My GPS Camera Phone

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In response to SF Girl’s tag, I’ve compiled a brief yet enlightening list of seven things that are weird and/or interesting about me. Here we go:

1. I love Brussels Sprouts.
2. I if I’m adjusting the volume of the radio, I always set it to an even number.
3. I’ve ridden a bicycle from Gainesville, Florida to St. Augustine Beach, one-way (about 87 miles).
4. I can’t handle open wounds, major cuts, lots of blood and needles. Nope, not a fan.
5. Cheesy wordplay and bad puns are awesome.
6. I didn’t have my own cell phone until 2007.
7. I once purchased a dried out blowfish in Hurghada, Egypt. It was blown up and made into a lamp. No idea where it went off to.

In the interest of self-preservation, I left out stuff relating to liquid nitrogen bombs, endless nights of debauchery and foreign travel faux pas. No way is that stuff getting out.

This was a fun exercise in Photoshop filter application. Many times, filters are overdone and abused, causing the image to look worse than it did originally. However, when applied in moderation, they can produce interesting results.

The image here was shot with my camera phone, as usual, and then edited in Photoshop CS. After a bit of cropping, I added a level adjustment layer to even out the colors. Then a single, overhead light was rendered to brighten up the center and darken the edges, adding a little more depth and drama. After that, I added a 40% pinch distortion, followed by a gentle ocean ripple. All of this was then covered up with a layer of clouds set to 15% opacity.

The image itself was a snapshot of the setting sun’s rays between the clouds as seen from my office window. (I get some great sunsets.) While the original shot was nice, I didn’t want to post another sunset photo. So I inverted it and applied the steps above, producing something that looks more like water than air.

With that said, I task you to start thinking of strange and unorthodox ways to capture photos with your camera phone. After that, try something even stranger in your favorite photo editing software. With a little imagination (and sometimes a lot of moderation!), you can produce something far beyond the ordinary.

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In the atrium of Weimer Hall on the University of Florida campus sits a dusty relic whose purpose has been overtaken by today’s modern printing methods.

No, it’s not Walter Cronkite. It’s a machine called a Linotype.

The Linotype was not a printing press, but the machine used to create type bars that created the monolithic plates for (thanks Craig!) that went into the printing press. Each line was crafted in the Linotype via molds and molten lead. The finished product was a lead line of characters which was then positioned on the plate which would do the printing.

The UF College of Journalism website has an informative story on the Linotype and the acquisition of this particular piece. Here’s a quote from the article, Historical Type, by Dean Emeritus Ralph Lowenstein:

“For about 100 years prior to the 1970s, reporters and editors from the high school newspaper to the largest metropolitan daily had memories that included the clatter of Linotypes as printers translated newsroom copy into lines of solid lead. We all had the thrill of carrying home our first byline in the reverse lettering of a line of type, or of becoming the butt of the Linotype operators’ perennial joke – handing a new reporter a line of hot type and watching the greenhorn gasp in pained surprise.”

Today, Linotype (the company) is one of the leading font foundries in existence today, boasting over 10,000 fonts, two of which are used on this website – Palatino and Helvetica.

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Image credit: Nancy

Nancy and I received a late Christmas gift to ourselves on Tuesday – cell phone data transfer software! I know, how exciting!

This is a big deal because our phones do not have removable memory or Bluetooth. (For what it’s worth, they will survive submersion for up to 20 minutes and are indestructible.) What this means is that trying to get pictures over ~300K off the phone was impossible (more on that later). Needless to say, there’s a handful of photos that I’ve been waiting to post, but couldn’t for this reason. Today’s is the first of that batch.

This was taken in October 2007 in my front yard. The photo is a long shadow of my youngest daughter, who is holding out her skirt for maximum dramatic effect. I tweaked the levels and cropped out her legs, just to the point of her feet. For extra-super-mega dramatic effect, I flipped the canvas 180 degrees. Yes, this photo is upside-down. Neato, huh? You’ve got to click the image and view the larger size to get the best view.

The Datapilot Universal Pro Kit is what I’m using now to retrieve my pictures off the phone without having to use cumbersome pix messaging. It took a few false starts to get this software running, but I’m pretty satisfied with the product. The user interface could use some work and their online knowledge base could be better, but I did have a good experience with their e-mail support. In addition to data transfer, I can also make my own ringtones! WOOO!

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