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

Conventional wisdom states your money is better spent on a good quality lens than on the camera body. And for the most part it’s a very good piece of advice - something like the Canon 85mm f/1.2L will produce stunning images mounted on a 1000D body, whereas even a Nikon D3x will struggle to take decent shots with the 18-55 kit lens in anything other than favourable conditions. There is, however an curious anomaly in this trend that occurs at precisely fifty millimetres.

By and large telephoto lenses are easy to design, optically but require some very large [read expensive] elements if you want a fairly wide maximum aperture. In contrast wide angle lenses have to bend light much further and apertures can only be so large without the use of sophisticated [read expensive] optical corrections.

The humble 50mm, once the standard ‘kit lens’ bundled with new SLRs happens to sit at the crossover point. The focal length is long enough to employ a simpler non-retrofocus design, which is tried and tested, with inexpensive elements keeping the manufacturing and assembly cost down. As a result you get a very large maximum aperture and good optical performance for what is relatively little money.

And mounted on a full frame 35mm body the selective focus is sublime…

MG

People ask me how long I’ve been into photography and they are always surprised when I say I’ve really been doing it for less then three years. That’s not quite the whole story however.

I tried to recall my first experiences with photography when I was interviewed recently by friend and fellow photographer Tom Hole. I had an old manual SLR which I learned to use but never stuck with. I was visiting my parents for Christmas and I thought I’d try and see if I could find any of my old prints, and to my great surprise I manage to track down the exact photographs I referred to in the interview:

“I remember being obsessed with creating double exposures, making my friends look like ghosts, and trying to recreate scenes from top gun using model aircraft stuck to the inside of my bedroom window”.

…so here are two photos I took in 1993 when I was 11 years old:

Even at that age I was interested in creating the image from scratch rather than photographing the world around me. And now that I think about it everything I have done since has been preparing me for where I am now - my early experiments in photography were followed by years of working with computer arts packages. This all leads to the creation of composite images and complex work with strobes which are my main passion now, when I finally pick up a DSLR and reignite a dormant interest in photography.

MG

I had to post this as soon as I saw it - vandals/subversives/pop-culture philosophers/bored design students have pasted photoshop toolbars and menus over heavily airbrushed advertisements displayed in the city’s subways, in a bold and candid statement about the spurious nature of the images beneath.

Or so it seems. The cynic in me at leasts entertains the idea that this was in fact carried out by the Ad agencies themselves as part of some guerrilla marketing campaign. Weclome to the age where nothing is real and even some of the hoaxes are a hoax.

It’s fairly clever either way, I’m sure it brightened the odd commuter’s day! And before anyone accuses me of referring to a cream cake in my headline, take a look at this.

MG

What do you do when it’s past midnight on a cold dark Christmas evening & there’s nothing on TV? Put on a 100mm 1:1 macro lens and look for something to point it at! For me the Christmas tree with all of it’s lights and decorations was an obvious target. This is the first time I’d been taking photos for the sheer fun of it in a long time. I was using a macro lens so that nothing would be too close or far away, giving me complete freedom - a principal which dictated my entire approach to the shoot.

If you don’t have a dedicated macro lens there are several options to getting close focus - extension tubes, screw on close up adaptors and finally reversing a telephoto lens.

Other than that you only need a tripod - camera shake is exacerbated by working close to your subject and the relatively dim output of the fairy lights is not going to get you anywhere near hand holding territory! I had the aperture wide open at f/2.8 and this obviously has the effect of reducing depth of field, but the main reason I was shooting wide open, however, was so that I could simply look through the viewfinder and see exactly what I was getting (without having to keep pressing DOF preview). Shoot into something hollow such as a Christmas tree and there will be detail at many of depths, selective focus allows you to pick out what you want and pretty much defines the shot.

I was simply moving the camera around, turning the focus ring and just seeing what looked interesting. The best thing about self assigned projects (or rather, messing around) is that there are no constraints and no penalty if it all goes wrong. It’s something I’m going to force myself to do more often from now on as it not only will it help brush up on technique but it’s good to relax and recharge creativity (you can tell we’re getting to that resolution making time of year again). That’s pretty much it except to say read on to see the results, and do give it a go yourself!

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I should say at the head that this post is not really about photography. But before I get a head of myself, it does head in a similar direction… Ok I’m done.

This is my contribution to The Head Project which, in case you didn’t know, is “a work of worldwide collaborative fiction”. Basically you get a head for two weeks, it is yours to do as you please with the only condition that you document your experiences, feed it and post it off to the next person when the two weeks are over.

So the box arrives in York, and for the first time I begin to get a sense of what the project is really about. The container itself, the outer protective shell of the head is clearly well travelled. There are many addresses scrawled over the cardboard with a return to: in Chicago and it arrives bearing documents from the Icelandic post office. Global indeed. I decided my contribution should coincide with where my own head is at…

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