Engineering + Music = Awesome

[DOH! Nick, suspicious of this, looked it up on Snopes.com, a source for debunking urban legends and internet fraud. WAH-Wah-wahhhhhhh. This is fake. It's CG. There is also no Trammell Music Conservatory, and while many things can be made from tractor parts, this was not. SNOPES.COM's debunk ]

My mom sent me this forward today and I thought it was so cool I just needed to pass it along. In the world of email, you never really know how long a forward has been out there in the ether - my apologies if you saw this a year ago or something.

The "instrument" was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa . The vast majority (97%) of the machines' components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft. Leave it to midwesterners to repurpose farm equipment! (somewhat less surprising if you've ever seen what people buy at Tractor Supply Co.)

It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of set-up, alignment, calibration, and tuning before filming the video. The instrument is (or was) on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is already slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.

Cool.

A White (nearly) Christmas!

It's Christmas Eve, I'm listening to holiday music on the radio, and I've spent the last few evenings in front of the computer, sorting through this past weekend's pictures from snowy Big Bear! It almost feels like Christmas! =)

Nick and I ventured up to Big Bear, in the San Bernadino mountains, this past weekend for a little getaway with some good friends, good food, and good snow! Big Bear is a 3-hour drive from San Diego (North past Riverside and then up into the mountains) and is one of the closest snowboarding destinations. And though Nick has been there many times in the years we've lived here, this was our first time staying the whole weekend! (Nick has always just made it a very long single-day event) A few months ago, a coworker asked Nick if he had ever used the Marine cabins up at Big Bear ... to which Nick replied "Marine cabins?!" It's a group of 8 6-person A-frame cabins run by the Marines from Miramar, nestled on private land just steps from the slopes at Snow Summit. (here's ours:)



We reserved the cabin for last weekend months ago, not knowing whether there would be decent snow this early in the season - and then last week we got absolutely DUMPED on! There must have been 4 feet of snow up there. We got our first impressions of the enormity of the storm when we saw SUVs driving down the mountain on Friday afternoon with 3 feet of snow STILL stuck to the car roofs! Here are some shots of the snowy mountains from I-15:







Once we got into the mountains, the snow line was low enough that we needed chains for much of the drive. I loved seeing the snowy peaks emerge as we wound up the hillsides:













After checking into the cabin, Nick hit the slopes right away so he could get some night snowboarding in. Once Chip and Daryn arrived, Chip joined him over at Snow Summit, and shortly after their rosy-faced return the final couple, Kim and Jared, arrived. We made it an early night on Friday so Nick and Chip could hit the slopes first thing Saturday morning. The rest of us had a relaxing Saturday, reading, cooking, and enjoying the beautiful weather. I went out a few times and took some pictures:





















This was underneath the eaves of the cabin, where some icicle melt contributed to the "Banzai Pipeline" effect:


And we were teased relentlessly by a few Blue Jays who were very interested in the peanuts I tossed into the snowbank out front, but who never wanted to stick around long enough for me to get a good shot. Here are a few I got after MUCH patience and maybe even a few curse words.




(He was digging in the snow pile for those peanuts in that one - you can see the snow fly!)



The four of us wanted to go snowshoeing, but by the time we got our act together the only place up there that rents snowshoes was all rented out, so we headed back to the cabin, got some sleds, and trooped off to find a good sledding hill. The property that the Marine cabins are on is pristine and gorgeous (and will make a fantastic destination for snowshoeing in the future!) and we were pointed toward a hill that had a fairly well-tamped-down and defined sledding path. After an hour or so of climbing up and rocketing down, we began to formulate a plan to stage a 3-pronged snowball assault on Nick and Chip upon their return from the slopes. Once back at the cabin, we started stocking our snowball arsenal and preparing our shelters.

