More food picture

Though FooPhoMo may be over, I still like the "take a single food picture" idea. I took some threatening-looking ginger yesterday, which came out so-so. Todays picture has been planned for a long time, and came out almost better than I envisioned it - I love how sharp the knife appears.

"Bleeding Apple" ©2008 Lars Clausen
Buy this photo at RedBubble.com

Update: We now have this printed on canvas hanging over the dining table, and it has been exhibited in several places. It is definitely my favorite "made" photo, in the sense that I knew ahead of time what I wanted in the photo, and carefully arranged everything to get it just so.

FooPhoMo is ended!

At the beginning of March, quaryn_dk suggested that I try my new macro lens by taking exactly one picture a day of food. Having done so (outside of travelling and stuff), here are the results - in black & white for reasons of learning about that. Comments and favorites are welcome.

Idea: Google Maps ephemeris

Use Google Maps API to display the direction and height of the sun at any time.

First off just lines showing direction of sun at a given time.

Next ability to move/zoom lines to have them show the lines you want.

If API allows 3D info, make shadows!

Gallery

Since I've upgrade to an ad-based account, I now have galleries! From last outing:

Short trip to Brabrand Sø

Nice sundown today, though (as usual) hazy. Went by the little lake behind Viby Stadion, which wasn't very interesting. Continued out to Brabrand Sø, the west end parking lot -- almost full, so many people were out, and indeed the weather was nice, esp. for early February. In fact, a little freaky warm for the time. Should have been snow and ice and stuff. Tried some backlight pictures, the colour shading in the water with silhouettes works nicely, if the silhouettes have a good form -- simple or patterned.

Photoshoot: Århus Å

Took the 70-300 with me when going for bread. The little park has a couple ducks and *many* gulls. When shooting birds and other rapidly moving objects, set manual exposure for the bird -- especially white things will easily overexpose, and getting that extra speed will help.

Went down to Eskelund to recycle cardboard. Since this was the first sunny day in quite a while, I was hoping to get some good time in, but I napped until about 3:50, and by then I could mostly just watch the last rays of the sun disappear. Official sundown is 16:36, but I was out at the path at 16:10 and the sun had by then dipped below the usual western clouds. The path out to the lake is actually rather long, and the flooding has made it difficult to get out to clear water.

Photos turned out to have little interest, except perhaps the three sculpture pics. Need to consider what to look for on snow-less, plant-less days. 70 mm is fairly long (112mm equivalent), and 300mm (480 equivalent) is positively paparazzian.

I tried the printable lenshoods for the 60mm. Disappointed to find out that they don't attempt to screw into the normal slots, but are supposed to be put on with tape or rubber bands or something.

Ditching Karrigell

Karrigell is too complex for my needs. I'm going with mod_python for the web service backend and PHP/JavaScript for the frontend.

Going with PHP for the backend would make it easier to move to an external server that might not have Python, but starting with Python allows a quick start and giving some KPA-MySQL access code back.

The Publisher mod_python handler is excellent, exposes functions with their parameters. Extremely easy for web services. Combined with JSON for transfer of data, the web service side of it is pretty much taken care of.

The trick now is the right division of labor between PHP and Javascript. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of obvious tutorial for Prototype.