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Posted on October 19, 2003
It’s been awhile since I’ve written in here, and a fair amount of cool things have been happening, so here’s the lowdown:
After my last post, I took off to see my cousin Nicole get married in Massachusetts. It was great because I got to see so many relateives that I haven’t seen in years…if at all. I finally got to meet Melanie and Michelle, who are two cousins of mine from California, whom I never met before. It was great. They were posing together in front of the church for their father, Steve. Recognizing them from the picture my grandmother showed me, and wanting to get a picture of them myself, I went up next to Steve and pulled out my camera. One of them said to the other, “Who’s this guy taking our picture?” I take the shot and say, “I’m your cousin, Mike.” It was great. The wedding was at a very nice church in the woods, and the reception was just over the border in New Hampshire.
Just before I was getting ready to leave for the flight, my father gave me a very nice Pentax 645 camera. It’s 20 years old, but it takes pictures on 120 or 220 size film, which is around twice as large as 35mm film. The idea is that when you get the photos blown up, they don’t look as grainy. So far I’ve probably gone through about 6 or 7 rolls of film, not counting the first roll I put in it, which I loaded backwards and totally messed up before even taking any shots. Someone at work who is familiar with these kinds of cameras said the 645 is formatted to fit an 8″ x 10″ print. Most of the photos I’ve been taking are… so-so. Mainly its a matter of remembering that I should have the sun at my back, and that kind of stuff. What I see with my eye isn’t necessarily what’s going be captured on film or seen in a print. However, I do have some pretty good photos, and I still plan on taking some more. The idea I have is to get a fair amount of good shots to choose from, then get them blown up to 8×10′s and send them out as Christmas gifts. Of course, the hard part is figuring out what kind of photo each person might want. I think getting 3 8×10′s of one photo is cheaper than getting one 8×10 each of three photos.
Also, I’ve once again been playing with Blender, but this time I’ve been playing with animation. It didn’t take a lot to figure out how to do the animations, but its not like there weren’t problems either. At first, I was getting the animations, but the AVI files would be huge, like 100MB for a 10 second animation. I tooled around at the Elysiun forums, and posted a question, to which somebody suggested saving it as an AVI-jpeg instead of AVI-raw. I tried that and got the file size down tremendously…from a 100+MB file to a 4MB file.
The first animation (815KB file) is just simply lights turning on along a fashion show runway. I did this by starting all of the lights on a different layer, and then bringing them onto the visible layer one by one. The second animation (4MB file) is a test of a flying camera. Basically, the objects in the scene stay where they are, but the camera moves around them, which in this scene is kinda cool, because I used some chrome spheres and a cone, so as the camera moves, so do the reflections. Of course, the camera isn’t visible, but it’s only a test, so it doesn’t really matter. I did these for the first couple of animations because I wanted to be sure that I could actually animate the camera and the lights. I knew it was possible to move the meshes and stuff around, but I wan’t so sure about the camera and lights. Apparently, it is also possible to use more than one camera, but I haven’t figured that part out yet. Its food for thought though.
