Erik's Blog

After my recent splash back into the tilt-shifting pool, my Photoshop muse has been working on ways to focus a photograph viewer’s attention to a particular part of the photograph using, well, focus. While what follows are technically fake tilt-shift effects, the aim in choosing the photographs and choosing the focal depth of each image was not only to make the subjects look miniature, but to draw your attention. All the photographs are mine, plucked from my photo library. I highly recommend viewing them all larger than they appear here, as they are much more impressive large.
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My little town has two photographer shops and two framing shops. In both, the shop windows are filled with examples of their work that has recently been finished and is waiting to be picked up. The main frame (computer joke) shop is right downtown and I walk by there every day. Usually they have certificates, caricatures, cross-stitched scenes, puzzles, and occasionally a painting or two. Yesterday, as I was glancing at what my fellow townspeople were having framed that day, my brain registered that there was something very wrong about one particular certificate. The text reads, “Second prize, shop window competition, 2009″. See if you can spot what’s wrong.
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I’ve always been fond of photographs of the space shuttle. There’s something truly magnificent about a space-bound rocket sitting on the launch pad. It saddens me that the shuttle era will come to and end this year. I just hope its successor doesn’t take too long to get off the ground, so to speak. When I saw some photos of the roll-out of STS-130 yesterday, I selected a couple as good tilt-shifting candidates. Below I present to you the results.
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The other day I was looking at a framed photo in my house and wondering how the area of the border around the picture (called a mat board in the framing industry) compared to the area of the picture itself. Immediately I remembered the master of all aesthetic ratios, the golden ratio, Phi! 1.61803398874989… I thought, “I bet if the ratio of the area of the picture to the border was Phi, it would look good!” So I set off on an algebraic quest to find the answer…
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My parents are visiting, and they brought a set of photos that I haven’t seen for a very long time. They are photos that I took just before and during my high school graduation from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics on June 1, 1996. Needless to say, it was quite a blast from the past. There’s nothing like a photo of the dorm room you lived in fourteen years ago to bring back a flood of memories. My time at NCSSM was definitely the peak of my academic career. Everything (i.e. a four-year bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from NC State) after that was a slow glide downhill.
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For several months now, my favorite podcast has been Are We Alone?, put out by SETI. At first one might think that a podcast from an organization that has listened to the heavens for years without hearing so much as a peep from the aliens might not have much to talk about, but it turns out that they do: astronomy, anthropology, biology, psychology, etc. It’s more about understanding how humans became what we are and extrapolating that to speculate about alien life.
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What happens when a photographer walks around town on a windy and sunny day with, not a still camera, but a video camera? Photographs…that move.

On my walk yesterday I had quite a few American Beauty moments¹ where something as simple as a flower dancing in the wind made me stop and admire Nature. When I filmed the first few clips, I didn’t know how I would put them together, but by about the fifth one, the idea for this video was formed.
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While I’m certainly not the first to think of this particular play-on-words, I do think that my book cover is better than the other parodies I’ve seen already floating around. The font, in case you’re wondering, is called Didot.

For those of you that don’t know who David Pogue is, he’s a technology columnist for the New York Times, and general internet geek celebrity who gets to test new gadgets before they are released.
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I’m a bit of a NASA TV addict. I particularly love watching live shuttle launches and ISS docking maneuvers. The fact that we can launch ourselves up out of our atmosphere and rendezvous with a space station moving at 7.7 kilometers per second 340 km above the Earth blows my mind every single time. Yesterday, as I was watching STS-129 approach the ISS, I had to pause the video to do something else, and when I moved the Quicktime slider back up to the live feed, I noticed how much cooler it all looked at accelerated speed. So I saved the feed I’d been watching, sped it up twelve times, and put some music to it.
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T-shirts that say funny things on them aren’t very big in Spain, for babies or adults. Also, Nora has just now gotten big enough to wear the ones she has, right when t-shirt weather has ended for the year. So she probably won’t get to wear hers very much. But the other day I put them on her and took some photos, because I think they’re cute and funny.
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