Big Yellow Blog

Big Yellow Houses

2006-06-21T19:57:00.000-04:00

There are a lot of other Big Yellow Houses out there - and a significant number seem to be Victorian houses, with stories of remodelling epics gratifyingly similar to our own money-pit experiences - not shared here because they're all have the same theme (i.e. we did something, and it went ear-bleedingly expensively wrong) and because the latest fiasco is not over yet. Apparently we're also not unique in giving directions to our address as "it's the big yellow house on Main Street at the center of town" - and my originally named domains (big-yellow-house.com and big-yellow-house.net) are not as cleverly original as I wanted to believe. I know this because I've been exploring, trying to solve the Mystery of the Popular Picture - the previously mentioned house pic is still recording way more views than it deserves. I was hoping to find a link to the picture, or some such

The #1 from a Google search used to be a virtual neighbor - http://thebigyellowhouse.blogspot.com , (you have my sympathy and apologies if you found my blog while looking for this). The author of that blog (now on it's own web site - you'll get auto-magically redirected) has an infinitely larger readership than this - and also has a Flickr account, so I guess it's a remote possibility that a few of those folks are finding my picture through a search.

It's also possible that it might be attracting people looking for a restaurant, or a bed and breakfast; or who want to talk about pets, or are looking for childcare or asian carpets. Any and all of whom would be disappointed once they reached my Flickr pictures.

The mystery remains.

Big Yellow House

2006-06-07T08:12:00.000-04:00

Big Yellow House
Originally uploaded by Big Yellow House.

Curiously, this is my most popular picture on Flickr. Now, that's not actually saying very much at all - "popular" overstates somewhat the attention my images receive. But to the extent that anyone bothers to look at them at all, this is the picture that has had most views. And I don't know why - it hasn't been posted anywhere else that I know of, not even on my wife's blog and a Flickr search is unlikely to find it either.

I think there are other pictures of the house that are more interesting (there's a set full of them), and there are other non-housey pictures that I persuade myself are worth a couple of seconds of viewing time. But this one mysteriously got (admittedly low-level) attention even before being posted in a Flickr group, and has three times the views of the next house picture.

Maybe the blurb is interesting enough to warrant reading. This at least is a testable hypothesis - I have an occasional project to attach historical notes to other images, and if they become relatively popular (say double digit view counts) then an alternate career as a caption writer beckons.

Spring Rains

2006-05-27T09:50:00.000-04:00

All lectures are cancelled
Originally uploaded by Big Yellow House.

The torrential rain we had resulted in a flooded basement, and some better images from my camera. Experimenting with Portra 400VC - after the worst rain was done - I caught a couple of postcard shots in Concord - including this one showing the river flood level reaching the area where rangers give their talks on the Shot that was Heard Around the world.

Town Common

2006-05-05T09:18:00.000-04:00

Town Common
Originally uploaded by Big Yellow House.

Either my critical standards are getting higher, or I'm in a creative slump lately. I suspect the latter.
the lat four rolls have produced, maybe three pictures worth showing to others and none at all that are worth advertising. This is the least worst - not including family pictures which I do not post publicly.

I'm visualizing images quite well now, and compositions are, for the most part, pleasing or interesting and occasionally both. But the execution is still not so good - I should slow up and take longer to consider the exposure and lighting, and sometimes not take the picture until another time of day. On the other hand, I'm trying to not pre-judge the outcome and not inhibit the taking of pictures. USing slide film gives lovely results, but I still think of slides as "special" in some way, and I simply don't take enough pictures.

Chimney

2006-04-02T18:30:00.000-04:00

Chimney
Originally uploaded by Big Yellow House.

The eos-3 is fast becoming my camera of choice for shooting slides, I like the heavy camera and I'm still comfortable with the eos-5 for B&W. It's a bit noisy for unobtrusive indoor work thpugh. From what I've read that's a feature.

I'm getting better at reading a shot - e.g. this one taken in the morning from the bridge near Kendall Square. This is actually a ~50% crop - the right side has another smokestack that is visibly distorted by the lens at 300mm.

Dusk

2006-03-21T21:47:00.000-05:00

Dusk
Originally uploaded by Big Yellow House.

