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May 31, 2007
Flickr Embedding test
Here's a link to my photos on flickr:
Flickr: Photos from kwillis
Here's how I found out how to make the above 4 pictures appear:
http://www.flickrness.com/
Posted by kwillis at 11:57 PM
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Inspiration of Business Card Design
Need some inspiration for a new business card? Look no further than, well, lots of business cards that already exist.
http://creativebits.org/cool_business_card_designs
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dailypoetics/sets/72057594104389710/
http://veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/the_new_duoh_logo_identity/
http://desktoppub.about.com/od/businesscards/a/bcard_parts.htm
Orginal links provided by:
Creating a new Business Card | Abduzeedo by design
Posted by kwillis at 11:46 PM
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37 Sources Of Inspiration
I know I can also use more sources of inspiration. Here are 37 ones you may not have thought of from Inspirationbit.com.
Did you ever feel lost in space, trying to gather your thoughts, get motivated to write for your blog, design a website, come up with logo ideas, find a perfect object for your photo shoot, simply be inspired to live your life to its fullest? Here is your one in a lifetime chance to swim in the ocean of inspiration filled from 37 sources.
Some of my favorite posts are:
#7 Inspiration For Design And Advertising
Get inspired by word association and playing on words, find ideas in images, look “at something in a different way”, using metaphors.
#13 Storyteller’s Muse
Don’t force the Muse but entice her by having a set of “prompt cards”, reading, doing something mindless. Make a date with yourself - just You and your Muse.
#14 What Inspires A Graphic Designer
Inspired by the environment (”every visual object can be interpreted into graphic design”), people of the world, the design process from start to finish.
Group Writing Project Results: 37 Sources Of Inspiration - Inspiration Bit
Posted by kwillis at 11:19 PM
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Black Magic - Intensity Pro HD Video for MAC and PC
I just saw this ad and it seems like a great solution especially if you want to do a live switch with two HDV cameras. Get 2 of these cards and you're in control of everything.
Add the incredible quality of HDMI to your computer. Intensity features the latest HDMI technology for the highest quality capture and playback on Windows or Mac OS X computers. Now you can edit using big-screen HDMI televisions and video projectors, or capture uncompressed quality from HDV cameras all for only $249
Posted by kwillis at 05:03 PM
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May 30, 2007
The Interplay of Art and Science
The topic of Leonardo, art and science is never very far from my thoughts. Working in a medical school and having an art background naturally draws me to articles such as this one, entitled: "The Interplay of Art and Science: Two ways of Viewing the World meet in the Visual Realm", by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles.
Caption for the image: "THROUGH HIS STUDIES and drawings, Leonardo became aware of the joining and subsequent divergence of the nerves from the eye in the optic synapse. (Circa 1500; pen, ink and red chalk.)"
Published almost simultaneously, these very different books present a double view of Martin Kemp's original and often brilliant approach to the connection between science and art. Leonardo focuses on a single genius; Seen/Unseen pulls back the lens to investigate the nature of creativity thematically, using profiles of extraordinary artists/scientists over a span of 500 years. Kemp is intrigued by visual works that combine the skills of artist and scientist, often, but not always, in the same person; he calls himself a "historian of the visual."
Original article:
The Interplay of Art and Science: Scientific American
Kemp's ideas may be familiar to readers of Nature who have followed his science and culture column. Currently professor of art history at the University of Oxford, he has produced a veritable library of books and articles about Leonardo. Away from his desk he organizes exhibitions, most recently one at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the beautiful, coffee table-size Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design accompanied this exhibition. Kemp's text dovetails seamlessly with the often life-size reproductions of Leonardo's drawings, sketches, jottings and notes, providing insight into the artist's philosophy, mastery of geometry, and compassion.
Leonardo da Vinci has fascinated generations of artists, art critics and novelists. But few have been as absorbed as Kemp, who has walked in the master's footsteps through Italy and France. Kemp's name is synonymous with Leonardo scholarship. In a February New York Times account of the announcement of the possible discovery of a missing Leonardo masterpiece, The Battle of Anghiari--walled off but retrievable in the Palazzo Vecchio--the reporter gave weight to the claim by noting that Kemp strongly supported the investigation.
