The colour and texture of film with the Mini Diana F+
I’ve been running plenty of rolls of film through my Mini Diana F+ over the past few months. I’ve been quite experimental with black and white and colour film, and some colour rolls I have cross processed. Some shots I’ve structured the composition, but many have been just quick snaps without thinking about it too much. This spontaneity is what the principles of lomography are all about, which I like because they are more about a creative philosphty rather than technical stuff. Shooting spontaneously puts a smile on my face, but has drawn me to notice some of what I call ‘happy accidents’. This is where you capture something great unintentionally. When scanning my film after developing, I discover what I have actually got on the film. Sometimes what you hoped for doesn’t work out as desired, but a lot of the time wonderful things present themselves, sometimes bold, sometimes subtle.
Check out some of my photos below. Click on the images for an enlarged view:
Remember, these were taken on a tiny camera, with a fixed plastic lense, and often the film likes to scratch as it’s wound along…
These shots were taken using lomography’s 100 iso redscale film.
These two were taken with the standard 100 iso ‘lomo’ film from lomography, which has good colour saturation and contrast.
These last three shots were taken with Rollei “crossbird” 200 iso film. This is print film put through a regular C41 negative process. It did weird things, but I like some of the results. Different delicate bits of detail present themselves, along with gritting celluloid grainy, blobby bits like on the edges of the frames.
These are taken with Kodak TMAX 400 iso, black and white negative film. There’s something about the shots that I really like. They’re a little soft, and not with the full range of contrast, but there’s an abstract appeal I think. They almost look like really old paintings.
Some drawing…
I’ve felt a little out of touch with my drawing of late and haven’t been able to devote much time towards it. Sometimes I like to get back into the groove by doing some life drawing, still life, or in this case just some drawings from pictures that I like. Some may discredit this, because it is just replicating an existing image. I understand the argument, but I like to use it as a technique for getting my eye and skills back, analyzing the image and recreating it with a pencil.
Here are three of my latest pics.
Animation test for Jeff Raglus
Here is a looped piece that I animated in flash for Jeff Raglus, a Victorian based artist and musician. Jeff has exhibited his art all over Australia for many years, and he was one of the original kooky artists that helped bring the popular surf brand “Mambo” to fame.
This animated piece has been achieved using flash’s “tweening” morph-like animation techniques. I’m afraid to say that I found these methods very unintuitive to use, often difficult to edit and results can be unpredictable. I’m still getting used to how flash works so maybe I’ll get used to these techniques more and find it easier next time!
I have been a fan of Jeff Raglus’s art for sometime now. We have talked about the idea of animating his work quite a few times, often in the surf, where our high powered meetings take place. He showed me a couple of his paintings from a recent exhibition he had at Qdos Art Gallery in Lorne. Here are Jeff’s paintings that this piece is based off:
Jeff and I are potentially developing his character “Schnorky the Wave Puncher” into a small animated series. We are still discussing which techniques of animation are preferable, and will continue various tests. It’s still very early days, so we’ll just have to see what transpires!
Watermark your images with python
I set about making a tool in python that can place a water-mark identity image over my pictures that I wanted to put in the public domain -(i.e on my website or through email ). Using python means I can make a tool that can batch process image files or folders quickly. I think it’s a good idea to watermark your images. This way people know where they come from, so it is less likely that due credit is lost.
Download the watermarking toolkit here.
The download bundle above has 2 tools (LB_picturePrep.py and LB_watermarker.py) for batch processing your images with options. These scripts have been made for command line usage.
LB_picturePrep should cover all that you would need to do when preparing smaller resolution images, with the option of watermarking. It has the revamped functionality of the image proxy making tool I made a while ago. The script is optimized further, and will now automatically orient your images (shot with a digital camera). This way you can make smaller web ready files that are watermarked, all in one operation. Alternatively, if you aren’t interested in making smaller resolution files, then LB_watermarker does addresses the orientation and watermarking with no image resizing.
The requirements for using this toolkit is of course python, an interpreted scripting language. I also use the Python Image Library (PIL) module, which you will need in order to run either of these 2 scripts.
Here are a couple of examples of image results (click to enlarge):
You can see that the tools can position the watermark in different positions, with varying opacity. The image to the left has a black and white watermark file that was ’screened’ over the image. The image to the right has a watermark with an alpha (transparency) channel to allow for a composite ‘over’ operation. Either mode will allow for varying opacity.
See below for the details of the 2 scripts, and how to use them.
