I Scream, You Scream

Today was the last day of 5 in 5. I decided to take the time today and make an EL based wall lamp. However, my best intentions were thwarted by lack of time and the right material. I would normally have persevered on, but I think that EL material is way to expensive to get into without a lot of planning. So on to the backup plan. We had originally tried to get some liquid nitrogen to do shattering photographs and to try some food hacking. As there are a lot of safety issues with liquid nitrogen we were not allowed to bring it on the floor. I decided to go ahead and make ice cream anyway. I made Honey, lavender, habanero ice cream. The ice cream was totally made from scratch, and I took a quick trip to Whole Foods for the ingredients. I found most of them there, except the honey which I bought from Tremblay Apiaries in the Union Square Greenmarket.

When i got back to school I chopped the habanero and the lavender and separated the egg yolks. After that I added the rest of the ingredients about 2 cups heavy cream, 1 cup milk, and about a cup of honey to the pot with the lavender and habenero. Be careful when you’re working with the habanero as it’s very hot and the oils can stay on your skin for a long time. I cut a cross shape into the tip and put it in. Bring the mixture to a low boil and shut off. It’ll look weird, and then it’ll look good again. Then pour your mixture into an ice cream maker and follow its instructions. We used a Play’n Freeze Ice. The instructions say not to throw, but we didn’t have the instructions and played a 6 person game of hot potato. It was pretty good, but the 15 minute freeze time is a lie. For the love of milk, if you make ice cream get a cheap electric ice cream maker and go to town.All in all it was a sweet ending to 5 in 5.

3 comments | August 1st, 2008

Robot Chef Show

Today Anderson Miller and I took on the task of creating a cooking show based on recipes created by Robot Chef. Robot Chef is a program that Andy wrote in our Programming A to Z class which read all the recipes from three recipe web sites. The program then computes the probablity of ingedients to appear together in recipes. For example it will look at all the recipes and then see how many times for avocados and limes appear together, and then calculate a percentage based on the total number of times that avocados appear that limes appear with them. Robot Chef uses this data to generate recipes. Sometimes the recipes are absolutley disgusting sounding…venison and sugar anyone? Sometimes the results are suprisingly good. On the final day of A to Z Andy brought in some Tequila cake and it was actually pretty great.

For today’s project we made a cooking show with one of the Robot Chef recipes which we called Cashew Suprise Cake. Enjoy.

Robot Chef Cooking Show from Anderson Miller on Vimeo.

1 comment | August 1st, 2008

DIY Audiobook

For today’s project i recorded an audio book. I love listening to children’s stories on audio book, and thought it would be fun to make one on my own. I recorded Beverly Cleary’s Otis Spofford. It was actually one fo the more difficult projects I’ve done. I realized that spending 7 hours in a 2 by 3 foot padded room reading into a microphone is hard work. I did enjoy it though and the final file is below as well as a link to the Google books page.

Otis Spofford at Google Books

My Reading
 

1 comment | July 31st, 2008

Laser Activated

Today for my 5 in 5 project I assembled a trigger for camera flashes that is activated by a laser and used it to take some photos of a piece of ice landing in water. I have wanted a device like this for a very long time. A laser trigger allows you to fire a camera or a flash when a object breaks the laser beam. It is essential for high speed photography, and it makes other photo tasks such as position based photography possible. I am mainly interested in it for taking still life photos.  I also needed to have my unit interface with the Pocketwizard triggering system that I currently use.

 

I had done some hunting in my early photo career and heard that at RIT there is an entire class on high speed photography. Also I heard there’s a guy there that makes his own laser triggers. I thought what an electronic genius. I also looked at commercial laser triggers, but they are very expensive (http://www.kapturegroup.com/kap_htmls/laser.html). I found a simple solution a few months ago on Maurice Ribble’s site Glacial Wanderer. He has made a simple trigger using the Arduino and a Sparkfun laser module as well as many other photo triggers (lightning and sound will be my next projects soon). I loved his use of simple materials and have wanted to build one for a while.

