Yearly Archives: 2006

The photo gallery of the future

Photography

Flat screens continue to get cheaper.

If you are in a high sales tax state the chances are fair that you have purchased expensive electronic or photographic goods out of state by mail order. The sales taxes saved, not to mention the satisfaction of knowing that you are starving the beast that is government, outweigh shipping costs.

So it’s not lost on me that the wonderful B&H AV catalog is not only from an out of state vendor to this Californian, but also contains some 35 pages dedicated to televisions. Or, as I prefer to think of them, picture frames.

The traditional gallery model, adopted in my home theater requires the viewer to walk around and gaze at each wall hung picture in turn. He can, of course, enjoy an interactive experience by clicking on the hotspots in the electronic panorama version. That’s pretty neat. But it’s still nice to look at a Really Large Print mounted on the wall.

So why not just scrap all those frames and mattes and hangers and replace all of them with but one large screen flat panel television monitor? We look at pictures on computer screens all day and the definition is just fine. And while it’s true that a gallery with multiple hanging pictures can entertain more than one viewer at a time, in the home you are usually dealing with one viewer only, so that’s not an issue.

Let’s pause for a moment and consider the economics. My home theater displays fifteen pictures, each 13″ x 19″ framed and matted 22″ x 28″. Each picture costs maybe $10 to print, taking into account paper, ink and depreciation on the printer. The mounting board and matt add another $25, the frame and glass $35. So that’s $70 a framed print or $1,050 for the fifteen hanging on the walls. And those are DIY prices. Don’t even think of going to the framing store. Suddenly, I don’t feel so good….

The diagonal of a 13″ x 19″ print is 23″; the diagonal of the framed print, with matt, is 36″. The closest TV screen to this size I can find at B&H is 37″ and most run around $1,000 to $1,600 delivered, and that’s for an HDTV model. I can deliver the picture to this screen at no additional expense using my Sony AV unit in the home theater. This device, in addition to playing DVDs, plays CDs with JPGs just fine. Indeed, I can compile JPGs or TIFFs into a QuickTime movie slide show and route the output to a screen of my choice using my iBook laptop computer and a $19 adapter cable from Apple.

Plus I can watch regular TV on this screen and display as many slideshows as I want, as opposed to the static picures on the wall which are incredibly labor intensive to assemble. Indeed, I am comfortable in speculating that I could install one large flat panel television in less time, much less, than it takes to process, print, mount, matt and frame a conventional print. And that print will have a fraction of the dynamic range of the transilluminated ‘slide’ projected by the television. Further, adding music or virtual reality movies with sound effects is very simple, as I have illustrated in these pages.

So what’s wrong with this picture? With limited wall space and nowhere to store hard copy prints, why not scrap them all together and replace the lot with a slim flat panel TV screen? The prints will only get more expensive to make while the TVs will only get cheaper. And you no longer need acres of wall space to show your work.

Here’s the price history of one chosen at random from another web vendor:

I would guess there’s little to choose between brands quality wise, as most screens are made in just two or three factories in the far east. Sony and Samsung, strange bedfellows indeed, make their screens in a jointly owned factory, for example, so there’s no need to go ‘label shopping’ in the mistaken belief that a famous name means better quality.

Update May, 2011: Click here to see how I delivered on the above.

Quicktime movie enhancements

Software

A bit of coding makes for a better experience.

Apple buries it on their web site, but there’s a lot you can do to enhance the Quicktime experience by adding a few parameters to the HTML code which runs the Quicktime movie. Apple calls this ’embedding tag attributes’ – which sounds pretty offputting.

Click below and, once you are done, click the back arrow to return here.

Click for demo

I have used six Quicktime parameters to enhance the viewing experience. The code looks as follows – I have numbered the lines to refer to them; in practice, no numbers would be used:

Line 1 – This tells your web page where the movie file resides.

Line 2 – The size you want the movie on the screen. 600:338 is 16:9 widescreen.

Line 3 – This sets the background color – red being appropriate to this subject. You can also use standard hex numbers – if there’s a color on your screen you want to match, run Apple’s DigitalColorMeter utility to determine the number and insert the siz aplhanumerics between the quotes.

Line 4 – This is an important one. Once the viewer has finished watching, a single click anywhere on the movie will direct him to this page on your web site – in this example I am redirecting the viewer back to this blog page. Note that the ability to pan with the cursor in all directions and to zoom in and out with the keyboard Shift and Control keys remains unaffected.

Line 5 – This prevents the viewer from downloading your movie and saving it.

Line 6 – All Macs come with Quicktime, so no plugin download is required to watch Quicktime moves if you use a Mac. If you are one of the unenlightened many still using that lock-up device known as Windows, and if you do not have Quicktime on your PC, this line will automatically direct you to the download page of Quicktime for Windows on Apple’s web site.

Line 7 – This scales the movie to preserve its original aspect ratio rather than forcing it to fill your frame.

If you go to the panorama page on my web site and click on any of the thumbnails to watch a movie, you will see these enhancements at work, in full sreen mode.

The full range of Quicktime parameters can be found on Apple’s web site here.

More lies from CBS

Hall of Shame

Protect your property by all means, but lie about it?

Hot on the heels of my piece on digital tampering by the news media comes the not-so startling revelation that the people at CBS are at it again.

This time, the purpose of their lies is innocent if no less damnable, namely protecting the image of their $15mm a year teleprompter reader, one Katie Couric.

A picture being worth a thousand words or 15 lbs of fat, I will let the following photograph do my talking for me. Guess which one CBS used in promoting Ms. Couric?