LB_picturePrep is the main, more versatile script, and has these features:
- - will automatically attempt to orient your images correctly.
- - will create lower resolution ‘proxies’ with presets for “web” (640 pixels along larger dimension),”1k” (1024 pixels along larger dimension) or otherwise will take a divisional ammount to create the smaller images.
- -has the option for applying a watermark to your images once they have been reduced in size.
There are 2 modes for completing this. If your image has an alpha channel, this will be used to create the transparency of the composite ‘over’ the source image. If no alpha is found the script will ’screen’ the brighter values onto the image. So you create your watermark image file to cater for your composite mode preference.
**You will need to add the file path to your watermark file at the top of each script.** This is hardcoded, so you can just set and forget.
As for positioning the watermark, there are 5 options, initiated with the “-p” flag and a number from 1 to 5.
Number 1 being the top left and other position counted around clockwise from here.
So 2 is top right, 3 is lower right, 4 is lower left, and 5 is the centre.
HELP / INSTRUCTIONS:
PROXY-MAKER FLAGS:
-d or –division
-
Sets the divisional ammount to create the new smaller res files. The images will be divided by this number.
-t or –type
-
Will maintain the file format of the original files -otherwise will default to jpeg.
-w or –web
-
Sets the target proxy Res so that the larger dimension is 640 – which is an ideal size for email and web work.
If images are smaller than this res they will not be altered.
-1 or –1k
-
Sets the target proxy Res so that the lerger dimension is 1024 – for a 1k approximation.
If images are smaller than this res they will not be alterred.
WATERMARK FLAGS:
-m or –waterMark
-
Enables the watermarking, once proxy making has taken place.
-o or –opacity
-
Sets the opacity level of the watermark. Default is 70 (percent) if this value isn’t specified.
-p or –position
-
Sets the position of the watermark file from 1-5. These positions are listed numerically from top left heading clockwise. The 5th position is centered.
-i or –invert
-
Inverts the watermark image when in screen mode, handy if you havent had time to prep the watermark properly.
and of course -h or –help will display the HELP / INSTRUCTIONS listed above for either script.
Usage example:
LB_picturePrep.py -d 2 -m -p 4 -o 50 /Path/To/File/Or/Folder
this example will make half resolution proxies with a watermark in the lower left corner at 50% opacity. Much like the first example image above.
LB_watermarker is the almost the same as LB_picturePrep. It just has scaled down functionality to cater only for orientation and watermarking. It will not create lower resolution files. It will still require that you set the path to the watermark file, within the script itself. This script uses the same flags as the LB_picturePrep tool, except for any of the proxy maker flags or the “-m” that enables the watermark for that script. Again running “-h” or “–help” flags will display the usage.
Usage example:
LB_waterMarker.py -p 3 -o 75 -t /Path/To/File/Or/Folder
this example will place the watermark in the lower right corner of the images, with opacity set to 75%, and maintain the original filetype of your source image.
Happy watermarking!
Portraiture in Illustrator test
Though I couldn’t help finding the result a bit sterile, so I resorted to what I know and messed with the image a bit in photoshop, ending up back in the rasterized pixel based world. I’m still very used to more freeform paint style when creating pictures. Oh well, it was an interesting test for me.
skipping girl -2d animation in photoshop
Back to the world of drawing and 2d animation. I started animating this one in flash, and also tried pencil which is a free open source 2d animation program. I had intended to then paint each frame afterwards in photoshop, but i remembered that photoshop can do video layers, basically allowing you to load in image sequences, or animated frame by frame. So i did the final animation outline and then colour layers in photoshop. The result isn’t vector like flash produces, but you get access to all of the photoshop tools. Most of the time i would never need to work vector anyway. The playback was great, because its only 10 frames at 300 x 300 pixels, but I can’t see photoshop being able to handle stuff that was too higher resolution, or playing back long sequences. So, photoshop is great for doing small 2d animation tests, and shading stuff mapped out in other programs. I will definitely use it again for colouring / shading other 2d animation pieces.
Oh and I also figured out how to display pieces like this as a looping swf flash file, with transparent alpha! …check the edges. More stuff like this to come I think!
