Meet Cody.

The second Cody dog that my parents have had.

Cody is a yellow lab mix of something. She is also completely strange.

Of course, most of my family’s dogs are totally strange. We are such dog people, though, and we encourage our dogs to explore their dogginess, within appropriate boundaries, and this leads to dogs with uniquely strong personalities.

Cody, though, is one of the most interesting dog souls I have had the pleasure of spending time with.

My Mom picked her up at the humane society a few weeks ago. Our family always goes for strays or rescue dogs. Not only are these dogs in need of homes, but even the most basic of high school biology teaches you that what the AKC calls “pure bred” is a dog much more likely to have health problems than a mix-breed.

And, of course, a bit of genetic dice roll yields some interesting traits.

Cody loves fruits and vegetables. In this picture, Cody is nosing her way through the blackberry patch.

She sniffs out only the ripest of blackberries and gently picks and eats them with a certain bit of calm air that is rare to find in a 2.5 year old dog.

Cody has her side of the row of blackberry bushes and my mom picks from the other.

It is amusing to watch as my mom and Cody head down the blackberry row, one on each side, picking berries.

Cody also enjoys peaches, blueberries, and other fruits and vegetables.

As calm as Cody appears in these two pictures, she is also quite the action packed dog…

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Roger recently turned 8 years old and, of course, I pulled out the camera to document the event and share it with the family.

This is a shot of Roger getting ready to blow out the candles on the awesome Super Mario birthday cake that his mom made.

But note the weird candle-ghosts hovering just in front of Roger’s face. This was one of about 8 shots in the sequence, and the only one where the candle-ghosts weren’t overwhelming.

It is almost a neat effect here, but not at all desirable.

The shot was taken with the 50mm f/1.4 lens, at f/1.8. This is a completely fantastic lens that I have raved about before.

I was chatting with Duncan– who has about umpteen bazillion times more photo skilz & knowledge than me– and showed him the picture.

His conclusion: classic flare. Bad flare. He shoulda seen the others!

In chatting some more, Duncan dropped a link to this Canon tech note on me.

As it turns out, digital camera sensors are more reflective than film.

Thus, it is quite possible that the relatively intense candle light was reflecting off the sensor, then bouncing about the lens and back to the sensor, thus generating ghosts.

Likely enough that Canon has specifically optimized lens design around minimizing the impact of such internal reflections unique to digital sensors.

Amongst other digital specific optimizations, Canon has been reshaping some of the elements to reduce internal reflections off of the sensor. The technote goes there in more detail.

Now, that might not actually be what is going on here. But it warrants further investigation and comparison. Instead of candles, some high intensity LEDs should do the trick.

Fraser Speirs — another photographer with a much bigger photog-clue-stick than me — suggested that it might be the filter. And, in fact, I do have a relatively cheap, totally flat, filter on the lens. I’ll definitely add ‘filter vs. no-filter’ to the testing criteria.

For lenses, I’ll probably just order another plastic fantastic (cheap, kick ass lens — it turns a rebel into a [large] pocket point and shoot) and I may have access to the 50mm f/1.2 lens.

This is Roger’s geode collection that he has amassed over the last couple of visits to Missouri.

Well, three geodes and one bit of pasta for scale.

Geodes are an interesting bit of geological product in that they are effectively little pockets — bubbles really — of gas and minerals that form

The geode fragment in the back was likely a part of a much much larger geode. Size of a basketball kind of large. It has an interesting crystalline structure not apparent in the photo.

The softball thing at the left is the most perfectly round geode I have ever seen. It has fossil inclusions in the surface, but is otherwise just perfectly round. Might be interesting to slice it open, but it is just so… perfectly round and magnificent as is.

The last geode is kinda small. Really really small. I had no idea geodes could be that small.

But, as Roger often teaches me, discovering small is often just a matter of paying attention.

It is actually quite a spectacular little bit of crystalline geological product.

The image at the right is a close-up of that really tiny geode.

Quite the surprisingly complex bit of crystalline structure in a very, very small package!

Not surprisingly, this image was shot with the Canon 65mm 1-5x macro lens.

To take this kind of picture with this lens requires a tripod, a stand for the subject and a really good light source.

All of which I happened to have, though some of which was a bit hacked. Click through for details.

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Since the iPhone’s release, there has been much criticism of the built in 2.1MP camera. Certainly, there is room for improvement.

Personally, I don’t really understand most of the criticism. Cell phone cameras suck. If you want a real camera, get a real camera. Even a $150 pocket point and shoot will outperform any cell phone camera by a long shot.