I have a new toy - my EOS 3 arrived, and I took it for a walk at the weekend - this is one of the results.

The differences between the lens performance is increasingly noticeable to me - the shorter zoom can sometimes take reasonably sharp images - this is one - but I'm struggling for consistency. The longer zoom is sharp, always.

Oh well, I'll have to keep banging the rocks together ...

Crossing the Bridge

2006-03-13T22:03:00.000-05:00

Crossing the Bridge
Originally uploaded by Big Yellow House.

I braved some cold weather at North Bridge in Concord, and was rewarded with some not unreasonable pictures - like this one.

I am so inspired, I've bought a camera off eBay; an EOS 3, which I have high hopes for. I like the 1n, but it's a bit noisy and the auto-focus is not so good. The 7ne is good in this regard, but is not as robust as the 1n, and I like holding a substantial camera when I'm shooting. So the 3 promises the best of both worlds - electronics better than the 7, and a build like the 1n.

That is assuming that the camera acually works when I get it. We shall see.

Small White Rock

2006-03-09T22:36:00.000-05:00

Small White Rock
Originally uploaded by Big Yellow House.

The past week or two have been hectic, with little time or inspiration left to devote to photography. I have an incomplete roll in each of my three cameras - so I guess there'll be a glut of images soon. Maybe another one will be worth saving.

Meanwhile, I have been wrestling with magenta casts to my prints from the Canon i9900. Apparently it's not an uncommon experience, but there's no reliable diagnosis. I actually get no color cast on my black + white prints from the Canon EasyPrint software - but everything else (PictureWindow Pro, Photoshop Elements, Microsoft DIS, ArcSoft, etc..) gives a greater or lesser cast, worse with the Pro paper, less with the Plus. The most reasonable explanation I came across suggested multiple color correction was occurring - but of course there was no suggestion as to how that might occur or what to do to correct it.

This was taken at Grassy Pond in the fall.

Harry Potter Personalities

2006-02-28T21:05:00.000-05:00

Apparently I'm a

Harry
Potter Personality Quiz by Pirate
Monkeys Inc.

whereas Liz is a Snape (that's an INT J). There is little else I can safely say.

Town Hall Bench

2006-02-17T08:06:00.000-05:00

Town Hall Bench
Originally uploaded by Big Yellow House.

Impatient with my attempts at still life photography, I took my trusty old ae2 for a walk in the snowstorm on Sunday. And I managed to take some pictures that turned out as I had visualized them - which was quite pleasing. I seem more comfortable carrying a camera around, capturing what I see, than setting up a shot.

This was taken outside of the Westford town hall - about 200 yards from our house.

Unsharp

2006-02-10T11:42:00.000-05:00

Still trying to get consistently satisfactory results from the film scanning work flow. Recent efforts tried the manual focus Mamiya 645E with some Velvia 100 - I really like the larger format slides. The film looks very good and sharp, but the scanned results are poor - the larger format bows in the film holders, giving some Newton's rings, and the scanned image is soft. The Mamiya has a somewhat less sophisticated metering system than the eos 7 and eos5, so the technical learning curve persists for me to produce the images I want.

Limes

2006-02-03T10:35:00.000-05:00

Limes
Originally uploaded by Big Yellow House.

So my working theory for the disappointing images is that the 70-300m zoom was just too close to focus correctly, even though the focus indicator claimed it was ok. This image is from the second roll taken, and (after scanning and sharpening) is a reasonable still life, suggesting that a macro-like image is possible. I'll try some more this weekend, making a point to get the focussing distance correct, and try using the medium format to corroborate the results.

The limes are the first from our indoor bush (a sort of proto-tree) that has survived against prevailing odds.

Sony do the Right Thing

2006-02-02T07:44:00.000-05:00

The bsod symptoms shown by my laptop turn out be the cause of a Sony recall of the machine. Of course, this notice wasn't actually sent to me, and the description of the problem "the system either fails to boot or sporadically shuts down" is so generic as to be unfindable unless you seach for that exact phrase. But the good news (?) is that there's a motherboard problem, and Sony is replacing it free of charge and extending the warranty. So kudos to Sony for doing the right thing.

