Mushroom Forest

Mushroom Forest, originally uploaded by brunoj.

This is outside my office. There’s been almost 20 inches of rain in the last week here (in Athens GA). There has been 3-4 inches of standing water in my front yard for almost that long as well. It usually absorbs into the ground after each hard rain, but I think it’s so saturated already that the water just pools on top.

I’m bring a real camera with me tomorrow to get better pictures of this mushroom explosion.

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Update 9/23/09: I went back today and the forest has been clear cut (or eaten by beavers).

B_2, twice

B_2, twice, originally uploaded by brunoj.

… went to New Orleans last weekend, found this ornamental rail around the front plate of a tomb that reminded me of the root system of type B2.

Flickr stats

My flickr photostream surpassed 10,000 views this week and I’m getting real close to 2000 photos (1966 as of now).

The most popular photo seems to be this terrible one of the Athens GA all ladies polo team at SESPI 2009. I have no idea why it has over 400 views.

The second most popular photo is a favorite of mine, my blue 1984 Raleigh sportif in its original (to me) configuration. I recently retired the frame after 1 year and 8 months of hard riding and racing on it.

6 Person Rail Bike

Barn, originally uploaded by J.Muir from Santa Cruz.

I came across this awesome vehicle while browsing flickr today. It reminds me of the conference bike, but this concept is much cooler. It’s like a conference bike for hobos.

BRP Blog

This is a plug for the Bike Athens Blog, where my BRP time lapse video is posted today.

Bike Recycling Program Time-Lapse

Another experiment with time-lapse movie making.

This is from the Bike Athens BRP (Bike Recycling Program) today (6-11-08). There are about 160 stills taking over 30 minutes. The participants appear in the credits.

Link to YouTube

The latest Bike-cam 3000 experiment

I put a new video on YouTube and Flickr. I made it using 120 still images taken by my camera (mounted to my bike thanks to Bike-cam 3000 (patent pending)). The camera is a Canon powershot G7, but it is running the modified CHDK firmware which provides (among other cool things) an intervalometer feature so you can make time-lapse sequences easily.

More experiments are to come..

Bike-cam 3000 and my video editing woes

I built a handlebar mount for my digital camera the other day. The idea was to make some time-lapse movies of long rides and/or of community rides like the Critical Mass and the Courteous Mass (yes, two different rides on two different Fridays every month).

My first attempt at a camera mount sucked pretty bad. It was one of those Gorilla-pods wrapped around my seat post and seat stay so that the camera pointed backwards. What ended up happening though is that the bumping around on the road caused the camera to slowly point downwards toward my rear wheel and as a result I have hundreds of stills of my back wheel and some pavement. This is not very interesting.

My second attempt involved modifying a reflector bracket. I saw someone doing this in a HOWTO on Instructables. It turned out that somehow I had all the parts I needed at home, including the 1/4-20 bolt scavenged from an unused tripod, so it was easy to put together.

The new mount works great, except for the shaking. When I’m on the road every little bump in the pavement translates into a big bump on camera. So this is where my video editing woe comes in. I thought that it would be easy to run the video clip through some software to “stabilize” the image. IT turns out that this isn’t as easy as I’d like, or as free as I’d like.

First, in iMovie ‘08 which came with my mac there is no such image stabilization feature (nor is there a feature to speed up or slow down a clip, which is ridiculous). Also, Apple, in all their wisdom, decided to remove the capability to run 3rd party plugins. Why on earth would they do that?

So after downloading iMovie HD (came with iLife ‘06, outdated indeed) from the Apple website (for free, which is nice) and loading the “piStabilizer” plugin (which is not free, but you can use the demo version if you don’t mind a nice big “DEMO” watermark on your footage) I got my footage stabilized and sped up (because iMovie HD **DOES** have the slow-down/speed-up video effect that iMovie ‘08 lacks).

You can see it below (again, with a huge DEMO watermark which sucks).

Link to YouTube

Photobiking

Have you heard of Photowalking ? I prefer photobiking. I put the camera in my bag, I ride around, I stop when I see something to take a photograph of. Here is the Pilgrim’s Pride technical station, or the top of it anyway. I sat on the edge of a bridge (over the rr tracks) to take this while cars whizzed by trying to kill me. Fortunately neither I nor the camera fell off the bridge.

FGG # 7222

Check it: FGG #7222