I recently setup a camera to shoot a time lapse movie of a walking iris boom opening.
There were approximately 100 shots, 1 minute apart for the duration of the movie. As you'll see, the bloom opens quite fast. The blossoms only last one day– they close up as it gets dark and fall off the next day.
It's incredibly easy to now create your own ring tones for your iPhone without paying the 99c. Here are a few different ways to accomplish it.
1. Use GarageBand to load a track from CD or an MP3 file. Trim the song down to a reasonable length. If it's short, it's a good idea to loop it a few times and make sure the loop point sounds natural. Export the song as a “.M4A” via the share menu. Rename the file with the .M4R extension and drag into iTunes. Sync your iPhone.
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2. Use Quicktime Pro to edit/copy/paste the ring tone. Export as MPEG-4 audio. Rename the file with the .M4R extension and drag into iTunes. Sync your iPhone.
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3. Locate an existing song in your iTunes library that is .M4A format by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on the song and choose Show in Finder. Copy the song to your desktop and rename the file with the .M4R extension and drag into iTunes. Sync your iPhone.
Unsharp mask: it's a great too to have in the digital photo toolkit, for sure. Just like most Photoshop tools, unsharp mask also has an original darkroom “analog” that's fascinating. This entry from Photo Critic attempts to demystify unsharp mask through history and application.
We recently bought an Apple Time Capsule for backing up or main machines at home. The first thing we did was disable the wireless portion of it since we already have a wireless base station that's performing quite well (we've also been burned by bad Apple wireless products in the past, read: original Graphite Base Station had bad capacitors, an Airport Express that randomly drops the wireless signal, and two Airport Expresses that have faulty power supplies).
I needed to perform a restore from the time capsule to my PowerMac G5 via 100mbit/s ethernet. The total size for the restore was just over 90GB– it took just over 40 hours to restore completely. That's nearly two days! That's just wrong– there has to be a problem somewhere.
To it's credit, it performed as advertised allowing me to restore my computer completely from a backup. It just took longer than I believe it should have.
Needless to say, I'm now backing up my machine on an internal drive and leaving the Time Capsule for future generations until there's a fix.
Oh, and don't believe the estimate. It never went over 20 hours at any point.
Oscar Myer is currently promoting a new mini-sized food product and thought it a good idea to down size their wiener mobile. The new set of buns is a MINI Cooper S with the traditional red and yellow paint job with a ginourmous bun and hot dog on top. Catch the video for a quick making of. Watch out for the hot dog related humor.
No word yet on Dawn Wiener's reaction.
Brit electro synth-pop Alison Moyet and Vince Clarke Yazoo are back together to promote a new 4 disc box set of their early and short-lived work together. They have announced U.S. tour dates, two of which are in New York July 16 and 17, 2008.
Check out these photos by Bernard Zee from the 2007 San Francisco Fleetweek airshow. There are some really stunning pictures like the one to the right which shows visual distortion from the shock wave of the aircraft. Amazing!
Link. Thanks, Jim!
Thanks Flickr, you always come through.
I just learned about this one today. Cameratoss is a term that is much what it sounds like. Darken the room, turn on specific point light sources, set camera for longish exposure, trigger and toss. I might not be trying this with my new camera, but maybe a small point and shoot with the tether around my wrist.
Link to Cameratoss Flickr group. (photo by davespilbrow via Flickr)
Lens Babies
The Lens Baby is a flexible lens that fits on your SLR camera to give you finger-tip selective focus on subjects. Compress the Lens Baby in one direction and you get a tilt-focus effect, similar to that of a large format camera. The results are endless. Lens Baby also makes accessories for video cameras as well.
Joby Gorillapod
The Gorillapod might be the best impromptu tripod available. Position the three fully jointed legs in any position or secure it to a railing, lamppost or chair-back to get a shake-free shot. The rubber-ringed joints stay put.
Thanks, Ray!