She skips all day, and never gets tired…
skating research drawings
I found these the other day. I recall drawing them to get in tune before i did the skater flash animation piece.
life drawing – the rudeness of nudeness
Did some life drawing a while ago to keep the old hand to eye drawing co-ordination up to date. Here are a few of the drawings:
roadtrip & custom hot rods with mini diana F+ lomography camera
I recently purchased a Mini Diana F+ lomography camera as part of my own renaissance back to analogue and the world of low-fi. Keeping up with the latest digital technology is a constant demand, so now I’m back to real film. I shot 4 rolls of colour and one black and white, testing this rad little camera. You can do wacky things like multiple exposures or partially winding on the film for the next shot (check the panorama below). It’s so cute and fun to play with, and it’s probably the easiest camera I’ve ever used. Lovin’ the low-fi…
Last week I went on a road trip with the family for a week house-boating on the Murray River. I took pics the whole time. I’ve included a couple of the road trip up, and some from by the river (at the bottom). The rest of the photos are from the when I stopped off in Newstead, just out of Castlemaine for the 2009 Chopped Custom Hot Rod Show. What a great place to further test the little lomo cam! Check out the pics.
processing images to look like halftone print
I have always liked old prints that look like they are made up of many small dots. This process / look is called halftone.
Here is an example of a black and white halftone print of an old Barbarella poster. (click on the right black and white images below to see what i’m talking about)
I made a python script that sort of replicates this look, using PIL. You can grab my halftone script here.
You can create dotted images in black and white or colour. You can have white dots on a black background, or black dots on a white background. So essentially a positive or negative method of dotting. The script gets some cool results, but it is quite slow, especially when you have a smaller dot size or larger resolution source files. As it builds a new image dot by dot, the more dots the more time it takes.
Here are some of my tests. Click on the images for full effect: please note they are obviously not from photos i have taken myself, and the sources and credits are unknown.
Usage
From commandline:
python pathToLB_halftone_v1.0.py fileOrFolderToSourceFrom args
or of course, you can alias it to ‘dot’ or whatever you like.
FLAGS:
-s –squareSize Sets the number of pixels allocated for each dot shape. Eg: 6 = more small dots 16 = fewer larger dots
-c –colours Sets the script to colour mode.
-f –fileType Sets the filetype for new files created. Supported types are: [ "jpeg", "tiff", "gif", "png" ]
-n –negative Sets the script to negative mode (being black dots on a white background) rather than the default, (white dots on a black background).
The python script i have made produces image results very similar to half tone -I guess the only difference is the dots are displayed in line with each other rather than in a zigzag pattern.
I would love to use either this script or my pixelize script to process some of my animation, for a stylized effect. Even animate the dot size over time perhaps? I guess that could be another idea…
Further info on halftone.
first go at flash animation
flash animation test -skater from shredFest on Vimeo.
This is my first attempt at animation in flash.
It’s all drawn frame by frame drawn at 25 fps. It is from reference, but isn’t rotoscoped. I then warped it in shake, adding a simulated camera move in 2d, as if a video person was following the action.
Its a little short and sweet, because its incomplete. The computer I was doing it on died with the flash project on it. Fortunately i had emailed a work in progress quicktime of it to my friend John -who did the accompanying sound. He then emailed me back this -which is all i have left of the project!
Next time i may just do 12 fps! Less frames to draw…
Also, here are some drawings I did of some skaters to get some of the posing figured out.
backup your stuff! ….for 39kb on mac or 176kb on windows.
Computers suck. They can die on you at the worst time and you don’t want to lose your important stuff, like your mp3 collection…
I’m not really interested in backup systems that restore my computer to certain points in time, like time-machine. Although these are well designed and useful systems, they can be confusing and you can lose track of your files, as such systems are time based. All I want is a simple, reliable tool that archives important stuff, so I have peace of mind that my precious files are BACKED UP! So I wrote my own little backup utility in Python.
I originally wrote this for my personal Mac, and later adapted the script to work on Windows. I use windows for work, and there is a lot of data created daily that needs to be kept safe. The script backs up to external hard drives. I have multiple drives enabled on the Windows version that I use at work so I can rotate the drives daily -keeping one drive offsite (in case or fire, burglary, rodents etc). The other handy thing about the Windows one is that you can log out and it will run and then it can shut your machine down when finished (if you wish to shutdown). So once set up -all you need to do is log out of your machine and it takes care of everything.
The scripts are basically an organiser around the unix ‘rsync’ utility. Rsync doesn’t exist on Windows systems, so I have included an rsync.exe in the Windows version.
