I also tried the Lytro Illum, which I bought last week. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t work very well & it turned out I was right. It doesn’t handle low light very well (and I’m completely spoiled with the α7sii & an F/1.4 primary), but worse, it doesn’t capture any depth at such a large distance. So I have a few of those photos but I won’t bother sharing them.

Instead these last two photos have tilted focal planes, rather than a pull-focused-exposure.

After feeling a bit disappointed that the flowery effect wasn’t working well I decided to just record video, so these are the last 14 minutes of the show (which was about half an hour long total). It’s kind of a lot to watch, so I recommend skipping to ~4 minutes 50 seconds where I play with the focus.

With the longer exposures I had to close the aperture quite a bit, so the “flowery” effect is pretty limited. (I figure I’ll cut some polarizing filters to cut the light down so I can open it back up.) The video demonstrates just how big the bokeh can really be. (I had the same problem recently trying to photograph planes at Logan Airport. That’ll be another use for the polarizing filters.)

Before the show I wandered around town a bit looking for interesting things to photograph. The one thing that really caught my attention was how this vine was climbing this guy wire.

For some reason power lines & telephone polls, and electrical equipment, have always been favorite photographic subjects for me.

Earlier in the day my brothers’, their wives, and my nephew, came to my mom’s house. Here’s my nephew Max (and his mom Nicole is next to him in the background).

Stephen Hawking died today. He was diagnosed with ALS when he was 21, and given 2-3 years to live, but he died today at age 76. I thought I remembered hearing all sorts of weird coincidences about birthdays, including that Stephen Hawking was born on (I thought) Newton’s date of death. Turns out it was Galileo’s date of death. But I thought there was more to it, like that Newton was born on Galileo’s date of death, but that isn’t true. But Hawking did manage to die on Einstein’s birthday, kind of a closed time-like loop, ha. It’s also pi day, since 3.14 = March 13th. I watched a Attenborough documentary earlier tonight, about a supercolony of ants that have conquered much of a mountain somewhere. I’ve heard about supercolonies elsewhere, I think maybe it’s two species of Argentinian ants that seem to be taking over the world? Anyway, these ants had a lot of interesting feats. Like they harvest a sweet nectar substance from aphids, which they farm. And their larger scale cooperation and many queens (even within a single nest, of the hundreds or thousands of nests). Attenborough asked (maybe rhetorically?) if we are witnessing a step in evolution where ants evolve wide-scale cooperation, which he then points out humans discovered some time ago. (Ha! For years I’ve kept a list on wikipedia of interesting science facts (it could use a lot of cleanup), including:

A number of ant species farm fungus, thought to have discovered agriculture 50-65 million years ago, long before humans. The most advanced ant farmers (leaf cutter species) farm a fungus that exists no where on Earth besides their farms, an example of mutualism. There are also species of ants who “milk” aphids, and protect the aphids while they feed.

(Reading that now I feel like “ant farmers” is probably normally misinterpreted to mean “humans who have ant farms” when I meant it to read “ants that are farmers”. I guess I should fix that.) It’s entertaining to think of larger-scale cooperation as something that we might have beaten the ants to! Though even with our head start, they still might beat us to the punch. We haven’t quite yet achieved complete cooperation with one another the world over, but we seem to be progressing in that direction,  mostly (certainly far more than at any other time in history). But I bring all that up to say I have a far greater emotional attachment to David Attenborough than I did to Stephen Hawking, despite the fact that my education is in physics and I’ve always considered my interest in biology to be more armchair curiosity than formal study. Granted, I always did well in biology classes and I never actually studied anything Hawking worked on, and much of it is over my head because I have no formal education in general relativity anyway. So it shouldn’t really be that surprising.

Update: After posting this that Attenborough documentary on ants was taken down via a copyright claim from the Australian Broadcasting Network! So disappointing!