Daryn, gathering up some snowballs she had made:


Jared, chilling out in the snowdrift:


Jared and Daryn, stocking up one of the trenches:


Not wanting to leave any packable snow with which Nick and Chip could possibly make snowballs in a retaliatory strike, we made sure to tamp down all of the "good snow" areas. Here's Jared, in action:






Aside from the boys returning too early (it was still light out), the plan was successfully carried out as predicted. I even warned Daryn and Jared that Nick would probably charge me to get to my snowball stash ... and he sure did! It was a great time.

Sunday morning we wanted to get everyone out to the sledding hill for a few more runs (with Nick and Chip, this time) and I brought my camera and captured some pretty spectacular spills. We had done a good job of packing down that snow on Saturday, and it had a chance to really freeze overnight. By Sunday morning, it was lightning fast, and a big bump had appeared about 2/3 of the way down ... which means we were catching some AIR.

Nick's first run:




And another good run by Nick:





The hat probably requires some explanation ... while we were in New Orleans, it was unseasonably cold and Nick decided to try to find a hat in one of the tourist-tack shops on Bourbon Street. Even though it was only early December, one of them had this elf-ear hat on clearance, and it definitely did the trick! Nick has since gotten many compliments (or maybe just "comments") on it, and he even wore it on the slopes for a bit of Christmas cheer.

Anyway, Nick didn't have too many real wipeouts, but here was a great one:
(catching some air on the aforementioned bump)


(with a face full of snow, he still has a post-wipeout grin)


Here's one more picture that I just love:


Nick made sure to grab the camera from me so I could get up and do a few runs. I didn't do too many, mostly because that run was MUCH icier the second day and I managed to successfully damage myself (well, my ass, anyway). But it was so much fun and didn't really hurt until later ... and the pictures are hilarious!

On my first run, realizing that I was going fast


Hitting the bump:


And coming down on the edge of the sled:


That look pretty much said it all. Ouch. But adrenaline is a great thing, and all I could do was laugh breathlessly!


On my second run, I thought I would try to slow myself down a bit by putting my legs out ... well, it worked ... in a way.






While I think my wipeouts were pretty, um, awesome(?), Jared definitely had the most spectacular wipeouts. He also had the most. Period.




Another:




Let's just say there were a whole bunch just like that. I have them all posted on Flickr (click HERE), along with great shots of Daryn's, Kim's, and Chip's runs (Chip always had the best post-run facial expressions!!)

At the end of the sledding run, the boys all decided to be daredevils and come down the run together. Thankfully, no one was hurt!







On our way back down the mountain, much of the snow had melted and we were able to take our chains off at Big Bear Dam, which was a great point for me to get some shots of the partially frozen lake (the lake almost never freezes, so this was pretty cool!)

Randy, This One's For You!

My brother Randy and I have been exchanging emails more frequently than usual lately, mostly because he's been bitten by the photography bug and decided to go "all in" and get a Canon 40D with some great lenses. Since I share this interest and also have invested in a Canon system, I pointed him toward some lenses and some professional photography forums, and (among many of his friends who are dSLR fiends) have talked with him about the photo editing workflow options.

When I decided to get into this hobby, I guess I didn't really appreciate how central a good editing system is. A note about editing: I'm not someone who tries to use editing software to make my photos look supersaturated or hyper-real, though there's certainly a market out there for that kind of thing. But digital photography (well, any photography, really) has its limits, and the sensor can only record a certain amount of data, whereas our eyes sees much more dynamic range of color and tone. I see photo editing as a way to make your pictures more closely resemble the scene you saw. Some scenes almost always need some help in the digital darkroom, namely sunsets, sunrises, and other situations where you tend to have one part of your picture overexposed and the other part underexposed.