The Opposite of Success

2006-01-27T18:29:00.000-05:00

Now I've established Flickr as the home for my images I can now carry on with the idea of the blog, which is to chart my progress with the image taking itself.

I had another dispppointing set of pictures from last weekend, trying to take some "yarn-scapes" of some interesting textures and colors of wool. I don't have a macro lens, so I used my 70-300mm zoom and a 28-105mm zoom. The better images came from the longer lens - but then at 4 times the price of the other they should! I shot using direct sunlight and Portra 400VC. Not such a good combination, it turned out. The direct light didn't help the colors, and the film seemed not to give good resolution for the subject - but it may also be that the eos 5 was unhappy focussing on the yarn - or it may be that I was within the 6ft focusing distance, or something. Yarn doesn't have much in the way of edges for sharpening, and all scans need to be sharpened somehow.

Lessons were learnt - and there's some Provia 100F sitting in another camera from the same session, so at least I'll be able to compare.

But it's not just technically that the images don't work. Compositionally, they are all pretty much horrible. It turns out that yarn is more difficult to capture in an abstract form than I had supposed. Well, I'll try again and hopefully improve a little. This picture is the least abstract, and so is the most bearable.

Oars

2006-01-27T16:53:00.000-05:00

Oars
Originally uploaded by Big Yellow House.

I've blogged and deleted entries a number of times since setting up my Flickr photostream. Hopefully this one will stay up.

I've added a Creative Commons license to all pictures and text, so in the unlikely event you want to reuse any of it non-commercially, you can with attribution. Of course, for commercial use I would be gald to hear from you to disucss terms!

Dream on.

Terebi Tower

2006-01-24T18:51:00.000-05:00

This picture includes the Nittele Tower in Shiodome, Tokyo - another of my rainy-day-in-Tokyo images from October. (The name Nittele is derived from Nihon Terebi, and is the head office of the Nippon Television Network). There's a lot of new buildings in the Shiodome part of the city - this one was designed by Richard Rogers, who has been involved with many landmark buildings, including the Millenium Dome in London, and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Still Life

2006-01-22T15:49:00.000-05:00

The notion I had for the blog was that I would coerce myself to display a picture each week from whatever films I had processed most recently.

This is from a couple of weeks ago, so I'm already falling behind my good intentions. I was experimenting with some still life with natural light - not least because I don't have any studio lamps. As usual I wasn't happy with any of the images - most turning out to be ordinary pictures of ordinary objects like the pots pic below. The best I could come up with is this idea on the right, which is a small crop from a much larger and more boring image. I'll try and work on this idea for an image next chance I get. These were taken using Provia 100F, with a Canon 7NE, and made their way from film to here via a Canon 9950F scanner.

From the Gallery of Reasonable Pictures

2006-01-21T11:31:00.000-05:00

Another day, another image from my 2005 Gallery of Reasonable Pictures (a depressingly small collection) - this time I've tried reducing the resolution of the uploaded image to get a smaller file. I happen to like this image, not least because it was taken at Euro-Disney. Not as sharp as I'm aiming for - but it's a good example of the kind of picture I like to take. Maybe when I get enough entries in the GoRP I'll discover I have a style after all.

I haven't figured out whether I need a separate online host (maybe Flickr?, Photobucker?) for the pictures yet. For now I'll use this blog and see what happens.

BTW I managed to delete the image a couple of times in the editor and then had to reload it. I think this may mean that there are now three versions of the file hanging around somewhere; I reposted the Tokyo Rain image with a new file name in the blog entry after linking to it from the sidebar. The old version is still accessible; so if filename is the distinguishing item, there will be only the final version of the wheel image.

Tokyo Rain

2006-01-18T18:43:00.000-05:00

I'm trying my hand at photography, attempting to produce images that capture elements that interest me in a scene or situation. I guess my aim is to have my pictures show the world as I see it.

