California Redwoods in 3D Video
Posted on March 15, 2010
Step Right Up Folks! See Amazing California Redwoods in 3D!
red-cyan 3D glasses required – double click on video for HD
Regardless of what you thought of Avatar, the movie has moved 3D from the sideshow tent to the Big Top. Even though some of the live action shots have the hyper-stereo look of old Viewmaster frames, the characters and virtual worlds are stunning and natural looking, a huge advance from the creepy fake skin world of Polar Express or the flying daggers of 50s B movies. The new 3D TV sets are expensive, but ten years from now they will be ubiquitous. I will probably not buy one, but wait for decent projector. We have had a home theater for many years and couldn’t conceive of watching 3D on anything less than a seven foot screen.
Movie makers have always tried to give a flat screen depth by layering scenes from the foreground to the background along what they call the Z-axis. One of my favorite over-produced examples of this is CSI Miami, where cameras constantly crane past fluorescent beakers and testubes as actors and extras cross in several directions on several layers in the background. In 3D, this will drive me nuts, but they will do it…guarantee you, along with flying body parts. The biggest challenge of 3D is restraint.
I took advantage of a gorgeous Sunday afternoon to walk to a waterfall in the canyon below our house. Redwood forests are notoriously hard to photograph. They are mostly green and brown with little contrast. You can’t shoot tall trees vertically, for obvious reasons. Shooting their bottoms usually doesn’t show their massiveness unless you stick a little kid with a red hat in front. But 3D can do it. I grabbed a few shots with my 3D rig. Grant, my 3D is a bit hyper. That is because the distance between the eyes of my two cameras is a bit far, about 4 inches instead of the average 2.6 inches of human eyes. Which brings be the the conclusion that this is the way the Na’vi probably see as they have enormous heads. I am off the hardware store this afternoon to get the parts for a new rig to move my eyes closer together and correct my Na’vivision.
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Palm Springs 50s-Style in 3D (3D Video)
Posted on March 11, 2010
(Blue and Cyan 3D Glasses Required)
You may have to double click on image to get HD (A YouTube glitch)
I saw my first 3D movie when I was about 12, when Palm Springs was playground for the rich and hyper-famous. It was a soft-porn flick at a so-called “art house.” A pal of mine snuck in and propped open a door so the rest of us innocents could revel in 12 foot breasts protruding from the screen like Titan Missiles. Last week, in the spirit of James Cameron, I rigged up a homemade 3D contraption consisting of two HDTV-capable digital cameras and hit the road in search of depth. Palm Springs was perfect, as it is sooo 50s as I had to process the video in the sooo 50s anaglyph 3D (red and cyan glasses) which works on YouTube, is passable in black and white, but which in color looks like some chimp-created watercolor. I stuck the camera out the car window as Pat and I drove through the Palm Canyon area of Palm Springs, the former haunts of Elvis (his honeymoon cottage is the odd roundish house in the video), Marilyn and, oh dear, Liberace. One of his houses is for sale, along with its statuary. Just think Liberace and statuary and you’ll get the picture.
So reach back into a drawer and dig out those old Red-Cyan glasses (there’s probably a pair stuffed in your comic book collection) an see Palm Springs 50s-style.
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Sri Lanka Doorman Turns 90. Has Worked At Galle Face Hotel Since WWII
Posted on February 20, 2010
A happy 90th birthday to K. Chattu Kuttan, the doorman at Sri Lanka’s Galle Face Hotel. He has worked there since 1942 when he witnessed a Japanese Zero crash land on the hotel grounds. I have stayed in the grand but musty old hotel a couple of times. In its days of glory The Galle Face hosted kings, presidents, movie stars and assorted high-profile scoundrels. Kuttan posed for me a couple of years ago. The hotel may be a bit tired, but K. Chattu Kuttan assuredly is not.
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Day at the Newseum: Madeline Albright Meets J. Edgar Hoover
Posted on February 10, 2010
A bit much, I think, meeting J. Edgar Hoover and Madeline Albright on the same day. OK, Hoover was quite dead, the late FBI boss a statue bending over assertively, as if ready to pounce, in the the main foyer of the Newseum in Washington DC, but the former Secretary of State/UN Ambassador looked quite pink and healthy as she showed off her collection of brooches in a TV studio upstairs.
The Newseum is a monument to journalism, the so-called “fourth-estate,” which in its finest form has kept kings, presidents, politicians, scammers and mobs in check and at its worst pumped up wars, spread tyranny, “live shots” of car chases and celebity DUIs.
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Oceans Apart: Las Vegas and East Las Vegas
Posted on January 27, 2010
I had a dream that the Grand Lisboa tower, a hotel-casino that now dominates the skyline of Macau, came alive one night, pulled itself from its mooring, marched across China’s Pearl River Delta and, like Godzilla, tossed trolley cars around Hong Kong.
Ka-Ching? (a Chinese expression?)
Like Vegas in the 90s, this former Portuguese backwater colony, now called East Las Vegas, has gone over-the-top.
I think about my week in Macau last year as I walk the strip in Las Vegas, past rubble-strewn lots that look like some lizard of mass destruction had just swung through. Past construction cranes that have not moved an inch since my last visit a year ago. Past women stuffed in short tight skirts like shrimp in sushi rolls, alone or in pairs, peering at their mobiles. This is not the Las Vegas of the mid-century when Mo Dalitz and his pals ruled and in the words of a longtime restaurateur, “knew how to take care of people.” This is not the Vegas of the 90s when the Steve Winns and corporate poobahs built palaces and faux New Yorks and Venices and “family values” was the motto. This is the Now Las Vegas: down and a bit dirtier, but not out.
Oceans Apart: Las Vegas and East Las Vegas on connectedtraveler.com
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