The Windy Pixel

The Met

Annie — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 10:30:48 +0000

The Met is my favorite museum in New York – as it’s got something to please everyone. And I just couldn’t resist the second photo….

Photo by Annie Elmer – Feel free to use images with links and credit – no commercial use without permission.

Golden hour above the valley

Justin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 07:40:49 +0000

I was out and about yesterday and didn’t get to post this image. A day late I suppose. Half Dome and the Yosemite Valley from glacier point during golden hour.

Endless Summer

Annie — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:30:50 +0000

Labor Day weekend is upon us, which usually marks the unofficial end of summer. I happily await fall (as it’s my favorite season), but there’s just something about summer. It’s lazy and carefree. The warm feeling on your skin after a day out in the sun. The smell of grilled burgers and hot dogs. The long days and evenings spent out on the porch. Each year I’m sad to see summer go.

I spent a few days in New Jersey at the end of my East Coast trip. I have a good friend who lives there and her family has a beach house in Avon-by-the-sea. New Jersey was everything that I was and wasn’t expecting. Quaint, sleepy beach town – with the occasional appearance by a loud, overbearing “Italian” family or groups of teenagers tanned within an inch of their lives. I didn’t spot Snooki or the Situation though, nor did I flip a table, so I don’t know if my Jersey experience was truly complete. I did get one hell of a sun burn (which has since morphed into a beautiful tan!) and spent 3 days with a great family and the world’s sweetest dog, Lucy.

I hope you all have a safe and happy holiday weekend.

Photos by Annie Elmer – Feel free to use images with links and credit – no commercial use without permission.

The Bean and The Canyon

Justin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:00:20 +0000

Early morning, February – one of the last times that Mike and I photographed the city together. We met in Millenium Park and did a few images of the bean and then grabbed a coffee at Intelligentsia on Randolph. The sky was gray, the light was interesting, but we were a bit too wrapped up in chatting to get any real photography done. After all, this was probably the first time we’d met to put something interesting in front of our cameras for three or four months. It was one of the first clues that the three that had set out in starting tWp had drifted fundamentally onto separate paths. We caught up over a cup of coffee and both headed home, just a few frames on our memory cards and far earlier than we had done on so many previous photowalks. What did Ferris Bueller say? “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.” If I don’t say anything else about tWp and the people with whom I ran it for so long, I’ll say this – we stopped and looked around and the sights were all the better for the people with whom I looked.

Somewhere on Mike’s HD there is some HD video of me explaining this photograph and the process of capturing it. I hope to pair it with an exposition of how to process those frames into the image below.

I am getting close to launching The Golden Sieve and I wanted to do just a couple more posts here on tWp as pieces of reflection on the blog and on times past. I’d like to have those published sometime over the weekend or early next week and then launch the blog afterward. I’m a bit busy at the moment and whether or not I can hold onto this schedule or not is questionable. Your patience is always appreciated.

UPDATE: People are emailing me asking for prints. Since I don’t much care for Imagekind anymore, I’ve gone to a custom – one-to-one interaction system for selling prints (i.e. email me if you want a print).

The North Windmill and Queen Wilhelmina’s flower garden

Justin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:00:57 +0000

Here we are on the extreme west end of Golden Gate Park at the restored north windmill. Two windmills like the one you see here were once used to pump water throughout the park. We came here shortly after sundown to catch a few moments of beautiful light before heading back down the peninsula. The windmill is no longer functional but is now adorned with a beautiful flower garden, the gift of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands.

I can’t wait to see this garden in the winter when the tulips come in! The grass is thick and carefully kept, soft yet firm, like a great green carpet. Families and tourists came and went, taking pictures and absorbing the abundant peace.

I’ve been thinking a lot about image processing and HDR methods recently (on account of my writing a new “What Is”/”How to” post for The Golden Sieve) and I rather like the effect achieved here. The trick is to manage each essential component of the image differently. The Queen’s garden needs a different treatment than the sky in order to achieve the proper look. This requires manual adjustment across the frame and takes a lot more time to process than typical high-throughput methods – which is one of the reasons I will likely not post every day on The Golden Sieve – I’d rather publish fewer, higher quality images than post every day for the sake of posting.

