British Wildlife Center | February 2012

After a long wildlife photography hiatus, I'm back! Well maybe. I'm running out of my own photos to sketch from, so maybe it's time to go back to get more references from the wildlife parks.

I wasn't aware that Surrey was having a boatload of snow, thankfully I wore my full bad weather setup - with a minor hickup of not wearing double layered socks, so my toes are still feeling quite tender even as I type.

The critters we managed to get photographs today were the Red Squirrels, Wildcats, Otters, Deer, Harvest Mice and Owl. Foxes and Badgers were no go, the first being uber skittish, and the latter refusing to wake up.

Brought my usual wildlife kit out - D300, 300/4, 70-200. For the most part, the 70-200 was in use, though when the harvest mice were abound, I switched over to the 300/4, occasionally with the 1.4x TC.

Bit rusty shooting with long lenses, and messed up alot of the shots by incorrectly selecting where to focus. To give an idea of how thin the DOF is on a 300mm:

The AF - thankfully - is still spot on, and I was using a single point AF for most of the day, alternating between 11 and 51 AF points depending on the speed of the critter. I only had to switch to multi point Af when tracking fast moving critters or low contrast subjects.

What can I say. I just love the D300's AF.

Towards the end of the day, a pair of owls were brought out for us to shoot, a Tawny Owl and a Barn Owl. I'm not a big fan of owls standing around, so tried to get uber close details.

The above is un-cropped, using the 300/4 with the 1.4xTC. Bit saddened there were no foxes available, would have been frakkin' awesome to catch them in the snow.

Perhaps next year.

Two new things were also introduced into my photography today, first off is my flash being powered by Sanyo Eneloop batteries. After years of pining for them, I finally have a set! Only because I blew up my last set of batteries and their charger. I don't know why, don't ask. But it's not bad, since I've used them for about 2 years, across countless photography trips over many countries.

The eneloops are.... well they work like the sanyos they replaced. Supposedly they rock as they don't have any charge leakage, so you don't need to "top them off" before going on a photoshoot.

In addition, the bundle I picked come with a really awesome microprocessor controlled battery charger than charges 4 cells together, *individually* shutting of the charge when each cell is done. On top of that, if only two cells were charged at a time, a quick charge mode activates, decreasing the charge time in half. And 3 times the speed, if only 1 cell was charged. I can't see myself using this feature, but it's still nice to know this little tidbid :)

Secondly, I've moved over to Corel Aftershot Pro... no sense in hanging on to old software. Still getting to grips with the package. One thing I'm not a fan of is the contrast slider, it tends to give some really hot highlights, whereas adjusting the contrast via a curve seems to do much better. Color wise, I'm a bit too pooped to copy/redesign my old color curves for Aftershot Pro, need to get that done soon.

Two Wolves

Came across this searching for stuff wolves to practice my sketching.

http://www.community4me.com/two_wolves.html

Ack it's February!

January's over! Aieee!!!! 1/12th of the year is gone, can't believe time is flying by so fast.

Have I Told You Lately

Music music music.

The saxophone logs will now be shifted towards the end of each month, as I will take the first few weeks to familiarize myself with each new ballad the forum members decide. And those few weeks will be needed to create my backing track as well. Seems like my theory lessons are slowly paying off :)

I've been asked several times if I intend to take this as a new career, and the answer is no.... The lifestyle of a gigging musician is definitely not what I'm interested in.

What I want to do though, is join jam sessions.

Ever since the last two times I've played in an ensemble, it's just magic. Creating music on the fly in real time with people. Hence: Jam Sessions.

Lots around London. Appear, pick a tune, improvise. Oh yeah. The jams I've been to so far are just waaay beyond my level. To do that, I need to learn the language of music, then I can speak it.

How time flies

Checking out some piano sample libraries at Imperfect Samples, it seems like the downloads are in the range of gigabytes. Like..... more than a single layer dvd! (Ok, so I'm outdated but whatever)

It just brings me back to the old days with my 28.8k modem, when a game *patch* for like mechwarrior 2 or some microprose game, which was like perhaps a megabyte plus took about a quarter hour to download. A megabyte won't take more than a few seconds with today's dsl speeds.

