Solving technology problems, one at a time
Flame Painter is a procedural painting application by Peter Blaškovič available on http://www.escapemotions.com/. It’s remarkably versatile, but a lot of experimentation is necessary to figure out what it is capable of, so I’m posting a series of tutorials on how to get specific effects.
Last night’s harvest moon was so big I couldn’t resist trying to get a shot of it with my little camera, a Canon powershot SX210IS.
It’s easier to take pictures of the moon with a point-and-shoot camera in the afternoon, because there is very little contrast between the sky and the moon itself. Here’s an afternoon shot taken a few months ago. This was hand-held, at maximum zoom, using the automatic settings. Exposure was .02 sec (1/50), ISO 80. The craters are clearly visible.
Yesterday we drove out to Grand Rapids to see the sculpture garden at Frederik Meijer Gardens. I was blown away by the quality of the art and the beauty of the gardens. What made the visit even more exciting was the collection of Chihuly glass sculpture installations all over the grounds.
Beside the fantastic outdoor art and flower collection there’s an immense indoor botanical conservatory, with desert, carnivorous, tropical and Victorian garden sections. The enormous Tropical conservatory also features unusual tropical birds, along with many Chihuly pieces large and small which can be discovered among the palm leaves.
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Images from a flickr gallery devoted to CHDK (these are not my images!)
I’ve experimented with all the features on my Canon point-and-shoot camera, but one thing it is missing that would be very nice to have is auto-exposure bracketing, so I could create HDR images more easily.
It turns out there is an alternate operating system, CHDK, or “Canon Hack Development Kit,” that you can install on an SD card. When the camera boots up with it, lots of new features are available. It doesn’t hurt the camera, and disappears the minute you boot up without the special SD card.
CHDK makes it possible to do some camera hacking by writing scripts in BASIC that can be run on your camera.
Continue readingAll my public images on Flickr are licensed under the Creative Commons. You are free to share and remix them as long as you attribute them to me by including a link back to the original flickr page or by including the following link code back to this page:
<a href="http:thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000704.html" target="_blank">Photo by ellenm1</a>
View the pictures that have been used so far
The British Museum, probably my favorite museum in the whole world, is a monument to curiosity, exploration and a refreshingly innocent nineteenth-century sense of national entitlement to the best the world has to offer.
The Great Court of the British Museum, transformed into a glass-covered public space in 2000 for the millennium. More…
Several of these brushes have been created in the negative, so that using them with light colors on a dark background will reveal only the light tones on the statue. Nice effect. Download file
Continue readingHigh-resolution Photoshop brushes based on Ernst Haeckel’s engravings of shells and sea jellies. Great used as stamps, or the spiky shells look particularly good when you use scattering and angle and opacity jitter. Download
Continue readingThis is my second set of brushes based on Haeckel’s drawings of diatoms, coral and other sea creatures. 11 different brushes are included, many with variations in opacity, spacing, size jitter, etc. Download file
Continue readingDownload File These brushes were derived from Durer’s engraving St Anthony At The City. Create your own remix of a 16th century town! Let me know if you create something nice with them, I’d like
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