iD News and Blog

Tilt-Shift Photography, or How to Make Everything Look Tiny

This is a large format camera:

Unlike your digital camera (which most likely doesn’t even need you to focus), or an old-school SLR film camera (which only needs focus, shutter speed, and aperture), a large format camera has a lot of controls. Check out how each piece moves in 3 dimensions in the picture below:

2 of the adjustments you can make are called tilt and shift. Without getting TOO technical, what you’re doing is moving different focus planes to interact with each other in a way that you can’t really do with other cameras, thus selecting a certain region of the film to be in focus. There are modern tools that can do this on modern cameras (even digital!) – for example, lensbaby.com offers a lens that can make those adjustments. What will this do for you? You may remember this picture from a previous blog entry:

So, if you don’t have an extra $350 to spend on a lens (ok, let’s face it, you’re going to use it to buy video games and Mt. Dew), you can still acheive this same effect with a Gaussian Blur. It’s a great effect. You take a picture of normal sized people and magically they become miniatures!

Select a round (circular or oval-shaped) selection around the center, in focus, portion of your photo. Invert your selection and feather it by a lot. 100 pixels isn’t too many. Select Gaussian Blur from the filters section and experiment with settings. Can you make a photo look like these?

Email me *your* contributions at justin(at)internaldrive.com (@ symbol left out intentionally to prevent robotic spam crawling!) and I’ll post the best ones in a future entry.

 

Tags: iD Tech Camp, photography, Photoshop
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Four Online Games to Exercise Your Brain!

It is well accepted that games and puzzles serve to keep ones brain sharp. In fact, there is even pending research that the kind of stimulation they provide can prevent/slow the progression of certain mental conditions such as Alzheimer’s and even improve cognition in individuals who’ve suffered head trauma. Additionally some types of games require social interaction which benefits ones social skills, especially in young adolescences as it develops the their ability to corporate (or beguile!) to achieve an objective. At the very least, games are a fun way of giving your brain a work out, which is just as important to exercise as the rest of your body.

Here are 4 very fun “brain games” that I personally frequent. They are each very different and promote very different types of cognitive skills.

1) http://games.asobrain.com/ – Xplorers

Mental Muscles flexed:

• Memory
• Social Skills
• Strategy, Planning Ahead
• Resources Management

“Aso Brain Games” offers a view games, however I’ve chosen it for one in particular; Xplorers. Xplorers is a carbon copy of the best selling, European, tabletop board “The Settlers of Catan” by Klaus Tuber. It is a classic “German-style board” game as it encourages a very high-level of player interaction, is simple, short and highly aesthetic. In a nutshell, the game resembles a hybrid of Risk and Monopoly, minus all the boring parts (seriously when is the last time you finished either?)

2) http://www.flashbynight.com/drench/ – Drench

Mental Muscles flexed:

• Visuospatial Cognition
• Planning Ahead

The self-proclaimed “World’s Simplest Flash Game”. Players have a limited number of moves to paint a grid all one color. Moves must be planned based on the pattern of the pre-existing pixels, which is randomly generated from 6 different colors. Calling for an extremely high level of visual concentration, players will becoming increasingly adept at interpreting a seemingly chaotic grid of colors. Though very different from Chess, players must think several moves ahead, similar to Chess players. As each move yields a tree of options, players must think through as many options while they can keep track of, all the while swimming in a sea of brightly colored pixels!

3) http://www.fantasticcontraption.com/ - Fantastic Contraption

Mental Muscles flexed:

• Creative Problem Solving
• Understanding of Physics and Engineering
• Trial and Error

This game allows user to build contraptions to compete various tasks. The game is very open ended and it’s puzzles can be solved in a variety of ways, there is no one correct answer. This gives it tremendous reliability as you can revisit puzzles to try and solve them is a simpler way (or a more complicated way!). What is particular fun about this game is that one can build their own levels and share them with the community. Participants have used this to create spin-offs of the game such as “Battle Bots” in which users create contraptions which joust one another!

4) http://games.swirve.com/earth/ – Earth 2025

Mental Muscles flexed:

• Resource Management
• Long Term Strategy / Planning
• Social Skills
• Mathematics / Statistics

This text-based game is run tournament style in month long and two-month long installments. Hundreds of player compete in building an empire. During that time they must find ways to monetize, defend and expand their empire by employing a variety of different strategies. Seeking out alliances are needed for survival. The game allows for many different types of play; will your empire’s army brutally conquer others or will you focus on industry and grow rich through exporting goods?