Leonardo is based on a "theme sheet," a miraculously recovered piece of folded paper (reproduced across two pages in the book) on which the artist began sketching and writing in 1490. Kemp explains the value of paper half a millennium ago--which meant that every inch was used--and he interprets the apparent chaos of sketches as a record of Leonardo's "laboratory for thinking." He tells us that there are about 6,000 surviving pages of the artist's notes and sketches.
Yet even for the keenly interested, Leonardo's notes, written in a mirror script, are difficult to decipher, and their dispersion on this theme sheet may not be deliberate. A finely drawn portrait of an old man merges with a delicate pair of trees, and the rest of the drawings, notes and designs bear no apparent relation to these sketches or to one another. The jottings, combined with references to the well-known paintings and models for machines, reveal a man of his time at home with geometry, though probably not mathematically prepared for the scientific revolution that was a century in the future. Ahead of his time in a visual way, however, Leonardo observed nature closely and drew "notes" from what he saw, from an autopsied heart to floodwaters and debris, believing that all knowledge had to be confirmed by observing natural phenomena. He must have had remarkable eyesight to capture motion as he did, as well as a rare ability to see mentally in three dimensions, one of the themes of Kemp's second book, Seen/Unseen.
Although Leonardo is not the heart of Seen/Unseen, he is the touchstone for much of Kemp's thinking and one of the "nodal" figures, men (mostly) who as both artists and scientists are the focus of each of its chapters. In "Wholes and Parts," for instance, Kemp identifies Charles Darwin as a man with one foot in the dynamic view of nature of the early 19th century, where men such as his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and artist George Stubbs saw "an animate nature in continual flux," and the other foot in the Victorian era, in which "Natural Selection itself represents the emergence of the 'fittest' theory into a very specific environment" that was familiar with the earlier worldview and thus receptive to his much more radical theory.
In this same chapter Kemp leaps to the 20th century and Richard Dawkins's "selfish genes" and James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and wonders about a self-regulating biosphere. Kemp likes to move back and forth across the centuries, explaining how scientific ideas morph and mutate in different historical eras--a sort of dialogue across time that he relishes. In "Growth and Form," he pays homage to D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's classic 1917 book On Growth and Form, explaining Thompson's references to Albrecht Durer's method of proportional transformation and connecting this approach to form to the visual mathematics of fractals, chaos theory and machine-made images.
Sometime in the 19th century, according to Kemp, the invention of the camera and its offspring technologies, cinema and radiography, liberated artists from having to reproduce nature with conventional perspective, freeing them to move in different directions. Scientists, in contrast, embraced photography and happily wed cameras to their microscopes and telescopes.
Kemp is still in the process of exploring the explosion of visual culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We humans are, as he illustrates in various ways throughout this rich discussion, visual creatures. We need to see in order to understand. Biologists, he reminds us, needed an electron microscope to see DNA and, from that glimpse, to construct a model. He lauds the contribution of physicist Richard Feynman, who devised the "Feynman diagrams" (which are not included in the text), because he thought, and taught, with images. Kemp applauds the visual reconstructions of contemporary planetary scientists who capture images of planets, such as Venus, while taking the liberty of coloring them with familiar, Earth-like tones. Why, he asks, bother to map Venus, where we will never go? Because, he replies, we are explorers, and explorers want to map their discoveries.
Kemp acknowledges that his reconsideration of scientists and artists across the centuries is sometimes difficult, and he asks his readers to bear with him. Some may be left sensing that this is not his final effort to explain visual culture, which is not the study of art or of science but an inquiry into human creativity that can be seen. In his own ongoing inquiry, Kemp is ambitious and enlightening but occasionally difficult to follow. He questions the validity, interpretation and ultimately the use of computerized, machine-made images extracted, for example, from PET and fMRI brain scans. Suddenly he fears the technology he has been describing. "The more technological the image looks, the more it exudes ... authority," he writes, but a computer is, nonetheless, a man-made tool that "seems to promise a non-human precision." And it would be a mistake to put the tool makers in the privileged position of deciding how their tools should be used.
