A collection of photography and exploration focusing on Upstate South Carolina and beyond.
EDIT: I’m catching up on blogging. This one was supposed to come out late July, but I never got around to finishing it. I guess better late than never. My nephew’s son is 13, and is car-crazy. Ethan has this idea that he wants to find an old car and rebuild it. He thinks he … Read More “Cruising through a Car Cemetery” »
This was going to be a very different post. I was about to explode with righteous indignation about the theft of yet another photo. And while the photo theft did take place, it was a different photo and my culprit turned out to be…me. It was an interesting rabbit hole of research that led me to an unknown (to me) photographer and an appreciation for his work.
This week Google was making news with the release of a new app. PhotoScan is designed to capture old photos from photo albums, with algorithms to enhance the photo and minimize glare. I have tons of old photo albums from Laura’s family and from my own family, and I’ve been trying to find the most efficient way to digitize these images with the best possible quality. I figured I needed to give PhotoScan a shot.
Here are my first impressions…
That term has been tossed about quite a bit during this election cycle. As I understand it, it’s the tendency to only listen to those things that support your preconceived notions, and to disavow any evidence to the contrary. I’ve certainly seen that happen, and the speed of media has simply increased the divisiveness created by such echo chambers. Even so, I’ve decided to create my own echo chamber, and here’s why…
I did it. I downloaded the Pokemon Go app and have been playing it off and on for the past week. My intent was to sit down and write up a blog post, but as soon as I got a few seconds to gather my thoughts, some other blog post or news article had come out covering, hyping, complaining about the very points I wanted to cover. It seemed that anything I wrote would just be additional noise. But, to heck with it…
Once I learned about Cinemagraphs I knew I’d have to try out the technique. I was able to find several tutorials online on how to create these using Photoshop, notably the following:
First, though, I knew I needed some imagery with which to work, so I grabbed my camera(s) and headed to downtown Greenville.
I just learned about a photographic technique. A cinemagraph is based on the animated GIF format, but is a far cry from the dancing baloney that gave animated GIFs a bad name in the late 1990s. Cinemagraphs are a combination of still imagery with subtle motion, kind of like the photographs in the Harry Potter movies.
This is not a new technique – the first documented example was for a video game in 2008. The term was coined in 2011 by Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck, who used the technique in their fashion photography. Here’s an example from their website, cinemagraphs.com:
Back in 2007 I wrote an post entitled “Geopodcasting – Adding Location to Audio.” I had just given a talk at SC EdTech on geotagging, and the post was meant to explore the idea of geotagging audio files.
There have been lots of changes in the seven and a half years since that post came out. I wanted to revisit the subject and see what tools and options are now available for for adding location data to audio.
Back in 2007 photo geotagging was just taking off. It was (and still is, to some extent) a tricky process. Back then smart phones weren’t as prevalent, so not too many people had a hand-held device that could combine GPS, imagery, and audio. Today we have iPhones, Androids, and various tablets that can do all of this. So you would think that the process would be much easier. But is it?
Here it is! Here’s the first episode of the Random Connections podcast! The first episode is based on one of the earliest posts on the blog. I had made a list of science fiction predictions that would have come to pass by 2004 in a post entitled “Yesterday’s Tomorrows.” Ten years later I updated the … Read More “Days of Future Past” »
Every now and then you need to toss a new coat of paint on the place. It’s no different with blogs. They can get stale after awhile and need a bit of updating. I figured that a ten-year anniversary was as good a time as any to change things up here. I’ve switched over to … Read More “Sprucing up the Joint” »