CRT Assemblage

Me. A television. A camera. An experiment: CRT Assemblage:

RedBubble Find: The Party by John Pitman

It's nice to see a landscape with people in it:

The Party by John Pitman

The 141st Heckington Show

Yesterday I took my cameras to the 141st Heckington Show. This is often said to be the biggest village show in the world (note the careful wording in the banner on their website).

Along with the usual displays of livestock and the normal events you'd expect to see at a village show there was also a display by UK FMX — a motorcycle stunt team. It's the first time I've ever tried to photograph anything like that so it was quite a challenge. As it is, I think I got a handful of reasonable shots.

You can see the full set of photographs from the day over on my main site in the 141st Heckington Show gallery.

RedBubble Find: Chill Out by James Price

Ahh, yes, that feeling:

Chill Out by James Price

Got my Lisp t-shirt

The postie turned up today with a package from RedBubble. It was my Lisp t-shirt that I ordered a couple or so weeks back:

Here's a photo, with CLtL doing the modelling:

New Toy: Sunpak PF30X Flash

I've been after a flash for my EOS 400D and PowerShot G9 for a while now but I've never really had the spare cash. As much as I'd love to spend £250+ on a Speedlite it just wasn't going to happen.

And then, last weekend, while having a browse around Amazon, the Sunpak PF30X popped up as a related item to something I was looking at. The price (£49.88) looked too good to be true so I did a little more digging about. Pretty much everything I could find suggested it was a good flash for the price. What was even more encouraging was the fact that "the price" tended to be closer to £100. A quick search on eBay confirmed that this was a good price with most of the "Buy it Now" offers being around £75.00.

And so a purchase was made...

It turned up this lunchtime and I've just had a (very) quick play with it. It worked fine on the EOS 400D and, after some messing about, on the G9 too. For some reason, when I first attached it to the G9, it just wouldn't fire. After turning the flash and the G9 off and on again everything seemed to work just fine. I'm not sure what happened there.

I'm now looking forward to having some free time to have a proper play. I think I can also feel some on-the-cheap off-camera flash action coming on at some point soon. :-D

RAF Waddington Search Hits

I've been running my ruby and graphviz weblog tool on an ad-hoc basis for a while now, generating my photography search hits page, and it's been running pretty well. I've had to iron out one or two small issues but mostly it's run smooth and has been interesting.

I did an update earlier on today and found this:

It's pretty cool that people are finding my RAF Waddington photos, but it's even more cool to see XH558 turn up there.

RedBubble Find: Kata Tjuta by Erland Howden

Delightfully minimalistic:

Kata Tjuta by Erland Howden

Bourne Family Fun Day

Yesterday I took a drive down to Bourne to have a wander around, and photograph, the Bourne Family Fun Day. The event was held at the recreation ground in Bourne and was held in aid of the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire Air Ambulance and another charity whose name escapes me at the moment.

The highlight of the day had to be watching an Elvis impersonator performing a cover version of Nirvana's Come As You Are. Life doesn't get much odder than that. ;-)

You can see the full set of photographs over here.

RedBubble Find: Zombie Bridal Party by Cathie Tranent

I love this photograph for three reasons: 1) I love a good zombie movie, 2) It's funny, 3) I love the idea of a city having a zombie gathering.

Zombie Bridal Party by Cathie Tranent

RAF Waddington 2008

Last weekend was the 2008 RAF Waddington air show and, as we've always done ever since we moved to Lincolnshire, we went along on the Saturday.

The forecast was awful. Mostly rain but with the chance of it clearing up a little in the afternoon. This would normally be disappointing anyway but it was worse given that this show was going to be the return to the skies of the privately rebuilt Avro Vulcan XH558.

As forecast, the morning was wet and horrible and hardly anything was flying (although the Red Arrows managed to put on a small display despite the fact that the cloud was very low). Thankfully the forecast chance of better weather in the afternoon did happen and we ended up with a nice sunny day.

Given that I had the PowerShot G9 with me as well as the EOS 400D I decided to try recording some videos too:

A joint display by a Typhoon and a Spitfire:

XH558 takes to the sky:


A joint flypast of XH558 and the BBMF's Lancaster:


XH558 lands:


It wasn't all videos though. I shot plenty of photographs too. For those see my Waddington 2008 album on my main photography site.

Self-Documenting ruby t-shirt

For reasons I don't really understand myself, recently I've been messing about with the idea of code on t-shirts. Sure, it's not exactly a new idea, but I couldn't resist it. I started out with this Lisp t-shirt (mainly because I wanted one myself, the order is in and I'm looking forward to getting it) and then went on and did this one (which I'll probably end up buying at some point in the near future).