I use film cameras, partly because they're cheaper than digital, but mostly because I've set myself the task of learning the craft using traditional materials. This was taken during my recent business trip to Tokyo, and is a experimental narrow crop of the original (see the GoRP link in the sidebar). I've had several trips to Japan over the past two years, and though my time is carefully scheduled by my hosts I managed to find a few hours on a wet day and caught a some images with which I am not too unhappy.

I don't have the exposure to hand; it was taken hand-holding a Canon AE2, with a 50mm lens and using Ilford XP2 400 film.

(This and all my other images shown on this site are, of course copyrighted to me, all rights reserved).

Concerning the wolf moon and bio-feedback

2006-01-18T14:31:00.000-05:00

The past month has seen three of my computers have near-death experiences; all are now repaired, and though my rationalistic, scientific training leads me to believe that the full moon had something to do with it, there's part of me that suspects foul play.

Back in the days of my sixth form (high school AP to you) chemistry classes - our short-of-stature instructor Mr. Bird would point out that the technology had long existed to manufacture cars that were completely rust-proof. The reason that such cars were not made was that no one would then have a reason to replace their old car; the impermanence of the idiosyncratic British sports car was a prime example of Built-In Obsolescence (henceforth, BIO and apparently called "planned obsolescence" here in the US). Now this was the UK in the socialistic pre-Thatcher-70s, while in the USA of 2006 the notion that anyone might want a car, or any other product, that they would own for 20 years is regarded as quaint if not actually unpatriotic, so the mechanisms of BIO are now more indirect. For example the technology cycle for electronic devices rapidly renders functions irrelevant or inadequate (I can't play a CD in a 8-track machine, and yet ...) , and the reduction of costs for all mass-produced items allows us to replace them on the smallest of pretexts. It's notable that the quality of most (but not all) goods has improved , even though the expected usage has decreased. This seems to suggest that BIO is no longer an intentional goal of a producer, rather it's a consequence of larger processes such as globalization - corporations aren't shaping the processes, they're struggling to keep up, poor things. And to the extent that BIO accelerates a demand-driven purchasing cycle, it has a self-reinforcing nature independent of a manufacturers goal - a positive BIO-feedback loop, if you will.

But I suspect that there is an insidiously negative kind of BIO infecting the world of computers. My experience this month is probably typical of anyone who owns a computer. At 2 years of age my geriatric desktop ceased life shortly after I 'upgraded' a video card when some software (all right, a game) required something better than I had; or, rather, my card was on the small print list of unsupported hardware. In other words, the demands of a new activity made part of my system obsolete, and the mechanism by which I was required to make my PC relevant obsoleted some more of it. The total cost of repair and upgrade would have bought me an equivalent new machine, had not the prospect of reinstalling the many gigs of software been so daunting.

Only days after that a laptop produced recurring BSODs after a microsquish XP automatic upgrade did secret but unhealthy things to some drivers. Search the net and you'll find innumerable postings by people who, like me, were trying to find a repair for a fault that is unacknowledged by either MS or the device manufacturers. For such things there has arisen a store of folk remedies available on the web, information that is unverifiable, and which may or may not be helpful. But since the corporate culprits evidently have no economic interest in investigating and providing a repair it's hard not to conclude that this is intentional negative BIO-feedback. The XP infection obsoleted my machine with catastrophic indifference, and left me no recourse short of a new purchase than to seek a cure from the shamans who inhabit the darker corners of the hardware forums. Fortunately, as of the past 4 hours, the operation was a success, and the patient lives on.

The third machine, another laptop, simply expired after a few months of use. Not having outlasted its BIO date, it was under warranty, and should have be repaired without question - and so it eventually was, after a full month of email exchange with the support group munchkins who had to confirm that the machine was not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.

It's probably not an original observation, but it seems to me that the implementation of a product's built-in obsolescence is now to be found in the services provided by the manufacturers, rather than the product itself. That is, the services are intentionally inadequate to extend the life of the product to any significant degree. While this is understandable for cheap commodity items - when a AA battery is used up I might expect to buy a new one - it is surely the result of a cold actuarial calculation when the common experience of a computer owner is one of negative BIO feedback.

Then again, I still don't completely trust the wolf moon.

Not yellow yet.

2006-01-16T14:25:00.000-05:00

And not big.