For two and a half years now, I've been using CS2 Photoshop for all of my photo editing needs. A lot happens with photo software in two and a half years, I've discovered, and I've been contemplating upgrading to CS4 for a while. And then Adobe introduced the newest version of Lightroom. I knew a lot of pro photographers use Adobe's Lightroom as their primary editing software (they use CS4 for fine detail), and when Randy asked my opinion on it, I realized it might be worth a demo (you can download a demo for free) to see how a Lightroom + CS2 setup might compare to a straight CS4 upgrade. I think Lightroom is pretty intuitive, whereas Photoshop requires you to learn a whole language of photoediting ("layers" and "masks" and "filters"...). And you can really do a lot in Lightroom very quickly so long as you don't require extreme precision in your editing. So I've put together my own Lightroom workflow example for Randy (and anyone else who cares!). The screen shots end up pretty small, but just click on the images to see them bigger.

Take this image: this was from our recently blogged trip to the tidepools.

I had taken a couple of shots with different exposures, but this was a good middle-of-the-road kind of shot. The rocks and Nick are underexposed but not terribly so and the sky isn't completely overexposed, so I knew I could tease out some detail from both halves of the shot.

Lightroom has a gradient tool that digitally resembles a graduated neutral density filter. By clicking on the gradient tool, I can choose a lighter exposure (+0.90) and drag a gradient near the horizon. Because of the rocks, I angle it (but still have a patch of sky that accidentally gets lightened - I can fix that later).


I can click on the gradient tool icon again and the lines disappear. A control point remains, however, so if I want to change anything about the gradient, I can just click on the control point and re-edit.


Now the sky: I click on the gradient tool and click "New," select an exposure of -0.70, and drag a new gradient from the sky toward the rocks, overlapping slightly.


By clicking on the toggle just above the "-0.70" you reveal more adjustments to be made within that gradient, and I bump up the contrast and the saturation a bit in that gradient area (the sky).


Now to address that halo caused by using a gradient on an irregular surface. Next to the gradient tool is a brush tool. Clicking on the brush opens up some options, including brush size, feather diameter (like a fade of the effect), flow (how opaque you want your change to be), and density. I set a small diameter and middle range on the other options. Because I want the brush to correct the increased exposure from the Nick+rocks gradient, I make the brush correction a -1.10 exposure. I click the letter O on the keyboard to show my brushstrokes in red, and then I paint with the brush (I can click the letter O again to hide the red and show the actual correction).


Still not completely satisfied with the results, I click on the gradient tool and it brings up the control points for the two gradients I made before. I click on the "Nick and rocks" gradient and change the angle a bit to reduce the halo effect. I also increase the exposure correction. I could go back and use the brush on the upper part of the cliff if I wanted to, but I'm past the point of caring at this point (since this is just for demonstration).


Going down to the global adjustments tools, I increase the saturation and contrast of the entire image, and I could also now sharpen the image (though I prefer to sharpen selectively in Photoshop).


If you go back up and look at the original image, you can see how dramatic these changes are, and they bring the image on my screen closer to what I saw through my camera viewfinder.

BUT ... what if I only used Photoshop? Here's what I would do:

I open the raw image in Photoshop's raw camera utility (the blue areas represent underexposed parts of the image that have been pushed or "clipped" to black):


I can recover the detail in the clipped black areas by increasing the overall exposure of the image a bit (+0.35; I also move the shadows slider back to 0 to help recover detail in the darker areas). At this point, I don't increase the exposure too much, as I will want to darken the sky and lighten the rocks yet.


I click Open and open the image in Photoshop. I select the sky using the magic wand tool, and by Shift+clicking, I can add to the selection area until the whole sky is selected. Zoomed in to 50%, you can see that this is pretty exact.


I go to Layer--> New Adjustment Layer--> Levels and the Levels dialog pops up. If you look down in the lower right, you can see that a new layer appears above the "Background" layer in the palette. There's an icon to represent a "levels" adjustment and next to it is the layer mask. The layer mask represents, in black and white, the parts of your image being affected by the layer: black is unaffected and white is affected. Since I had selected only the sky, the rest of the image is black on the layer mask. I moved the left (shadows) slider to the right until it touched the very start of the black levels curve, and I moved the right (highlights) slider to the left a bit. I moved the middle (midtones) slider to the right a bit as well. That takes care of the sky, for the most part.