So what happens when a professional artist with an unparalleled intimate knowledge of light gets a hold of an iPhone and decides to take some pictures?

What you see at the left is what happens.

The renowned watercolor artist Paul Jackson has an iPhone and he noticed some interesting characteristics of the iPhone’s camera’s implementation. Namely, it scans when it takes the photo and, thus, you can achieve interesting effects if you move the camera just right. Combined with his mastery of all that is light, he set out to see what he could do with the camera.

Some very cool images resulted. Paul says “I just love the shots I’ve been getting from my iphone camera. You can bet it will affect how I paint things!”

Paul’s paintings are simply stunning. It is hard to believe that an image like this is a watercolor. And Perfect Curves is a great example of Paul’s mastery of painting light.

Truly a great artist!

Paul was recently invited, as one of only three american artists, to exhibit at the First Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary International Watermedia Masters in China during the Olympics.

He is spending some time traveling through China and is documenting his experience on his weblog. It is a fun read and full of interesting observations & insights.

I look forward to seeing how Paul’s future work is influenced by the strong imagery of China!

Meet the juvenile black swallowtail larva (I’m pretty darned sure). This little guy looks like a piece of bird pooh for a reason.

Specifically, it is employing feces camouflage. By resembling a bit of bird poop, the caterpillar makes itself look singularly unappetizing during the vulnerable first part of its life.

And by “little guy”, I do mean little. This worm was exactly 3/16ths of an inch long — just about 5mm long.

No, really, about the size of a grain of rice.

That leaf? It is the end of a parsley leaf.

I was wrong. This is not a swallowtail larva. It is most likely of the Brush-footed butterfly family (Nymphalidae). Swallowtail caterpillars of this size look very similar — similarly bird poop like — but do not have spines.

It is amazing how quickly they grow. Within only a few days, that little pooh-pillar turns into a rather stunning green worm that will grow to up to 2″ in length.

Not so coincidentally, the caterpillar features a new defense mechanism. When harassed, it sticks two bright orange antenna out of its head that stink horribly.

Even without the antenna, the caterpillar’s head is really quite striking.

I tried to get a shot with the antenna sticking up, but discovered that the caterpillar seems to fairly rapidly learn that any particular stimulus is not threatening and will stop wasting energy defending against harmless “attacks”.

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Anyone who has had a poke at my photography knows that I totally dig macro photography. I love taking photos of flowers and critters where the extremely small fills the frame.

The second lens I added to my tiny photo tool chest was the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM Lens. I can’t say enough good things about this lens. Actually, I really need to write up a review of the lens because it is just a stunning piece of glass and is worthy well beyond just being a Macro lens.

However, there is a much more extreme, single purpose, Canon macro lens and I was just lent a copy today (by David Hill — of Medialets, of interest to iPhone app develoeprs — one incredibly generous soul!).

The Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5X Macro Lens. It is, flat out, ridiculous. Just very very different from normal lenses. The wikipedia article contains a decent explanation.

The picture at left is taken at a minimum magnification of 1x. It is of the power button on my MacBook Pro.

Since the lens is fixed focus, that is the maximum sized bit of reality that can be captured with the lens (the image is cropped just slightly — about 90% of the original size).

So what does 5x look like? Click through to find out….

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I have been very very busy working on lots of things that I can’t talk about.

Roger is but days away from his 8th birthday. In this photo, he is illuminated by the same LEDs I used to illuminate my self-portrait with a bit of emphasis on the less extreme range of lighting.

I like the result. Captured Roger nicely in one of his rare quiet moments.

I also grabbed an extreme close-up of the LEDs reflected in his eye. You can see the shape of the source of illumination.

Recently, we have been experiencing a bit of appliance stupidity in our house.

Replacement parts for our refrigerator seem to be a major profit center for GE and our microwave was clearly designed by jackasses.

Read on for many too many details.

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A couple of days ago as Ben and I were biking into work, we stopped at an intersection and chatted with one of the folk who maintains the stoplights in the Cupertino / San Jose / Sunnyvale area.

He was in the process of changing out some of the lamps in the cross walk signs, eliminating at least one incandescent lamp and replacing an LED element with a newer model.

I took a moment to examine the LED element that he had removed and he gave it to me. SWEET!

It is somewhere around 60+ reddish-orange LEDs arranged on a printed circuit board in the form of the standard “don’t walk” hand. It is backed by a power supply such that it can be plugged into a standard 120v outlet.

And it is bright. Seriously, blindingly, bright.