And then I got to thinking that it might be interesting to have a go at creating a t-shirt that was, in effect, self-documenting. The idea being that the design would contain code that would, as much as possible, be usable in creating the design. After thinking on this for a while I decided that a Mandelbrot set would be a good place to start.

Having already done some Lisp I thought it was time to do something with ruby. So, I sat down and knocked up a quick script that would plot a Mandelbrot set, emitting it as a PBM file, just to make life easier. I then converted that to a PNG. After that I loaded up Photoshop Elements, created an empty image sized correctly for a RedBubble t-shirt design, added in the Mandelbrot and then layered the ruby source code over the top. A tweak or two later and I had a finished design:

I'm rather pleased with the result.

That said, the idea still needs some more work. While the shirt contains the code to produce the background image it's not a fully self-documenting t-shirt in that running the code on the shirt won't produce the whole design. That's to say: you can't run the code and get a PNG that's ready to upload to RedBubble.

I think a bit of reading of the documentation for RMagick is in order.

RedBubble Find: Catbells in the morning by PigleT

The reflection alone makes this. The encroaching tree on the right, rather than distracting, gives a feeling of the image emerging. But what really makes it is that small yellow dot. You want to look closer don't you?

Catbells in the morning by PigleT

Mostly Sky

Just one more, honest. Had this urge to do one of shots that are mostly sky:

High Timez

It's official: Animoto is kind of addictive.

:-D

Animoto

I quite like photographic slideshows done as videos and I've dabbled with them from time to time. However, I've never published any because, ideally, they work best with some music to back them up and as far as I'm concerned that can create all sorts of copyright issues.

This morning I read this RedBubble journal entry by Grant Bissett and decided to create an Animoto account and have a quick play. The thing that most attracted me was the fact that they appear to have a library of licensed music, thus solving the copyright issue I tend to worry about.

It's pretty clever too. You start a video project, you either upload a bunch of images, or download them from a small selection of supported image-hosting sites (in my case from Flickr), you make the final selection, you select the backing music, and then wait a (very) short while. And then you've got a video.

There are options for sharing and embedding the video, and there's also the option to upload to YouTube:

There are two levels to the service. You can create videos for free but they can't be any longer than 30 seconds. If 30 seconds isn't enough you can make a longer video on a pay-per-video basis. There's also the option (which you also have to pay for) to create DVD quality videos. All seems fair and sensible to me.

Besides, these days, who's got an attention span longer than 30 seconds? ;-)

Exterminate!

Getting excited about an episode of Doctor Who is okay, right? No matter, I'm excited:

RedBubble Find: Mozzies Beware! by Martin Pot

I often find myself shooting lone objects against the sky. Sometimes with a perfectly clear sky, often with quite a busy sky. I love to look out for examples of this style of shot from others. Here's one I like:

Mozzies Beware! by Martin Pot

Seventy

I try and carry a camera with me everywhere I go. Even when I'm doing something as mundane as popping into the local town (Grantham). Most times the camera never gets used, but at least I've got it there in case something catches my eye.

One such "eye catching" moment happened this morning. It's raining, I'm sat in the car waiting for my wife while she was in a shop, and I notice how cool a sign in a shop window looks as seen through the rain on the windscreen. So out comes the Canon PowerShot G9 and I have a little photography session, the result of which is this:

Click for bigger version

RedBubble Find: Streetlight Opposition by Bobbie

I like this one for (at least) three reasons. First it's the whole "black and white in colour" thing. Second, it's the use of lines and symmetry. Third, it's the fact that the "dark side" of the image is the one where the bulb is missing. Accidental or deliberate the last one is a really neat detail.

Streetlight Opposition by Bobbie

RedBubble Find: Red Saturday by Alex Wise

Sunset. Leading diagonal. Reflection. Background detail. What's not to like?

Red Saturday by Alex Wise

RedBubble Find: Good Times Bad Times by Scott Ruhs

Because it reminds me of some of the images from the very early days of photography:

Good Times Bad Times by Scott Ruhs

East Kirkby

Yesterday was Father's Day and, as a little treat for me, I got taken out to somewhere while I could be let loose with my cameras: the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre at East Kirkby, Lincolnshire.

As luck would have it there was also a model aircraft flying display on too so there was more to photograph than just the centre itself (which, if you're in travelling distance, is worth a visit alone — especially if it's a weekend when Just Jane is doing one of her taxi runs.

The weather was a bit mixed, with plenty of stormy-looking clouds hanging around, but that's often a good thing as it means the sky looks far more interesting than if it had been clear blue.

It was a great day out and you can see the final album of photographs over here.