Similarly - RAM. I remember the day I earned enough moola to afford the 8MB ram upgrade so that I could actually play mechwarrior 2 - I'd purchased the game only to realize 4mb of ram was insufficient >.> And look at us now. I have 4gbs on my laptop at home, and at work we get to use machines with insane (to me) ram limits.

How time flies, and technological progression marches on. Now if only we can develop not only technologically, but *socially*, as a species.

Wacom Bamboo, 3rd Generation

Time really flies - has it been almost 2 years since I began my journey into learning more about sketching? Even though I only spend about a quarter of an hour a day - as well as a weekly trip for life drawing sessions (this has stopped due to time constraints) - I've seen well warranted improvements over the hundreds of hours spent.

On a whim about two weeks ago, I decided I want to dip a little into digital painting. A tablet makes sense here, and a Wacom tablet is in order then, but the prices of intuos was a major turn off - £250 for the M sized tablets I see littered around the desks of artists at work?

Ouch inducing for a newb! The alternative choice is Wacom's entry level tablets, the Bamboo series, that clocks in at £49. The Bamboo Pen Tablet (CTL-470) is the cheapest of the bunch, and features just a pressure sensitive surface with no frills. It does come with a license for ArtRage 2.6 though.

In use, I can't say it's better than an Intuos or not since I've never really used an Intuos, but it compares well, or maybe better to the Graphire I used to use. One thing I've noticed, is that after learning how to sketch on a pencil, I had a far easier time with the Bamboo, versus back in the day when I could *not* draw - the graphire was a pain to use.

In practice, the Bamboo is well built, and while the feel is far from that of the Intuos (£49 vs £150 for the similar sized Intuos S) and lacks buttons, for the hobbyist it is great. One minor gripe I have is that it uses one of the odd micro usb connectors, different from the types we connect mp3 players and portable drives with - another cable to keep track of.

On OSX, it plugs in and works out of the box. The installation CD leads to a web download of some apps as well as the Bamboo driver. So far, I'm still figuring out how to paint, with ArtRage and Pixelmator. The later, is to me, a pseudo photoshop for twenty quid. Imports .abr brushes, and the menus, panels and layers just work for me.

The issue I found here was the response of the pen did not work for me out of the box - and caused me quite a bit of frustration as I messed about with the pressure settings in Pixelmator to get it to work. It ended up to be a setting in the OSX's Bamboo Control Panel for the pen's stiffness - a stiffer setting worked far better for me.

Tried it on my Ubuntu box, but gave up after a quarter of an hour fiddling with drivers and all. I have much better things to do than figure out software - like harmony and all that jazz. If only OSX didn't have such a crappy interface - I really, really dislike the Finder in Snow Leopard, and the way resizing windows works etc just plain sucks. It's too bad, since I really enjoy how applications and stuff just works. Much prefer to spend my time doing/learning stuff than compiling drivers, seriously. That's me getting old and whiny.

So, to wrap this up, I think for the price the Bamboo is a great buy, and perhaps down the road in a few years, I may upgrade to an Intuos.

Corel AfterShot Pro.... what?!

Last week, Bibble Labs announced that they have been bought over my Corel. I think I snorted out some of the tea I was drinking. Like... what. the. hell?!


Apart from OS upgrades and reinstalls, RAW converter changes annoy me. Alot. Between bibble 4 and 5, they'd made a change to their rendering engine, and whilst it was for the better, I need to re-learn all the tools again.

So what about AfterShot? For the moment, I've got the trial version -  and us Bibble 5 users get to purchase the full version for £14, so it's quite a good deal. Well it had better be a good deal since Bibble is now sold to Corel for goodness sake.

Initial tests went well. Loaded it up, set my icc profile, reset, and tested on some D300 and LX5 files.

Out of the box, AfterShot IS bibble, all the familiar commands are there, and on my Linux box, it actually seems to run smoother, and the UI seems to work better. Props to the team there. Noise Ninja seems to be the full version, but it could also be a system thing since I'd purchased the full version years ago.

In general, the controls I use mainly in B5 have moved over seamlessly to AfterShot. There are some custom curves I have developed over time that I will probably need to port over, but it's not difficult to come up with new "looks".

The D300 raws ran as expected, though I feel that the click white tool *may* work better previously, but it's hard to say. LX5 wise, the click white tool still does not work as expected, and the color balance profiles just don't work. Thankfully, the LX5 has much better white balance detection compared to the D300, and the "As Shot" profile usually gives very good results. Usually. I've had one or two LX5 raw files come in... green.... and it was a picture of a piece of paper.....

