original purpose of this here web journal was to force me to write something at least once a week, that I could go head to head with my writer's block. The only way I can do this is by believing that nobody will read what I write. At the same time, I have to put the URL in my email signature and various other places because there's no reason to spend all this time writing all this unless someone can read it, right? That contradiction finally came together at Christmas when my sister got me a daily Sudoku calendar—I said, "that's funny, I just started doing Sudoku"; she replied, "I know, I read your blog." After a quick panic, I thought, "it's not a blog!" and then, "oh crap, I can't pretend no one reads this any more."

Where am I going with this? Comments. I didn't code up a comments system because, well, it's easier not to, but also because the comment spammers always find them. I had a simple "post a message" script running on the opaque.net front page and it soon enough filled up with links to Chinese portal sites even though it was totally custom and Google didn't even index the links. Way to go, link spammer! You've annoyed me at no benefit to yourself! (I'd go off on a tangent about zero-sum thinking here, but.. meh.)

Maybe I really want comments. It's hard to see Cabel puts up his BLOGLOL and get twenty comments in an hour telling him how great he is. Just because it's true doesn't mean I can't be jealous. To date I've avoided checking referers and counting hits, and I aim to keep it that way. But, well.. I could fix the spam problem by holding new comments and whitelisting by IP address. I don't really expect or want high praise, but maybe it will add value to what I write here (value to me—remember, nobody actually reads this) to have comments.

Comments?

Ha!

I got a chance to make thumbnail scans of the last couple rolls of film I developed. Looks like there's some good shots to work with:

Oh, and speaking of: I picked up an Epson R220 on eBay and ordered a monochrome ink set to see what kind of prints I can get. I love the idea of having a dedicated black and white printer..

In case you missed it, here's what we had at our fabulous New Year's Hangover Brunch:

Breakfast:

• Scrambled eggs
  
• Bacon (3 lbs.)
  
• Hash browns
  
• Biscuits (from scratch, of course)
  
• Some kind of egg casserole that Molly made
  

Supper:

• Ham with bourbon glaze
  
• Black eyed peas
  
• Cooked greens
  
• Rolls
  

Drinky:

• Coffee with Irish Cream
  
• Greyhounds
  
• Bloody Marys
  

I'll just go ahead and brag and say it's some of the best food I've ever cooked. People were eating enough to make themselves ill. It was beautiful.