Category: Misc.

Flame Painter: Exploring small setting changes with big effects

Posted on February 27, 2011 by ellen

This series of examples will give you an idea of the way very small changes in Flame Painter’s settings can produce very different effects.

The starting point for the series was the color selection: a gradient of gold, aqua, red and violet, ending in dark blue. The last session’s brush settings were still there, so I began at that point: a fairly long (Size=235) Ribbon brush with multiple nested orbits. The looping lasso-like edge of the brush has been circled: you can see the brush tail looping off to the left and then trailing off all the way up to the top of the image. The rather chaotic image is caused because of the whipping action of the brush: there are multiple rotations going on within it, creating unpredictable results.

Exploring Flame Painter’s Ribbon brush – Part 2

Posted on February 26, 2011 by ellen

In Part 1, I demonstrated some Ribbon Brush settings. This section contains a second set of Ribbon brush examples.
Flame Painter is a procedural painting application by Peter Blaškovi? available on http://www.escapemotions.com/.

There are three brush types in Flame Painter: Flame, Follow and Ribbon. Each produces an amazing variety of results depending on the settings chosen.

Flame Painter: Gauze effects

Posted on February 19, 2011 by ellen

Flame Painter is a procedural painting application by Peter Blaškovič available on http://www.escapemotions.com/. Its brushes are a set of dots that respond to your gestures using their own internal “physics.”

Flame Painter: Phosphorescent Sea Creature effects

Posted on February 18, 2011 by ellen

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.

Amorphous jellies

The next generation of screen technology

Posted on January 19, 2011 by ellen

An interesting peek at the not too distant future of visual, gestural interfaces. Thin, light, responsive and embedded. Every incremental improvement in devices and UI’s enables a whole new range of expression and interaction, so

The Canon point-and-shoot space telescope.

Posted on September 23, 2010 by ellen

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.

A visit to Frederik Meijer Gardens

Posted on July 4, 2010 by ellen

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.

How and why to #quitFacebook

Posted on May 12, 2010 by ellen

After logging in to Facebook yesterday and seeing yet another notice about how Facebook is going to swap my data with just about any site they feel like, I realized I don’t want to have to check their extremely complicated privacy settings every week or two to make sure they haven’t changed something I care about.

Besides being an incredible waste of time, it’s futile: they have made a practice of making significantly bad changes you can’t do anything about. Some of these changes can have real consequences down the road, and I just don’t need that. Moreover, it is not clear what real effect the settings have, in practice. So, since I didn’t grow up with Facebook and I’m not going to go through social withdrawal, it’s out.

Add features to your Canon Camera with CHDK

Posted on April 17, 2010 by ellen

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.

Check out this little elephant whipping the water around!

Posted on February 12, 2010 by ellen

Baby Elephant’s First Swim! from Zoos Victoria on Vimeo.