This is the thing with digital photography, raws are good and all, but I wonder, I wonder, when will my D300 raws be no longer viewable?

On the flip side, fact: My photographs aren't exactly pro-level "omg awesome" level good, so even losing them won't mean much. Plus, all the keepers are already exported to full sized jpegs, so at least there's that.

Bottom line, the new piece of software works, and time spent agonizing over the D300's raw format is a waste of time. Time better spent say, oh, doing houdini or figuring out chord voicings.

Wolf, out.

RBD Chain Sim

Found an interesting problem on the forums, and had to investigate. Chains, a fully simulated chain. The issue the OP had was with the links penetrating, and testing showed that increasing substeps helped.... but was that it?

Further stress testing showed that the links will still inter-penetrate given certain motion types (like that shown in the example, an animated link lifting the rest of the simulated chain).

Solution was to increase the Collision Passes parameter, *together* with the maximum substeps.

Weekend project - procedural active state sim

Inspired by this video, I did the above sim. It's more or less setup for the particle emission as well - feeling under the weather atm (fever, cold, etc), no mood to do more.

Ikuze, 2012!

The first week of 2012 is over! Dang that was fast. Started on a new shot today, looking forward to Monday to try some stuff I thought up on the way home. If not, it's full steam ahead. 2012, let's make you a great year!!!

We're all beginners... at some stage

Let's start the new year with an inspirational quote!

What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Ira Glass

From: writerunderground

Whilst Mr Glass refers to writing, this is obviously applicable in any creative field. Keep on plugging away, chase the dream, make it reality.

Silent Night, Holy Night

Just finished an arrangement for "Silent Night". My first arrangement, ever, and it sounds more or less quite awful. Not only that, I tried a new miking position that's closer, and makes the sax sound so damned thin. Maybe I should EQ the sax - if I knew how ;-) Last month's try on Fly Me To The Moon had a really nice tone, and that was done with the mic a fair distance away. GAH! :D

Harmonica and sax :3

We had a secret santa on our show, and my secret santa gave me this harmonica above! I don't know that much about harmonicas - apart from what they sound like - and some research proved it to be a very capable - and inexpensive - instrument indeed.

For a start, what I received was a 10 hole diatonic harmonic keyed in C. What's interesting is how the notes are produced - not only by blowing into the harmonica, but also from drawing air through it. I'm guessing mine is based on the standard Richter Tuning. Many props to my secret santa, that made my day :)

In other news, today was the last day of my sax class, for the year anyways, and we covered *alot* of topics, vibrato, tremolo, improving the articulation on the upper register, subtoning, and modes. Whew.

Articulation didn't take too long as I'd already mentioned to my teacher last month that I was having trouble articulating it, and we'd look at it the next lesson (i.e. today). In the mean time though, I worked on improving my embouchure - which seemed fruitless - but changing it - more lip out - seemed to do the trick, and my teacher agrees. Not only did it allowed me to articulate the upper register, it also added more harmonics to the high notes. Win.

Subtoning is new for me, so more things to practice, and modes, something I was never interested in but since I am learning about basses (mmmm double bass) and walking bass lines, that came up and had me throughly confused. Thankfully my teacher cleared up my misgivings quickly. Can't wait to get started on my arrangement now.

Forward!

HunbleBundle - Indie games - for all platforms!

Stumbled upon The Humble Indie Bundle a few days ago and have been gaming the past few nights. Oh joy! The main game of this bundle I was after is Gratuitous Space Battles, aka GSB. Reminds me visually of Master Of Orion 2, so picked it up hoping the gameplay would be similar.

Yes, and no. It's basically MOO's fighting and ship building section, in continuous waves. No building ships, no worries about space amoeba, just design ships, hit deploy and watch your fleet take on the cpu's fleet :D

Found a nice tactic of tanking with heavily shielded ships up from, with a second line of ships with just missiles. Shreds enemies reaal fast. What's curious, is that the *basic* weapons seemed to do the best damage *shrugs*. At the core, it is still a scissors-paper-stone kind of game.

Towards the end, I didn't even bother to deploy small ships, just the main cruisers in the pattern above, or for the giggles, a whole menagerie of the middle sized space ships armed with nothing but missiles and torpedos.

