I was totally going to ask where that wiring is because it scares ME TOO. But now that I know it’s YOUR house, I really hope you never burn down. Really and truly. And where do things like that last picture happen. Really – you know I’m naive and really don’t know.
pmac,
March 4, 2009:
If that is the wiring in your house, screw the new windows and have the house rewired.
k8, I think, but I’m not sure because I’ve never gotten a lap dance, that you can pay to have a “private” dance inside of some sort of booth at a strip club. Ken swears he’s only done it once but I have a feeling he’s full of shit.
That wiring in the first picture doesn’t look so bad, especially for a landmark home in New England. You should see the fabric-covered crap that passes code here in NYC. The picture itself is excellent, with the mixture of new and old: the cable amp with its wall wart versus the cable modem (if that’s what the black box in the lower left is) with its ghostly green lights. But how did you get the light like that? The bright white light is irregularly shaped and has a thin yellow border. Based on the shadows, it’s brightness is dwarfed by the natural light coming in from the left. Very impressive shot with a lot to say.
Of course, the near-primary-colored ethernet cables are beautiful and ironic after the last picture. In fact, they are doubly ironic, since they are also made by Chromatic Technologies. The saturated colors and subtle lighting are just beautiful.
The reflective third picture of Girlfriend is also beautiful. Did you soften it? It looks like a glamour shot, which makes it ironic as well since it is such an innocent shot.
My favorite picture of the set is the fourth. Girlfriend’s expectant expression as she smiles and clutches the icebreakers, the shadows on her hat and footprints in the snow, the perfect framing, and the overall richness of the shot are just mesmerizing.
Of course, the sixth shot of the tree is astounding. It’s reaching shadow, the sun through its branches, and the lonely bench in the background make it hard to look away.
Awesome set.
And, yes, you can get a private room at all strip clubs I have ever been to. You pay the stripper by the hour. Whereas, on the open floor, you are not allowed to touch the stripper even during a lap dance, in the private room, you can do whatever the stripper will allow.
yes, k8–crissy is right: it’s a private booth at a strip club, which is not an easy place to get a camera into.
the wiring looks worse than it actually is–better to have many circuits properly fused/breakered than fewer with more current drawn on them. from what i can see other than two circuits which are still running on knob and tube/cloth insulated wire, the rest are up to code.
the pain in the ass was the fact that i had to spend a weekend mapping out what went where, and i’m still not 100% done. 🙁
as usual you have a very sharp eye for detail, stoogepie.
the light in the first pic is really due to it being a tonemapped high dynamic range photo. it is an amalgamation of 5 shots taken at different exposures, very underexposed to very overexposed. those shots are automatically “stitched” together to make one that covers a much larger range of luminosity than would be possible with a single exposure using a digital camera.
in fact the DR is so great that it cannot be reproduced on common media such as lcd or crt screens. thus the second part of the process, the tonemapping, must be done which remaps the input vs. output luminosity into a more limited range.
the tonemapping stage is where the artistic choices must be made… the previous process of generating the HDR itself is mathematical. for example, one method of tonemapping uses a simple compression across the entire image, which results in an output that looks a lot like a single, “correctly” exposed picture except for the additional detail in the highlights and less noise in the shadows. this tends to reduce local contrast in the same amount as it reduces global contrast.
a different method of tonemapping uses a radius value to do the opposite: increasing local contrast, a process sometimes called detail enhancement. this was the method i employed in this picture. it tends to work very well on pictures where accentuated low level detail can be acceptable–for example, on industrial, grunge, or mechanical scenes like this one. basically detail in the highlights and shadows is retained and a higher-contrast scene is rendered with less contrast, but with small-feature details that would be lost using global compression tonemapping.
the softness of the 3rd shot is due to using a very “fast” lens with a wide aperture (a 50mm f/1.4) that’s about 50 years old. it ends up being a little bit out of focus, and the depth of field is very very shallow, leading to a high degree of blurring outside the focal plane. using fast lenses is challenging for your focus skills, since there is so little margin for error. in fact, if you look very closely you’ll notice that the sharpest thing in the frame is the FRONT of her hat. it SHOULD have been her eyes, which means i was “front focused” by about an inch. still a pretty good effort with a manual focus lens!
i like the 4th one very much myself. she and i had just stopped from hiking into the woods/state park looking for a suitable hill to sled on. nobody was around; we made our own tracks, alone. she said she was hungry so i told her we’d stop under the shelter. i taught her to not sit right on the snow, keep her back to the wind and her hands in her mittens as long as possible to stay warm. inside the icebreakers container were some all natural fruity snacks. when she was done with them i gave her a sip of water, and we found an old pack of juicy fruit gum in the bottom of my backpack. we shared some, and loved how crunchy it was in the cold but how ridiculously fucking juicy it got seconds after popping it in.
It’s the tone mapping! I LOVE THAT STUFF! And I’m seriously thinking about stripping. So, if I go in a room with a guy – he gets to touch me? Do I have to kiss him?
