noCreativity.com » Experiments

Experimenting at new levels

Ronny — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:30:34 +0000

I have been experimenting around a lot in the past year. I have run into all kinds of limits when experimenting and where most of those experiments stopped, this one actually started off… The limit I’m referring to is not the most regular one: The rotation of the earth in space.

I wanted to capture startrails. Startrails are basically the same as trailing lights from a passing car at night. The only difference is that the trailing light is coming from about 7 million lightyears (or any random that makes it sound more dramatic) away and it takes about 15 minutes to actually spot movement.

I went out twice in one night just to shoot some pictures. Once, just to be sure I actually would be able to capture startrails and once for the money-shot. The result?

Personally my favorite is the second one because it show so much more than just the stars. Although I’d prefer to actually capture a longer timeframe next time. Unfortunately right now it’s impossible to do so because it’s cloudy all day, so if the weather gods would please do me a favor: Summer please, 28°C, no clouds and piss off. Thank you very much!

Once I get my head around this a bit more I’ll probably write down the outlines on how I actually did this… I won’t right now because it just felt like I was doing it all wrong and got very lucky to get this kind of promising results

Let me know what you think, and which one you like best!

Unreality

Ronny — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:56:53 +0000

A few weeks ago school started again. One of the new classes I got is ‘Audio Visual Media Production’. That’s a fancy name for ‘After Effects and stuff’. Only 4 weeks into the academic year I felt like taking a leap… Following the crazy idea of “If you can think it, you can make it“, I took my camcorder, recorded some footage, got back to my computer and started fighting my clumsiness in After Effects. Only a few hours later I finished a first version of my experiment. I spent today continuing and finishing this experiment.

The result is pretty much what I expected (although I am pretty embarrassed about the horrible arm-in-front-of-logo-disaster. Feel free to enlighten me on how to do this without making it look this bad ). Enough words, check it out!

This is my first shot at making something look good in After Effects. If there’s anything on your mind, let me know. I could use advice and feedback

UPDATE: I changed the way the arm is put over the logo when turning it around. It looks a bit better, but still far from perfect.

Image Transition Effect

Ronny — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:44:34 +0000

[ Link ] I saw this cool image transition effect on a site and I wanted to create this myself. Hit the spacebar to slow the animation down

WebcamRelief

Ronny — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:02:54 +0000

[ Link ] I decided to play around with webcam feeds and 2.5D in Flash Player 10. Requires a webcam

Three sixty five! Three sixty fiiiive!!!

Ronny — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:19:39 +0000

About a week ago Dorien was talking to me about her blog. We were talking about 365-days projects. Personally, I’d love to do one myself but shooting a decent picture every day? Not gonna happen. I can’t find the discipline to take a shot using my DSLR every day. Not to mention the time invested in preparing the shot, getting it right, getting to your computer and uploading the shot… That’s (at least) a one hour job every day! During one year…

So I was thinking about a way of getting the shot wherever I want, whenever I feel like it, and upload it right away… I figured using my iPhone and some photography apps might do the trick. About an hour later I uploaded my first shot. I really like the fact that it is instantaneous. I shoot, I process, I upload it to Flickr. *magic happens* Wordpress gets the latest picture from my set on Flickr and displays it in the sidebar. Done.
It only takes a few minutes a day and I’m pretty sure that next year in September I’ll have a cool collection of pictures (which I’m planning to use in my next big project )

You can see the latest picture in the sidebar. And because I like the process so much, let me share how the workflow is like on the right. (From left to right: I take a shot, I edit it a bit and then I polarize it (and add the tag of the day)).
If you like it, check out my Flickr set which is updated daily (duh)!

If you’re interested in what iPhone apps I’m using:

Default camera app
Vint Green (take a shot and immediatly have it developed into a vintage green version)
TiltShiftGen (take a shot/open an existing picture and edit colors, vignette, blur (circle/tiltshift) (I love this one)
Polarize (convert the image to a polaroid: frame and color correction)
QuadCamera (get 4 shots one after each other into a single picture)
CameraBag (take a shot/open an existing picture and add one of 9 effects)

If you got any cool suggestions or ideas: just let me know

I’m on fire!