Instead of using the magic wand or another technique to select the rest of the image, I go to Select--> Reselect and the selection of the sky that I had just made reappears. I can Select Inverse to select Nick and the rocks. I feather this selection (Select--> Feather--> 50 pixels) so that there's no dramatic line of demarkation, then I go to Layers--> New Adjustment Layer--> Curves. The Curves dialog pops up. If you look in the palette (lower right), you see the Curves 1 layer appear, with a layer mask that has the rocks and Nick in white.



Here, I want to improve overall lightness without increasing the maximum bright point or the minimum dark point, so Curves was a logical choice. By dragging up and to the left, I lighten the selected area.


Now I want to add contrast. I could just find the contrast slider and increase it (like in Lightroom) but I prefer to use the Curves tool to adjust contrast. I click on a whitecap in the water and an open circle appears on the Curve representing the tonal value of that point in the image.


Because I want the whitecaps to be lighter, I know I need to adjust this part of the curve up and to the left.


Similarly, I want to adjust the darker water and the rocks and make them a bit darker (but still preserve the detail). I find the appropriate spot on the curve and pull it down a bit.


I can now use duplicate background layers with layer masks to adjust sharpness to, say, just the rocks and Nick or remove noise just in the darker parts of the rocks.

The final picture is pretty similar to the Lightroom final pic but without the halos caused by the gradient tools. Sharpening in Lightroom is pretty crude, though there are plug-ins (ranging from inexpensive to very expensive) that do a much better job than the in-house Lightroom sharpening; sharpening in Photoshop is much more exact and offers much more control. With enough patience and practice, using the gradient / brush tools in Lightroom can produce a very similar effect to PS's layers technique. Both programs and techniques are non-destructive; that is, both produces changes that are infinitely re-editable and at any point you can throw away some or all of the changes you've made without damaging the original image.

I'm pretty happy with Lightroom and PS and a coordinated workflow. I'm hoping that Lightroom introduces more control over Curves, because for me it's a dealbreaker of a tool - I can use it for Contrast and also color correction (by adjusting curves for each of the color channels). A school of philosophy on contrast that was pioneered by Ansel Adams is the Zone Method, in which you identify and categorize your tonal range (ie the histogram in the upper right) by "zones." And then to add contrast, you apply changes to specific zones and leave others alone, providing an image that is dramatic but realistic. This is done very easily using the histogram as your visual Zone reference and Curves to adjust at the ideal place. I rely heavily on this tool!! If Lightroom made a Curves tool more similar to that in Photoshop, I would probably rarely end up using PS.

Food for thought, RJ. =) Miss you, bro!

Return to the Tidepools

During the month of November, the extreme low tide in San Diego coincides with late afternoon - a great time to visit the tidepools, since they close at dusk (as in, there are police cars that blast their alarms and flash their lights to say "you'd better get the heck out of here asap").

On November 30, Nick and I made a quick jaunt out to the tidepools at Cabrillo National Monument for sunset. The marine layer was rolling and it quickly turned to pea-soup fog. But there was something about the quality of the light that late in the afternoon on the orange cliffs that was really striking, and I definitely enjoyed taking pictures of our long shadows!





We headed in the opposite direction from my last trip there with Mom and Dad - this was possible because the tide was extremely low (-1.4). There was a well-marked path (bordered by the stones) that took us up and over a ridge and gave us different views of the high cliffs.





looking up:


Nick pics:



I just love this picture of Nick. It makes me so happy every time I see it!



If you compare this shot up the coastline to a similar shot from my prior tidepools blog post, you can see that we are at a very different angle here, up on the cliff instead of down at water level.


If you look closely, you can see an egret in the water. In fact, she/he's almost in exactly the same place as the one that popped up in my last visit! It's hard to believe that it's the same bird, but ...