I started by finding a laser module to hack. As time was of the essence I was forced to buy my laser pointer from Staples, but i think a cheap 4 dollar laser pointer would work just as fine, and I would have preferred it. I started by taking the laser module out of the laser pointer with some delicate screw driver work. It looks like the below outside of the big case.

I desoldered the power bar and the spring for the ground (the spring steel in my pointer was very strong and cannot be cut with regular wire snips without damaging them).

After removing those parts I was able to solder on new ground and power wires.  There is also a switch on the laser pointer that I wanted to bridge because I wanted the Arduino to be able to control whether the laser pointer was on or off. 

 

After that a quick assemble of Maurice’s circuit.  I added a relay to control my laser pointer.  You omit this by bridging the switch terminals with a piece of wire going from one to the other.  If you chose to do that then you will control the laser by switching its power on and off.  

 

After the build I took the setup home and used it to take the ice cube falling shots.  I set up the lights and the glass of water on a black background ( please be careful if you try this, photo lights and water are not friends).  I set up the laser trigger in like below. I didn’t have a clamp to hold the sensor high enough so I had to jury rig one out of several clamps.

The laser itself was held in the knuckle of a c-stand.  I’ll take a moment to tell you that it is very important that you weigh down and stabilize the stands holding the laser and receiver.  If they fall out of alignment they can repeatedly trigger the flash.

 I also set up two lights from behind to light the glass, and one from above for overall illumination.  I was careful not to let any light onto the background. 

 

After initial setup I started shooting.   I shot at 2 seconds at f11.  I would trigger the shutter after turning off the modeling lights on the strobes.  Also my studio was fairly dark at the time so there was no issue with ambient light.  If I was shooting during the day I would have had to black out windows if the ambient exposure caused problems at the meter reading above. After the first shot I noticed that the flash was firing too early.  The problem with the flash firing so early was that it froze the ice cube in mid air, but did not catch the splash.  I added a delay to Maurice’s code of 100 milliseconds and this fixed that problem.   A second problem is that the laser would register in the shot after the flashes fired and the water was in the air.  I rectified this by delaying the laser turning back on in his code by one second.  After this the shots were amazing and exactly what I wanted. 

Well not exactly.  My flash units are profoto acute2 heads driven by a profoto acute2 2400 generator.  The flash duration on these units is not as short as a more expensive unit by Broncolor and so the water droplets are not as frozen as I’d like them to be.  I’ve know the flash duration on some Nikon Speedlights is very short and I’d like to try these as well. 

If you click through, you can look at a larger size of the image below.

 

 

 

2 comments | July 30th, 2008

Mating Drawings.

My project for 5-in-5 today was a system of software organisms that create drawings through behaviors.  In the early spring I went to go see Casey Reas speak about his work  He referenced Sol LeWitt’s instruction based art works as a source for his work.  LeWitt would send parameters and instructions to galleries to create the art work themselves.

 

 In this method he would communicate complex drawings through precise instructions such as the following piece from the MoMA in 1978:

Three-part drawing: A six-inch (15 cm) grid covering the walls. 1st wall: On a red wall, blue lines from each corner to points on the grid, yellow lines from the center to points on the grid; 2nd wall: On a yellow wall, blue lines from each corner to points on the grid, red lines from the midpoint of each side to points on the grid; 3rd wall: On a blue wall, red lines from the midpoint of each side to points on the grid, yellow lines from the center to points on the grid. (The number of lines and their length are determined by the draftsmen, but each wall has an equal number of lines.)

The idea of prescribing rules to programatic objects has stuck in my mind since Reas’ talk.  I worked on this theme and built a system of circles that follow a few behaviors and executes a drawing.  Though I like the look of this project as static images, I feel it also has a life as a screen based piece that follows the evolution of the drawings.

The circles are first drawn to random points on the screen.  They pick a destination, and then when they reach it they pick a new one and move there.  If along the way they run into another circle iit is considered that they are mating.  When the circles mate they add together each one’s colors.  After a circle reaches a certain age and it has mated it can die.  When a circle dies a new one is born and its  predescessors trails are faded out a little bit at a time.  At points during this progression you get different static images. Many times there are mass die outs, and births that disolve all trails and return the screen to black with individual circles.

1 comment | July 29th, 2008