Ronny — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 11:05:18 +0000

(Luckily not in the litteral way… Allthough I ran into a few close calls…)
So what do you get when you mix up the following?

Tennisballs
A ladle
Dry cord
Lots of oil
Fire
A digital camera

You get to play fireball!

We had some great fun, and the result was pretty much what I expected from a first shot (yes, this is supposed to be the first of many fire-related experiments) at Fireballs and trails. If you like what you see, check out the complete set in my Flickr stream.

Dooodl(e) fun!!

Ronny — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:06:07 +0000

When Dorien and I were in Denmark, back in June, we stayed at a bed & breakfast. Before leaving we signed the guestbook. That made me think back of the days when I had a guestbook on my site. I remember building tons and tons of those things. The more I kept thinking about this, the more I started to realize I really liked it back then. And to be honest: I still love the idea of a random visitor leaving you a message… However, a good old fashioned ‘guestbook’ is kinda ‘out’…

I have been thinking about this for some time. A few weeks ago I was browsing Kris‘ site and found the answer to this guestbook-problem in the sidebar: A Doodle-wall. He allows his visitors to draw a little doodle and save it to the sidebar. Better yet: He built a history-browser too which allows you to browse all doodles through time.

I loved the idea and the philosophy behind this and went to build my own. I just finished the first part of Dooodl (this is the name of the official Wordpress plugin coming out sometime soon ) and it’s already running in the sidebar! Feel free to test it and save some doodles! If you run into any kind of bugs or unpleasant problems, let me know!
Feel free to drop me a line, whatever the reason might be: Bugreport, suggestions or the good old ‘I iz serious cat! I can haz hamburger, not guestb00k!‘

Links:
Draw your own: Click!
View all of them using the (temporary) History Viewer: Click!

Eye of the fish!

Ronny — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:26:07 +0000

Yeah, my creativity for a decent post title is really not helping me these days.
However: Luck is totally helping me out. People that know me a bit better might know I have been looking for a fisheye lens for quite some time now.

When I first started looking for one, I actually just went to the local store where they told me I’d have to cough up about 900€ for a decent lens. Later on I went to a MediaMarkt where The Experts were able to find a much cheaper lens! Starting at 850€, my dream was still very far away.

Let’s face it: Fisheye shots are cool, but not 850€-cool. So I was actually giving up, until a friend of mine told me he bought a fisheye lens for 250€. Now THAT is one sexy number.
He gave me a link to the site where I could order the lens. I was about to order when it turned out I could lay my hands on a secondhand lens. Only 24 hours later I had my own Peleng 8mm fisheye lens. Needless to say: I’m a happy camper!

The bad thing? Since I’ve got a Sony camera (worst decision ever) I can’t get a lens with auto-focus…. The Peleng lens is not compatible with Sony, however they can provice an M42 version that DOES go with a Sony. Is that a dealbreaker for a 250€ fisheye lens? Absolutely not. More of a challenge, and therefor more possibilities.

If you’ve been looking for a cheap ( = price) yet good ( = quality) fisheye lens, the Peleng 8mm seems to be just that.

For your viewing pleasure: A few shots made with my lovely Peleng 8mm

Painting with light

Ronny — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:52:39 +0000

Sooo… Let’s start by apologizing for not having posted anything here over the past few weeks (Say: 2 months). I went back to Westende – my hometown – for some vacationing (and working offline), so I didn’t really get to sit near my computer during that time (which was pretty cool for a change). I did however write a workshop on creating a basic picture viewer with XML in Flash for the Dutch magazine Publish which will be published in October 09.
Since a few days now, I’m back in Kortrijk. I’m still in the process of getting back used to being here, but I think I’m doing fine.