In the same way that they tried suing gun makers for murders committed with their weapons, doubtless that scum bag class known as tort lawyers will be suing Adobe/Photoshop any day now for making it possible to trim off all that fat. The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable, as Wilde once said of fox hunting.

Always carry …. a sound recorder?

QTVR, Sound

A new twist on an old saying.

Which of us has not heard “Always carry a camera”? The exhortation is rarely informed, of course. Any Englishman will tell you that it never rains when you carry an umbrella, and for most, the same applies to cameras. You never see good pictures if you just happen to have one along for the ride. Good pictures are made, not found.

However, just to put a new twist on it, how about “Always carry a sound recorder”?

This past weekend I was with our four year old at a local park and, as is the case with kids, Winston made straight for the play area. This, you must understand, is fenced. Not to keep anyone out but rather to keep all those threats to society, little children, in. And no, this was not in the Bronx or Brixton. The reality, I suspect, is that one of the city councilmen just happened to have a relative in the fencing business and …. well, you know how the rest of it goes.

Well, Winnie was struggling with the latch to the gate so I gave him a hand, only to be met with the most appalling squeaking as the gate opened. Payola for the gate oiling program must have been missed this year, I suppose. But the emotion I felt most was one of excitement. This was a fantastic sound effect! So I whipped out the Edirol sound recorder (from its newly acquired 99 cent canvas case found at Target – Roland being too cheap to supply one) and had at it with the gate, much to Win’s amusement. We whanged the gate back and forth a few times and had a jolly old time doing it, I must say. Creepy! Adults like funky sounds too!

I had already added wind howl sounds to the Piedras Blancas motel QTVR picture but this project just called out for a creaky gate sound to complete the feeling of desolation. It was a moment’s work in Audacity to superimpose the squeaky gate on the wind howl and then to parcel the whole thing up in CubicConnector.

Here’s how the sound tracks look in Audacity – the wind howl is at the top. Subequently I copied and pasted the squeaky gate to match the length of the wind howl then told CubicConnector to loop the whole thing:

Now I’m not about to lug the Canon 5D/KingPano head/Linhof tripod with me wherever I go, in the search of new panoramas. But the Edirol may just make the trip.

* * * * *

A few words about this old motel. It has been on Highway One, close to Hearst Castle for as long as I remember. Back when I first saw it on my inaugural drive up the most beautiful road in California – that would have been 1979 or so – it was replete with gas pumps and was a hive of activity. A half decent restaurant and those same jolly white and electric blue colors. Then over the years it began to fail. Nothing wrong with the location, just lousy management and marketing. Finally, last year, the State of California bought it for an obscene amount of taxpayers’ money and promised to convert it to an educational institution, whatever that means. After all, this is the state that made America’s best public schooling system into the worst in a short twenty years, so it’s not as if they can claim to know anything about the subject.

A year later what you see is what is in my picture. A couple of old paint buckets sit outside the deserted main entrance. Weeds grow everywhere. The gas pumps are long gone and a couple of abandoned cars soil the parking lot. It’s an incredibly sad scene. Desuetude and detritus in this otherwise pristine area, with a brown State of California sign ‘Closed for Restoration’ tacked by the doorway. That’s a sign that needs to be posted on the Capitol in Sacramento.

Keld rediscovered

Photographers

The Great Dane is back.

I first learned of the sparse, severe work of Danish photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen from early issues of Leica Fotografie magazine from the 1950s. His focus on carefully composed details of ships, ropes, man made items for the most part, was appealing for its clarity of vision and very sparing use of color. It has aged a lot better than Danish furniture.

While ‘lifestyle’ magazines leave me cold for the most part – why would you pay for marketing after all? – there’s one that is head and shoulders above the others. Indeed, as the only way to get it is to be the registered owner of one of their products, its hardly marketing at all. After all, you have already paid up. And the best thing about their products is that no one will know what you have. If you like gauche Rolexes, look elsewhere. That magazine is put out by the makers of one of the very few mechanical items more lovely to behold than an early M Leica. It is called Patek Philippe and I urge you to get a Patek if for no other reason than to enjoy the publication:

Most noteworthy in its editorial policy is the frequent focus on art and photography. The currrent issue (Volume 11, Number 7) has, in its large pages, superb portolios of the work of Don McCullin (of Viet Nam war photography fame) and Keld Helmer-Petersen. An equally fascinating article looks at modern makers of sundials. Add substantive pieces on French sculptor Camille Claudel and Francois Junot, a Swiss maker of mechanical objects (see the cover, above), and you have content not likely to be found in the pages of some nouveau riche-targeted hack job put out by ‘luxury’ car makers extolling the virtues of their plastic upholstery and the latest in internal decorating.

While Keld-Helmer Petersen made his living as a commercial photographer, it’s his 1948 book ‘122 Colour Photographs’, which I am lucky to have in the library at home, that made him famous. When everyone was working in monochrome, he turned to color because, in his words “You have to think of colour as form….”. It helps that the interview is conducted by a famous photographer, the Englishman Martin Parr, so it is neither banal nor trite.

It looks as if his ‘rediscovery’ may encourage Petersen to publish again and I urge you to place the book on your short list.

And just in case you fall for Patek’s tag line “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after if for the next generation”, let me disabuse you of that belief. The reality is that it’s like owning a rangefinder Leica, meaning a cleaning and overhaul every five years at horrendous cost. These are intensely mechanical devices, after all. The next generation had better hope I don’t go belly up if it wants mine (the Patek, not the Leicas; I’m selling the latter). Leicas get obsoleted. Pateks do not.