art lover, reader of books, capturer of light, manipulator of pixels, teller of stories.
The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.
I really enjoyed The Killing last night. This early Kubrick film from 1956 was fantastic! It had an interesting narrative structure, skipping back and forth from character to character back and forth in time as they plan to rob a racetrack. Great characters! The pacing of the horserace in an early scene must have been great on the big screen in a theatre. I hadn’t seen that Kubrick film before but his budgets grew from this early gem.
On another note, my hallway floor is now 75% complete. I will post images when finished! My buddy Darren is great with renovations so I am lucky to be getting such great work! 🙂
The weather is turning cold and it is damp. I really noticed it this morning as I went to the gym. Scary stuff!
My friend RP surprised me with an early morning walk up in the Gatineau’s! Cool fall weather, perfect for the trail. We grabbed a quick coffee at this awesome place in Old Chelsea, called Biscotti. Right around the corner from the Chelsea Pub. The trees were more bare than we both expected but the view at the top was quite impressive! Here are a few pics including a lonely bicycle 🙂
A really great way to start the weekend!
I wondered if there was a way to aggregate text conversations to build info-graphics. I was initially interested in my own text messages, wondering how many times i have used the word “dude”, for example. Or how many times my messages were about saying that I was on my way! The only downside was that I couldn’t find a way to export all of them as simple text. Once they were text I could easily parse them in Visual Basic. But I digress. I then thought about whether or not the same could be done with massive social network data.
I assumed that Google (the company itself) would do it in order to improve their search engines but I wondered if the information was available to little old me. It would be fascinating to convert that data in order to better grasp the “chatter”.
Turns out that these researchers did exactly that with data from Facebook. Fascinating. A lot of those gendered stereotypes are borne out in this study. The authors analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age.
So yes, there is a bias in the sample: these people are interested in participation. I wonder what everyone else is saying. I guess only the NSA can produce those infographics.
I was once asked about Facebook and if I thought it was the new google. I didn’t and still don’t. Facebook doesn’t really do anything. It aggregates your data in a graphic user interface that you can easily use. To me, it is essentially the same as the open source WordPress. The other reason why Facebook isn’t a great investment is that while once cool, it isn’t anymore. I give it another few years before it becomes mySpace 2. Funny stuff here.
Hypocentre is a new video with an environmental message: humans can be a destructive force on our planet. While I enjoy taking photos of the streets of Paris without people as well, I’m amazed that they got such wide shots of Parisian streets without anyone at all!
well worth the watch!
Oh…. and if you want to know how they did it, click here!
The kayaking was a bust. I did get a chance to use the 100-300mm, just no blue herons. I’m really happy with it, and put it through its paces in some shots with limited light. It has a lot of “character”, something that I would expect with one of my older legacy lenses. This has auto-focus 🙂
So below are a selection of various shots over the weekend. There are some macros of bird feathers and bones with my Olympus 60mm, the vast majority are the 100-300. Most have some minor cropping, some more than minor. The cows were a real treat 🙂
The weather is wet and cold and I love it!
My friend RP moved into her new house this weekend so I am very happy for her… so happy that I decided to steal one of her photos that she took on a recent trip with her sister to use as my new header… i hope she doesn’t mind 🙂
I purchased the Panasonic 100-300m telephoto to get some photos of wildlife while kayaking but no luck so far this weekend. I have, however, been reading and last night I did get a chance to take some shots of a beautiful sunset! And while not the sharpest lens or the brightest lens, I think it did a pretty good job! So here are some images from last night:
Many thanks to MB for the suggestion to watch David Gelb’s 2011 documentary on the greatest living sushi master: Jiro Ono. Tokyo’s own 85 year old sushi master is a Michelin three star restauranteur who specialize in high end sushi. This is the story of Jiro and his two sons who work with him, learning at the heel of the master. Really great stuff!
Here is the link on wikipedia!
And here is a link to yet another Top 10 movie list at Open Culture. This one is interesting. Vertigo supplants Citizen Kane. I watched the first 5 on the list before falling asleep during 2001. Attempting to discern the “best” film is like, in this case, asking what is better: Cubism (Vertigo) or chiaroscuro (Welles)?
I had never seen Sunrise, Murnaus’s 1927 silent masterpiece. I found it riveting! The soundtrack was excellent, from the lonely horn as he calls to his wife to the set design – an entire city block complete with cars! I’m no silent film aficionado or anything but I really enjoyed this. Tokyo Story is blissful.
Im looking forward to finishing watching the rest of the films on the list… maybe this weekend. And then maybe a Fellini marathon 😉
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
Tokyo Story (Yasujirô Ozu, 1953)
La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
A brief sunny interlude into a rather overcast day. There was a lot of wind so I just took my chances with the macro of the bugs with an Olympus 60mm. 🙂