Kemp's thoughts on art are self-consciously different in kind from other recent efforts to link art and science that either concentrate on individual artists and scientists or focus on a particular scientific breakthrough. None approaches the world as Kemp does. Seen/Unseen is a glimpse into his own thought process the way his Leonardo is a glimpse into the mind of an almost mythical genius. Kemp offers us a way of considering how artists and scientists have intuited visual truths in the past, reminds us that the past and the present are connected, and warns us against the potential tyranny of the newest digitized images that, though often beautiful and beguiling, are still man-made and not infallible.
Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, author of Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century, teaches a course on the history of science, invention and the visual arts at Yale University.
Again, the original article is posted here:
The Interplay of Art and Science: Scientific American
Posted by kwillis at 12:52 PM
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May 29, 2007
Google Maps Street View
So Google just launched this new addition to Google Maps called StreetView that "allows you to quickly and easily view and navigate high-resolution, 360 degree street level images of various cities in the US." If anyone knows how they got all of these photos, please comment.
I'm just waiting for the digital camera that saves your photo with global positioning data in the metadata. Sony has a device you can buy to add onto your existing camera. It looks like this:
But back to Google, Google maps uses Adobe Flash for the StreetView pop up window within the existing map interface. But that doesn't give us many clues as to how they made this. I searched and searched and all I found was a YouTube video. It's somewhat cheesy but quite an informative video from the
"Official Google Channel":
YouTube - Google Maps Street View
What about MicroSoft Virtual Earth -- cough -- Google Earth--? Check out this screenshot:
Once again Microsoft seems a bit behind the times, but still this seems like a close second to driving a real car.
Posted by kwillis at 11:07 PM
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The World's First Computer Animation And Effects In Film
'Who's on first?' What do Andromeda Strain (1971), The Hunger (1974), Futureworld (1976), Star Wars (1977), Tron (1982), and Young Sherlock Holmes (1985)? Your3dSource.com has the answer:
Many of us think of the movie “Tron” as the the first film to use computer animation or effects in any form. But the technology goes back a lot further than 1982, when Tron was released.
Full Article: Earliest Examples Of Computer Animation In Film
Posted by kwillis at 03:00 PM
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May 24, 2007
Jon Neufeld - Sweetland
I just got back in touch with a friend from high school-- Jon Neufeld. He's a singer living in New York City. Probably not far from my brother and sister in Brooklyn. He always had a great voice. He would sing at assembly for no reason in from of our whole high school, but everyone would love it. He dragged me into a musical where I couldn't dance or sign, but I did juggle. He also wasn't a bad freshman soccer goalie. You can hear his fresh sound on his web site: jonneufeld.com
One song that hits home, pardon the pun, is Sweetland. Here's what Jon writes about this song:
SWEETLAND
This song is a culmination of thoughts on California. The lyric goes, "Many friends of mine have traveled. Some are fine and some unraveled." This pretty much sums up the dichotomy of the state of California.
A few years ago, my girlfriend and I went out to San Francisco to visit some friends. I was immediately taken by the energy of northern California. Driving along the coast, walking amongst the redwood trees and "standing high on the mountain, looking down upon the ocean." Breathing the sweet dewy air of northern California, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of this land. It was in many ways a spiritual moment for me.
If San Francisco is the holy land, then L.A. is the Lions Den. Manifest destiny and the dreams of millions have drove countless people to the west coast.
In my last year of college, I worked as an intern at Universal Music Distribution in Massachusetts for an Artist Development Representative named Joe Kara. During this time, I had the good fortune of working on behalf of Elliot Smith. I had never heard of him before, but upon listening to his music and seeing him perform I was converted to a true fan.
When I heard of his death, my heart sunk so deep in my stomach I could hardly speak. I was so overwhelmed with sadness. I started writing this song the night I heard Elliot Smith had died. The brutality and harsh poetic nature of his suicide weighed heavy on my mind.
