Limitless Pulse

I’ve been attracted to a specific scrolling bus shelter billboard for a while. Sometimes shooting works, other times not so much. I’m happy enough with this particular experiment.

Had a great evening with Bex seeing both Venus Williams and Roger Federer on the opening night of the US Open.

Thanks much, Antonia! Sorry you couldn’t make it.

And for a better glimpse of the panoramic photo above, view it on the Occipital site.

The image above is a bit of an experiment. I wanted to play around with embedding sites into other sites, which I want to do for parts of mechaneyes.com.

At the same time I was wondering if I could showcase the images I’ve shot using the 360 Panorama iPhone app on my own sites. As you can see, when viewing on the Occipital site the image is interactive, allowing you to pan around the scene captured with the app. Click on the image above and and drag it around.

I found it’s rudimentary to embed a site into an iframe on a separate site elsewhere. It just takes two lines of JavaScript. However, this approach doesn’t work within a WordPress post. To work around that, I used the PageView plugin that implements the effect through editing a very basic WordPress shortcode.

So yes, I answered both questions quickly and easily. I’m hoping that a side effect of this bit of experimentation is that I use the 360 app more and publish those photos to various places online outside the Occipital site.

I shot the two images above, the two that are obviously photos, while walking around the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Flushing, Queens.

The image between the two was a line of pixels selected in the first image that I stretched up and down to fill the frame.

For the other two images I’ve again been experimenting with the iPhone 4′s HDR feature. Again what I’m doing is moving the camera while it’s making its two exposures, resulting in a misaligned image once the composite is made.

Additionally, the rolling shutter on the iPhone 4 will bend the subjects of photos when the lens is being moved while making an exposure. Looking at the images, you can see that the Unisphere is far from a perfectly circular globe. It’s bent in different ways by the nature of the rolling shutter.

All in all I was shooting for about an hour. My experiments with this iPhone HDR effect have been pretty casual. This time however I was able to see variations based on different types of light.

The distorted compositing effect is most easily produced when there’s more contrast in the frame. Shooting from the side of the Unisphere that was more evenly lit resulted in less intense effects. You can see above that the backlit subject is distorted fairly intensely, while this image below is an example of the effect applied to a more evenly lit subject:

I’ve always had an interest in exploiting features of technology to busted, but aesthetically pleasing, results. Another aspect of this approach is that you never really know how things will turn out. There’s definitely a lot left to chance. Again, this is something I’m drawn to.

I’m enjoying this kind of image making. That said, in looking for inspiration, I’ve searched but can’t find examples of other people using this approach. If you come across anything similar out there, please point me at it.

How amazing are the two in the middle…

Found this shirt via ATshirtBlog.com, W being my favorite letter of the alphabet, and Wikipedia being one of my favorite resources.

Kevin Vellanoweth sent me one of the Stephen Wilkes images making the rounds the last few days. After being enticed by the first image, I set out and found a series on Flavorwire.

The latest edition of the Sound Noir Podcast is up and features the mix Tim Sweeney played for us on June 11th.

We’re a bit sensitive when it comes to our podcast, as it’s so infrequently updated. This is changing as of Saturday as we’ve bought a digital recorder to grab the sets we and our guests play. One would assume we’ve been collecting the audio from all of the previous events, but each time, for one reason or another, we haven’t been able to finish.

We featured the podcast in the mailer sent out today which gently reminded people what they should be doing Saturday, namely, coming to our party. Its inclusion went over nicely — the link to the podcast was clicked on more than any other link in the email.

This one / two punch feels good. Look forward to us doing more of the same over the next couple months.

And if you haven’t gotten the hint yet, come listen to sultry sounds Saturday!

More visuals inspiration:

via Stan Wiechers on Google+

A bit of visuals inspiration:

via jamaaka on Flickr