The Unreasonable Man

Lights… action! This is a shot, taken today, 31 December, with the 5D and 17-40 4L lens, of my second home. I lit it with three Canon E-TTL II speedlites:

Without flash, you would not see the outside: the snow would just be total, burned-out white. So I used flash. One flash would not do it with so large a room: you would get light and dark areas. So there is one flash out of sight on the bottom left, one on the camera bounced against the ceiling, and one under the chess table in the middle, giving some nice almost eerie light, and some interesting shadows. The slaves fired without line of sight to the main flash, as you see.

Once you know how it works, the Canon E-TTL II system is not bad.

Happy New Year!

This is why Digital Signage (or DooH, Digital out-of-Home media) must be connected, via the Internet, to a central server.

Because if it is not connected, this is what you see 99% of the time.

The media owner sends a new DVD (which in itself is very limiting, because it means one content set for all, and one change a month). But the player breaks, or no-one thinks to insert the new DVD, or -horror- the location owner uses the player to play a Disney video instead.

The advertiser on this Canadian dental waiting room network cannot be happy, because this dead display is likely to be the rule rather than the exception. Another failed network in the making - and the solution is so simple. Just network them. Yes, yoiu then pay for a Digital Signage provider, a player, software, and networking: but you will have a working network that you can actually sell the ads on, knowing they will play where and when you want them to - and your customers get proof of play.

That would be me.

This time, to once again illustrate exactly how sharp the Canon 50mm f/1.8 prime lens is. Click for larger image and view at full resolution (which for this JPG is of course much smaller than the original RAW):

As you see, I like shallow depth-of-field portraits. I feel that this gives the portrait an otherworldly, hyper-realistic look. Your mileage may vary, but for me, this works.

The camera is a Canon 5D, the lens the 50mm f/1.8, and the camera on “Manual”, set to f/2.8 at 1/60th second, and the rembrandt lighting was achieved by bouncing a Canon 580EX flash off the wall.

Well, not the flash - just the light.

Here I am this morning: single flash, camera mounted but bounced off the wall. Using a 17-40mm 4L lens set to 28mm.

As usual, view at large size (and original, not scaled) to see how sharp the image is.

This shot, taken with a lens set to 28mm, also illustrates the folly of literally sticking ot “the rules” - one such rule being that you never take a portrait at less than 100mm - the nose becomes too big.

Warning. It is vacation time, so I have not shaved for a week. Scary stuff.

But I thought I would give another brief illustration of why you want to avoid on-camera flash. First the on-camera picture, then:

Not too bad, but straight, so there is no definition to the face, no depth. Instead, you want to bounce the flash off ceilings and walls; or perhaps even (as in the next pictures), be held off camera using an off-camera flash cord. If you hold the flash high and at a 45 degree angle to the face, you get this:

Or you can go for a slightly softer look, bouncing a bit more:

I think most would agree, the pictures with a bit of definition are better. I prefer the middle one.

These were self-portraits, so no great artwork. Taken, if you are interested, on a 5D with a 17-40L lens set to 35mm, at f/4, with the camera on Manual at 1/125th second (at 400 ISO). Click to see bigger: even with the limitations of self-portraits and a lens that would not be considered a portrait lens, this is not bad.

An iPod Shuffle’s box can contain exactly 20 batteries:

I see in today’s shocking news that Benazir Bhutto has finally, and sadly predictably, been killed. Pakistan is once again at the forefront of the radical Islamist war on democracy.

Thoughts of relativism and understanding vanish in the face of such violence, and hence I believe it is, in the end, self-defeating. I think perhaps we ought to send a strong signal back - only what?

I have a new HP NAS disk that presents its media via the UPnP streaming protocol.

Fine - except no client known to man (or at least, known to The Unreasonable Man) supports UPnP streaming. Incredible, but an hour of Googling so far just shows “there should be a plug-in for vlc/WMP/etc but I can’t find it”. Hardware solutions exist (eg the Roku boxes) but they are “not in stock”. Or a $1500 Mac when a $0 piece of software or $100 piece of hardware should do it.

In the end, I found and bought a $185 DLink DSM-320 streaming media player. I upgraded and programmed the (excellent) universal Logitech Harmony remote to recognise this streamer. That part was easy. But trying to connect the streamer to my home entertainment system is incredibly complex: in fact, with a PVR, a DVD-player, A CD player and a cassette player and now this streaming media player, and only two video inputs - it is impossible. I have to choose: DVD player or streamer.

And the streamer itself fails most of my acceptability tests. First, it is impossible to explain to a non-technical person what it is. They call it a “media player”, but it is not a media player, really: it is just a device that picks up a stream and puts it on a screen. The server (like the PC with special software, or in my case, my HP UPnP NAS) is the player. In addition, the DLink GUI is unusable and primitive. The aspect ratio setting does not work. The device did not work until I had first upgraded and then reset it and re-entered all settings - and so on.

No wonder we don’t distribute audio and video through the house yet. This stuff is a million miles from being useable. This is for gurus, not mortals.

But at the same time: this is highly exciting. When someone finally does an implementation that is less crappy, we will finally have our TVs and stereo systems connected to our music collection, our movie collection, and Internet radio stations etc. For around $100. Looks like I have finally found something exciting in technology, after a several year drought. And this shows also why DRM should -and will- fail. Oh! Exciting!

Another example of flash lighting. This time with a secondary flash from below (fired using Canon E-TTL II), lighting up my son’s face:

(Click for larger, etc)