A short time later, I read an article in Rolling Stone Magazine about Elliot's death. There was a section where a close friend of his was saying that before moving out to L.A., Elliot had been living in Brooklyn, NY. It was said, that this was the happiest he had ever known Elliot, and when he moved out to L.A. he fell further into drugs and depression. "It's lonely out there. Where everyone sees you, but nobody hears you."
I have a number of friends who have moved to California. For all of them, the experience has been different. Heaven and Hell under the same sky.
For now Jon, it's 'Heaven' for me. Thanks for the inspiration.
Posted by kwillis at 11:51 PM
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Film Racing
Let the race begin! I just paid my dues and I'm officially registered for the race. Can you make a film in 12 hours? See you at the finish line on June 9th, 2007.
Posted by kwillis at 11:24 PM
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May 23, 2007
How to build flash video player embeds in blogs
Video Sharing Sites like Youtube or Google video provide simple HTML code for embedding their video clips in your web pages. But sometimes we want to add raw Flash Video files like SWF animations or FLV [streaming or progressive] which are frequently used by News or media websites.
...Just copy-paste the following HTML snippet in your blog template and replace the height, width and streamName parameters with real values [you can find the video size (dimensions) and URL of the flash video by looking at the HTML source code of the webpage where the video is originally embedded]
Incase you would like the video to start only when the site visitor hits the play button, replace autoPlay=true with autoPlay=false. Once the video track finishes playing, the cue marker would return to the original position. You can disable this by setting autorewind=false.
Orginal Post:
How to Embed FLV Flash Videos in your Blog ? at Digital Inspiration
Posted by kwillis at 03:13 PM
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May 21, 2007
What HDV Camera should you buy?
I've posted on the mega pixel myth for still cameras, but does that also hold true for video cameras? How is it possible to buy HDV -- high definition video -- cameras at the same prices as miniDV cameras were going for a few years ago?
Here is a decent article from 2006 that talks about 4 'solid' HDV cameras:
GUIDE TO BUYING A HDV AND DVCPRO CAMERA KIT - WWW.URBANFOX.TV
The HDR-FX1
The GY-HD100
The AG-HVX200
The XL H1
But technically what about those cheaper cameras are they worth buying and what are the minimum requirements?
The key as with still cameras is the chip size. 3 CCDs -- Charge Coupled Devices -- or 3 chip cameras are always recommended whenever possible. But the effective pixels can be confusing. These ranges from 1,070,000 effective pixels of the Sony FX1 and 1,560,000 effective pixels of the Cannon XLH1. Keep in mind the XLH1 is almost double the price of the FX1.
When is comes to chip size Urban fox says size does matter, "Bigger is better. Most prosumer cameras use 1/4-inch CCDs. All of the models in our chart have 1/3-inch CCDs. In comparison the Digibeta camera has 2/3-inch CCDs. A larger CCD always results in better pictures, even if the pixel count is the same."
There are also alternative sensors now being developed called CMOS or Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor sensors. What are they and are they better than CCDs? Urban Fox writes, "They allow more individual light sensors per square centimeter than CCD, and offer a wider dynamic light range, for better detail in both shadows and highlights, and are less susceptible to vertical smear. They are still being perfected (especially by ARRI with its high-end digital film camera, the D20). They do offer higher resolution (and good multi-resolution handling) at lower costs, which is why they are now being introduced into digital stills cameras. Sony has two HDV single CMOS cameras the A1 and the C1. They are very small - with only a single chip there is no need for a beam splitter - to split the light into red, green and blue (which makes the 3-chip cameras bulkier)"
So is the Canon HV10 that sells for under $800 US worth buying? It comes with a 2.96 CMOS image sensor and rated at 3.1 mega pixels. That sensor is 1/2.7 inches big yet produces images at 1080i. The Sony HDR-HC5 camcorder is rated only at 2.1 mega pixles yet has a slightly smaller CMOS Sensor at 1/3 inches. It's priced about $50 more that it's Canon counterpart. I feel another marketing onslaught coming on to confuse consumers again. Also, one should consider the lens quality. The only way is to do your own tests.
