Over the holiday break I spent a couple of days in Melbourne, and of course went on a graffiti spotting tour again to some of the excellent locations there. There are a few alleys that are pretty much outdoor art galleries, with art all over the walls that’s seemingly not only tolerated, but encouraged.

I’ve got the film back from processing and scanning now and uploaded to flickr. Interesting to see how things have changed from the last photos I took in 2005…

As mentioned a few posts previously, I went to the linux.conf.au open day last week, representing Blender amongst all sorts of other projects.

I had a great, though brief time, took some photos, and wrote up a short report for BlenderNation, which I’ll also post here:

A lot is said about the bokeh effect in photography (and simulated in 3D CG), but it may not be commonly known that it’s something that can happen any time light passes through a small aperture, not just within a lens. The other day while I was in the back yard, I noticed the same thing as light was passing from the sun down through leaves in the trees above and casting beautiful patterns as each point of light spread out to become a disc shape on the ground below. I had to take a photo of it, and I bet there’s some kind of irony in that. :)

As far as simulating bokeh is concerned, we now have an incredible new Defocus node in Blender’s compositor in the upcoming 2.43 release, for simulating depth of field blur. I did a bit of testing while it was under development, and for the most part, it does an excellent job. Big thanks to Alfredo de Greef for that one.

A few pics of Tokyo through a fisheye lens, from November. I’ve also discovered the awesome new geotagging capabilities on flickr. It took an evening to go back through most of my ~400 shots there and drag and drop them to the locations around the world that I remembered on the map, but damn, it’s a fantastic feature.

I’ve finished putting up pics on my flickr from Antwerp and the HISK, where Bassam and I gave our short 3D course. Unfortunately after going through the films in more detail, it seems that only a couple of my Blender Conference photos came out :( Serves me right for using dodgy old expired film and a half-working flash.

I got a bunch of films back today, with pics from Europe, Tokyo on the way home, and some assorted other things waiting to be developed. I’ll upload my few pics of the Blender conf and the HISK soon, but for now here’s just a handful from a while ago, out around the city with Kat while she was doing some exercises for class. Hers are much better though.

Museumnacht happened on the weekend - an open museum night in Amsterdam. Various events and parties were taking place at the many museums across the city, with an Erwin Olaf film exhibition opening here at Montevideo.

It was great to see Montevideo so alive, and a great break to get out from the usual weekends I’ve been having here. Here is my night, documented in pictures.

En route to my current home in Amsterdam, I flew against the sun and stayed a few nights in New York. I’ve now got some digital/digitised photos online from the very interesting trip. There’s also another 40 or so black and white prints, but who knows when I’ll be able to scan those.

Since I don’t have my film scanner here with me right now, I have been trying a ’scanning’ technique which is pretty dodgy, but works to some extent: On the Mac at work, I create a filmstrip sized mask image in Seashore, lay the medium format slides on the LCD monitor and take a photo of it with my digital camera. Not that special, but good enough for now!

On the way back from the Orange pre-production workshop in Amsterdam, I spent three nights in Tokyo and enjoyed it immensely. I’ve now finished processing, scanning, and uploading a bunch of photos that I took while wandering around.

It was nice to experiment with various medium format films in the seagull since I have very little experience with them. I went through a roll each of colour 800 negative, black and white 3200 negative, colour 400 slide, and black and white 100 negative film. Very fun!

I’ve now got some photos online from the Orange open movie project pre-production workshop in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago.

Another four weeks, and we all have to head back again to kick off production on September 1st. Hooray for jetlag!

I’ve finally finished uploading a collection of photos of graffiti, stencils, stickers and such found in my wanderings down in Melbourne on the 18th/19th of June. Many of these photos were taken in an amazing little alley (more like an urban gallery) off somewhere behind Chinatown, and in the more well known Centre Place.

I’ve also got the first photos (1, 2, 3) from the very first roll of medium format that I’ve put through my Seagull. These are scanned from negatives in an Epson 4180 scanner. I’m very pleased with the results - it’s all so exciting! :)

Today, I attended a sand mandala dissolution ceremony, run by a group of travelling Tibetan monks raising money for a hospital in Eastern Tibet. It was a beautiful and spiritual event, especially in the very peaceful surrounds. Although I’ve a bunch of 35mm and B/W 120 film in a borrowed holga yet to be developed, I’ve put a few digital photos online. Be sure to read the descriptions to understand the process!

I finally had a chunk of free time today to spend waging war on my todo list, so I took another stab at these photos from my travels in November last year(!). After some quality time with the crop tool, I’ve also shed the shackles of the evil 4:3 compact digicam aspect ratio. Anyway, here’s a brief look at Finland.