It is often said that the Lord works in mysterious ways. His ability to have me create a video documenting the "Rockin' 4 God 2014" event is ample evidence supporting that old maxim.

I am no documentary filmmaker (by any stretch of the imagination) but I have been looking for ways to exercise my video making muscles and this opportunity just struck me as just too good to pass up. It was an opportunity to photograph a rock concert with an all access pass. A day long event featuring four bands, a clown act and a sermon thrown in for good measure. Just the sort of volunteer work that would appeal to this old-school hippie photog.

Going into it, I was not exactly sure how I would go about completing the project. My video camera is little more than a toy - 640 X 480 pixel resolution with a fixed focal length lens - but I resolved to view this as an artistic endeavor and give it my best shot - as it were. The name "Rockin' 4 God" suggested to me that the video should be "high energy" (whatever that means) so a tripod in the corner was out of the question. I was going to have to go at this with a hand held camera to get in on the action.

I think it is safe to say that I am certainly no DevinSupertramp - but what I couldn't do with a rig like his? Since a GlideCam exists only in my covetous mind I decided to visit my freelance hardware store (a.k.a. garage) and see what I could come up with in the way of constructing my own Stedi(ish)Cam device. The internet is chocked full of ideas on this subject but seeing that my garage was gimbal free, I opted to go for a weighted pendulum style device that many claim to be a step above a purely hand-held camera - and I will give them that. 

If you can scrounge-up 46-1/2 minutes you should check out
"Rockin' 4 God" The Video Project.

The actual job of recording the event presented many challenges but that is the name of the game and honestly what makes it so fun to do. I took along my Canon 5-MP rangefinder camera to - at least - get some quality stills and realized midway through the shoot that I would be combining stills and video clips for this video project. The little video camera uses SanDisk memory and I felt confident that the 4 Gigabyte chip would be ample for the day but took along two more 1 GB disks as a precaution - good thing too because for some odd reason the 4 GB disk refused to hold more than about 500 MB. It took every bit of those other 2 Gigs to get-r-done. When it became obvious that I should now use the video camera sparingly I started relying more and more on the still camera to document the event.

That was working fine until about two thirds of the way through the day when the Canon's battery went belly-up and I found myself regretting not tearing the house apart looking for the spare pack when I was gearing up for the day. Thankfully the video camera has the ability - as do most video cameras - to take still images. I finished the day bouncing back and forth between still and video modes adding one more layer of "what am I doing" to the task at hand.

Stereoscopic vision is one of those miracles of the human condition that is all too often taken for granted. If you are fortunate enough to have two functioning eyes then you posses the ability to view the world in three dimensions and thereby have the tools required for depth perception.

When you look at a single object with two eyes you are actually presenting your brain with two separate images that it must meld into one. The average difference in eyeball separation is only 2-1/2" to 3" but that is all it takes to discern depth in three dimensional space.

Not very long after the invention of photography it was realized that if two photographs were taken of a single object with the same separation as the human eyes, these two images could be used to relay a three dimensional view to an individual via the use of a device known as a stereo-graph or stereoscope. The stereoscope would accept precisely mounted images (or view cards) on one end and the user of the device would peer through a couple of magnifying lenses (one for each eye) and would be treated to a picture set that would trick the mind into melding and interpreting as if the viewer were standing at the original camera location. The result was so awe inspiring and entertaining that "Stereopticons" (as these viewers were sometimes called) became a sensation. As a result of their popularity a grand industry arose whereby anything worth photographing was photographed in stereo and marketed to the connoisseurs of this fascinating pastime.

To this day there continues a very active community of Stereoview enthusiast. An internet image search using the word "stereoview" will send you into an incredible World of 3D photography to an extent that borders on the unbelievable.

To those of us that have mastered the art of freeviewing stereo pairs the internet now offers the ability to see back in time and far away places. You too can enjoy this hidden treasure trove by learning the technique known as freeviewing, which is the ability to render stereo pairs in glorious 3D in your minds eye without the use of a stereo-graph device of any sort.

It is the purpose of this article to help impart the skill of freeviewing to the uninitiated in the hopes that you too will use this simple technique and enjoy this remarkable pastime - this window on the world of long ago - this time machine available at your fingertips.

So what's the secret?  [Continue]

In the last couple of weeks the nogoodniks have taught their robot armies to defeat the Geeklog® Capcha system and as a result BlogDogIt has seen an explosion in new members. I hope that the robot's feelings were not hurt when I deleted their shiny metal asses.

::Ben over at Geeklog.fr wasted little time devising a foil for our Cracking Nemessi. He chose to utilize the slider control in place of the vision test to determine your humanity. Geeklog operators (V1.8.0 and up) will want to pick up Capcha plugin 3.5.2 from Geeklog.fr.

It will be interesting to see how long this little brain storm will hold the spammers at bay.

This device replaces all instances of the old-school Capcha around the site here. Please let us know if it causes you any problems (unless you are a robot in which case you can choke on it.) [smiley:;)]

It's a picture + a few lines of text blog, featuring history, art, old photographs, maps, and more.

Dutch.Man.Amersfoort.Creative.IT.Music.History

 The World upside down

The convention that North is at the top on most modern maps was established by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (90-168 AD) and was adopted by other cartographers.