Terence's Blog » Uncategorized

[Life Update] – On the road again…

ttstam — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:08:53 +0000

Okay, it’s been far too long since I’ve gotten an update up here. Work had managed to eat away almost all my spare time. Between work, frisbee, and, okay, the occasional LAN Party with the college chums (I *did* get into Starcraft II Beta…) I haven’t really had a lot of time to work on projects. Certainly being in Oregon 5 out of the last 7 weeks didn’t help.

Be prepared for a bunch of photo posts, interlaced with the occasional IT and Engineering rambling . Feel free to leave me some comments on my posts

-=- Terence

[Hotlinks] – Crappy Mandarin, boys with toys

ttstam — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:18:33 +0000

Really bad Mandarin

Came across this priceless video of the current Macau SAR’s chief executive, Mr. Fernando Chui, being sworn in. His Mandarin is unbearably bad, so some prankster had taken the liberty and subtitled it with just about the worse words one can use, given his mispronunciations. So he’s shown essentially in the video talking about fecal matter, pants not fitting, and a sick Dad frying cheese – to the Chinese President Hu Jin Tao.

My mandarin isn’t perfect, but if I’m the chief executive, I’d at least learn how to say my own name, the place I’m running, and the place I report to correctly.

And on the note of good Mandarin speaker, here’s a clip of the Australian PM Kevin Rudd at APEC2007.

Boys with Toys

Came across Vrogy’s photo stream on Flickr. What do you do when you mix a CAD guy, a CNC mill and a cosplaying geek? A website where you can download Solidworks model of the Halo3 sniper rifle, among other things.

And speaking of boys and projectile weapons, here’s an old video of a Rufus Hussey, the “Bean Shooter Man”. Mr. Hussey passed away in the 1990s, so this must be (judging from the Pepsi cans) quite an old video.

And here’s a modern day German guy by the name of Joerg Sprave that designs some really out of this world slingshots, complete with compound ball bearings and load balancing yokes.

[Photography] – The Disappearing Photographer

ttstam — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:52:05 +0000

Last Sunday, I went to a UW Garage shoot, hosted by the Seattle Flickr Meetup. The UW Garage shoots are a a tradition that I help started when I first started learning off-camera lighting; I wanted people to practice with. We invade my alma mater, the University of Washington’s parking garage and share photographic resources (lights, stands, triggers, and recently, models) and practice our lighting and photo techniques as a collective group.

It’s a cool event – our little crew had been featured on Strobist.com, YouTube videos, and Chase Jarvis’s video blog.

Here’s an outfit that Emily wanted to be photographed in. The moment the sunglasses went on, I knew I was in trouble. The curvature of the sunglasses, coupled with the mirror surface, meant that there’s really no way to hide the light source in the final image.

When I see a mirror surface like that, I know I have to create a large enough light source to try to fill the family of angles that the mirror surface will reflect. So I moved Emily away from the white wall that I was shooting her against, and used that as a reflector for my two flashguns. Note that now I’m between the wall and the subject and is backlit in the shot above.

To make myself easier to remove from the image, I took the secondary diffuser fabric from my Photek Softlighter, and poked the camera lens through it. Now, I can “camoflage” myself underneath the Photek’s diffuser:

Much better. The light thrown by the wall also lights up the softlighter’s diffuser, which makes me that much easier to remove.

A little bit of touch-up in lightroom (edit brush, +4EV exposure comp) and we are left with the final image:

(and this is now her facebook profile image, so I know I did something right ).

Additional Resources:
Seattle Flickr Meetup Group [Discussion forum | Meetup.com Webpage]
Strobist.com – to learn more about off camera lighting