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August 24th, 2005
12:24 am - Let me take you there, show you a living story
In early April, I found myself wanting a better camera rather badly. I kept finding myself in interesting places and yet crippled from shooting what I wanted by the small point and shoot digital I had (Canon S45, which really isn't a bad camera, but wasn't well-suited to my purpose; I bought 3 at the time and gave 2 to my siblings so we'd be able to share bits if the need arose). Of course, the time was not right, I had to deal with taxes.
At the start of May I mustered the money for a digital SLR. There are exactly 2 problems with it:
- Carrying one while biking sucks, and I keep seeing interesting things while biking. Tonight as I was working back east on the North Shore Trail I emerged from behind the Science Center in time to see fireworks from the Pirates game at PNC Park reflected off one of the Gateway Center towers. No camera. I saw 2 trains pass on the Ohio Connecting bridge. No camera. I saw a bunch of ducks swimming in the river, with the sun dropping behind the horizon formed by the hills across the Ohio. No camera. Gah!
- It (like anything) can't take pictures of what the eye can see. At night it needs flash. In more light, it may still blur.
I've been archiving days in pictures at http://www.dementia.org/~shadow/InPictures . There's no front page there yet; When I get motivated, I'll fix that.
The galleries deliberately lack text. The pictures are a window into my world. Some of the pictures need no explanation. Some simply have none. Others, well, if you want the story, all I can say is you'll have to ask. Please do.
In fairness, I have commented on some of those days in protected entries. Comment if you want to be friended (create yourself an account, of course; they're free).
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Comments:
The Janis Junction pictures in 12-14Aug are nice. Is that a replica of something real? If so, is it something you could get pictures of for comparison?
Actually, that would be cool in general. Comparison shots of real world items and the model railroad world equivelant.
It's actually a freelance model. So, no comparison shots possible. I was amused, though, to hear one of the locals who'd come to visit say the large railroad station (a commercial model of a German prototype) was the old Columbus Union Station (no, not really).
Very cool galleries, and I like the format.
Maybe have a camera mounted into a bike helmet, with a hand switch to snap the pic? :)
Well, in that vein I want an eye cam, but I'm scared of letting anyone touch my eyes. Blindness, at least in 2005, is permanent, and I am attached to my world. Not that the eye cam I want exists.
Basically, I want to blink an eye and capture a still of what I saw. (No, not the inside of my eyelid.) Memory is only so good, and memory degrades. Some things are worth looking at forever (though, perhaps one would argue with some good cause, that you'll remember those things, and I suppose I'm not in a position to argue it).
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/6813724/1252668) | | From: | ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) eichin |
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| Date: | August 28th, 2005 05:41 pm (UTC) |
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You can approximate that less invasively though...
* head or chest mounted cam (wide field of view, you'd have to point more than glance, which would take practice; maybe even fisheye lens, with lots of pixels and a bunch of back-end reprocessing)
* helmet or glasses mounted blink sensor (there's some simple hack for this used in early iris-tracking experiments, to discard the input at the right times) or even an ekg-style pad and some processing to pick up the muscle twitch
* a huge amount of cheap portable storage
Actually, if you crank up the storage, you can have the camera shooting most of the time, and have the blink sensor just log "this time+place was interesting" and save the image from 300ms earlier :-)
(The big problem with the eye cam concept is that there's so much we *don't* see - we fill in from cues and hints, and our cognitive apparatus convinces us that it all hangs together. So you'd need not just a short term trace of saccadic motion, you'd need the triggered visual memories that come up with it... easier to just grab lots of pixels of the scene :-)
(Hmm. The reason I started this post was I wanted to ask if you had plans to have an rss feed of new stuff.. not *everything* but just thumbnails of the top level new-gallery-creation indicators. I can just write a quick scraper too :-)
Well, I'm generating galleries right out of iPhoto, or one of them was with Galerie. Do you offhand know of a useful way I could generate an RSS feed at the same time? Maybe I need to look at one of the other iPhoto exporters.
, at least in 2005, is permanent, and I am attached to my world.
True. Geordie's VISOR is way off in the future, and I suspect working replacement eyeballs.
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