Posted by kwillis at 03:42 PM
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Twin Cinema
Here's a great new song that sings of passion for the cinema. They've also made a nifty imdb.com parody for their promo site. The cover art is pretty interesting as well.
The album site: New Pornographers - Twin Cinema
The Lyrics to Twin Cinema:
In home theaters
still projecting
undestructing
a voice from the back of your
double feature
soft and harder
wait
in silence
while planning your attack
shining through the hollow today
thinking maybe heavens away
they've shown this on both screens
they've shown this on both screens
in torn seats are
film leaders
lead the charging
of armies into war, yeah
lead the charge of
twin teachers
false and feature
picture and author, yeah
flipping through the photos they send ya
Lyrics
going to 16th and Valencia
they've shown this on both screens
they've shown this on both screens
team
teeming with things
you can find in the dark
dust in the light
falling through
day after night
falling with you
photos of you
oooooooooohhhh
in soft seats are
stills projecting
no protecting
from voices in the back of ya
double feature
soft and heartland
stone the hope then
they slip ya through the cracks yeah
flipping through the photos they send ya
going to 16 and Valencia
they've shown this on both screens
they've shown this on both screens
they've shown this on both screens
they've shown this on both screens
Another song called "Sing Me Spanish Techno":
Posted by kwillis at 12:23 PM
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"Daphne" wins the John Gutmann Award
The director, Claudia Leger, just announced that "Daphne or the Forbidden Touch" has won the John Gutmann Award for Best Graduate Experimental Narrative.
www.myspace.com/filmfinals2007
Posted by kwillis at 11:38 AM
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May 20, 2007
Need a Vector? Use Vecteezy
Need a vector graphic? Vectezzy has a ton of them and they are updated daily.
Vecteezy is an index of Free Vectors available for download by some of the best designers around the world.
Posted by kwillis at 09:43 PM
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Even Easier Embedded Flickr Slideshows
Here is an update to another post I made on embedding Flickr slideshows. Paul have made a easy form page that allows you to copy and paste generated html code.
Here's the form:
flickrSLiDR - Embed Flickr Slideshows within Your Site
Posted by kwillis at 09:20 PM
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May 17, 2007
How to Track Flash Events with Google Analytics
Here's a good help document on how to track your visitors path through your flash file/site.
Flash Code Examples
on (release) {
// Track with no action
getURL("javascript:urchinTracker('/folder/file');");
}on (release) {
//Track with action
getURL("javascript:urchinTracker('/folder/file');");
_root.gotoAndPlay(3);
myVar = "Flash Track Test"
}
onClipEvent
(enterFrame) {
getURL("javascript:urchinTracker('/folder/file');");
}
More:
Google Analytics Help Center - How do I track Flash events?
Posted by kwillis at 12:34 PM
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May 14, 2007
Digg/ Smashing Magazine: 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding
More CSS best practices that I Digg...
CSS isn’t always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren’t sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements. An easy way to minimize the complexity of the code is as useful as not-so-well-known CSS attributes and properties you can use to create a semantically correct markup.
70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding | Smashing Magazine
Posted by kwillis at 05:37 PM
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Making bordercolor work in FireFox
This has annoyed me for awhile. Here's the solution:
IE and Safari support the bordercolor attribute directly on TABLE elements which colors the external and internal borders. FireFox does not, but you can use standard CSS to fix it.
TABLE { border: 1px solid #eee; } TABLE TD { border: 1px solid #eee; }
Original post: Making bordercolor work in FireFox / Mozilla [firefox] [css] [mozilla] [webdesign]
Posted by kwillis at 03:34 PM
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Create Alternating Table Row Background Colors
I've been searching for an easy way of creating alternating background colors to increase the legibility of tabular data. I did a google search and the top results didn't offer an good solution for all browsers or that was as easy to use with existing tables. This example by Kennet Svanberg offers the correct solution using javascript and simple CSS. Yes table are still good for some things.
