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.

I’m spending this weekend at Hilltop High School in Chula Vista, California, for the final round of qualification in the VEX Robotics “Elevation” tournament.  (For a quick rundown on the rules, keep reading.)

iD Tech Camps gave away a scholarship to the “Excellence” award winning team – Team Spyder from Poway High School!

The winning Alliance consisted of 3 teams, the rest of the matches were 2-on-2.  Check out the pictures – Robotics isn’t just for boys!

The ingenuity and enthusiasm I see at these tournaments is unbelievable.  We use the same kits in our iD Tech Camps RoboContenders class that are used for this tournament, and I can’t wait to see what this summer’s crop of roboticists comes up with!

Here’s a quick rundown on the rules, from the vexrobotics.com website:

• Elevation is played on a 12′x12′ square field. Two alliances – one “red” and one “blue” – composed of two teams each, compete in each match which consists of a twenty-second autonomous period followed by two minutes of driver-controlled play.
• The object of the game is to attain a higher score than your opponent alliance by placing cubes into goals, and by “owning” goals by having the highest cube in a given goal. Points can also be earned by “parking” on the platform or by “controlling” the bonus cube.
• A bonus is awarded to the alliance that has the most total points at the end of the Autonomous Period.

If you’re like me, sometimes it’s hard to get a good idea of what your best photos are when you’re looking at them on the screen.  Sometimes it’s good to get away from the computer, and look at paper.  While I always advocate “staying green” and avoiding paper where possible, sometimes clients (or grandparents) prefer things the old-school way.  Professional photographers use “contact sheets” which are sheets of paper with sample images on them, much like you may have seen “thumbnail galleries” online.  A contact sheet is a paper version of a thumbnail gallery.  Adobe Bridge features a really easy and customizable way to view just the images you select.

Open BR CS4.  Select “output” from the top row, and you’ll see a dialog box on the right hand side with multiple sets of options.  At the top it asks if you want to output to a pdf file or for the web.  According to what output options you choose, you can customize the way you want it  to show up.

You can see a couple of samples here; a contact sheet with 40 smaller images, or one with 20 larger ones.  You can choose whatever sizes you’d like, or use some of the more common presets.