Erik’s Blog

My wife works in an anchovy processing plant. They do the entire process: freshly caught fish go in and cans come out. Last Friday, she came home very stressed.
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I have not yet lost my newfound fascination for tilt shifting. I’ve been searching through my photos for more candidates as well as looking for Flickr photos with Creative Commons licenses (that means you’re legally allowed to modify and republish as long as you cite the original source) to play around with. Here are the results of my recent efforts.
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This is one of the most interesting articles I’ve read in a while. It’s taken me all weekend to get through it all, but I’m already more conscious about each step.
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Occasionally the sky does something that makes me run to get my camera. I took the last two yesterday morning. Yesterday I had to get up at sunrise to go to the doctor to have some blood taken for analysis. Not because I’m ill, but because I’m healthy. It’s been almost 20 years since I had any blood and urine analysis, so I thought it would be a good idea to get a "healthy" datapoint on my medical chart from my 30th year.
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Anyone who lives in Spain and has a television that they turned on this past Easter will have seen video of two celebrities kissing on a balcony under a McDonalds sign. I care zero about the Spanish celebrity gossip scene that overruns the broadcast networks day and night. I do my best to remain uninformed about what’s going on, so I don’t really know who the kissers in said video are. Actually, in my search to find an image of them, I was unable to avoid learning that the man in the video is the son of Isabel Pantoja, the diva and queen of all that is celebrity scandal gossip in Spain. Whatever.

As I was watching this video loop repeatedly hour after hour as people discussed the implications of this new intimate relationship, I started subconsciously wanting a hamburger. That’s when it hit me! (more…)

Just two photos that I took around town recently. The first is from a series of trees that line the street across from some now demolished houses. It’s fashionable here to link neighboring trees together through grafting. These flowers were on one of the arcs between the trees.

The second photo is right outside a school entrance. It’s easy to imagine the problem it solves: children pouring out of the school directly into the street. With the barrier, they have to make 90 degree turns and, thus, remain on the sidewalk. (more…)

Recently, I made another attempt at a timelapse video of the stars. The night was a lot clearer, but, unfortunately, it was both too cold and too unpredictable to leave the window open all night, so the light from the street lamps hitting the wall caused significant glare in the image.
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Last Thursday was a pretty sunny day. But, within an hour of shooting this video, as the sun went down, it began to rain. When I went to the window to see the storm, I saw another Alexander’s Band, just like two years ago. With the setting sun low in the sky behind us, the rainbow was one of the brightest and clearest I’ve ever seen.
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It won’t surprise my regular readers to learn that, as soon as I learned about tilt-shift photographic effect, I immediately set about thinking of how to make a tilt-shift timelapse movie. It would be nice, of course, to be able to set up a webcam in Times Square and tilt-shift that, but, alas, I live in a small town in Spain, and I only have one street that I can look down on at an appropriate angle. But the sun was out yesterday, so I set up my camera on top of two stacked bar stools (I don’t have a tripod yet) pointing down at the street outside my house. My camera took a picture every 15 seconds for two hours and seventeen minutes, resulting in 548 RAW files. I optimized the exposure settings and loaded them all into photoshop, 100 at a time, sized them down to 800×600, ran a batch tilt-shift action on them, and saved them as jpegs. Then I loaded them into Quicktime as an image sequence, saved it as a movie and put some titles and music with iMovie. And voila!
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For the past month, I’ve started a new hobby. I used to think that people that kept little model trains and spent their time making miniature dioramas were a little crazy. But I’ve recently changed my opinion. I had the idea that it would be cool to create little miniature models of some of the places I’ve been and photographed. So I went down to the local crafts store, and purchased little trees and little people figurines, and have been spending my nights in my office making these little miniature models of my photos, and photographing them. This might seem like a waste of time to you, but it’s truly fascinating to me. After a full month of getting only 4 hours of sleep every night, spending every waking moment, and roughly a month’s salary on this project, I finally have some results to show you. I hope you like them.
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