Many sites that present tabular data use alternating background colors to increase the readability of that data. And as I developed a site, I realised I wanted to do that, too. The problem? In my case the table was not generated by a server side application or script of which you can find numerous examples on the Web.
Full Tutorial:Alter Table Row Background Colors Using JavaScript [JavaScript & AJAX Tutorials]
Posted by kwillis at 03:17 PM
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May 10, 2007
How to get back a deleted photo
I've now witnessed two times were photos were accidentally deleted from an SD memory card. How do you get those deleted images back? Is there any hope? Yes there is! You can stop shooting and without formating the card put it into a card reader connected to a pc. Then let a disk recovery software go to work. The downside is that most you will have to pay for from $25-$70 but sometimes those lost images are priceless. Here's one that I've seen work: PhotoOne
PhotoOne Recovery is an easy-to-use and powerful image recovery software designed exclusively for digital camera users. PhotoOne Recovery recovers deleted, formatted and lost digital photos, images and pictures from almost any types of media cards used by digital cameras.
If images were deleted or formatted in a digital camera or a computer, or if the media is corrupted and not recognized by Windows, PhotoOne Recovery can find lost images back for you.
Image Recovery - Photo Recovery - Recover Images - Image Rescue
Posted by kwillis at 02:20 PM
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May 08, 2007
Glass Tree
This photo is of a glass tree in Murano, Italy near Venice. The man man tree was about 50 feet high and stood in a square patrolled by a small dog. The day was quite bright compared to the previous days which suited this photo. The blue sky and saturated colors capture the vividness of the sculpture.
Posted by kwillis at 11:41 PM
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Searching Tips
Here are some searching tips I have compiled:
Be specific
• Use nouns and unique words
• Put the most important words first
• Use multiple terms when possible
If you were interested in "bias in newspapers" you could search for:
newspapers bias slant censorship journalism
Use quotes around phrases so the search engine will search for the words as a phrase not as separate words To look for a term, rather than search the individual words in a term, use quotes around it:
"world health organization"
Use a plus sign + in front of a word or a phrase to require its search A word or a phrase preceded by a + must be present in all pages returned
+"absentee voting" +"assisted suicide"
Use a minus sign - in front of a word to exclude its search
If you wanted pages on fusion but not cold fusion you can prevent "cold" from being searched:
-cold fusion
Use lower case letters to find words that are either lower and upper case
japanese internment
"world war ii"
Use parentheses around terms that are alike. Enter connectors in capital letters
(adolescents OR teenagers)
television AND children
Use words like "policy" or "research" in your search to find sites that are more reliable.
Use words like "controversy," "debate," or "issue" to find sites that cover both sides of an issue.
Posted by kwillis at 08:50 PM
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Digital Mummy Podcast
The Digital Mummy Podcast was officially added to iTunes on 12/6/2006.
I shot the main footage back in September and then edited over the course of the next 2 months using footage from the the History Channel and SGI.
Description:
This podcast uncovers the mystery of a two thousand year old mummy from the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. The Anatomy Imaging Resource Initiative at Stanford took the lead in imaging this mummy using high resolution scanning without even touching the fragile sarcophagus.
The direct link to watch it in iTunes: https://deimos.apple.com...
Continue reading for the quicktime...
Links:
Mummy Podcast Page on SUMMIT
Posted by kwillis at 04:58 PM
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Making the Best Black and White Images in Photoshop
Recently, I tried to remember how to best make black and white images in Photoshop. Sure you can just choose image > adjustments > desaturate but that gives you no control of the result and it's often pretty flat. Doing a hue saturation adjustment layer is basically the same thing. So then comes the channel mixer and here's how to use it:
With RGB selected go to image>adjustments>Channel Mixer. In the channel mixer select "monochrome" and start moving the channels. The trick is that you must adjust the channel sliders to what you want but they must add up to 100 if you do not want to change the lightness of the image. When I do this I usually adjust it until I like it and the exposure looks about right then I do the math and make small changes.
Full Article: Photo.net - Photoshop Color to B&W Conversions by Justin Winokur
Posted by kwillis at 03:38 PM
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