Posts Tagged 'photography'

Hey I’m actually blogging again! I had three resolutions last year: start playing games again (Success!), process photos (not good enough), blog again (delayed success!). Establishing a good work/life balance is tricky. It’s often hard to do really enjoyable or productive things when you’re sorta half way working all the time. It’s much better to just disconnect, and I’ve found my working hours are more productive per hour. There’s a decent amount of research into it, but aside from short bursts we’re really only productive working 6-7 hour days. If you do 12-16 hours a day for weeks those hours become less productive and certainly less insightful. So I’m currently working to enforce taking breaks and cutting work out and stopping thinking about it.

About the blog again. This blog has been the least popular of my 3 personal blogs, but coincidentally the only one tied to my real identity. Mostly, it never really had a focus and I sorta liked it that way. People often describe personal blogs as naval gazing, and then the same people proceed to live blog inane things on Facebook all day. I think I’ve posted some fairly useful content, as well as stuff about cooking that far fewer people care about, and I like it that way. I just find writing enjoyable, and I enjoy expressing my dedications to things like technology and cars.

Anyway, back in late 2010 – early 2011 I was averaging 2000-5000 unique visitors per month. Of course by then I’d basically stopped updating the blog, and really only had a spattering of posts until fairly recently. It looks like traffic is back on track and February should be around 2000 again. The screenshot above is still missing a weeks worth of traffic. I’m quite happy about that.

I started playing video games again mid way through 2012. From the start of the ’90s (and arguably earlier) up until the mid 2000s I was a pretty serious gamer. I got really busy with work projects, got stressed and put off some of one favourite hobbies, I literally didn’t touch any games. This year Eva and I played Corpse Party and Persona 4 (The Golden/PSP Vita version), both extremely fun. I played Mother 3 (something I’d been meaning to play for ages, but all of my Core2Duo Macbook Airs couldn’t really keep up and I’ve lost my GBA copier) which was tear-generatingly good. I played an undub of the English release of Growlanser 4, it was pretty much the best game in that series by a long shot. Really a lot of good time had and it feels good to get back into gaming again. Next on the horizon is the recently released (in English) Corpse Party sequel, or the 3DS remake of Zelda: Ocarina of Time which has been gathering dust on my desk.

Processing photos is still lagging behind. I still have the bulk of my Kyoto pictures from the fall of 2012 and 2011, lots of assorted day trips and a trip to Florida from 2010. Yikes. Eva of course is far more caught up on photos, I think I’m just too much of a finnicky processor. I’ve removed a lot of the fun from it, so while I enjoy taking the pictures I just don’t like tweaking them. It’s something I’m going to work on, figure out a way to pace myself.

OK so aside from the bit about the blog traffic this was a total naval gazing post. Apologies! I’ll have something more interesting written over the weekend :)

Gettin' my Myspace on: the cell-phone-in-a-bathroom-mirror-style self-portrait

One of the hardest things to capture when it comes to cars is the sound of the engine. Engine sound is made up of several components, but the majority of the sound is induction and exhaust. Induction is the howl produced when the cylinders suck air in, exhaust is when they push post-explosion hot air out. Capturing induction isn’t particularly difficult, the frequencies seem to pick up pretty well on everything from cell phones and better. Exhaust is a much trickier thing to capture accurately, though being the louder sound on most cars, is what people desire to record.

The reason exhaust is so hard to capture accurately is two fold. Firstly the frequencies are quite low, which poses a problem for most smaller mic pickups. To that end, I don’t believe its ever *really* possible to capture and play back an accurate exhaust of say a Ferrari or a Le Mans car, but we wan’t to get as close as possible… As much of the sound is ‘felt’ as it is heard.

Boom!

Secondly, and the major problem when recording exhaust notes is the shear amount of sound. A showroom stock high performance car will produce upwards of 80 dB at full throttle at a distance of about 15 meters (50 ft). Thats not particularly a problem for most microphones, but the sound levels go up dramatically as you get closer making it impossible to get any sort of accurate recording. Race cars on the other hand, such as ALMS cars produce 110dB as close as 15 m. Good luck trying to capture it from a far, let alone from right at the apex of a turn. Once a microphone is over exposed, it begins to clip, and not all frequencies are lost evenly. This produces very unrealistic audio, and is the reason that most of the exhaust videos on the youtube are terrible… Anyone who’s tried to record race cars will attest to this.

The 5Dmk2 revolutionized the world of HD video recording, with its full frame sensor’s amazing low light performance. As good as its video quality is, its audio quality isn’t. The tiny onboard mono mic clips early, produces very non linear tones and always ends up sounding echoy. I’ve never been happy with the sound on the videos I’ve produced of our own cars, and at the track its completely useless. Upon doing some research into the budding SLR microphone market, I decided to pick up a RODE Videomic on Tuesday. The mic provides recording down to 40hz (with an optional high pass filter to cut it off at 80hz, though thats the opposite of what I need), and can record 143dB with less than 1% distortion. On top of that, theres dips for -10 and -20db pads. More than enough for the race track. The mic is light and snaps directly into the hot shoe mount, plugging into the mic port on the left of the body.

I gave the setup a test run, which more than vetted the recording resolution of the mic. However I had set gain up wrong on the camera body, which didn’t really show it off. I whistled in the parking garage and watched the dB meter, deciding upon an audio gain of 3/64. This was much too low while blipping the throttle to about 4500 rpm, with the sport button off, that both slows down the opening and prohibits the throttle bodies from opening fully at low RPMs.  (I’ve since learned humans can whistle in excess of 120dB!) I doubled the audio in iMovie ’09, and it was still too quiet. Though despite being boosted by 200%, the reproduction quality was still good, you can hear the muted throaty-ness of the exhaust, and the wurr of the inline-6 feeding it, pretty accurately to being behind the car. Next time I’ll probably go with a gain setup on the camera body of 15/64, keeping the HPF off and not using any of the on-mic pads.  Fun ahead!

I am retroactively posting this, i.e. this is back-dated. Sadly I must have run out of time, something came up, etc, when writing this.

Continuing from my initial experiments with the Rollei mount Zeiss 50mm f/1.8, here was the rest of my weeks photos. Was a fun experiment, the lens is remarkably sharp for something 40 years old and uncoated. The challenge required that all photos be taken on my old 20D crop body, all in jpeg with any and all color changes (i.e. sepia, saturation effects) be done on body. This made things more challenging, but I do like the results I got.

IRCing at work! Feet on the desk.

Manly exhaust!

Commuter reflections

In the tunnels

I hope to do weekly/monthly theme photo challenges in the coming year, i.e. where I pick a theme (say mechanical things, a color, or a particular type of lens) and run with it for a month. We’ll see if time permits. I’m bad enough at processing the photos I take as is.