thedude.com

On today’s return trip from the Golden Rock, we made a few stops. The last of our stops was in Ingabo Village where we happened upon the initiation rite for this 12 year old boy. Tomorrow he heads off to the monastery to do a stint as a monk, where he will live a life guided by by 227 strict rules.

But before he goes, there will be much celebration and dancing. After a blessing and feast, the young man is sent off in style on the back of a costumed dancing (or not) horse.

Some things are best described with sound and motion, and this was one of those events. If you’d like to see how the dancer moved and hear the band or if you’d like to see a non-dancing horse and some adorable kids hamming it up, click on the videos below.

This is always such a difficult event to shoot. The F-18’s are moving at speeds up to 650 miles per hour, and perform their most breathtaking maneuvers more than a mile away. I have to use my longest lens with the camera set to ISO 1000 so that I can use a shutter speed of 1/2500 of a second. Lots of compromises.

I took more than 500 shots. Even so, I think I achieved better results last year. Oh well, I guess I need to keep practicing. More shots here.

Here’s a sneek peek inside Oakland’s Cathedral of Christ the Light. Although the 190 million dollar addition to the Lake Merrit skyline will not be open to the public until 2:00 PM this afternoon, I was able to sneak in yesterday and shoot a quick panorama.

After scratching my head about the outside of the cathedral for months, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the interior is quite nice. The sparsely decorated cathedral is flooded with a diffuse light warmed by the wood louvers. The cavernous space produces the expected acoustics - you know you’re in church with your eyes closed.

The odd feature though is the ginormous Jesus hovering above the altar. The image seems to be created by light passing through a drilled sheet of aluminum. To my eye, the points of light resemble LED’s on an outdoor advertising display or some kind of giant black and white TV, making the effect seem sorta cheesy. Now, imagine that space filled with a colorful stained-glass window. Yes, that would look better.

These images were shot on the roof on May 7, 2000. A lot has changed since then.

Rendered with AutoPano Pro - this pano never looked so good.

We’ve been spending a lot of time with our neighbors Jack Tres and Olive lately. That’s a good thing. I shot this picture at Flora on Thursday night. The light was provided by a single candle on the table in front of Tres. I used my old manual-focus f1.4 Nikkor wide open, at 1/15th of a second with the Magic Camera set to ISO 3200. This image is to me, nothing short of amazing. It’s as if the camera added light to the scene. I could not see her this well with my naked eye!

Then, I added the neat little border and drop-shadow to the above thumbnail without ever opening any image editor. Instead of PhotoShop, I used ImageMagick on my Linux server to create the effect at the command line! The command I used to do this:

convert image.jpg -resize 605x \
-unsharp 0.5x1.2+0.5+0.1 -matte \
-bordercolor white -border 8 \
-bordercolor grey85 -border 1 \
\( +clone -background grey60 -shadow 80x3+6+6 \) +swap \
-background white -mosaic image-thumb.jpg

Why would I do this? A few reasons.

1. It’s very fast - it takes just 2 seconds to create this nice effect.
2. I can create this effect form anywhere without any special tools.
3. The effect can be applied very quickly to a whole directory of images.
4. I can add a “create pretty thumbnail” option to Wordpress.

I have a lot to learn before I have item 4 working, but the challenge is half the fun of it!

Embedded streaming video!

 
I found an inexpensive MOV to FLV converter which produces pretty decent results. The files are much smaller that the source Quicktime files, and still have much of the quality - even at large sizes. This means I can now stream video like this time-lapse of my commute to work directly from thedude.com. New possibilities!

Olive said she wanted a shot of her jumping in the air, and I had in mind what I thought was a cool way to frame the shot. Olive braved frigid temperatures at sunset tonight, but the wind and the light conspired against us. And though none of the pictures turned out exactly as I had hoped, we both had fun during our 20 minute shoot.

thedude and Kelly joined about 1,000 others last night to show our respect for His Dudeness at the first San Francisco Lebowski Fest.

Yes, there were plenty of Jeff Lebowski and Karl Hungus look-alikes. Music was provided by the hilarious Meshugga Beach Party. Primal drum beats and sexual energy came by way of the fabulous Extra Action Marching Band. NEW! Now with Video!

We tried our best to get close to Jeff Dowd, to get a shot of thedude with thedude, but no luck. Perhaps we’d have been able to better focus if we hadn’t consumed those last two caucasions. “Hey, careful, man, there’s a beverage here!”

Yes, you’ve seen this location before on this web site. But not 30,000 pixels wide. The HDView plugin makes this previously unimaginable feat entirely possible. Be sure you have the HDView plugin installed, (Sorry, no Mac version yet) then check it out!

When I first used this plugin over at xRez, I was completely blown away. HDView is a must-have plugin! Get it now!

Then, click on this link to get a taste of what’s to come. Amazing!!! So much to be excited about!

It turns out it’s easy to embed a GigaPan Panorama on a web page. Hopefully, this will get more of you to check it out. Be sure to drag the the zoom slider on the left. Or, double-click on a region to zoom in on it. Looks like I have a white-balance problem in this panorama, but the amount of detail in is fairly awesome! Of course, you can always view a full-screen version as well.

This is really my first attempt with a decent camera attached to the GigaPan, so my results can only get better. Hope you’ll come back often for more!

Of course, after looking at the results xRes folks are getting I’m considering other options altogether…

I was lucky enough to have an amazing seat at today’s Giant’s game. I was in row one directly behind the batter at AT & T park. I think I was closer to the batter than the pitcher was! If you look closely in the very center of the shot, you’ll see a Plexiglas window. My seat was just to the left of it - next to the guy in the blue ball cap facing the camera. :)

Being that close meant that I was too close to the field to shoot a decent panorama. So, to get the shot above, I moved about half way back in the stands. And yes, the Giant’s beat the Marlins, 4-3.