introduce you to my blogging and life 
09
02
2010
Below is a section of the Brooklyn Bridge Park that remains under construction, as seen from the Brooklyn Promenade above the (B)BQE.
09
01
2010
As Marie posted recently, the roof farm has been under assault by a battalion of enormous tobacco hornworms. They are green, somewhat pretty and 
they devour our tomato plants at a record speed. Check out her post for great pictures of the bandits in action.
So before waging a final battle against the invader, I got my macro gear out and despite an annoying afternoon breeze, got a few shots of the poor buggers. Their markings are simply incredible, so I focused on them - pardon the pun.
Even after reading that these are the conventional « eye spots », Mother Nature’s classic way of fooling predators, I still find it hard to believe that they aren’t real eyes. Look at the details! Complete with a pupil and actual ridges!
For reference, each eye spot is smaller than a millimeter in size. Granted, at that level of magnification it all becomes some kind of voyeurism and the quest for beauty turns into scientific curiosity...
08
30
2010
"Lying in a den in Brooklyn
With a slack jaw, and not much to win
I said to the Marie, 'Are you trying to tempt me
Because I come from the land of plenty?'
And she said..."
"Yes."
Score!
Posted at 11:43 PM in + Panoramas: & New York: & Schtroumpfissime:
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08
27
2010
UPDATE: Apologies to those of you who were stuck with the Rockport panorama coming up instead of this one. There was a conflict between two panoramas on the same page (sloppy coding on my part, I placed them in identically named DIV's.) What happened is that once you switched to the comment page, a single pano was loading and thus, worked fine. This should all now be fixed!
Here’s a 360° panoramic shot of a newly opened section of the Brooklyn Bridge Park, to echo a much more substantial post by Marie. It was taken last week at night on the way back from the overrated Grimaldi's Pizza, where we'll probably never go again, just not worth the trouble and wait. Maybe I'll post about that later.
Click on the "Full Screen" icon and then click and drag to navigate within the image in all directions.
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Notice the tidal pool and public boat ramp, probably intended for launching kayaks. Curious to see how vehicle access will be regulated. Also in the background, the 4 levels of the very poorly located and inconvenient BQE highway, with the lower service road, two levels of opposite high speed traffic and the pedestrian Brooklyn Promenade at the top...
08
24
2010
As a photographer, I am a child of the 21st century. I love color. I crave it. I couldn’t be or do without it. So I tend to underexpose a touch and to slightly boost saturation, or rather the newcomer vibrance*, because 
that better reflects my inner view of the world. I don’t really dissect a scene into zones like Ansel Adams did. What I look for are balance, color, contrast, shape, texture, question marks, surprises and puzzles. I let them talk. I analyze how much they move me. If they tip the scale towards the positive, I press the mental shutter first and the camera’s second. If not, the mind looks elsewhere.
But every once in a while, color fades and abstraction and mood prevail. The time has then come for black and white, or any monochromatic tone. It sometimes happens in the field and others back at the ranch, in the comfort of my digital lab. I have caught myself staring at a shot for an eternity, uncertain of what was wrong or missing, only to realize later that nothing had been - there was just too much color. I’d take that distraction away and the shot was reborn.
Any way. Here’s a monochromatic look at Rockport, with more color photos on the way soon.
* Vibrance is the new chic variable in color correction. While the old saturation adjustment would boost color saturation of ALL colors - actually clipping those already quite saturated, a rather destructive result in terms of quality - the new vibrance smartly boosts the saturation of the less saturated colors and leaves the saturated ones alone, achieving images that are much closer to what the human eye perceives in its infinite wisdom of intelligent universe translation.
08
21
2010
Here’s a full 360° panoramic shot of the Rockport harbour around which we just spent a delicious week. More photos and a short story to come soon. For now, as always with these new panoramic shots, please click on the « full screen » icon at the bottom right of the viewer's Menu and then click and drag the mouse to pan and explore the image. This was shot in HDR to compensate for strong shadows and highlights in the middle of the day. The stitch isn't perfect, I'll have to work on it further - and the shoot was expedited because of too many tourists walking in and out of the scene. 48 shots were involved in total. Rockport surely is a beautiful little town. Some of its peace and ocean rhythms still flow in my blood. For a while.
