Cafe Bucky

Yes, it’s a real place. Not something out of a Charlton Heston movie. Actually, it’s what you see on New Year’s morning after drinking too much at the Hyatt Regency party.

So, quick story. Walking through downtown. Argentinian looks at me and says “it’s about the people man! Not the architecture!”. I know he’s Argentinian because he says “wait a sec”, dips into his car, and whips out an Argentinian hat. Damn insists that I snap his photo. So I do. It’s not worth posting, so you’ll have to just nod along. So, anyfrikkenway, I generally don’t do the urban stroller photography thing - I give them the privacy. Oh, wait.. wait. No, I lied there. Here’s one of a Harmonica Guy:

One of the more extreme examples from yesterday … Name that place in SF.

“At The Center Of It All” - Union Square, March 2006

I coerced myself into getting to the City today to do some photos, as in the Urban Zoom Blur thing. It’s been a while. This one lept out at me. The zoom leads to what’s really important in life (no, not tequila), so that hit me the right way. I’ll have others on Flickr or FlexiPhoto as soon as I go through them.

The javascript-driven Pictures On A Page package has been updated (along with the demo) - poap-1.0b4.tgz. It features keyboard commands (’n', ‘p’, arrows, ’s’ for slideshow, ‘1′-’9′ to set delay).

POAP is now usable in Windows MSIE. There are some CSS quirks to iron out. It also should be updated to cache image src locations when calling into FlexiPhoto.

The followup to the Canned Gallery is Pictures On A Page. You can download from poap-1.0b3.tgz. This is entirely a soft launch, as I haven’t seen it on a Windows box yet. It might make breaking noises on MSIE for all I know.

It’s a simple front end for flipping through photos, and has many keyboard commands. A new feature is the ability to flip between different portfolios (see the demo). Another new one is to vary the slide show delay (in seconds) by using the ‘1′ - ‘9′ keys.

Have fun. Tweak to taste. Let me know if it works for you. Note that the “FP Collection” Portfolio in the demo is grabbing scaled photos of varying jpeg quality from FlexiPhoto. The other Portfolio is just a static directory of images… no php/db.

I did mention in Rev ‘Em Up and Shoot ‘Em that I was getting back to the track this year to do some race photography. Sophia and I made it to the ALMS race at Sears Point, and I was able to shake off a little rust. Some photos have been tossed up on Flickr. They’re just screen grabs of what I see in PhotoShop / Bridge. There’s a lot more to go through, but that will have to get in line behind my Portland, NYC, and Cross-Country trips …

I’m so out of practice! I might just hit the Portland ALMS race to sharpen up some.

Not only was I a little rusty at the race, but I wasn’t set up as well as I would have liked. There’s some things that I have managed to figure out about zoom blurs:

• Filters - I was using an 80-400 zoom, but without a filter. I should use a polarizing filter, in part to cut an f-stop off of the exposure. That’ll give me a little more leeway with shutter speed (I want slower)
• Monopod - get back to using that … a twist zoom isn’t as nice as a push-pull. Without a monopod, the twist gives a sideways motion to the photo (in addition to the zoom blur) that I don’t always want.
• Pan and Zoom - There are steady zoom blurs, and then there are the ones where I am zooming and panning at the same time. It makes a difference as to whether I should zoom in, or out, over the course of the exposure. I gotta think about what result I want

There’s a whole lot more I can say about zoom blurs. I will note that my blurs are all in-camera - I don’t use that aspect of PhotoShop. It’s a fun challenge to balance all of the variables (ISO speed, lens, amount of zoom, shutter speed, panning, timing) with moving cars. Not to mention the high contrast environment of asphalt versus bright sky. I’m sure it plays havoc with the exposure meter (”what the heck is he doing!?”).

I looked at my camera this afternoon and realized it was talking to me.

“Take me to the track”

What?!

“Take me to the track! I want to take pictures again. I want to get dusty. I want to get into the paddock and see insanely fast cars”

What?!

“Oh man … c’mon. Let’s hit some races at Sears Point and Laguna Seca. It’s been frikken years man! I’m a camera, and you’ve got this zoom blur thing going. Let’s go man!”

(… looking at beer bottle suspiciously)

Ok, cool. That’s what we’ll do. It has been a while, I miss it, and I will be in California for most of the summer. Yeah. Yeah! Let’s get some groovy shots!

“What’s on, then? Where are we going?”

Well, let’s see …

• (Laguna Seca) - Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix (MotoGP / AMA) - July 8-10
• (Sears Point) - Grand Prix of Sonoma (ALMS) - July 15-17
• (Laguna Seca) - Monterey Historic Automobile Races - August 19-21
• (Sears Point) - Indy Grand Prix (IRL) - Aug 26-28
• (Laguna Seca) - Montery Sports Car Championships (ALMS) - Oct 14-16

“Oh boy! 5 races?! Gimme plenty of batteries and CF cards! And can we bring Susan’s Nikon D1x too?”

Hold your f-stops man. We’ll see. At least a couple of races, ok?

“snap snap!”