Also, we watched the eclipse on a hilltop in Wyoming, on a lake shore, with about 10 other people, I think maybe all of them were from Colorado. Jenny was one of them, she left a comment on my main page, and then I did something that messed up the comment section on the main page, and I haven’t figured out how to fix it yet.

I spent a lot of time trying to motion stabilize the footage of the eclipse, with mixed results. I shot it in 4K with a Sony A7S ii and a 150-600mm Sigma lens (with a Canon to Sony E-mount adapter) I rented from lensrentals.com. I used opencv to find circles, but that didn’t quite work as well as I hoped. Then I used contour detection, with fairly good results. And then there is the issue of cropping. A month has already gone by since the eclipse, so I’ve set that aside and the video is here now.

And the plane crossing it, that was incredible! In the video, shortly after the eclipse starts, the screen goes black. I was watching the LCD when that happened, and my first thought was, “did the camera just die‽ how could it die right now‽” You can hear, I think Collin, saying how the plane is headed straight for it. I looked at the lens and saw that the breeze had blown the solar filter back in front of the camera, and I managed to flip it back off the lens just in time to get the plane crossing. Later Collin looked up flights for that area and we found two commercial flights that went directly over us during the eclipse, and in the video there are, I think, a couple times where you hear someone mention there are two planes. Collin once, and one of the other women later I think. She also says something about how the plane looks like it’s steering to see the eclipse, and I think at the time both Collin and I thought she meant they had flown into the shadow, and we figured that was planned. But looking at the flight paths later, it looked as if one of the planes banked sharply to one side, then the other, and then back again, possibly to show the passengers? The result looks like a big bump in the flight path, which otherwise is headed north east to south west across the country. 

I ended up buying the Sony I rented, and they’re notorious good at shooting video in low light (the reason I rented it). The night before I returned the lens I decided to look for Andromeda, and I didn’t know how easy it is to spot. The app I was using to look for it was so filled with stars I had trouble orienting it right, and decided to look at the Pleiades star cluster first, and I happened to catch a meteor on camera.

Recently I’ve been working on another variation of minesweeper again, and I just now learned a little tiny bit more of Swift, which is actually what prompted me to post. I figured if I write about what I learned I’d be more likely to remember it. It involves the concept of in-out parameters for functions. I had run into them in the past, but didn’t understand what they were doing, but the examples I just read were clear. 

I also started by trying to figure out what was meant by some code, a class named Array2D<T>, which it turns out is a generic type. Generic types (apparently) let you write code that will be more flexible than normal, like the way an array type can take integers, floats, strings, etc., as members, that’s what makes them generic. The explanation of generic types involved in-out parameters, which if my understanding is right, are sort of like functions that will change the values of parameters. I think they’re kind of like a shortcut of having a function return modified values and setting the variable you pass into the function equal to the returned value. To use an in-out parameter you must write inout after the parameter name in the function declaration, and when you call it you use an ampersand to denote the inout variable. Here’s the documentation for in-out parameters. And here is the documentation for generic types.  (Generic code I guess.)

I also revisited an idea I’ve had for a long time, and worked on quite a bit a few years ago, involving trying to generate point clouds from a video with a pull focus. I managed to get an iPhone app working that would perform a pull focus, and then wrote some opencv code to pull out the in-focus parts, but it does a terrible job. After the bad first attempts I remembered how years ago I read about a simple method for focus stacking (a related problem), that consisted of blurring the photo and subtracting the blurred result from the original. The idea being that the in-focus parts change the most during blurring, and the out-of-focus parts don’t change much, so the result is mostly the parts that were in focus. But the results of that were pretty horrendous too. I also had the color off when I made the video below. 

When I return to it again I’ll try implementing something like the contrast-based approach to autofocusing. I suppose something I should keep in mind is that, ideally, each pixel will result in only one point, so I really want to look through the “column” of pixels (a single pixel over the duration of the video), and select the one with the highest contrast? That doesn’t sound terrible…