Update: Oh, I forgot the most important part! Let's play "find Marie." The winner wins a... mention on Coriolistic Anachronisms, the coolest, photographiest, laziest, bizarrest, most irregular and yet hopefully most randomly and occasionally entertaining blog around... ;-)
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Posted at 10:36 AM in + Panoramas: & On the road: & Photography:
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08
02
2010
Quite busy working these days, « métro, boulot, dodo » has never been more appropriate. So the time and energy to run around shooting like crazy have dropped a touch. I am also working in the background of the main photography web site upgrading all the galleries - which were until now set with a regular 900x500 picture size - for the upcoming full-screen interface. More later.
I have received my spherical pano head from Germany and the first tests were very promising. Parallax should pretty much be a thing of the past. The 7D is going to be put to good use. A single 360x180°spherical or cubic HDR panorama involves 50 pictures to be blended and stitched together. But with better gear now and a bit of practice, I can manage to achieve consistent results in minimal time. That’s on the shooting side of things of course. Processing still takes quite a while.
Be patient, stay tuned. Cheers.
07
07
2010
I’m not one to celebrate nor appreciate National and Independence days much, whether a 4th of July, a 14th or a 1st. While people drink and party, I tend to ponder. It is so easy to raise a flag high and forget the atrocities that have led us where we are. I do not feel that ancient blood baths are anything worth celebrating, especially when they are actually being perpetrated all over again on some distant land. If anything, a day of mourning and remembrance would be more appropriate. To feel sorry for a necessary evil and convince ourselves we have grown. But have we?
This 4th of July was equal to itself. I worked most of the week-end and had to deal with drunks and fights. The fights were fueled by ideology conflict, intolerance and latent racism. If a country’s national holiday meant anything serious, one would think that the masses would find something more intelligent to do than get trashed.
And was I in France, I wouldn’t look forward any more to the upcoming 14th of July, for exactly the same reasons.
In any case, a walk along the Brooklyn Promenade with Marie was uneventful and I managed to get a nice-ish shot of our Manhattan skyline from the new park in Brooklyn. Peace to all.
06
27
2010
Below are the humbling results of my first video shoot with the Canon 7D. It’s all quite laughable, really, since I am a complete amateur in this domain - and yet somehow, it feels promising and rather exciting, like the tip of an iceberg, its mass awaiting for me to commit, dive and explore...
Please keep in mind that while the 10 minute long, 50 MB streaming video below is highly compressed and shrunk to the Flash format, the H.264 full-1080p HD MPEG4 original is almost 1 GB in size. You are only getting a cheap preview of the amazing quality now achieved by video DSLR’s. The full-size footage actually outperforms DVD quality. If some of you have an HD TV or Blue Ray player, that’s more like it...
So, this was two weeks ago. I had set out to Coney Island for an afternoon, attempting to record glimpses of the place, its strangeness, its people, the recently reopened Luna Park, the ocean nearby, all soaking in a mixture of summer and heat and seaside smells.
Apart from the camera, I do not own much in terms of video-making equipment. Obviously that’s a serious handicap because if still photography requires very little extra gear, videography on the other hand demands for a considerable load of specialized tools to even dream of perfection. We are talking tripods, dollies, lights, grips, stabilizers, LCD screens, microphones, booms, etc.
Me, I’ve purchased a very reasonable Azden SMX-10 directional microphone, not being financially ready for a Rode VideoMic - and a little disheartened by its size. That day on Coney Island was quite windy and the SMX-10’s foam windscreen fought hard to keep the sound clear. I might have to double it up. Bottom line is, I’m better off than with the camera’s on-board mono microphone but still far from great audio.
Then there is the issue of fluid panning. While my Manfrotto tripod and the ballhead are fantastic for still photography, they do not replace a video head and make for rather lousy camera motion. Practice will help. In the meantime, I try to tighten the head just to the point where it starts seizing up, back down a touch, and hold the camera firmly while panning.
Of course, I made big initial mistakes, and learned a lot from them. My clips were all too short. I was filming for the scene duration I envisioned in the final movie and did not allow for editing and transitions. Note to self: add at least 5 seconds prior and after each clip.
Also, when it came to filming the guitar player, I only shot short clips one after the other, which means that at editing time I didn’t have a soundtrack to work with. I will not make that mistake again. Any time a soundtrack is necessary or interesting, I will first shoot a long uninterrupted clip for its audio, and then short additional clips from different angles - provided of course that the audio doesn’t change in between. This means that to film a song, for instance, I should probably spend about a third to half of its duration recording sound, and the rest shooting various angles. It’s nothing like filming a scene simultaneously with two cameras but hey, it’ll have to do...
My shutter speed was all over the place, too. With frame rate set to 30 fps (actually 29.97), I was experimenting with high speeds but as expected they make the footage look very synthetic, almost stroboscopic. I will now stick to the conventional 1/60th to 1/125th and step down my aperture accordingly, which will mean somewhere down the line investing in more neutral density filters to reduce depth of field in bright light.
The lenses performed well. My new 10-22mm makes for great wide-angle shots but logically doesn’t allow me to blur backgrounds much. The 55-250mm, however, even with a mere f4 maximum aperture, does a great job at this. Some of the shots have a rather movie-like limited depth of field, and the ability to shift focus forward or backwards inside of a scene, like when I clumsily went from the hands of the guitar player to the strange man in a white hat behind him, is just fantastic.
So just give me plenty more practice, a really interesting subject, lots of time at the editing table and I should be able to keep you all entertained... For now, turn your volume up, click on the thumbnail below and smile indulgently.
Posted at 2:15 PM in Bits and pieces: & Photography: & Videography
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06
10
2010
Here's the result of some playtime with the Canon 7D. It's a 360°x180° panorama of Times Square, played in Flash. Of course there's much room for improvement - I need to refine my makeshift pano-head and locate the lens' nodal point* more precisely, but the modest result is fun and immersive. Make sure to click on the Full Screen button at the lower right of the preview below, and once in the real thing, you can click and drag the image in any direction, including up and down... Press Esc to exit Full Screen.
To view virtual tour properly, Flash Player 9.0.28 or later version is needed.Please download the latest version of Flash Player and install it on your computer.
Note: By referring to the nodal point, I seem to be subscribing to a popular panoramic photography misconception; the actual no-parallax point of a lens would be its entrance pupil, not the nodal point.
« Since it looks like you guys might get brushed by Hurricane Earl, will you take pictures and post them? »
Date of comment: 2010-09-02 18:21 • Reply« Indeed, with sections of the Eastern Seaboard under a Hurricane Warning, we’re keeping an eye on Earl - which has just downgraded to a Cat. 3, with hurricane force winds extending to 70 miles and tropical storm force winds to 200 miles outward of the eye (now at 947 MB.)
Date of comment: 2010-09-02 18:40 • ReplyIt’s expected to weaken some more overnight and everything now depends on that forecast turn to the NE. The current track puts Earl tomorrow afternoon at a little less than 200 miles offshore, so we could get 40 to 60 mph easterly or northeasterly winds, enough to threaten the farm on the roof...
If and when everything is secured, yes, I’d like to go shoot some waves. Haven’t thought of the perfect spot yet, though... »
« How many pictures do you have to take on average to make such a stunning panorama? Not that I’m going to attempt to do it :) »
Date of comment: 2010-09-03 23:44 • Reply« Oh but you should. 3 or 4 images stitched together should do the trick, and you try and keep the camera level with the horizon near the middle of the frame...
Date of comment: 2010-09-04 02:01 • ReplyMe, I just overdo it. The 360 panos take most work. This one, however, was simple: 4 shots x 3 bracketed exposures each. »