Yesterday night (actually early this morning) I decided to go out to shoot some pictures. For some time now I really wanted to experiment with a technique which is known as ‘lightpainting’. Basically it is nothing but using long exposures to shoot the picture and ‘painting’ the area you want to put extra light on with a flash light. You can create some pretty amazing stuff with that. I’ll try to create a video tutorial showing an actual example of what to do, and how to do it.

Tonight were my first tryouts, and I’m pretty happy with the results so far. Here are a few shots. Feel free to check out more of those on my Flickr page!

4 “WTF?!” moments during a Flex/AIR experiment

Ronny — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:56:30 +0000

On a shiny day I was sitting inside, and I don’t know what bug just bit me, but I felt like experimenting with Flex and AIR (instead of heading outside into the light). For some reason I felt like creating a Photobooth clone with only one feature: Taking a snapshot every few seconds and saving it to the disk. During my quest I came across a few findings that were either extremely weird or just plain awesome. Here goes my list of ‘WTF?!’
(If you don’t like reading, but you do want to check out the AIR app, click here)

HorizontalList and ItemRenderers in Flex

I must’ve done something wrong… I can’t imagine this being so hard.
What I did was: I used a simple HorizontalList component, set the columnWidth to 80, built my own itemrenderer and put them together. The itemrenderer basically loads a JPG and displays it. Seen as my images were larger than 80px I decided to do some maths the resize the image on the fly.
To start with, i went into my itemrenderer, and traced the with of the bitmap, and the width of the itemrenderer itself. Just to make sure those properties are actually ready. First thing to notice: this.width inside the itemrenderer randomly traced 80 and 85.

What the f-… Wait… Eh… No, what?

I didn’t really find out why that is, but if anybody feels like enlightning me: go right ahead. (After that, I noticed that sometimes the first or the last (or both) items in the list weren’t updating at all… I must be misunderstanding some fundamentals of the framework I guess… [Btw: I did NOT manage to fix this in a decent way, so at some point I gave up an threw it away...])

The panel titlebar in Flex

So this is AIR, right? Goodbye system chrome, hello you science-fiction-looking chrome! I created my own (very Flex-looking) chrome and disabled the system chrome. I wanted my app to be able to be moved around on the desktop… You know: Like windows do (not Windows…).
I figured: Hell, the Panel component looks a lot like a basic window. Why not use it as the main window? So what’s the first thing a regular human brain would do? Right, you’ll try to get to the titleBar via the panel instance… But you can’t! I figured I must be misunderstanding the construction of the panel. So there I go, reading about the titleBar on the Panel Class page in the Flex Livedocs. Most of you already know but just let me spell it out for you: It’s protected… So you can’t get to it right away… You have to built your own panel class that extends the original Panel class, and create your own public getter for the titleBar…

Excuse me: WTF? Oh, I think I understa… Oh, no I don’t: Why again?

No seriously: What’s the deal with that? I can see how you don’t want a setter there… But no getter? What good is that supposed to do? Anyway, let’s fix this…

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx :Panel xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" width="400" height="300">
mx><mx :Script>
< ![CDATA[
import mx.core.UIComponent;
public function get theTitlebar():UIComponent{
return this.titleBar;
}
// There are probably way easier/simpler ways than this...
]]>
mx>

And now I can use theTitlebar of my DraggablePanel class to actually drag my panel like a real window…

pnlMain.theTitlebar.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, startTheDrag);
private function startTheDrag(e:MouseEvent):void{
nativeWindow.startMove();
}

That looks pretty straight forward, and actually works like a charm… But why did I have to do this? Why is the titleBar protected??

AS3 JPGEncoder for FP9, FP10 and the one on speedballs

So at one point I actually got to building the thing I actually wanted to build: A Photobooth-clone that takes a picture and saves it to the harddrive. Drawing the bitmap went fine, saving the encoded JPG to disk went perfectly smooth as well. The AIR API is really fun to work with. Pretty straight foward… But I will get back to that in just a minute…

The problem at hand right now was the Bitmap encoding: I draw a bitmap (480 x 360) and I want to write it to disk. So I include the AS3corelib in my project and continue my quest. When testrunning I notice the application freezes while the bitmapdata is encoded. And not just for a moment. Noooo… For a full second (or longer)! I can hear you thinking: ‘A second…? So?’. Well if you want to shoot a picture every second this application will just completely freeze. And let’s just face the fact: it’s just plain annoying the have an application the freezes every few seconds for that amount of time.

So I started playing with quality settings, and bitmap sizes. All to no avail. The encoder is just too slow. Peter suggested taking a look at the Vector implementation found here. That went way faster already: Up to 4 times faster. But still: 0.3 seconds is pretty slow… So I read through the comments and run into the magic word: ‘Alchemy‘. I haven’t been playing with Alchemy myself (mainly because I don’t know C), but I knew Alchemy would be the key to he solution of this problem. So I downloaded this SWC (direct link), implemented this version of the encoder, ran the script and…
….I went ‘WHAT THE FUUUUCK?’ (You can see what that looks like below)

This video was made using the pictures Alchemy created. Alchemy was encoding these bitmaps in .05 seconds per frame! (I swear, I went on for at least 15 minutes WTF-ing over and over again…). So: From 1.2 seconds to 0.05 seconds… That’s about 24 times faster. Ain’t that amazing?

The coolest thing? I didn’t even have to compile the C code myself as I was given the .swc file. (Believe me I gave C compiling a try, but me and Terminal… It’s just not gonna happen…)

File.nativePath and File.url in AIR

The one thing I love about AIR? The combination of creating crossplatform applications using the tools I’m familiar with from online development. The keyword here is crossplatform. Creating AIR apps is supposed to be a straight forward process. You shouldn’t worry about platform specific issues. AIR is handling the heavy lifting for you. The only thing you need to do is create the app using the crossplatform API. Or so you would think.

One of the first things I noticed was the fact that the file.nativePath property isn’t all that crossplatform. And nobody can’t really explain why. Even Lee Brimelow didn’t manage to explain that in his tutorial…

I mean: How can the native path not be cross platform? It’s native to it’s own platform! (I really went WTF when learning that).

Apparently you can do anything using the file.url property. To me file.nativePath isn’t intended to be used when trying to access a file, but more intended to show the end-user where on the filesystem the file resides using a platform native notation.

Examples

Windows XP: c:\Documents and Settings\noCreativity\My Documents\myFile.jpg
Windows Vista: c:\Users\noCreativity\My Documents\myFile.jpg
OSX: /Users/noCreativity/Documents/myFile.jpg

instead of

file:///c:/Documents%20and%Settings/noCreativity/My%20Documents/myFile.jpg
file:///Users/noCreativity/Documents/myFile.jpg

I am no Adobe AIR expert so please, feel free to correct me. Because this really itches me. How can a crossplatform API have a property which is not crossplatform-compatible (and don’t get me started on the whole OSX Dock/menubar vs Windows Start Menu/taskbar thing… But somehow, that’s different…)

Finally… The end…

Yes, I had a hard time doing all this but I learned a lot! My conclusions?

I like Flex and how it enables you to rapidly create data driven applications, but I’m pretty sure I’d really have to look into the inner workings of the framework before trying to build something, using the framework… And basically that ‘really looking into it’ ruins the mood for me… Definitely when experimenting.

Alchemy is amazing! I can’t wait to get a good C development environment up on my iMac and start playing with C and lean how I can get the best from both worlds. If you have got any decent suggestions on how to do that [without Terminal] feel free to tell me
Oh and by the way: If you’re experimenting with Alchemy and you’re open-sourcing code or libraries, I encourage you to add a .swc file with the compiled C code. Thanks in advance!

I love the AIR API. Although that nativePath thing will keep haunting me until somebody can give me a straight answer, ’cause I feel like a complete idiot right now.

Oh, and if you care: Feel free to check out the application!

Download: Click!