What are your favorite brain games?

 

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Green Blog Action Day!

o maybe you’ve heard of Copenhagen. No, I’m not talking about the little can, I’m talking about the UN-sponsored global summit on climate change. If you haven’t heard of it, you must not read very many blogs! October 15th is designated as “Blog Action Day,” and 20000+ different blogs mentioned the big day. One interesting thing to note is that this number, as high as it is, is only one half of 1 percent of all of the blogs that are out there.

iD Tech has been pushing green issues for years. We know that we can help save power by turning off lights, computers, and monitors when we aren’t using our labs, and that reusing cups (by putting our name on them!) helps reduce waste. Did you bring in batteries or ink cartridges last year? Maybe a used cell phone or two?

If you have any more ideas on how to improve efficiency and reduce waste at camp, we want to hear them!

 

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iD Princeton ‘05 Reunion in NYC and Philly!

At iD Tech Camps we always say that our students will make friends that last a lifetime but I’d like to point out that the same is true for our staff as well! When I started with iD, back in the summer of ’05 I taught Web Design and Flash Animation out our heralded iD Princeton location. While there I made good friends with an international staff who was hired from Scotland, Andy aka “Wee Haggis”. Though I could barely understand a word he said, we quickly became close friends.

After working hard all week at camp, we’d take road trips all over the northeast coast touring the different parts of the country. In fact, he joined me the next camp season to drive across the country to work at iD UCLA, a road trip I’ll never forget!

I’m proud to say that we’ve remained good friends ever since and have visited each other just about every year. However, our most recent rendezvous was a special as his entire family came a long for the ride! I met up with them in New York City, then we all headed to Philadelphia. Here we are at the world famous Philadelphia Art Museum in front of the infamous “Rocky” statue. Andy and I are up top:

I found the only place NYC broadcasting the Scotland vs. Macedonia Football game, as it was not to be missed (my awesome Scotland Football jersey compliments of Andy’s fam) here we are in attendance:

PROTIP: Did you know the symbol depicted in the Scotish “Isle of Man” Flag (between Andy and I) is called a Triskelion

 

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How Do You Get That Blurry Background?

It’s a question people ask me about my photos sometimes:

“How do you get the background to be blurry like that?”  The photographic term for this blur is “bokeh,” which is derived from a Japanese word meaning “blur,” and it specifically means the aesthetic quality of the out-of-focus area of an image.

Without going into a complete technical dissertation, it’s time to talk about aperture and depth-of-field (DOF.)  The aperture is the technical name for the opening in your camera lens that lets the light through.  The wider the aperture is open, the more light that is let in.  The depth-of-field (DOF)  is the term for the area of your picture that is in acceptable focus.  Below is what is known as a “shallow” DOF.

This effect, having the background look blurry, is one that is often pointed out as making pictures look more pleasing.

So, how do YOU get a blurry background with your camera?  There are two basic paths to this result: the hardware method and the software method.  If you have a camera that has aperture (aka f-stop) settings and manual focus, we can experiment with change those settings.  If you’re using a fixed-focus camera or a fixed-aperture camera, we can focus on the sotware method.

The Hardware Method:

Get as close to your subject as possible, and use the smallest f-stop number your camera allows.  Experiment!  The closer you can get, the better, so if your camera has a “macro” setting, try using it.  Aperture priority (usually indicated by a letter “A” on the selection wheel) is also a good thing to use, since that’s where you set the f-stop.  The lower the number, the wider the aperture, and the more chance of blurry backgrounds!  For example:

The first image was shot at f/5, the second at f/32.

The Software Method:

Import your photo into Photoshop.  Select the subject and then select inverse.  Use the Gaussian Blur filter to blur your background.  Try feathering your selection first.  Use small amounts of blur!  If you use too much, it can make real photos look fake.  This is called the faux-tilt-shift.  I”ll cover that in an upcoming blog, as well a bit more of the science behind WHY the blur acts how it does between different cameras.

Above:  what could happen if you use too much blur!

I encourage you to read up about aperture, DOF, and f-stops.  If you have access to a film camera, shoot some film.  It’s a completely different experience than digital, and you could learn some things.

Happy snapping!

 

Tags: photoshop CS4 cameras photography blur iD Tech Camps
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