Random Frames

I was happy to see that some people had more fun than me on Valentine’s Day. This was a massive pillow fight in San Francisco. That’s my friend Mischa there trying to defend himself. I love these pictures. You can see a lot more here. The feathers look so surreal in long exposure.

Aparently this was a real flash-mob event, organized through the internet and even Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia). The san fran Chronicle wrote a nice article about it.

Via Rob Galbraith’s website, here are a few links to blogs by photjournalists at the Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy:

   John Lehmann of Canada’s Globe and Mail
   Scott Strazzante of the Chicago Tribune
   Scott Sady of the Reno Gazette-Journal

Use this thread to post any other interesting photos and blogs from the Winter Olympics that you come across.

A friend pointed out these pictures of the Chinese countryside to me, and I thought they might be appreciated here. I’m a sucker for the ones with reflections in the water, I have to say. It’s a tough choice, but I think the 14th one is my favorite. How about you?

I was very taken with some creative costumes and models Melinda stumbled across via livejournal. There’s animal costumes made from shoes and tights and sleepings bags, and there’s a page of animals made from pieces of assorted hardware. I’m quite tempted to use one of the animal ideas for this year’s halloween, but the best ones seem to all involve being stuck in an odd, uncomfortable position.

Seems a little dead around here. Though I would post this for amusement.

Enjoy -Homis

Ok, so I saw another link on BoingBoing to a photo gallery I thought people might be interested in.

Above is one of the pictures in the gallery. Now, what do you think you are looking at? It looks exactly like a scale model that someone created and painted realistically, right?

Well, if you thought that, you’d be wrong. The pictures in the gallery are pictures taken from a helicopter of actual places (the above picture is of an aquaduct in Rome). He uses a tilt-shift lens to create that effect.

I’ve never heard of a tilt-shift lens before, but I looked them up, and kind of have an idea of what they do now. What I still can’t really figure out is, what is it that makes a picture of a model look like a picture of a model and not a picture of the real thing?

On BoingBoing, I caught a link to this site. The site has a bunch of pictures showing a home theater system that some guy turned into a huge set that looks very similar to the bridge of a Star Trek ship. It’s a little bit crazy. Cool… but crazy.

You can also view a 3-D tour of the room at this site (worked in Linux/Firefox).

On Kottke.org, I saw a link to a photo essay about shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh.

I was fascinated by the pictures. The environmental laws are looser there, which is why a lot of ships get sent there to die… where they are disassembled and scavenged by workers (many of whom don’t have shoes or gloves).

I got a chance to see the Beta 2 of Windows Vista this week.

The vast majority of the features that have been added are things that have been available in other operating systems or competitors’ software for years. They have ripped off an amazing amount of stuff from Mac OS X, including the drop shadows, Spotlight, etc.

I have to admit, though, that there was one feature they ripped off but managed to make even better than the thing they were ripping off. And that is Expose in OS X. The Windows Vista version is shown in the above picture.

When you hit a particular button, you get an edge-on view of all of the un-minimized windows. You can then click on the window you want brought to the front, or you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to cycle through the windows in that view. It is very slick, and is the one new feature that they have added that I actually want.

Apparently, people use this for their hands as a moisturizer. But they never bothered to change the labeling. Thanks Nicole K for introducing me to this wonderful teat-healing product.