Problem sets

Justin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:00:59 +0000

Oh my yes – Eckhart Hall, the seat of many a mathematics course for me at the University of Chicago.

I got to thinking about this photograph yesterday because of a conversation I was having via twitter with a @thewindypixel follower about bit-depth and dynamic range in photography. Suffice to say that this is a topic that could make ones head swim. I am writing this behemoth of a page on “what HDR is,” and “what HDR isn’t.” Normally these things are best left short and sweet, but the devil is in the details and to be good at something, you need to understand it. I am an academic researcher by day and as such, can’t publish a paper without providing details as to how experimentation was performed. So too it should be with the new blog – there will be a massive “Materials and Methods” page on The Golden Sieve.

Onto the photograph then. I used to head into this hall every other day during the week while class was in session. Either I would have a statistics class here or there was a mailbox for my math instructor. We had to do these highly detailed and complicated problem sets – you know the kind where you have to prove something that is normally taken for granted? I really loved the math – I found myself getting really involved with differential equations and then multivariate calculus it was like learning another language that was as good at describing the world as words, but that could provide explanation for things where words fell flat. In any case, I would have wagers with other students as to who would score higher on the exam – I won. I’m a brat. Then I found biology, or rather, I found myself no longer required to take these great math courses. Perhaps that’s the way I am with a lot of intellectual pursuits (though I’ve stuck with biology for some 7 years now). That same instructor to whom I used to bring these piles of paper wrote me letters of recommendation when I wanted to go to graduate school. So here I am and there I was about to leave the U of C and I hadn’t been in that building for years and years.

I shot with Mike along the lakefront at dawn, getting these images of the frozen jetty at the 31st street beach. I’ve only posted one or two of those – the truth is they were flat. It wasn’t until I came to campus that I really understood my subject and could make great photographs. This image sat on my HD for months – I didn’t think it was that good. Then I reconnected with it somehow – maybe I was in the same frame of mind recently as when I’d taken it. Maybe I am feeling that connection to the University of Chicago all the stronger that I am now out on the left coast.

I didn’t linger long, I made my image of the math building and moved on – off to another pursuit. Never satisfied.

First light on Eckhart Hall, Jan 2010.

The Guggenheim

Annie — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:30:24 +0000

Photos by Annie Elmer – Feel free to use images with links and credit – no commercial use without permission.

A color photograph of a black and white world.

Justin — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 11:00:43 +0000

Today’s photograph is an oldie from between Fullerton and North Avenue on the Lake Michigan waterfront during January. A fresh snow storm was just starting and I got some images of the frozen beach. I posted this image yesterday to the RSS feed of The Golden Sieve – subscribe here. I know a lot of you wonderful people have already subscribed to that feed and I’ll try to keep it interesting and updated both here on tWp and on tGs until I am fully migrated over to that blog. Happy Sunday.

Strawberry Fields

Annie — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 10:30:36 +0000

Photo by Annie Elmer – Feel free to use images with links and credit – no commercial use without permission.

The Golden Sieve

Justin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:41:10 +0000

I’m very proud to announce the name of my new blog and provide an RSS feed to those of you who want to subscribe a bit early. My new blog’s name is The Golden Sieve and it will officially launch on Monday September 6th when I will provide lots more linkage and give you details on what I hope to accomplish, why I named it The Golden Sieve, etc. Until then, you can follow along with my occasional updates via FeedBurner. Click here or on the screengrab below to be transported to the feedburner page for The Golden Sieve. Here you can add it to your RSS reader or bookmark the page and keep an eye on things until I have this new playground finished. You can even subscribe via email and get my RSS updates directly to your inbox! Cool, huh?: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheGoldenSieve

There is something of a welcome post for those of you who subscribe via RSS. This post includes a really cool picture I took of a theater in Ida Noyes Hall – its warm and empty space just felt like the right image for an attempt to populate my new corner of the internet. There is also some information in this post about what you can expect from The Golden Sieve.

I’m really excited about this new blog and I hope you all follow me along to the new venue!