Apart from that, other games I tried were the a platformer and shump, Cave Boy+ and Jamestown. Jamestown refused to run on linux - spent a good hour browsing forums to no luck. Luckily, my "audio production machine" - a mac - runs the mac ports perfectly. Download, click, install, game on! No fussing about with dependencies or segfaults, gah.

Both games are superb, and they take me back to my youth, with Cave Boy's old school pixel art and fm sounds. Jamestown is a great shooter, graphics are amazing, and alot of attention to detail was paid on the sprites. The music is superb, with great cut scenes as well.

I've mostly stopped gaming as I know I get tunnel visioned to complete the game, and with games like FF XIII clocking in at more than 50 hours of game time, it's not a way I wish to spend my time.

These smaller games don't seem to suck me in that much, especially with smups like Jamestown that don't seem to have any leveling system in place - easy to just hop on and get distracted for an hour or two.

Oh well back to more serious stuff.

Audio Synthesis in Houdini

I purchased Logic Studio recently for my recording and mixing needs, and came across the synthesizers in it, learned alot about alot (ok two) of them and have fallen in love with the concept of synthesis, be it subtractive synthesization, FM and what have you. I've learnt a bit of this in school (yay engineering) applied to linear systems, and have some experience with RF modulation, but never for audio synthesis like this.

The concept of creating an initial tone, which is then filtered and passed through an envelope generator to give us a sense of articulation, sustain and delay is just... wow. I'll never listen to electronic music the same way again.

Having been doing various tutorials with Logic's ES2 synthesizer, which is a mainly a subtractive synthesizer. Whipped up this little test in Houdini's chops for giggles.

It's exactly as described above. My base tone is a Triangle wave, which seems to give a very pure tone with some harmonics. A square wave is then generated and passed to the trigger chop, which generates envelopes. (The envelope controls are surprisingly, a step ahead of the ES2's controls, including features such as interpolation type, delay *hold* length, among many others).

CHOPs node layout

Multiplying the envelope train against the triangle wave gives a psuedo wind instrument sound.

I have a copy of Andrew Lowell's Simultaneous Music, Animation, and Sound with Houdini - from years back that I did not finish. Looks like it's time to figure out how I can link my music to houdini :)

Ignore Everybody

http://gapingvoid.com/ie/

Came across this website, of all places, a forum discussing the merits of different audio compressors, i.e. VCA vs Opto vs FET vs etc etc

It's a very pleasant read, and I hope to incorporate a few more ideas into what I do in my free time.

The bottom line I read from the extract is:

Choose to live your life the way you think is best for you. No one else knows what is the best for you.

Chase your dreams, no matter how small. Don't copy*, be original even though the path may be lonely and un-travelled.

Work hard. This brings up the 10,000 hour rule, and the question of talent vs hard work. I'm sort of in-the-middle of the rule. I think talent is important, but more importantly, I think is the desire, the drive, and the (shudder) "passion" for what you love. Talent (which I wish I have) plus drive and dedication means an uber vfx td, imo. Which I am not. Yet. :P

Challenges. Everyone has their own set of issues with which to conquer. I think I have a fair number of those, like my inability to go socialize. I am sooo sad here, and it is what I believe to be a BIG challenge to tackle.

* I some what disagree with the no-copy idea. As stated in posts before, copying is a very good way to develop skills, not to exist as a copy. Skills learnt can be applied in so many ways (e.g. I use alot of wedding photography style flash, BUT I've never shot a wedding ;-) ) - once again, it brings up Everything Is A Remix.


This quote from the URL easily summarized the path I've chosen to walk.

"The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care."

No regrets. Carpe Diem.

Parallism of Learning II

STICK WITH WHAT YOU GOT
Another aspect of learning is your tools, or rather, learning the nuances of our tools, before we can actually perform. In the case of photography, it's learning about just how to operate the camera, from basic stuff to like filenames, to more advanced stuff like setting up dynamic AF, tweaking the exposure meter, AF tracking time etc.

Things like this take time and experimentation, and only experience gives you the knowledge when to use it e.g. If I have time, I will use a single point AF combined with the AF confirmation light, if it's a fast moving street type situation I might go the hyper focused route, quick busy situations may require the dynamic af, giving the focus more chance to be "in focus".

