Tilt-shift and time-lapse

Once again I fail to provide anything profoundly new or original here: I found this on BuzzFeed, but I hope to add some value to the extent that I can supplement what you’re seeing with my own witty commentary, and I’m assembling items from a few separate pages that took me some time to find, but now they’re in one place for your convenience.

The topic of the day is the wonderful tilt-shift, time-lapsed videos of Australian photographer Keith Loutit. Tilt-shift is a photographic technique that is a popular trend these days, wherein some sort of focal adjustment (beyond my knowledge of the technical aspects of photography) is used to bring sharp focus to a particular portion of the photo, while blurring the background. The resulting effect is that the objects in the photo look miniaturized. I think this is a learned response we have to these photos, because we’re used to this focal effect occurring naturally when a macro lens is used to photograph actual miniatures up-close.

Whatever the cause for our perception of the photos, the effect is undeniably cool. Here’s one of my favorite examples:

Time-lapse photography is a much more familiar (and much older) technique, wherein individual frames are shot at specified intervals (say, one per minute), then played back at regular motion-picture speed, to allow the viewer to perceive very slow changes (such as the blooming of a flower) in a comparatively short period of time.

Put these techniques together, though, overlay a wicked techno soundtrack, and you’ve got pure genius. Here are two examples from Keith Loutit’s website:


Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

This one is cool to me because it features the Circular Quay region of Syndey, Australia, home of the famous Sydney Opera House. I spent a few days in this area around Christmas of 1995 and it has always stood out in my mind. It’s great to see one of my favorite spots on the planet in a whole new way. (Now, if only I could be sipping a nice chilled Victoria Bitter as I watch it…)


Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

This is the video that was featured on BuzzFeed, and was my introduction to Keith’s work. I was a bit surprised to see that he was in Australia — I didn’t realize Brisbane was so redneck (googling the phrase “Brisbane redneck” yields only this, which just leads back to us anyway) — although it explained why the chalk-paint flags on the dirt track were U.S. and Australian instead of U.S. and Canada. (For those who have not had the unique pleasure of attending a monster truck event, apparently here in the U.S. they always involve an absurd trumped-up rivalry between the U.S. and Canada.) Anyway — this piece is absolutely brilliant.

You can read more about — and see more examples of — tilt-shift photography at Cheapshooter. Also be sure to check out the Keith Loutit PhotoBlog.

Excuse me while I vomit

I just got an XBOX 360, and the first game I bought for it, as I had planned for at least a year (believing I would, eventually, get the console) was The Orange Box, a set of 5 games, including one of the most intriguing game concepts I’ve ever seen: Portal.

It’s as cool as I expected.

But… it’s set up like a first-person shooter. And as is often the case with first-person shooters, I’ve discovered to my chagrin that it makes me nauseous. Damn it! Maybe in the future I should remember not to play it at 7 AM, but right now I am just trying to settle my stomach.

The iPhone version of Amazon.com is better than the regular version of Amazon.com

Amazon.com (as if you don’t have it bookmarked) is (probably, still) the undisputed king of the mountain of e-commerce. Even though many of Amazon’s former brick-and-mortar partners, like Target, have since gone off and launched their own (usually better) individual e-commerce sites, Amazon is still at the heart of it all and is the go-to choice for buying… well… just about anything online. These days, as I’ve noted before, I use it mostly to buy MP3 downloads, which despite my usual criticism of Amazon in general (wait for it!), offers a great selection, better prices, and higher quality than iTunes… and no DRM.

But that’s not my point today. My point today is to address that one usual criticism I have of Amazon: their design sucks. And I am talking about both the surface-level graphic design and layout of their pages, and also much of their application flow as well. There are two main ways in which I think their design fails: there’s too much of everything, everywhere, all the time on their site, and (consequently, perhaps) many options that I think should be prominent and visible are instead hidden in microscopic type at the bottom of the page.

Case in point, from the Amazon MP3 realm: as a web developer, I’m constantly tinkering with web pages in ways ordinary users do not, and as a result I am frequently clearing my cache and my cookies. Now I could be careful and just delete the cookies from the sites I’m working on, but I’m usually in the middle of something and therefore in too much of a hurry, so I just delete them all. (And, yes, waste a lot more time in the long run retyping all of my usernames and passwords for the sites I visit… but at least that helps me remember my passwords!) As a result, I lose the cookie that tells Amazon that yes, dammit, I did already download and install your MP3 Downloader app so I don’t need to download it again! The first couple of times this happened, I was dumbfounded, and frustrated, and I re-downloaded and reinstalled the application, even though I knew I already had it. Finally I scrolled down and discovered a sentence in 8-point type telling me that if I already have the downloader app, I should “click here” to activate it in this browser.

Yeah, thanks.

Which brings me finally to my point. Today I finally took the plunge (what with it being Black Friday and all), and bought myself an XBOX 360. Later in the day I was sitting inside a Caribou Coffee (which itself was inside a Lunds grocery store), enjoying a Cinnamon Wild (though not as much as I would have enjoyed a Gingerbread Latte), and I decided to check the IGN Reviews app on my iPhone to see what good games were coming out for the 360, the better to fill up my Amazon wish list (one of the primary reasons Amazon is still so central to the e-commerce universe).

Once I had picked a couple of games I felt that, yes, I wish for, I decided to go right to Amazon on my iPhone and add them to my wish list.

Many websites have decided to leverage the popularity of the iPhone and also to adapt themselves to its cramped 480×320 screen real estate, by developing iPhone-aware versions of their sites. They detect the browser is an iPhone, and so direct the user to a streamlined, stripped-down version of their site that will be more manageable on the iPhone’s screen.

And you know what? A lot of times, but perhaps none more so than is the case with Amazon, this streamlined, stripped-down version is in fact better than the usual bloated, overstuffed standard version of the site. If they want you to actually be able to go about your business with their sites on the iPhone, they have to stay focused and not waste a single pixel with distractions and clutter.

Sometimes the sites have predictable, distinct URLs for their iPhone versions. It’s common these days to preface the URL for a mobile (read: regular cell phone) version of a site with “m.” and occasionally then the iPhone version with “iphone.” But sadly Amazon’s URLs are as cluttered and inscrutable as many of their pages are, so an iPhone-specific Amazon URL was not immediately apparent to me, and beyond that it seems that their site is handling the iPhone version as a more integrated feature rather than a separate standalone version of their site.

Too bad, really, because if I could I think I would use the iPhone version of Amazon.com all the time.

(For what it’s worth, I am aware that Amazon’s iPhone version has existed for over a year; it’s just that I had never bothered to use it before today, and besides, most of the attention it received upon its debut focused negatively on the fact that it was un-iPhone-like, without also recognizing, positively, that it was un-Amazon-like.)

If you’ve ever debated which decade had the worst fashions…

…then the Sexy People blog is here to help settle the question for you.

It’s somewhat rude, I suppose, to laugh at the poor fashions, hairstyles, glasses and mustaches of days gone by, but it’s only because we’ve all been there. So let’s all cringe together.

I never would have expected it myself, going into this, but now that I take a cold hard look, I actually think the ’90s fashions are the worst!

Stuff for sale

Get your stuff, right here!

I am selling some things on eBay over the next few weeks to help pay for a new Fender Jaguar Bass.

Currently I have up for bids a Yamaha DTXpress electronic drum kit, an iBook G4 with some hardware issues, and a vintage Smith Miller toy semi truck from the 1950s in pristine condition.

You can check my current auctions page for anything else new that may show up over the next few weeks.