I went to Chicago last weekend for the premiere performance of my sister’s latest musical project, Nylon Radio (My sister is doing a doctorate in Music, um, Theory? at the University of Chicago).

All of the pictures were taken with my Panasonic G1 with 20mm/f1.7 lens.  It’s a digital camera, and a good one, but I feel like something has been lost with the switch to digital photography.  With film media, you have this really fascinating and unpredictable interaction between the type of film stock/processing and the environment that you were trying to capture when you opened the shutter.  When I shot on film, this was usually very, very frustrating, as you could do everything right and still end up with a bad shot, due to some quirk of the processing or stock or spectral distribution of the ambient light or measurement error in the metering or whatever the hell else.  But I find that digital cameras, especially high end ones, can render the scene so neutrally that the results are nice enough but boring.

So I was presented with something of an opportunity when I loaded the SD card into my laptop on the plane back to San Francisco.  I had to shoot nearly all of the shots wide open at f1.7 at 800-3200 ISO– there was no light, except for some ambient bounce that didn’t give any modeling and some LED music stand lights that look like death warmed over on skin tones.  If I was going to have anything usable, it was all going to be in post-process.  I decided that rather than trying to make a purse out of a sows ear, I’d instead play around with all of the fun ways you can abuse the Camera Raw filters, and let taste be no object.  Here are some of my favorites, with a quick description of the techniques used in each.

Cheap Photoshop trick #1: the automated panorama stitcher. I really love the look of these.  While the automated stitcher routine does a pretty good job of adjusting for different exposures, I set the exposure lock before I took the set, in order to have distinct light areas and dark areas in the picture.  I pulled the color temperature slider way down, but subjectively this was the feel of the lighting at the event.

You damn kids won't remember assembling these by hand prior to CS

Most of the really objectionable noise was in the color rather than luminance, so a lot of the remedies involve removing the color before applying some sort of false color process.  In the above picture, I also grabbed the midranges and pushed them into the highlight range, which had the effect of popping the band out from the brick wall behind them.

Here’s the warm-up act.  There really wasn’t any light on them at all, this was shot at 3200 ISO with the aperture wide open.  I compensated by shifting to the left until the guy was standing in front of the lamp, which at least popped him out from the background.

The original was a solid mess of color noise, so I desaturated the image completely and replaced the highlights with an orange tone, and the shadows with a lavender tone.

Here, I nibbled away at the saturation by color and value of everything but the central figure (my sister, Marcy).  You can do the same thing in half the time by using a mask and a saturation layer, but I find that this gives a more organic feel.

I’m still working at getting better at portraiture.  I got into photography as a matter of necessity, because I needed good photos of my shows for my portfolio, and the production photographer tends to shoot close-ups without any regard for preserving the look of the lighting (don’t shoot with a flash, please), if there’s a photo call at all.  I didn’t want to get right up in people’s grill while a performance was going on, so I don’t have a lot of close-ups for this shoot, but here’s one I quite like.

• Tested and working in Arduino 0018.

That’s it!  As per usual, you will have to replace the stock HardwareSerial.cpp in C:\Program Files (x86)\arduino-0018\hardware\arduino\cores\arduino with the modified version included in the zip file.  Get it here!

Edwin Dolby at Laser Productions had an elegant idea to address this, namely that you could use the constrain function to map out of bounds values to the correct 0-511 range.  However, I have decided not to implement this by default, as without some kind of numerical readout I think the values should just be set to what you set them.  But, easy to implement if you decide you want it!

A couple weeks ago, I lost my cufflinks.

If you want shamrock cufflinks picked out in ersatz emeralds, you can find them.  If you want a winking pirate, or matching male and female symbols, or a Mercedes logo (in diamonds, natch), you can find all of those.  In fact, nothing I can tell you will prepare you for how gaudy and ostentatious the selection will be.  You remember that jackass boss you had at that shitty job?  Apparently, he went on to sell cufflinks for a living, because this is exactly his taste in accoutrement.

Put on The Smiths and fire up the etching tank. These are what I came up with, using the process described in my prior post here.  I threw together some artwork in about twenty minutes, and finished the parts the same weekend.  I did two sets, one using Sierpinski triangles and one using the tracks made by subatomic particles in a cloud chamber

It’s right about the smallest detail I can get with the process I’m using right now, and for this and many other reasons I need to find a better way to do the resist stage than toner transfer.  I bought the backings on the bay of e, and painted it once with black paint, then took steel wool to it to remove the raised portion.  Then everything got a clear coat to keep the zinc from oxidizing.

Sometimes the quick projects are the most satisfying, and I’m pretty happy with the results.

My Friday nights are 23% more awesome by molarity than yours.

