Five tips for taking tango pictures in dark environments

Published by Peter on October 31, 2008 in Tango and photography. 4 Comments

I have been taking tango pictures intensively for more than 2 years now. Most of that time I’ve been using a Canon 350D with a number of lenses. What’s special about tango pictures? Most importantly, the tango events are in the evening/night with minimal lighting. I avoid using a flash, since it’s unpleasant for the dancers and because the pictures have very sharp and ugly lighting. Another thing is that I don’t use a tripod. I can’t tell the dancers where to move or to stand still, so I go with the flow. The fact that they move also means I need a shutter speed of 1/15s at the slowest; 1/20s is better and 1/40s is comfortable.

All these tips come down to the same: get the fastest shutter times possible while keeping the picture quality acceptable.

#1: take the highest ISO your camera can afford
50mm - f/1.8 - ISO800
If you can use sensitivity ISO 800 instead of ISO 100, you’ll win 3 stops. This is the difference between a picture at 1/40 sec (sharp) and 1/5 sec (blurry), certainly with moving targets (and tango dancers do move). Of course there is a trade-off: you loose colour detail.

This is the main reason why you’ll need a camera with a decent sensor, or in other words, an dSLR instead of a regular point-and-shoot camera. Even my 350D gets colour defects at ISO800. When they’re too bad, I tend to convert the pictures to black-and-white or somewhere halfway (by decreasing the saturation).

The camera I’m drooling over now, the Canon 5D Mk II, can take decent pictures at ISO 3200. That’s another 2 stops faster.

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CalendarBurner: Feedburner for iCal calendars

Published by Peter on October 28, 2008 in Google, RSS and Web2.0. 0 Comments

I am currently using my experience with milonga.be to build a similar site for Tango in Bulgaria. One of the major components of the site is the tango calendar. In this case I have chosen not to use a special iCal visualisation tool (more on that later in a series posts on Tango2.0), but just the standard Google Calendar IFRAME-based widget.

It’s not a bad widget, but it’s too limited. You can only display “Day/Week/Month/Agenda” style, the colors and fonts are fixed and it does funny stuff for events that continue after 12:00AM (which tango events regularly do, believe me).

I’ve already talked about the fact that iCal is a sissy format and that Gcal needs some more features. I was just thinking that it would be nice if some company would jump on that and provide the whistles and bells for iCal/vCal feeds (like those of Google Calendar), just like Feedburner did with RSS/podcast feeds (and they got bought by Google, so maybe their idea wasn’t half bad). So I introduce the following concept: CalendarBurner (since the Calburner/iCalburner domains are taken).

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Northern Soul

Published by Peter on October 25, 2008 in music. 1 Comment

Northern Soul I’m currently reading two related books at the same time:

  • “Turn the beat around - the secret history of disco” by Peter Shapiro
  • “Last night a DJ saved my life - the history of the disc jockey” by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton

Both speak about a phenomenon of the 60’s-70’s: Northern Soul. It is the unlikely emergence of a subculture of English white working-class youths that only danced to American upbeat soul music. It started in Manchester, the Twisted Wheel club and spread from there.

The original northern soul scene lasted from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and is considered a retrogressive or revivalist movement based on a style of music created years earlier. At the height of its popularity in the 1970s, African American artists had moved on to newer genres such as funk, jazz funk and disco, so the northern soul scene relied on a finite supply of 1960s recordings.

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Mastika Peshtera

Published by Peter on October 13, 2008 in advertising. 2 Comments

I went to Bulgaria in August, and one of the things I remarked there is that standards for advertising are somewhat different over there. One of the champions is Mastika Peshtera (”Мастика Пещера” -  a.k.a. ‘the Bulgarian afrodisiac‘). They use scantily dressed women and green striped melons on strategic places to stress the afrodisiac dimension. Imagine this type of advertising in Belgium. What would reactions be?
Bulgarian advertising: Mastika Peshtera

Mastika

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Touched by the iPod

Published by Peter on September 26, 2008 in Apple and hardware. 8 Comments

Apple iPod TouchAs most geeks in my circle of friends, I am known to buy hardware slightly more often than the average Joe. I have 3 Wifi routers at home (just gave away my 4th one), I have more than 2TB of hard disk storage, split out over half a dozen of PCs and devices, and I have more USB cables than teeth. But hardware that makes me *really* happy, that is uncommon. Don’t get me started on failing hard disks and non-functioning printers. So let me tell you about this new piece of hardware that I bought: the iPod Touch.

No iPhone, thanks

This is not my first iPod, I think I’m at n° 5. And before you start telling me “the iPod Touch is an iPhone, that can’t be used for calling. Why not buy an iPhone?”. Well, I don’t need a new phone yet, I’m probably gonna buy an iPhone in a year or so, when the GSM providers have reasonable data transfer prices, and there’s the price too: the 8GB iPod is slightly over 200 euro. The iPhone is 525 euro.

Applications

But this baby is really neat. It does music, sure, and video, like the previous one. But it’s got Wifi, a big, smart touch-screen, games, applications, and … From day one I’m using Google Mail (via IMAP), the Weather application, Google Maps. Then I started looking through the free applications on the App Store. So what am I using now:

  • Games: Dactyl, Cube Runner, BlueSkiesLite, Sudoku, TapTap
  • Stuff: iDoodle2Lite, WhiteNoise, Remote
  • Network: AirSharing, Speedtest, IM+, Palringo
  • Social networking: Facebook, AroundShare, GooSync, ShoZu, reQall
  • Info: BuienRadar

I’ve just started using reQall, a kind of task list + shopping list, which allows you to add via the iPod/iPhone, via the web and via a IM (Gtalk) account. This looks promising.

