brainwagon

A couple of people on my twitter feed yesterday (aside: I tweet using @brainwagon, and passed 5000 tweets yesterday) had questions about how this light field camera worked, how fast the sensor was, how long it takes to acquire the image, etc… While this is the first Lytro camera I’ve ever had the time to […]

I spent a couple years of my life working on a light field motion picture camera (and got named on two patents) as part of my former work, so I’ve been interested in light field photography and computational photography more generally. The company Lytro was basically the first to market such a device, and recently […]

Last week I was playing around with using “motion-mmal” to capture pictures of hummingbirds feeding at my feeder. That was fun, but if I wanted to get high resolution pictures, I could not get very high frame rates (maybe 2-5 fps at best). I thought that perhaps by writing my own capture application in C, […]

I know, I know, it’s probably getting a little repetitive and boring. But I’m still getting a kick out of my motion capturing hummingbird camera. Improvements are coming.

When I got home today, it appeared that I had a few more images from my hummingbird cam. Luckily, I got several nice frames of him her (probably), so I put them together into an animated GIF. Nifty. When I get a chance to do more stuff on it this weekend, I hope to get […]

I like to see hummingbirds. They seem completely incredible to me, like little hyper Swiss Watches, buzzing around the garden. I’ve seen a few of them in our yard, but I’ve been meaning to encourage them showing up more, so I recently installed a feeder. While the syrup level has gone down, I have never […]

Here are two more photos I took at last night’s camera workshop. I wanted to take something slightly more beautiful than a selfie, so I chose the Luxo statue outside the Steve Jobs building at Pixar, and some white flowers from the garden. Both were taken rather late in the day, under partly cloudy skies […]

It is with a sense of deep sadness that I heard of the passing of Ray Harryhausen this morning. If I were to pick two things which influenced me as a kid growing up in the 1960s, it would have been the Apollo Space Program and the films of Ray Harryhausen, although at no time […]

Here in the Bay Area, the Space Shuttle Endeavour did a victory lap, passing over Sacramento, the Golden Gate and many other Bay Area locations. Pixar Animation Studios is in Emeryville, quite close to the Bay Bridge, so I thought we had a pretty good chance of getting a good view. Sadly, all my good […]

Carmen and I just got back from a trip to London, and we had a blast. One of the geekiest things we did while there was to take a day trip by train out to Bletchley Park to see the site of the codebreaking efforts by the British during WWII. As any long time reader […]

I don’t spend much time talking about my day job here on the blog, but every once in a while, I have to take time out and crow a bit about Pixar and what a great place it is to work. Tonight, Wall-E picked up a Golden Globe for Best Animated Film. It was also […]

My wife noticed a mommy and daddy quail at our fence, with a whole bunch of babies squabbling around in the grass at the bottom. Couldn’t get any good pictures of the babies, but shot this video of the parents: Not sure the autofocus got the quails as well as they could have, here is […]

As a break from my amateur radio posts, here’s a photography one! Most of my photographs are cool largely by accident. This is no exception. Well, that’s not quite true, I was sort of trying for this effect, but it turned out much better than I could have expected. It’s shot with the Night Portrait […]

A while ago, I wrote about how you could unlock a PAP2 and use it on Free World Dialup as a simple, cheap VOIP adapter.  Unfortunately, while playing around with Asterisk this morning, my adapter reset itself, promptly redownloaded some new firmware, and now is back to being locked with Vonage, this time, without the […]

Using the multi-shot capability of my nikon, I grabbed sixteen small exposures of the frog croaking, extracted them, aligned them by hand, and made the (rather large, sorry for the dialup users) images on the right. [tags]My Photos[/tags]