I originally got a macro (close up) lens mainly to do jewellery/product shots, I didn’t really intend to do much nature photography with it. A while ago whilst doing some late night internet shopping I had a moth buzzing round the lightshade being a nuisance. I turned the light off hoping it would go away but it just landed on the computer monitor instead. I tried (and failed) to get a shot of it using the monitor as a lightsource (it was too dim). I then decided to have a go with the flash not really knowing what to expect. Considering it was all done with no preparation I was pretty pleased with the result. Here’s the set up if you don’t believe me!

The chance to do some more nature macro photography fell into my lap recently - though I warn you if you are at all afraid of spiders then I strongly suggest you don’t click through to the second part of this post!

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MonaTweeta II
Originally uploaded by Quasimondo

Came across this interesting project today - the goal is to devise a scheme to compress an image so that it can be transmitted in a single tweet, which comprises a mere 140 characters - barely long enough to describe the four course meal you’re part way through consuming.

To illustrate the magnitude of the task at hand, that opening paragraph weighs in at about two tweets. Quasimondo’s solution utilises some neat tricks.

Firstly using Chinese characters increases the available storage as the set is larger than the standard western character set (which presumably enables anyone fluent in Cantonese to exchange essays over twitter).

The clever part as far as I’m concerned is the decoded image is generated using the Voronoi tessellation, which means each of the multi-sided shapes that make up the image can stored as a single point with x and y coordinates (plus a colour).

This enables large and potentially complex regions to be transmitted very efficiently. This does, however require the careful placing of points to generate salient shapes, whereupon the next clever idea is utilised. The points, or ’seeds’ are generated randomly at first and then mutated over many generations of a genetic algorithm to find the arrangement that best replicates the original image.

Click the thumbnail for a more complete description from the man himself.

MG