Not to mention the exposure meter, no reflective meter is that good, and after years working with the camera, I instinctively know when to increase/decrease my compensation for the exposure I need - without checking the histogram to know I'm in the correct ballpark - comes with experience and many, many thousands of deleted frames.



Even though cameras are built to perform similar functions, I choose mine because it is the most intuitive to me, and it is only after years of use on the same camera that I can quickly adapt to the situation.

Similarly for the saxophone. Unlike cameras, they don't come with instruction manuals (ok it does come with a fingering chart), and it takes years to learn the nuances of the instrument. For example, my Middle D plays very sharp - a characteristic found (supposedly) in almost every saxophone.

Adjusting your embouchure (shape of mouth, in layperson terms) supposedly is the way to fix this, but not on my sax - it drops to the octave below. I need to play it with another key (high D) pressed down, just to get it on pitch. That said, I've noticed that my middle D intonation is actually getting better, so much so that with high D pressed, I actually go flatter......

Apart from variables like these, we've got the favourite part every saxophone player tends to fiddle with at times - mouthpieces, and their ilk, the ligature and reed. I've swapped a few mouthpieces in my short span of playing the saxophone, and everytime I tried on a new mouthpiece, I have to relearn how to play the piece. With my current piece, the Vandoren V5 A27, I think I've had it for at least 4, 5 months, and I'm still learning subtle nuances about it. How to hit harmonics, where to put the jaw, breath pressure for different notes.


Bottom line is, unless there is something majorly wrong or holding you back, equipment nowadays is more than suitable for most of us. Ok well more than suitable for me. No plans to change the saxophone (although I am still drooling for a vintage finish keilwerth sx90r) - and definitely not for the camera. Heck, ever since I got bitten by this music bug, the camera's usage has dropped significantly, only bring it out once a month or so.

Let's see how long it takes before I buy a new sax or mouthpiece :3

Parallelisms of learning

Today I realized how similar the path I took with the saxophone versus photography. In terms of learning, I approached them similarly, but one of self taught (photography) versus the saxophone, which I had the guidance of a really good teacher.

First, is learning from the masters.
One underlying topic my sax teacher has pushed is transcribing (I am pretty sure I wrote this in another post but whatever) - by doing so not only do we train our ear, we also learn the nuances of how the pros play, how they articulate to give a certain feel, it's like parker vs pepper vs desmond. Learn from the masters, and incorporate them into one's playing.

Exactly like what Everything is a Remix is trying to get across.

On the flip side for photography, I do the same, analyzing how the photographers I respect do their photography - this is exactly what I've seen mentioned in the many books I've read. But I only took to this several years ago. And indeed, it seemed like my photography skills improved quite rapidly after that.

So bottom line, copy. Devour everything you enjoy, find out how they do it, copy copy copy. And like the borg, become something greater than the sum of the parts.

or not.

:P

One year of sax...

And what a year it has been. The good, the bad, the ups and downs, the time wasted, things learnt. Looking forward to the future.

In more positive note *ahem* this is also my first outing with Logic Pro 9 :3 I finally bit the bullet and bought a whole slew of software and books for my xmas break. So far, Logic seems like a pretty good step up from garageband - it allows really basic stuff, for example, recording from mic 2 only (garageband only allows mic1, or mic 1 and 2 on the same track)

There is also a proper mixer, with peak levels display which is great to know when I'm clipping. Still very new to the package though, just figured out enough how to record, add reverb and export :) Logic studio comes with Space Designer, a convolution reverb that I'm just getting my feet wet with. The video above has the "Jazz Vocal Room" reverb engaged. Seems nice, but I need to do more tests to compared it against the AU Matrix Reverb, which is very nice in its own right.

Out with the old...

Today actually marks the end of NaNoWriMo, and I did not make it close to the finish point at all (10k/50k). On the flip side, in the brief time I did spend on it, I learnt a little bit about writing, that I do enjoy writing but it's not something I'm "passionate" about (observe the double quotes, I'm not a fan of the word passionate).

Also, I finally wrote down what has been going on in my mind for years, which is very nice.

I will probably finish the story down the line when I keep figuring things out. In the mean time, I have other pursuits that I do enjoy spending time on.

This month has been quite downhill, for out-of-work things, but they seem to have calmed down, let's see what the next month brings.