Here's the little guy, shaking off the water. You can see the droplets being flung from his head!


post-shake:


Talking with Nick about this next shot, he commented that it's hard to get a sense of scale; he thought these rocks looked bigger than they actually were because of how fine and delicate the texture in the rock was. In actuality, this rock protrusion was probably about 5 feet tall.


I just really love the smoothness of the rock here:


We caught the beginning of sunset just as we were being "persuaded" by the police sirens to leave:


And then we headed up to Cabrillo monument to catch the very last of the light. The fog was rolling in and it was verrrry thick, but it diffused the light and created a beautiful palette of pinks and purples over the fogged-in city. Here are a couple shots of the Cabrillo statue in those beautiful colors:



At the bottom of this last shot, you can barely make out the edge of North Island (Coronado) and the channel leading into San Diego bay (the horizontal line at the bottom).

Despite the fact that it was cold, super windy, and my lens practically salted over from the ocean spray being driven into us by the wind, it was beautiful and we were glad we got to do it together - maybe our last tidepooling trip before we leave San Diego!

Oh My NOLA!

(that's a great post-Katrina Harry Connick, Jr. album reference)

Nick is a very busy business traveler of late, flying all over the country in less than a month. I mentioned in the last post about his trip to Maryland, and he was just in New Orleans. Now he's in Saint Louis just in time for his birthday! The whole Sinnokrak clan is meeting there this week so Nick and his mom can celebrate their birthdays (today, the 10th!) and Nick can catch up with his brothers, sister-in-law Kate, and nephews Braydan and Joshua. They are even going to have a pre-Christmas Christmas, since Nick and I aren't heading back to the midwest for the holidays this year.

Without a holiday vacation to look forward to, this December was looking a bit bleak until Nick suggested that I try to meet him in New Orleans for a long weekend. Nick and I hadn't been to New Orleans since Katrina and we have such fond memories of the city as one of the few vacation destinations within our reach when we lived in Pensacola. It's funny to think about how different our lives are now compared to the last time we were there ... namely, how our idea of a "nice" dinner has changed now that we're serious foodies!! Always prepared, I looked into places to indulge our foodie sensibilities over the three-day vacation. We settled on doing Friday lunch at Commander's Palace, where they are famous for their M-F 25 cent martini lunches! We were smart, though, to limit it to one each: we did not want ANYTHING getting in the way of tasting that amazing food!! We started with soup: Nick had a duck, goose, chicken, and oyster gumbo and I had their famous turtle soup. Honestly, the soup was so rich I could have stopped right there and been full for hours. But we were in NOLA, for chrissakes, and we were going to forcibly expand our stomachs! I had the most amazing Black Drum (fish) from local waters, and Nick had veal ... here's a picture, right before we dug in!

[Note: I tried and tried but could not get the pictures to look right compressed into the blog format. I recommend clicking on the individual pics to see them more clearly. Sorry!]



We also ate at Cochon, which was upscale Southern comfort food ("cochon" is French for "pig" so you can guess how many things on the menu were pork!) and it was simply fantastic. If anyone's in New Orleans anytime, soon, those are two places not to be missed!!

Commander's Palace is in the Garden District, so Nick and I took the streetcar from our hotel on Canal Street. We had time before our lunch reservation to stop at the Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, right across the street from the restaurant. Of the New Orleans area cemeteries, it's one of the oldest and also one of the smallest. Anyway, here's a sampling of the shots:























I got a lot of use out of my super wide angle lens on this trip ... most of those shots were taken between 13 and 20 mm.

After stuffing ourselves silly at lunch, we decided to take a leisurely trek back to the French Quarter. As we walked through some areas that were ... well, let's say we wouldn't walk through them at night ... we came across this fascinating tree that had grown right through the fence. How long do you think that fence has been there, if a tree actually grew AROUND it?!



