Thursday, February 25, 2010

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Pi Day

Pi Day Countdown

I didn’t know that.

And what about “e” day?

e” is one of those amazing numbers that arises naturally in the scheme of things.

(Others include “pi” π = 3.141592653…, which is the circumference of any circle divided by its diameter; and “phi” φ = 1.6180339887…, which is the so-called “beauty ratio“). Both of these numbers are irrational (that is, their decimals go on forever and never repeat).

e is also an irrational number and it has value:

e = 2.718281828459…

The number e was “discovered” by several mathematicians (Oughtred, Huygens, Jacob Bernoulli, Mercator and Leibniz) but they didn’t quite know they had stumbled on it and didn’t know its significance.

There are some curious properties of e, one of which is that it’s the limiting value as n → ∞ of (1 + 1/n)n.

It can also be found by adding the infinite sum:

e = 1 + 1/1! + 1/2! + 1/3! + …

So what is e good for?

It is used extensively in logarithms (which was the only way to do difficult calculations for hundreds of years before calculators came along), exponential growth (of populations, money or drug concentrations over time) and complex numbers (which were used to design the computer or mobile device you are reading this on).

So happy “e” day (February 7th, or 2/7).

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Optimizing Photo Composition

Aesthetic images evoke an emotional response that transcends mere visual appreciation. In this work we develop a novel computational means for evaluating the composition aesthetics of a given image based on measuring several well-grounded composition guidelines. A compound operator of crop-and-retarget is employed to change the relative position of salient regions in the image and thus to modify the composition aesthetics of the image. We propose an optimization method for automatically producing a maximally-aesthetic version of the input image. We validate the performance of the method and show its effectiveness in a variety of experiments.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

How to Watch Oscar-Nominated Shorts (For Free)

 

Year after year the Academy nominates a bunch of films for best animated short film and best live-action short film, and consequently, America collectively scratches its greasy, dandruff-laden head. No one watches short films, so why would we have any opinions on these categories? Instead of using the gap created by the short film portion of the Academy Awards to use the toilet in the middle of your Oscar party, why not impress everyone with your brilliant, cultured opinions of this year’s short films? The toilet can wait, because we have friends to one-up!

http://nyulocal.com/entertainment/2010/02/17/how-to-watch-oscar-nominated-shorts-for-free/

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Vancouver City

"Vancouver City" music video is an artistic collaboration between Innerlife Project and TimeLapseHD. For more information and music downloads go to www.innerlifeproject.com
These time lapses are shot with a 12 mega pixel digital single lens reflex cameras. Original resolution is 6 times better then HD (high definition). The images have been resized for HD and are much better quality then shown here on YouTube.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Digital Analogue

Digital Analogue from ftjelly on Vimeo. Since the introduction of digital technology the relationship between camera and photographer has altered dramatically. Speed and accessibility have come at the expense of mystery, intimacy and tactility - qualities exclusive to analogue photography. Initially, and in reaction to this cultural atrophy, I composed a piece of music made entirely from sounds that I had recorded from a collection of antique cameras. Constructed using the digital composition software Reason, this piece carried a strong hip hop feel and seemed to connect past with future technologies. To accompany this track I created a video response that captured traditional, analogue techniques yet also had a strong contemporary theme.
This short film is made entirely with stop motion animation, with over six thousand still photos shot and then edited together. The cameras are literally ‘brought to life’ here, while image composition and lighting is as carefully considered in each video frame as they would be for individual photo shots.