My other machine is your linux box. – heehee. (via brad)

heh

I spent the afternoon working on panoramas in w/ Panorama Tools and Photoshop (Canon’s PhotoStich software didn’t give me enough (well, any) control in fixing problem areas and color balance of a beach party I went to yesterday (much fun).

All this photostiching reminded me of some stuff I’d seen a while back:

• NYCMosaics – J. Brian Caldwell took some stupendous NYC images post-9/11 (tutorial)
• Max Lyons Digital Image Gallery – probably the most well known guy who’s been doing this kind of high-res photostiching (tutorial)

Hmm, next up, taking some of my leftover images and trying out some blended exposures

The water photos I got today make me want to go back to the beach and try every exposure permutation possible.

I got a last minute request from a friend to shoot some photos at the premiere and after-party of Charlotte Sometimes, an absorbing psycho-drama. Double kudos considering its shoe-string budget—$20,000. (definitely a labor of love for all involved) The writer-director, Eric Byler, spoke a bit in the QA that besides making it possible to shoot on that budget, shooting DV also affected the way the actor-character-scene interaction played out as you weren’t changing reels every 10 minutes. A good case of how changing the medium very dramatically influences the content and process.

As far as shooting the after-party event, that was pretty hectic. I don’t usually do that kind of stuff, so I was glad to get some usable shots at the end of the day. Still, rather uncomfortable dealing with lack of equipment (wrong lens, no speed-lite, difusser), and the whole ‘say cheese’ thing, especially when your camera isn’t cooperating.

Hue and cry
on ‘whiteness studies’ classes:

Naomi Cairns was among the leaders in the privilege walk, and she wasn.t happy about it. The exercise, which recently involved Cairns and her classmates in a course at the University of Massachusetts, had two simple rules: When the moderator read a statement that applied to you, you stepped forward; if it didn.t, you stepped back. After the moderator asked if you were certain you could get a bank loan whenever you wanted, Cairns thought, “Oh my God, here we go again,” and took yet another step forward.

This is great: Matrix Reloaded re-enactments in Japan

Hmm, it sucks when you’re procrastinating and then you get in your head to try to find the one song that describes exactly how you’re feeling right now, and it’s just taking forever and you just can’t find it.

Former Aide Takes Aim at War on Terror

The Orin Hatch thing has been making the rounds recently. Err, yeah. What can I say? Hoo-ray for corporate vigilantism. Can’t wait until they talk about letting companies send out enforcers to break your knee-caps the next time you download anything. Sci-fi dystopia, here we come!

(are we there yet? are we there yet? — yes kids, we are.)

Of course, the obligatory TJ:

It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.