And, to top it all off, I also got a copy of Martin Parr's Think of England as well as a book about Martin Parr (which includes a wide selection of his work). I also got a copy of A Pig With Six Legs from The Cloud Appreciation Society. :D

RedBubble Find: Oxygen by Jules Campbell

I've got quite a soft spot for Through the Viewfinder shots, either the real thing or the post-processing effect. It's one of those things I keep meaning to have a play with myself (I could probably do something using a combination of the Lubitel 166B and the EOS 400D or PowerShot G9).

I think this is a nice example of that style:

Oxygen by Jules Campbell

RedBubble Find: Thank You for Smoking by Lelia Thomas

I love street photography:

Thank You for Smoking by Lelia Thomas

RedBubble Find: The Stock Market by Peter Zentjens

A nice example of working with a painting with light technique:

The Stock Market by Peter Zentjens

RedBubble Find: Escape by Jo O'Brien

There's a lot of quality digital photography and film photography on RedBubble and, more than once, I've had the urge to mumble about the works I really like. Thing is, it can be bad manners to display copies of other people's works if they don't explicitly allow it so I've generally stayed away from the idea (I could, of course, have gone seeking permission but, well, I guess I'm sort of lazy).

Recently a new group has been created where membership indicates that you're willing to let people display copies of your work elsewhere (with proper attribution, obviously). Because of this I've decided to start a series of "RedBubble Find" posts where I highlight a work I really like. I'm not sure how often I'll do this but I'm aiming for at least a couple of times a week.

Here's my first:

Escape by Jo O'Brien

Fun in the Park

Just up the road from where I live is the village of Donington. The village's main claim to fame, and one they're pretty proud of, is that it's the birthplace of Matthew Flinders.

Recently there's been a lot of work to turn a small field into a park that all the village can enjoy and, yesterday, an event was held there to mark the fact that it's almost finished.

Given that it's just up the road, and that we've got relatives who live there, we decided to pop along and join in the fun. Of course, I took a camera with me.

Some RedBubble Hacks

No website is perfect, that's probably even more true for the more "social" type sites where you tend to spend a lot of time working with them, and I've found that RedBubble is no exception.

A while back I took a look at Greasemonkey (something I'd been meaning to do for ages) as a method of fixing one little RedBubble niggle and, since then, I've "fixed" a few things that have bothered me.

Given that I've got a few RedBubble hacks kicking about now I thought it might be an idea to list them here:

RedBubble "Edit This" hack

This adds a much-needed "Edit this" link to a public view of a work. I often find that I'll notice a small problem with a work when I'm seeing it how everyone else sees it. Such a view doesn't have a way of taking you directly to the edit page for the work so this hack fixes that.

Better text formatting hints

RedBubble uses Textile as the markup language of the site and most people don't know it (I'd never seen it before I started using RedBubble). This little hack replaces the rather sparse help that is given on various edit pages with a more comprehensive cheat sheet.

Public view tab for mybubble

This little hack simply adds an extra tab to the mybubble pages that takes you to your public view. While such a link does exist in the mybubble pages this makes it more obvious.

Watch a forum thread in Google Reader

RedBubble's forums provide RSS feeds so you can keep track of what's going on. This hack adds a "Add to Google Reader" button to each thread so you can quickly and easily add them to Google Reader.

Watch comments for a work in Google Reader

Similar to the above but for the comments made on any work on RedBubble.

Move user actions further up a user's profile

Each user profile page on RedBubble has a couple of user actions: one to add/remove them from your watchlist and one to send them a BubbleMail. The problem is that, at the moment, these actions come below the written profile for the user. Lots of users have very long profiles, often with large image previews in them. Because of this you've got to scroll down quite a way to find those actions. This hack fixes that by moving the actions to before the user-written profile.

Simple BubbleMail preview

Another Textile thing. RedBubble's BubbleMail system (the internal messaging system for the site) has no preview facility. It's also pretty easy to mess up when working with Textile formatting. This hack provides a simple preview system that helps catch any silly errors before you hit the send button.

Extra paging for mybubble work lists

The lists of works in mybubble (your private view of your works) only have the page navigation links at the bottom of the lists. This means that you've generally got to scroll down the page to get to the next page. This hack fixes that problem by placing a clone of those links at the top of the list.

Average views per public work

Possibly the least useful of all the hacks. This one adds an extra bit of information to the view count stats you get in the work lists in mybubble: the average number of views per work.

Hopefully, as RedBubble develops, most of these hacks will become less useful. The ideal situation would be that such things are built into the RedBubble site itself. Until such a time...

Rails, Simile Timeline and Pocket IE

Following on from earlier, I ran into another problem with my little test application but, thankfully, it ended up being easy to fix.