You win some, You lose some. This is actually a post about a failure to achieve what I was trying to do, but it’s an interesting failure.  I was making some zinc etchings (see my earlier post about that) and I thought it would be great if I could then plate the exposed parts of the etching not covered by the resist with copper, which, when the resist was removed, would give me a two-tone metallic effect.

I had been putting a pad of steel wool into the bath to remove the copper from it prior to pouring it down the drain, for environmental reasons.  The copper would plate out onto it just fine, but it didn’t have any adhesion— if you weren’t careful taking the steel wool out, the copper would fall right off it.  So it seemed that I was close to my goal, if I could just get the copper to adhere to the plates.

Some hours of internet research later, I had a partial success.  Commercial copper plating processes use a complex process with very precise parameters of solution strength, electricity, and temperature, as well as proprietary processes such as strike baths and commercial brighteners.  There are internet forums devoted to the finer points of this, and I really should have paid more attention in high school chemistry because I can’t follow most of it.  But the underlying process is pretty simple.

Dissolve some copper into an acid bath, connect your anode (+) to a copper donor part, and your work piece to the cathode (-).  The positively charged copper will attach itself to the negatively charged work piece.  The acid is there to help the copper dissolve in the solution, I think.

For my copper anode, I used about a foot of stranded copper wire, with the insulation jacket removed, of course.  I used vinegar (acetic acid) for my acid solution, and also added about 3 tablespoons of copper sulfate crystals.  I think this is what made the plating work so quickly despite using a weak acid, as otherwise you would have to wait for copper atoms to be pulled off the copper part, transported across the medium, and deposited onto the work piece.  For a constant supply of voltage, I used a car battery charger.  The 12-14V it supplies is too much voltage, so I used several light bulbs of various denominations to make a voltage divider, with the voltage across the bath between 1 and 2 volts.

The acid will be consumed in the process, so you’ll have to keep adding more to keep the PH down.  Also, if you are seeing bubbles or black soot forming on the workpiece, you’re trying to plate too fast– you should reduce the voltage, make the mixture less conductive, or increase the amount of copper dissolved in the bath.  An apparently common maxim of plating is that you can’t plate material faster than you put it into the solution.  Also, without brighteners you’ll need to immediately clearcoat the copper plate after polishing it if you want it to stay shiny.

Plating onto (steel) quarters.

The process works pretty well for plating copper or zinc onto steel, but I was completely unsuccessful at plating copper onto zinc.  The acid just attacked the zinc and I got a lot of bubbling and soot deposits, but no copper.  In the picture below, you can see the bubbles of hydrogen gas coming off the zinc plate.

Fail!

More research:  So I spent a lot of time reading about this, mostly from patents because it turns out copper plating onto zinc is sort of a Thing.  Commercial processes involve a cyanide bath, which is not something I can attempt at home due to the fact that it would kill me.

The other mode of attack I’ve been thinking about would be to plate the zinc in an alkaline bath with some other metal, one that would allow me to then plate the copper using the acid bath process.  From what I’ve been reading sodium carbonate might work for an alkaline bath, but I’m not sure what metal I would plate with or whether that would really work.  Also, we’re getting pretty well outside my grasp of chemistry here.

]]> http://blog.wingedvictorydesign.com/2010/03/13/copper-plating-onto-zinc/feed/ 2 http://blog.wingedvictorydesign.com/2010/02/21/a-new-workbench/ http://blog.wingedvictorydesign.com/2010/02/21/a-new-workbench/#comments Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:19:50 +0000 Max http://blog.wingedvictorydesign.com/?p=961 Story Time. So, in Los Angeles I lived in this comically tiny studio apartment.  There, I did all my projects on this 3′ x 3′ table, which was also pre-landfill staging for junk mail and whatever else I was holding when I walked through my apartment door.  Here is it in action:

15% of surface area unusable due to feline possession.

Over time this table, which was never exactly heirloom quality to begin with, became so covered with assorted solder/glue/paint, burn marks (thermal and chemical), and power tool ‘oops’ Events, as to be only an article of furniture by virtue of its horizontality.

When I moved into my  spacious Portland apartment, I decided that I wanted a proper workbench, with room for cat storage and a soldering iron.  Specifically, I wanted to be able to work with a 4′ wide sheet of material, and something sturdy enough that it wouldn’t jump around when I used power tools, with storage for all the little necessaries like sharpies…

The tracks running perpendicular to the vise allow me to lock down any size material up to the length of the bench (6′).  It also has a compartment in the center to hold sandpaper, etc.   Here’s an exploded view (top and bottom) showing how it all goes together— the top is detachable to allow it to fit through a standard door.*

The Feet: I ordered the foot hardware from McMasterCarr, part #62805K42.  Then I took some 1/8″ thick steel plate, drilled a hole in it and tapped threads to screw the foot in.  I put a nut with an integral washer on it so that the weight of the bench would be distributed across the plate rather than resting on that 1/8″ worth of thread.  Here’s a picture to help make this clear:

Detail from the bottom of the foot hardware. This was taken while only the primer coat was on, before I did the red topcoat. Which looks fucking hot, IMO.

This has proven to be very sturdy.  The bench itself weighs about 150lbs I would guess, and I’ve stood/sat on it several times to work on something.

The Vise:  I used maple because I really like maple, and Rockler had an offal block of it that they let go for cheap.  It was subsequently pointed out to me that woodworking blocks are typically made out of a soft wood, to avoid marking up the work piece.  So take that under advisement, I guess.  The guides are just 1″ diameter pipe with flanges that I painted gloss black.  It looks really nice with the stainless steel screws.  The crank was made from a veneer clamp I got at Rockler.  The set screw that comes on the end part of the crank is some really odd thread size, and if you over-tighten the vise it will break the set screw.  If I was doing it again, I would drill out the hole, tap it with a more standard sized thread, and replace the set screw with grade 8 hardware.  But it hasn’t been such a problem that I would consider taking the whole thing apart to get at it.

Remark the First: It’s really goddamn heavy, y’all–mostly due to the layer of MDF on top.  This is good because it doesn’t jump around when you use power tools on it, but if you may consider using 1/2″ MDF on top and one-by framing material if that’s a concern for you.

Remark the Second: Having the vise in the middle of the front like it is has proven to be less than ideal.  I find that when I lock something down to work on it I would rather have it near the corner for ergonomic reasons.  You may consider moving the vise to one side or the other.

Remark the Third (*): It will fit through a standard 32″ door by detaching the top, standing the frame vertical, taking off the feet, and passing it through the door that way.  It will pass through a 30″ door if you have enough space to rotate the first legs through, then the second (and probably take the door off the hinges).  In my new San Francisco apartment, I have 29.5″ doors at the end of a narrow hallway, and I wasn’t able to get the frame through the door.

I modified the frame so that it is 30″ wide instead of 38″ to get it through the apartment door, which also had the advantage of moving the vise to one corner where it will be more useful, I think.

Plan downloads are available in Autocad DWG and Adobe PDF format.

Today is 12 July.  There are 21 days left to study. I’ve decided to go up for my LEED GA accreditation exam on my own dime, to try an make myself a more competitive candidate if and when there are jobs again, anywhere, ever.  If you’re not familiar with it, LEED is a sustainable building program developed by the US Green Building Council.  I think it’s pretty great, because it addresses two problems I have with sustainable development as practiced today:

• Greenwashing. Often, a company that wants to build some green cred will do something ostentatious like installing photovoltaics on their building.  It makes for great press releases, but for what they spent on solar cells (they’re insanely expensive, if you didn’t know), the company could have improved the insulation and windows, added daylighting controls, upgraded the outdated and inefficient HVAC system, retrofitted the plumbing fixtures with low-flow valves, instituted incentives for carpooling, and on and on and on.  The cumulative environmental effect of these small changes, many of which have short-term economic payback, far outweigh the big-dollar measures we associate with Green.  LEED requires a whole-building, life-cycle cost approach.
• In the Future, there will be Robots. Media coverage of sustainable efforts tends to focus on Blue Sky research.  Cold Fusion.  Electrical power generation from sentient dirigibles.  Cars made out of sewage.  Fine and funding-deserving research all, I’m sure, but it leads to the impression that sustainability is something we will do in the Future, with Future Technology.  The thing is, LEED certified buildings have, on average, 13% lower maintenance costs, use 26% less energy, have 27% higher levels of occupant satisfaction, and emit 33% less CO₂, right now, today.  While LEED rewards innovation, the majority of credits must come from existing, proven, cost effective technologies.

Anyway, I’ve been studying for about a week now, and have three more weeks to go.  The study materials cover a lot of subjects that are well outside my comfort zone: construction materials, plumbing, HVAC, sustainable purchasing.  As I alluded to in the post title, some of these subjects are more interesting to me than others.  But in the end I think it’s going to make me a much better lighting designer, in giving me some awareness of the trade-offs other disciplines deal with, and how my choices affect them.  If you’re interested, here are the primary exam materials and the secondary materials that seemed particularly interesting or relevant:

• LEED for Operations & Maintenance Reference Guide-Introduction (U.S. Green Building Council, 2008)
• LEED for Operations & Maintenance Reference Guide-Glossary (U.S. Green Building Council, 2008)
• LEED for Homes Rating System (U.S. Green Building Council, 2008)
• Cost of Green Revisited, by Davis Langdon (2007)
• Sustainable Building Technical Manual: Part II, by Anthony Bernheim and William Reed (1996)
• The Treatment by LEED® of the Environmental Impact of HVAC Refrigerants (LEED Technical and Scientific Advisory Committee, 2004)
• Guidance on Innovation & Design (ID) Credits (US Green Building Council, 2004)
• Guidelines for CIR Customers (US Green Building Council, 2007)
• Green Building & LEED Core Concepts Guide, 1st Edition (US Green Building Council, 2009)
• AIA Integrated Project Delivery: A Guide (www.aia.org)
• LEED for Operations & Maintenance Reference Guide-Introduction (U.S. Green Building Council, 2008)
• LEED for Operations & Maintenance Reference Guide-Glossary (U.S. Green Building Council, 2008)
• LEED for Homes Rating System (U.S. Green Building Council, 2008)
• Cost of Green Revisited, by Davis Langdon (2007)
• Sustainable Building Technical Manual: Part II, by Anthony Bernheim and William Reed (1996)
• The Treatment by LEED® of the Environmental Impact of HVAC Refrigerants (LEED Technical and Scientific Advisory Committee, 2004)
• Guidance on Innovation & Design (ID) Credits (US Green Building Council, 2004)
• Guidelines for CIR Customers (US Green Building Council, 2007)
• Energy Performance of LEED® for New Construction Buildings: Final Report, by Cathy Turner and Mark Frankel (2008)
• Guide to Purchasing Green Power (Environmental Protection Agency, 2004)

Book of Sorrows, 4th Ed.

My exam is on the 3rd, wish me luck!

Update: I passed!  I’m now a LEED Green Associate.

Thing is, it still works.  As near as I can tell anyway, not having a source of gamma rays to test it against.  And the quality of design and construction is so nice, now I feel bad about Frankensteining it.  In the coming zombie apocalypse, I’m sure it’ll come in useful.

brainsss....

If You’re Like Me, you don’t own a blender, but you sure as hell own an electric drill.  It’s strawberry season, and Safeway had two large cartons of strawberries for $4.  Fresh strawberries and cream are really one of the better things in this universe, but whipping the cream without a blender is a real chore.

So, a slight modification to my egg whisk:

Alrighty, good to go!

Apparently, taking appealing photographs of food is harder than it looks.  It doesn’t help when you’re rushing so you can stop clicking and start eating, fwiw:

A Little While Ago, I produced a film with some friends of mine called The Long Apology.  We’re nearing the end of post-production, and it’s time to start thinking about the DVD slipcase of the finished product.  I’ve been tasked with designing it, because I’m currently an unemployed layabout, whereas my friend and business partner Ryan, who actually designs these things for a living, has distractions like a job, dog, social life, &c.

We have some artwork I did as part of the marketing package for the film, and if we used that the front cover would look something like the above.  I put it together in about a day, so it’ll need some work, but it’s nice to have something to start from.

I wanted to see what the current state of the Art was, so I went down to Blockbuster with my digital camera, and took pictures of all the DVD slipcase backs I liked.  Which seemed to make the sales clerks nervous for some reason, but they left me alone.  One of the advantages of living in a city like Portland, with its abundance of weirdos that are only to willing to share their theories about Transcendental Meditation or whatever.

Strangely, it seems like the people that design these things are just phoning it in by the time they get to the back.  There’s a very consistent format, and very few of them show even a modicum of design intent.  The big budget movies actually had the least interesting backs, strangely.  I probably looked at over a hundred of them, and there were only a few that were worthwhile.  Here’s a pretty typical example:

We have the following elements:

• A tagline
• A synopsis
• A barcode in the upper right
• DVD special features
• A larger still from the film, integrated into the layout and background
• smaller stills in some kind of framing device
• Credits
• A bunch of icons corresponding to the format and such

Here are some examples that were interesting in one way or another:

I like that they picked a color palette and lived in it. Also, using a portrait for your primary design element is always a good choice, since we're hardwired to want to look at faces.

The diagonal slash dividing the top and bottom is a strong design element. Not so much the gigantic fucking barcode in the middle of prime design real estate.

Again, nice color palette work. Here, however, they've chose certain highlights that aren't in palette, which makes for a stronger design than a completely monochromatic palette.

Using a series of portraits like this is sort of hackish, but it was successful in getting me to pick the DVD up off the shelf, which is half the battle. Doesn't tell you much about the film, though.

I don’t know who does the promo artwork for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but it’s riveting.  Maybe not so useful for a DVD back, though, because it relies so much on simplicity.

From a design standpoint, they made some good choices: good layout, strong color choices. The overall effect is a little underwhelming, not sure why.

I’m going to watch the film again, and then fire up Photoshop and see what I come up with.