The games are not bad. Dactyl is strangely addictive, the movement sensors work really well with BlueSkiesLite, … I expect to see some killer iPod/iPhone games in the future.

The only thing I miss now is a good sync with my Google Calendar. iTunes can sync my iPod contacts with Google Mail, but not my calendar. GooSync is supposed to be able to do that, but I can’t get it to work. Of course Apple wants me to use (paid) MobileMe, but I want to see if I can find a free way first.

In any case, I discover a new use every day. It’s … exciting, actually.

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Stuff to install on a new Windows PC

Published by Peter on September 17, 2008 in tool and windows. 2 Comments

That is, the stuff I install on a new Windows PC. Since I need this list several times a year, why not make a blog post of it. As you will see,I have a more than average interest in video (conversion) and sysadmin (SSH/FTP). The links typically go straight to the download page.

Audio/video

  • iTunes (+Quicktime): excellent music manager and it rips to MP3 really fast
  • CDBurnerXP: for burning CDs, DVDs, ISO files
  • Irfanview: image viewer, editor and converter - for people who think Photoshop is overkill
  • Picasa: photograph workflow & archive manager (from Google)
  • VLC Player: ultimate video player, very complete set of codecs
  • ffmpeg with a GUI like GVC: video conversion: AVI, MOV, MPG, MP4, …
  • Handbrake: will make a good MPEG4 of any DVD in one go

Internet

  • Skype: for chat, phonecalls and SMSes with people far away
  • Chrome, Firefox or Opera browser - personally I like Firefox less. Opera is solid and fast, Google Chrome is an interesting new kid on the block.
  • FileZilla: FTP client
  • Putty: SSH and telnet terminal
  • EditPlus: customisable editor for text, HTML, CMD … that also works over FTP
  • uTorrent: because sometimes you need to … get stuff, you know

Tools

  • Google Pack: contains Picasa, Skype, Google Toolbar and a whole bunch of other useful programs
  • Adobe PDF reader: for reading PDF documents, and everything is in PDF these days
  • 7-Zip: compression/expansion of ZIP, RAR and 7z archives
  • CutePDF with GhostScript: printing to a PDF file (also allows converting a PostScript PS/EPS file to PDF)
  • UnixUtils: I’m a sucker for GAWK and WGET
  • Nokia PCSuite: for synchro with my Nokia N91 (yes, it’s still my phone!)
  • XAMPP: for developing with Apache/PERL/PHP/MySQL on Windows

The early days of (e)book piracy

Published by Peter on August 28, 2008 in culture. 2 Comments

I was thinking about this the other day. Piracy is really big for CDs and DVDs. One of the main reasons is that both media are so easy to digitize. Pop in a CD and in 6 minutes you have everything in MP3 files. Converting a DVD to XVID takes a bit longer and is slightly more complex, but not that much. Once they’re (unprotected) files, you can swap away. But books, we’ve always bought them in analog, paper form. Digitalizing meant scanning them, and that was just too much work.

Now that’s changing. Amazon is selling digital books on their Kindle device (240.000 devices sold in Aug 2008, 12% of books offered in both digital & analog are sold digital), Sony has a digital book reader (the PRS-505-SC), iRex has the iLiad. There will be more and more books available in digital format, and those will inevitably become a target for piracy.

The Kindle has its own AZW digital eBook format, but this is probably derived from the Mobipocket MOBI/PRC format. Mobipocket was taken over by Amazon in 2005. AZW/PRC support DRM (Digital Rights Management - a.k.a. you can’t read it unless I allow you to) for eBooks. Sony has its own (of course) format which is called BBeB (Broadband eBook), which also has DRM. Most readers also read PDF files.

My guess is, that as more books are being offered in digital format, there will be an increased interest in the DRM secuirty behind the file formats, and hackers will find ways to convert full books to an unencrypted format. This might be PDF or PRC/MOBI. And these files will be exchanged in the same way as we some people exchange music and movies. You will have a tab “eBooks” on thepiratebay, and youngsters will say “I have all Steven King’s books - downloaded of course, duh!” My guess is also that publishers will start blaming Amazon, and start suing their own customers, like the RIAA and MPAA are still doing. And it will take years for them to figure out that DRM is not a good thing, that it is possible to make money by selling things that can be copied. And they’ll probably arrive at conclusions that Seth Godin has been talking about for years already now.

Hip-hop is different

Published by Peter on August 22, 2008 in music. 0 Comments

Hiphop: A.S.S.

Fleshmap via Infosthetics

If you ever wanted proof that hip-hop & rap are a disruptive music genre, take a look at this study/art work by Fernanda Viegas, Martin Wattenberg & the crowdsourcing specialists at Dolores Labs: Fleshlabs.

They’ve take the lyrics of a lot of songs and figured out which body parts are most mentioned.

Based on a compilation of more than 10,000 songs, the piece visualizes the use of words representing body parts in popular culture. Each musical genre exhibits its own characteristic set of words, with more frequently used terms showing up as bigger images. The entrance image shows how many times different body parts are mentioned; the charts for each genre go into more detail, showing the usage of different synonyms for each part.

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