In the application I make use of Timeline. Including it in the application is simple enough. I just include this:

javascript_include_tag(
  "http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/api/timeline-api.js" )

in the html.erb file and the Timeline is available for use (I'll probably go with a local version at some point soon, I've just not got around to sorting that out yet).

The problem I ran into is that Pocket IE on my Pocket PC (a Dell Axim X50) doesn't seem to like this and throws an "Object Error". This was easy enough to solve in the end. I simply added this:

# Test if the request came from Pocket IE.
def pocket_ie?( request )
  request.env[ "HTTP_USER_AGENT" ][ /MSIE.*Windows CE/ ]
end

to my ApplicationHelper class and then, in the html.erb file, simply said:

unless pocket_ie?( request )
  javascript_include_tag(
    "http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/api/timeline-api.js" )
end

Combined with a handheld specific stylesheet to hide the div that contains the timeline I end up with a version of the page that works in Pocket IE with no problems.

Okay, I guess it's a little kludgy, but it works and solves the problem at hand.

Ruby on Rails (and some WAP)

I'm quite a fan of ruby and have been for many years. In the last year or so I've been meaning to get to grips with rails but, every time I've tried, we've ended up having a falling out.

Most of the reasons have tended to be based around the (it seems to me) amazing lack of useful documentation. Sure, there's lots of stuff out there that documents the framework, but the sort of documentation that helps ease you into the learning process seems very thin on the ground.

Not too long back, at the suggestion of Rich Daley, I invested in a copy of Agile Web Development With Rails. This was just the sort of thing I was looking for and it's been a huge help (and also a huge source of frustration in itself seeing as how it's aimed at an earlier version of rails than the one I've got installed, but I've managed to get over that hump — it also seems that there's a third edition on the way).

Even with that book I still had a couple of aborted attempts to get to know rails better. As often happens with me the problem really came down to not having a goal to work to, a problem to solve, an application to build. Finally, last week, I devised a problem to solve and set to work.

And it worked, and it's been enjoyable. So far I'm impressed.

For me a good development system is one where my needs have been anticipated and, up until now, rails seems to deliver. A good example happened very recently. After having "finished" my little test application I thought it might be fun to add some simple WAP support. I imagined it would be easy enough using respond_to. Something like this:

def index
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.wml
  end
end

However, that didn't work. rails didn't know what to do with a "wml". A quick Google search later (see, the online docs are fine once you know what you're doing) and I found that all I needed to do was to edit my config/environment.rb to add the following:

Mime::Type.register "text/vnd.wap.wml", :wml

A restart of the server later and everything was fine. All I then needed to do was to create a index.wml.builder along the lines of this:

xml.instruct! :xml, :version => "1.0"

xml.wml "xml:lang" => "en-gb" do
  
  xml.card :title => "My title here" do
    
    xml.p "Something interesting here"
    xml.p "Something else interesting here."
    
  end
  
end

and I was done (and testing was easy enough thanks to the wmlbrowser add-on for Firefox).

I think I'm going to like rails. Now to find a real problem that needs solving...

More Fuji Provia 100F Results

Having had enjoyable results with my first roll I decided to put a second roll of Fuji Provia 100F through the Lubitel 166B.

I finished the roll off the other weekend, while at Belton House, and last Monday I posted it for processing and scanning by my friendly Scottish landscape photographer (thanks Tim!). I got the results back on Saturday and have processed them all over the weekend. The results are as follows:

Mareham Lane Rapeseed

Lone Pylon



Repetition



Lubitel at Belton House






I did suffer some light leakage this time around, especially on the first three frames. The second frame (Lone Pylon) suffered the most, hence the reason I turned it into black and white. Other than that I'm very pleased with the results.

As it turns out, I was so happy with the way that Lone Pylon turned out I've made it available as a print (as part of my series Against the Sky) on RedBubble:

RedBubble Art Manager for Windows v1.4.0.0 Released

Earlier today I released a new version of my RedBubble art manager application (that was v1.3.0.0).

The main change in that release was the addition of a "Preview" button to the promotion code dialog:

When you use this a new window will appear that shows a preview of the image that is generated, like this:


Also, as per a suggestion from shawhouse, I added size parameters to the laminated and framed prints. This makes a subtle difference to the final image.

Just as I was making the release I got a message from reflexio to say that they'd discovered that RBArtMan failed to download an art list if you've only got a single page of art. This was a very easy fix.

So, later on in the day I released v1.4.0.0.

As well as fixing that bug I added a profile promotion code generator dialog:


It generates code that creates a banner for your profile just like you can find in your promote tab here on RedBubble. The main difference is that it'll do Textile code (used as the markup language on RedBubble) and BBCode as well as HTML.

The result is that you get little banners like this: