under the overcast

I'm a Javascript hack, in the sense I can write scripts with the efficiency and grace of a spastic with an axe. I finally got around to a Photoshop script I'd been wanting for a while, as well as cleaning up an older one that had worked but not well. If you want them you can use 'em.

Both are written for Photoshop 7, because that's what I use. The free Photoshop 7.0 Scripting plug-in is required. Documentation is enclosed for writing, installing and running scripts. CS and CS2 do not require plugins. CS2's Scripting Guides are more helpful for scripting PS 7 than 7's are, modulo small changes in commands and syntax.

Most of the script run time will be spent on screen redraws when Photoshop is in the foreground. They will run many times faster by hiding palettes before launching the script (so that it is not slowed by updating the UI) and hiding Photoshop (on the Mac, Option-click on the Desktop or another application's window) after launching the script (so that it is not slowed by updating the file window).

Neither script touches the background layer, but otherwise they do not distinguish between art layers, effects layers and layer sets, so save your file before running either script. With many layers they will overrun the file history, making the pristine state unrecoverable.

LayerMangler will uniformly change the opacity and blend mode of every layer, and jitter (shift) every layer a random number of pixels. ( Explanation and script dump... )

LayerOrder randomly re-orders all layers in a file, leaving the background untouched. ( Explanation and script dump... )

I predicted the work would take about forty minutes and ended up being two and a half hours. I may not be qualified as a project manager. But there are now fourteen photos hanging on the walls of Cafe Verde in downtown Ann Arbor, MI, en route to or from the farmer's market. As the guy who took the photos. I strongly recommend you go see them and praise me on my skills before I have to revert to emotional blackmail.

There are three new never-before-seen pictures - not even posted to this blog yet - and the remainder are from the Portofino show. This will be up for the months of June and July. Plenty of time.

Consider this a teaser post for a flurry of shots to come. I'll be posting a couple dozen images shot in and around Quebec City during Carnaval two years ago.

( Big picture behind cut )

A nighttime panorama of a highway alongside the St. Lawrence Seaway at night. It makes me think of a naked spine and lava. You can't tell what's going on, but I can show why it's interesting in this detail:

( Detail of big picture behind cut )

The product of two photo sessions: I set up my camera at the corner of Maple and Jackson (for the locals: in front of Zingerman's Roadhouse, facing the park) and spent about an hour and a half each night taking one to three second exposures of traffic.

I got better pictures than I hoped, out of experimenting with compositing the results. Most of the pictures didn't come out as I expected - either because of the cold or the long exposures or both, most of the photos had green specky haze on them.

The results are generic - lots of tracer trails, yawn. The trails are typically 1/2 to 2/3 the width of the frame, and they all blur together, which makes this too similar to every other time-lapse exposure of a highway intersection, even if the technique differs. I have ideas on how to redo this when the weather's warmer.

For once I'm not laying out all the process iterations - the changes are too subtle and uninteresting. The first picture's the best composite of the December 21 session, the second photo's from December 22. Actually, those dates don't sound right, but that's how the source files are stamped.

     

A couple days after Christmas I roadtripped north with a couple carloads of people from Korea, visiting Zenders in Frankenmuth, the Birch Run factory outlet shopping complex, and most notoriously the Bronners Christmas Store (MIDI torture). The food was great, everybody got winter clothing, but Bronners stopped us dead through sheer Christmas overload, and we left before half of our planned 90 minutes was up.

So, of course, Bronners is the only part I took pictures of. Nothing from my first visit a couple years ago is linked right now, but these are more interesting anyway.

                             

( nine more, not as good )

In other news, the Detroit Auto Show is coming up. I plan on attending, and once again I'm taking requests: If there are any cars or scenes you want to see, let me know. Last year, the most popular request was for booth babes. I don't have creds for the trade or press days, the only times the exotically thematic costumes come out, so don't waste your time. On the public days, all the spokespeople (of both genders) wear business formal or casual, excepting the occasional rugby shirt at the SUV displays.

From the Rolling Sculpture Auto Show that Ann Arbor hosts one Friday night every July. The name of the show is annoying but the event is always good: In addition to the usual rounds of custom cars, racers and preciously restored antiques there are art cars and unusual imports which make it interesting to a non-car-buff like me.

                       

( 16 more )

Shot over a couple early mornings around the 4th of July, when the weather was agreeable and the property was deserted.



                                         

( 20 that lack that magic something. )

Here's what rural parts of Erie, PA look like in late November: Grey and blurry.

   



The first two shots are of a new highway bypass built to connect Interstate 90 with downtown Erie. It knocks straight through the hillside I grew up on, coming within about a quarter mile of my parents' house. The hill and a ravine spare them from the potential traffic noise, although it looks too dead for that to be a concern.

The third image is of a vineyard in the Mooreheadville area, between Lake Erie and the hills to the south. Specifically, it's a composite of 100 rows of grape vines shot end-on; the shaft in the middle is are the support posts, the purple-grey stripe is the hills.

In other news, I brought down the photos from the November show at the Portofino Cafe. Be sure to check there again in December, since they've had a steady stream of good art. If you took the opportunity to look over my stuff, thanks a lot and stay in touch.

Click for really huge (5000 px wide) version.

( Is that all? )

A reminder: A show of my photos are up at the Portofino Coffee House through the end of November.

Spot photos are now hanging at the Portofino Coffee House until the end of November, including some stuff not displayed on the website. Take a look.

The cloudiness.com website's only active section lately has been surplus, which has seen a couple updates in the past month: an iPod parody, some more spec work from my archives, and photos of the ex-band Porkfist in rehearsal. I like the photos, they're not the sort of thing I normally do.

The lack of new work here lately is partly because of a 460-plus layer pano that's been progressing about as smoothly as a whale in a drainpipe. Once I can get that out, updates should return to their previous unsteady yet more frequent pace.

The Toledo Polish Festival is a street party in mid-July with a few nominal Polish-Americans. And, um, that's all there is to say about it, besides that we ate a lot of pierogi and sauerkraut.

                                   

( Five mre that don't rock as much )

After a long time tooling around, I've updated my website. Please take a look at http://www.cloudiness.com and tell me about any bugs you find, including any of the following:

• On some browsers the "Cloudiness.com" text in the top right floats so it's bisected above the window margin. It should use the dotted blue as a baseline. I'm having a hard time replicating this across identically-configured browsers: eg, Safari 1.2.2 v125.8 does it on one computer and not on another.
• The contrast of the text is poor on some displays.
• The menu rollover effect should be visible on all recent browsers except MSIE.

Flash Memory Prices Slump as Market Showdown Looms (Yahoo, via DPReview)

This is good. I've already got two GB worth of CompactFlash cards, but the new camera only writes RAW files with non-lossy compression, and even a 1gb card can be good for only about a hundred shots on a day when I might expect to shoot several times that.

The photos in this blog will be offline for the summer as I'm temporarily unable to host the files from home. I'll transfer select images to other accounts, but there won't be room for everything. Come the fall, I should be able to return to my habit of splodging the blog with dozens of crap photos at a time instead of a few decent ones.

(Edit: They're back online now.)

Things like this narrative make me think twice about my choice of subject matter. Especially since the key moment in the story take place about 30 miles from my parents' house, and I was planning on a working trip this summer in the towns the author names.

I have a book. It doesn't have a name, but it's got a couple of my business cards tucked in the front (transparent) sleeve. It carries a few dozen panos of abandoned shopping malls, cold beaches, abandoned ice cream stands, empty highways, abandoned warehouses, and you-get-the-idea.

It's no good as a portfolio because it's not selective. It's unnecessarily full of composites both good and bad because I want to prove that I do this a lot, I'm doing it deliberately, and curious cops can see for themselves that once a pano is composited, the layers of multiple-exposure distortion and visual noise is going to bring no succor at all to the hordes of terrorists who are supposed to be rotting our healthy infrastructure from within.

I'm not clear on why terrorists would want to attack abandoned factories in abandoned towns in rural never-was, when pegging something in a big city would be so much more profitable, in terms of effort and consequence. Apparently to win against terrorism one must institutionalize ones unreasoning terror.

I've been neglectful with the book. Haven't carried it with me for my last few shoots. I may have been lucky. Should get in the habit again.

The third in a four-part series of photos from Seattle, circa late February. The first and second parts are still visible as well. As usual, the better stuff is above the cutline, everything else, mediocre to bad, is below.

                             

( And 42 more )

( And some camera geeking )

This batch of composites puts me over 1000 panos. I lost count of the source files when they got over 40,000. Drink a toast.

       

I haven't shot large-scale panos for a while. I'm happy with the Experience Music Project building, especially because I've never seen picture of it in situ and had no sense of its shape and scale. It's a tricky building to shoot - it's no wonder most pictures focus on details and specific colors. This winter shot with shut down carnival rides is more of a piece to me than the other two shots. Although I like the docks, too.

               

( Blue! Orange! More photos! ) I've run out of disk space again, so after editing part three photography will be on hold until I buy more storage. There is still a pending post of here-and-there stuff shot in Ann Arbor.

From: Marriage R. Sacramented <bombay@chelsea-fanatic.com>
Subject: Best meedication for you!
Date: March 7, 2004 11:43:13 AM EST
To: nnn@yyy.zzz
It is, at that. Unless it's a state wedding.

This is the first of at least two parts: No idea when the next batch will be posted. Shots include the Archie McPhee retail store and various points north and south of Seattle. The better images are at the top.

                                                                                   
( Close to 70 more )

Just got back from Seattle, and boy are my arms tired. No, really. Hauling four point and shoot cameras, an SLR and two SLR lenses, associated kit, and a laptop to receive the compact flash files gets brutal on the muscles and joints.

So, I finally, suddenly, want an iPod. Plus compact flash card reader attachment. It won't make the cameras any lighter, but it replaces the four and a half pound iBook with a half pound 30gb data unit that also plays music. Huge, huge win on a ten-mile hike.

I need days to sort through what I've shot, but here's a teaser.