And near the new WWII museum (formerly the D-Day museum) we walked past a bar that had this slice of "local color":



Nick had been to the WWII museum earlier in the week with his meeting, although he didn't get much time to actually spend inside the museum. With nothing but time on our hands and no mission other than to eventually get back to the hotel, we decided to do a late afternoon dash-through. The museum is in the Warehouse District, which was hit hard by Katrina. There was wind damage and serious water damage, and the blocks surrounding the museum had some serious damage to old and historic homes and structures. In what must have been a controversial plan, the museum bought up the nearby blocks and worked with the historical society to move or preserve what structures they could, then tore down the rest and are in the process of greatly expanding the museum. They will add an "Air and Sea" structure to house planes and part of a ship, small convention center, ceremony facilities, and a large parade ground/courtyard. Here's a LINK to the website to see the expansion. My initial impression of the museum was that it was going to be largely devoted to D-Day, it being a former D-Day Museum. I was surprised that there was a very comprehensive Pacific Theater gallery, including all of the individual "D-Days" involved in the taking or taking back of the islands in the Pacific. It's a very modern museum with many interactive components like 2-minute histories from the mouths of American and foreign service members, soldiers from the "other side(s)" of the war, and stories of the men and women back home and the ways the war affected them. I thought the museum was really great and I highly recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in NOLA.

We spent the rest of the weekend walking, walking, walking. We hit jazz clubs and saw some really fantastic bands, went to Preservation Hall and were blown away, and saw "Steamboat Willie," a New Orleans institution, in the courtyard of Cafe Beignet. We went to the French Market and were shocked to see that the fixed vendor stands (the set of stands with gates, meant for permanent sellers like confectioners, farmers, local fisherpeople, etc) were still not open post-Katrina. We spoke with one vendor, Loretta (of famous Loretta's pralines!) who lamented that the fixed booths weren't open yet but who also talked about the wind damage the French Market sustained and the repairs that had to happen to the structure.

Here's me, behind the French Market:


We tried to walk up to one of our favorite spots, Louis Armstrong Park, but it too was still closed and under repairs. I knew that it had sustained a lot of damage during the post-K flood, but three years on ...? Upon that disappointment, I turned around and took this street shot:


The light in New Orleans this time of year was amazing. Because the French Quarter is oriented to the river and not the compass, you get a false sense of East and West. Every time you think that the sun should be setting to your left, it's actually setting somewhere between in front of you and your left. (wow, did that make sense?!) The consequence of this is that there are always shadows being thrown on the streets. That picture just above was actually taken right around noon! And this one was taken around 1 pm:


We had so much fun wandering around in the tourist-free city that was all decked out and festive for the holidays. Nick and I talked about finding a way to come back every December - no tourists, mild (usually, anyway!) weather, and the restaurants start their Revillon menus, which are special fixed-price holiday 3-4 course suppers for unbelievably reasonable prices. One of the most fun things we did, however, was trek up to the relatively hidden pool deck at the Westin and get some panoramic shots of the city (hooray wide angle lens!!)

Here's the river as it bends right at the French Quarter:


And here's one of the French Quarter all the way out to Lake Pontchartrain (the cathedral in view is Jackson Square):


And the French Quarter with that super clear winter sky:


Oh yeah, and I think most of you know these fools:




And speaking of fools ... the afternoon sun was SO BRIGHT and we were looking DIRECTLY into it. We got to the point of closing our eyes and counting down until just before the shutter ... and we still look like squinty fools.



So Nick suggested we just make crazy faces at the camera instead of trying to smile nicely, and we ended up taking a bunch and making ourselves laugh so hard we were crying. Or maybe we were tearing up because our retinas were so damaged. huh.


(I caption that one "Ahhhhhh, my eyeballs are BUUUUURRRNING!")



It would be worth going back to NOLA just to recreate that ridiculous photo shoot.

A couple more shots -

One from the Riverwalk, outside the second location of Cafe Du Monde:


One of a street band out performing on Sunday morning:


One of a beautifully botanical wall in the far French Quarter:


And one of the sunset I saw from the plane as we headed back home: