Painting done the hard way

“Wow!” was all I could say when I saw this!

This is a little documentary about Dave Lefner. He’s a artist, located in Los Angeles. He ‘paints’ using something called linoleum block prints. I have never heard of it before, but when I saw how it’s done and how amazingly cool the results looked, I wondered why nobody ever told me about this? The whole process looks so amazingly great!

On top of that: I love the video editing and quality! The footage looks so amazingly great! The colors, the shots, the image quality. It looks like the pixels were hand drawn onto the screen by an angel!
In all seriousness: What kind of videocamera does it take to capture such footage? If you do know: Please let me know!

Romeo and Juliet for photographers

I was browsing around, when all of a sudden this popped up: A video made to a pretty funny (yet very cool) hip hop song. It’s about this boy who meets a girl. Both are photographers and of course: they can perfectly fall in love. However: The boy is Canon-kid, the girl’s using Nikon. Now THAT is a problem…

Anyway, I love the video! Great colors, pretty sexy shots and a perfect harmony of beat and flow. Exactly what I’m looking for when talking about ‘personal style‘.

Webcam motion detection coolness

A few weeks ago I had to create an innovative way to scroll in a page. I have seen tons of scrollbars in Flash and I found it hard to create something completely new. At one point I wondered if I could wire the scrollbar to a webcam using Actionscript… So I started experimenting around…

When I first started I quickly ran into a problem: How the hell do I know if anything is moving? So I actually got stuck right in the beginning.
I went on a Google trip which led me to Koen’s post about motion detection. Koen was checking all the pixels (using nested loops) to calculate color values. I figured this generated way too much overhead. There had to be a better/simpeler way.

In his post Koen mentioned an article, written by Guy Watson, concerning an other way to get motion detection going. To make things simple: Guy just takes 2 pictures – one of the previous frame, one of the current – puts them on top of eachother, and applies the difference blend mode to the upper one: Tadaaa! There we go! The ‘unchanged’ pixels are blacked out. The remaining pixels are the difference in the picture… which reflects movement. Read the rest of this entry »