quasify

Over in Winter Hill last night playing around with some extended exposures. The basic strategy here is to keep the camera as still as possible while driving past various light sources. Unfortunately I didn’t run into any pursuant cops, firework factory fires or aurora borealis (-es? -i?).

My eyes are completely and permanently screwed from trying to watch a double feature in 1950s 3D. Creature From the Black Lagoon was actually pretty good despite showing the monster entirely too much though It Came From Outer Space made up for it with excess suckitude and double excess Richard Carlson. Though at least he kept his shirt on.

On that note, The New 3D Adventures of Zalandra. It works best at full screen with red/blue glasses and a strong drink or four. Blue goes on the left. Soundtrack is by no one as there is no soundtrack.

Mediafriend’s new album ‘I Don’t Feel Like This Is Happening’ is online for streaming purposes. Were I the type to express strong preferences I’d recommend ‘Flight Risk’ where Chris spins out a slow Pinback-like beat & verbal declining modulation before crunching into a dissonant conclusion. Or if by chance you’re an echoplanar fan you might like to hear the full versions of ‘Love, An Art’ and ‘In Green’, from which parts were excised for use in It’s OK to Be Afraid. I also appropriated the second version of Fragrant Skies for my own self-indulgent purposes a while back, prompting a surprising number of unrelated people to remark to me about what a terribly sad song this is. The Nuno Albuquerque version of this track goes to a calmer, chiller, less emotive place. All in all, worth checking out - a more productive use of your time at work than actual work.

Related:

• It’s OK to Be Afraid
• DJ Uncle Jazzy

Spent the last full day in STL banging my head on various sharp low-hanging objects at the City Museum. This is a bizarre place, half kinetic sculpture half huge jungle gym half architectural scrapyard. I can’t help but imagine that a large number of children and old people either meet their end or get hopelessly and permanently lost here every year. Below are a few shots from their outdoor 3D maze MonstroCity, constructed from salvaged rusty rebar and grates along with a few discard airplanes and trolly cars, all suspended five stories up. We were there during the day (obviously) but City Museum is open til 1am on the weekends and serves beer. Odds of survival clearly inversely proportionate to alcohol consumed. This place is utterly fantastic. It makes me want to take up welding.

Related:

• In Arlington, On Africa

The theme for the day is itty-small animals, both from the St. Louis Zoo and the Emerson Grand Basin.

Also saw some big guys too.

Albert Pujols, originally uploaded by -nanio-.

I find myself enjoying the pinnacle of cultural evolution that is STL for a few days. I put a little photoset here that I’ll be adding to as time permits. You’ll notice I’ve purchased a brown STL hat for fandom camouflage purposes but apparently when you cheer for the wrong team every time there’s a bases-clearing double it gives away your true allegiances. Go Cubbies!! (They won 9-3).

Happy May Day.

Revisiting my favorite* of the Sony Bravia commercials. Where did they find such a hill to shoot this thing anyway? … ~:{P

*And not just because of Jose Gonzalez (who, apparently, is a Swede). Paint explosions? Plastic explosive rabbits? Please. Although wait - Pyramid? Is this for real?

People you, me and we know are at Fenway AS WE SPEAK enjoying the remnants of a massive 1-0* offensive explosion. I am not one of those people, and odds are good that neither are you. So for us, the little people, those who fall outside the Red Sox ticket holders circle of trust, here’s some cool time-lapse footage of Fenway from Tom Guilmette.

One Day At Fenway - Letus Extreme Film - Time Lapse - HDTV from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

A bit from Tom about his technique.

I set the camera to 1080p 30p and ran the interval recording at 1 frame per ten seconds of time elapsed. These settings turned a 7 hour 15 minute event into a 1 minute and 27 second time lapse. The pan head moved about 160 degrees, left to right.

I ran the camera in auto iris, auto white balance and manual focus. I am still having trouble setting the wide angle 18mm lens to infinity. You will notice that this video is slightly out of focus. I think it is because I am using a cheap lens. You will notice the white balance changes as day turned to night.

*I have Toronto in my office’s 13-run MLB pool, and I can definitively say that this is their first shutout of the season, giving me a desperately need zero cell. Thanks!

Just when you though it was safe to go back in the non-nalgene bottled water…

Is the semester over? Not quite, no matter how many times I close my eyes, hold my breath and immaturely wish otherwise. The looming threat of having to grade the remaining avalanche of homeworks may yet send me completely off the deep end. Today’s brief walk around Willard Woods in Lexington was helpful in postponing that imminent demise.

In other procrastination news, gratuitous flower shots.

Related:

• At Willard Woods

Scrubs rolling through after the little dorks.

A reader submitted soundtrack contribution for SMHB’s graduation party. I’d have posted a youtube video instead if they weren’t both so terrible.

From the most recent DFCI “Inside the Institute“. Of interest to me primarily as in it relates to my sweet baby cranes but also for it’s bizarre choice of dirt to elephant ratio.

Q: Where is the “dirt” from the Yawkey Center for Cancer Care site going?

A: Workers from Walsh Brothers construction will need to remove roughly 136,000 tons (the equivalent of 34,000 adult elephants) of soil and clay to reach to the bottom of the site, where an underground garage will sit. As of last month, about 96,000 tons had been sent off for reuse elsewhere in the state.

About half of the dug-up material has helped line a landfill in Taunton, while some 4,800 tons went to a Boxford farm to help contour its fields. Another 16,000 tons is being used by Blue Hill Cemetery in Braintree to fill low-lying areas. Any dirt affected by underground fuel storage tanks has been removed for proper processing.

If you’re wondering about the digging itself, a set of excavators scoops and piles the clay onto one side of the construction hole. Then a larger excavator at street level loads it onto trucks. When this machine can no longer reach the stockpile, workers will use a clam bucket and crane to hoist the clay from the foundation’s bottom.

CNSMHB are running the marathon today, though you already know this if you’ve seen the explosion of the marathon tag in the past few weeks. To my knowledge this is the first full marathon for Team HB to have run together - SMHB ran Boston last year and CNHB ran New York with me three (!?) years ago. Today, Christine is trackable here (if that doesn’t work just go to Athlete Tracking and enter her bib, 26096). I’ll update this post periodically today.

UPDATE 1: 10K down for CNHB! 9:42 splits, this is under the low end of her split range (10:00-12:00). She’s somewhere in Framingham now, I think there are fans to see her at mile 6 but I haven’t heard from them yet.

UPDATE 2: 15K down, which should put CNHB passing over the gorgeous Lake Cochicuate. SP just called - she and the old people were indeed at mile 6 but managed to miss everyone. I’m planning to leave Longwood here in a bit to walk up to mile 25 - our most aggressive estimates put SMHB there in 90 minutes.

UPDATE 3: CNHB just passed 25K, her split finally fell below 10:00. That’s expected, hopefully no IT band issues. I’m heading out to see what there is to see, updates mas tarde.

UPDATE 4: Finished! Saw them both! Accidentally stepped on little one’s foot when she came to say hi, SORRY!!

UPDATE 5: Photos! What probably my best Bevo ever and one each from Team HB.

Related:

• Monsoon Marathon
• Beacon Street
• Puppy wants to run

All in all, I took somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 photographs yesterday at my first wedding still photography shoot. I had thought there were more, but scanning through them, I think we’re in pretty good shape. Adding in BML’s, we’re looking at 12.5 GB of RAW source material. I’m going to have to formalize a workflow for processing these. I think I’m going to switch from Picasa to Adobe Bridge for this project and others of similar volume. Since these photographs are in RAW, each one will be white balanced, cropped and converted to jpg before dissemination. Also, I think I’m going to end up getting a Noise Ninja license to de-noise some of these ISO 800 interior non-flash shots.

Anyway, it was a long day. I was up for 22 hours straight and my right wrist is hurting from lugging around a Canon Zoom Telephoto EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS. A fantastic telephoto lens, but heavy heavy heavy, and not a good lens to have on when you find yourself quickly shooting something in a tight space.

Related:

• Stills

I was deleting some crap and found a bit of forgotten source. There were some delirium issues when this was shot.

Instead of taking a good POTD yesterday I took this slew of mediocre ones. Overly appropriate audio track stolen without shame from Mediafriend. An improvement (I hope) on An Easter Afternoon.

UPDATE: A few people have mentioned having trouble with blip.tv stuttering for them. If that sounds like you, 529 is also on youtube.

Related:

• An Easter Afternoon
• In Cranes & Rainbows

A new argument for Chicago over San Francisco.