Both of the bundles have a folder of little bits and pieces. In the folder is the main Python script, you will need to open this in a decent text editor and edit some of the details to make it customized for your system. Note it is best to run the script via an automation system. The Windows version has an ‘instructions’ file for how to do this and setup Windows Scheduler. The Mac version has a cron file for automating via commandline with crontab. If you set this automation you can literally ’set and forget’. The script has inbuilt mail notification, which provides all information about the script output, so you can monitor the process.
Ahhh, peace of mind.
create lower resolution image proxies with python
For those who are friends of the command line, here is a simple python script that utilises PIL to generate lower resolution proxy images of your larger files.
This is often handy when doing any kind of vfx work where smaller files allow for faster interaction. The script is setup to process individual files or entire folders of images. I also use it a lot for quickly creating emailable size images from the larger res downloads off my digital camera. At the moment the script is setup merely to create jpeg type files, but I wanted to later implement the option of maintaining the original file format, or just specifying an output filetype.
Usage
From commandline:
python pathToLB_proxyMaker.py fileOrFolderToSourceFrom args
or of course, you can alias it to ‘proxy’ or whatever you like.
FLAGS:
-d –division Sets the divisional amount to create the new smaller res files. The images will be divided by this number.
-w –web Sets the target proxy Res so that the larger dimension is 640 – which is an ideal size for email and web work. If images are smaller than this res they will not be altered.
-1 –1k Sets the target proxy Res so that the larger dimension is 1024 – for a 1k approximation. If images are smaller than this res they will not be altered.
-t --type CURRENTLY NOT IMPLEMENTED: is intended to maintain the file format of the original files -otherwise will default to jpeg.
You can get it to make proxies based on a division amount of the original res -half res, quarter res etc. This is by using the “-d” flag followed by a dividing number. Eg. “-d 2″ will make half res files or “-d 4″ will make quarter res files. I have also included a couple of handy modes for making web or email size files.The flag “-1″ will make 1k files (where the larger of the 2 dimensions is set to 1024 pixels), or the flag “-w” makes a slightly smaller equivalent, where the larger of the 2 dimension is set to 640 pixels.
Known drawbacks
Unfortunately the version of PIL available at the time I wrote this post has a few annoying limitations. The main problem is that it will not maintain the image’s colour profile, or any other associated meta data. So if you have a particular colour profile assigned to your images, say ’sRGB’, it will not exist on the newly output proxy files. On my computer (Mac) I think it just assigns a ‘colour LCD’ profile upon opening the images -which can often look rather ordinary. Although you can manually reassign a colour profile to your images at a later date. I think there are various scripts out there that can do this, but that again is irritating as it means it becomes a 2 part process. I believe the next version of PIL (1.1.7) should address maintaining the colour profile across image manipulation.
sigma dp2 photography exhibition
Recently I was asked to take some photos to test the new snappy from Sigma – the “DP2“. It was for an exhibition to showcase the new camera. There were a variety of artists who were asked to contribute, making a great show from a mix of talent.
…and this is my image that I submitted for the exhibition:
“Hayley and the night cranes”
Not far from Melbourne Zoo, Parkville has its own herd of industrial giraffes overlooking Royal Park. Ordinary, even unsightly by day, they are transformed into serene, surreal elegance after dark.
In this photo I was lucky enough to capture a gazelle in the foreground.
This photo was taken with an 8 second exposure and manually fired flash, to capture Hayley in the foreground. 100 iso for less noise. The camera has a fixed 24mm lens. The aperture was at its maximum open – which is F2.8
Not a bad camera. I like the fact you can shoot entirely manually and in raw mode, but it would be nice to have different lens sizes to play with.
pixelizing images with python
I’ve been playing around with PIL (python image library) learning how to mash images in various ways. This was my second script after the proxy making script. It converts an image into a pixelized version. You can choose how many pixels across (along the smaller resolution) and how many colours you wish to convert to. So some of the images end up looking like old 8 bit video game stills. Kinda cool. Obviously you get better results form using bold, contrasty pictures.
Here’s a couple of tests. Please note these are not my images, and cannot credit the photographers as I don’t know who they are.
base image
pixelized to 8 colours & 64 pixels across
pixelized to 4 colours, 64 pixels across
base image, the lovely gwen stefani
pixelized to 16 colours, 128 pixels across
pixelized to 8 colours, 96 pixels across
Most graphical programs have ways of doing this as an effect or filter. I know there is a shake node for it. Though I like it how this one you can adjust the number of colours at the same time, and it’s pretty fast. It is also setup to batch process directories of images via command line. click here to download the pixelize python script.