Gramarye

I’ve been trying to take more pictures in black and white lately, partly because I’ve always liked black and white, and partly for the practice. It’s noticeably more difficult to take an interesting black and white picture than a comparably interesting color picture, because of course you’re trying to convey as much meaning with less information.

I suppose this is always the problem in photography; even if you have a color image with very accurate color reproduction, you’re still losing information like context and binocular vision. (It’s very hard to convey what’s interesting about a leafless tree if you can’t tell how the branches relate to each other because you don’t have depth perception.) The human eye, operating under naturalistic circumstances, is very good at spotting the important bits of what it’s seeing; the camera (or, rather, the human eye operating on a still image) is not.

(This doesn’t always hold. For example, the fun of macro photography of things like flowers or knitting is that you can see a level of detail that you hardly ever bother to observe when you simply happen to be in the same place as a flower or a piece of knitwear.)

So, it’s good practice to use black and white, because that forces you to pay attention to the information thats’s going to be lost when the color goes away; a tree in bloom will obviously stand out from its non-blooming fellows if you can see the color of its flowers, but if you can’t, it may do nothing of the sort.

I’ve had varying levels of success. These are relatively lame, for what I think are obvious reasons:

They would be somewhat less lame in color.

These are a bit less lame:

And I’m very fond of a few things, like the puddle at the top of this post, or this leaf, which is one of the few black and white macro shots I’ve taken that didn’t look totally stupid:

The interesting topography (am I using that correctly?) of the leaf is not as obvious when you can see its color. Unfortunately, I don’t have a color image of it, which indicates a lack of foresight on my part. :)

This one would be much better if I had a longer zoom or better resolution, because you can’t see much detail on the bird itself, but the ripples are much clearer than they would be in color. (I’ve had pretty bad luck photographing birds swimming in the channel previously, and I think this is why.)

Obviously I’ve got a ways to go before I can handle color and light correctly — even on the goodish pictures — but that’s the post of another day.

Note that this woman is attempting to break a record set by another woman. That’s interesting to me, since this seems like a characteristically masculine form of bravado/stupidity. Not to say that I disapprove in any way…

Woman attempts to break Guinness record by eating ghost chilis - Slashfood

It works great. The handle contains some kind of spring-loaded goodness so that energy builds slowly and is released suddenly. Sort of like shooting your paperwork with a crossbow.

(more…)

Just watched the pilot. It’s not bad. I was into it the entire time, the performances were all fine (and I like that they went with a cast more or less devoid of big names), and there were some neat tricks (the shirts, the way scene elements appeared and disappeared in response to the narration) that were funny and made you feel that someone involved in the thing was clever.

However, I’m concerned at how much ground was covered in the first episode. Essentially, not only did we get quite a lot of backstory on the characters, we also got about two seasons’ worth of plot. It’s one thing to catapult the viewer into the action, in the style of a JJ Abrams show — the way ??Lost?? jumps you into the aftermath of the plane crash, or the way ??Alias?? takes you straight through the premise, the family, and the killing of Sydney’s fiance. But the level of plot content covered in the ??Donellys?? pilot is comparable covering the entire first two seasons of ??Alias??, up to Irina jumping off that roof, entirely in through a combination of many very short scenes and pervasive narration.

Is the show going to keep up this breakneck pace? Hopefully not, because that would preclude anything like character development or good storytelling. Is it going to maintain the narrative framework? Hopefully not, because narration is a bad idea. But these two characteristics are what define the pilot, and I’m not at all sure I know what the show will look like without them.

Still, it was enjoyable enough, and I’ll certainly give it my viewership at least for a few weeks…especially since it features ??Fastlane?? alum Kirk Acevedo. I’ll watch anything with someone who was in ??Fastlane??.

I went with my sister to Peet’s and Smart Alec’s today. I happened to have my knitting with me (I’m currently working on a sleeve for my first sweater). It prompted a little more than usual interest today — not sure why. A couple of older women at Smart Alec’s complimented me on my knitting and also on my Bagsmith Project Bag, which is very popular with other knitters. They were perfectly nice.

The other comments and questions I received were also nice, I suppose, although they were a little weird. At one point, a girl came up to me and asked me if I was knitting a sleeve. I told her that I was. Then she asked me if it was for a sweater. I indicated that it was, and I refrained from asking her whether she thought it might be a sleeve for a hat.

But my absolute favorite, by far, was one of the staff at Peet’s, who complimented me on what I was doing, asked incredulously if it was really four needles (I was using five, all told, although — as I explained — you only ever use two at a given time), and then explained helpfully that “his woman does all that,” by which I assume he means that his girlfriend is interested in crafts, and not that he has some kind of female servant who handles knitting in the round for him. I didn’t realize that people still said “my woman” in that sense, in Berkeley, in 2007.

Now, neither of these people were very good-natured, and none of them were in any sense mean to me (although we also had a fun dispute with a rather unpleasant person regarding whether or not the door to a Smart Alec’s should be open following some kind of smoke-emitting incident in the back), but today’s experience has definitely not improved my feelings regarding small talk, or you know, other people.

Jim Moore points to uses of OPML in the classroom and blueskies an application for link sharing by students.

Amyloo: Friday, February 23, 2007

After a long and utterly tedious saga, which if I haven’t shared with you already I certainly shan’t trouble you about now, I finally received my 10″ US7 DPNs. I’ve been waiting for these so that I can finally start work on my first sweater.

(I really can’t use circulars. I hold my needles in a non-standard way — a way which is basically incompatible with circular needles. Also, the one time I tried using a circular, I found the need to switch to DPNs to finish decreasing (it was a hat) quite offensive. And since I like knitting on DPNs just fine, I’ve decided not to try to retrain myself.)

Of course, I’m half-dreading this prospect, since first sweaters are notoriously problematic. However, it’s something that I’ll have to get done sooner or later, and there really is no time like the present.

I’ll post soonish with more details about what I’m planning for the pattern, etc. And I’ll also be documenting this whole painful process for future reference — after all, I need to be sure I know what not to do next time. :)