I figured it would also make a neat light source for photography and decided to use it as the sole source of illumination for a self portrait. I put the camera on a tripod, used a remote switch to control the shutter, and aimed the LEDs at my head from a slightly down and off-to-the-left position.

Interesting shot. I dig it.

That is pretty much the natural color of the image. I did very little post-processing beyond cropping the image.

The one processing parameters that I did tweak that had a major impact on the resulting image, was to use Aperture’s RAW 1.0 processor instead of the 2.0 processor.

Much to my surprise, the difference between the two is huge!

Normally, I use the 2.0 processor and don’t think much about it. It does a great job, to these unprofessional eyes.

However, it appears that photos in the extremes of range are not necessarily best processed by the 2.0 pipeline.

Specifically: the only difference between the image on the right and the image above is the use of the 2.0 (right) vs. 1.0 (above) RAW processing pipeline. All other adjustments are the same.

That is a significant difference!

Certainly an eye opener and I will be re-evaulating certain images in light of this.

A bug? Hardly. Converting a RAW image to something that can be rendered on screen requires a relatively complex bit of math that is specifically designed to yield reasonable results given a wide range of reasonable inputs.

This is not a very reasonable image. It is lit by an intense light source comprised of relatively narrow bands of color; mostly orangish red.

I wonder what other RAW pipelines might do with this image? I dropped the original RAQ (w/sidecar) in a zip file on a server, if curious.

I played with the image a bit with both the 2.0 and the 1.0 pipeline. I couldn’t post-process the 2.0 image to bring out the level of detail/features found in the 1.0 image. Caveat: I barely know what I’m doing.

Honestly, I’m not sure which image is “less correct”. I like the 1.0 image a lot better in that I like the range of oranges that seem to be utterly missing in the 2.0 image.

My general impression of RAW pipelines is that there is a tremendous amount of math behind the RAW conversion process, but there is also a whole bunch of tuning for aesthetics. Camera sensors simply do not have the dynamic range of the human eye and, thus, RAW conversion is partially about compensating for the limitations of the sensors.

Prior to prohibition in the United States, gathering together in a party atmosphere, collecting fine quality ingredients, and precisely mixing/serving cocktails was a popular pastime.

Much like microbrewing, much of the lore of fine cocktailing was lost during prohibition. After prohibition ended, the large liquor and beer companies lobbied like hell to pass laws to prevent the resurrection of the craft alcohol and microbrew markets.

In the past 15 or so years, we have enjoyed a huge resurgence of craft brewing. Similarly, about the last decade has seen a growing interest in the art of fine cocktail mixology.

While this has included the rise of some very fine drinking establishments focused on classic cocktails, the hobbyist mixology market is growing rapidly, too.

If you are going to get into Mixology, you need a good recipe guide. Many paper guides exist, the best (that I know of) being Cunningham’s Bartender’s Black Book.

However, you can’t easily search a book by ingredient or flavor. You can’t be standing in a liquor store and think “I have bourbon, what do I need to make a couple of fine cocktails”. Nor can you experience a minor quake while in the liquor store and immediately look up quake related cocktails.

For that, you need an electronic guide and, with the advent of the iPhone application store, wouldn’t it be nice if such a guide were to be available in a device that you are likely already carrying anyway?

Enter Skorpiostech’s Cocktails.

With over 1,400 cocktail recipes, Cocktails contains a fairly comprehensive list of classic and modern cocktails.

Drinks are indexed by ingredients, flavors, base ingredient, and several other categories.

It is easy to search for a particular ingredient, making it possible to get an idea of the set of drinks you might be able to make given what you have on hand.

As well, you can easily share drinks via email or twitterrific.

All in all, the app is a very solid offering for 1.0. There are some obvious areas for refinement or expansion and I’m looking forward to watching this app evolve.

However, that isn’t the reason why I’m reviewing this otherwise very useful application.

Specifically, I’m calling it out because of the design value.

Cocktails is simply a beautiful app to look at and use. While the list of cocktails is relatively normal looking, the glass icon being the graphical element standout, it is really the recipe page — seen to the right — that shows an incredible attention to detail.

The typography is precise and crisp, with appropriate bits of unicode characters used when necessary.

Also, the background changes color depending on the age of the drink. For example, the Manhattan cocktail dates back to 1888, yet there are many modern versions, too. If you were to flick that recipe to the left, the backgrounds of the recipe would become lighter as the age of the recipe lessens.

A minor detail, sure, but it actually contributes considerably to the usability when simply browsing for a recipe!