Archive for October, 2007

I was recently confronted (during the preparation of my photo trip to Brazil) to a situation somewhat common. I did not take notice of it before, but I was tickled this time.

Facts first: In order to reduce the cost of lodging during my trip the travel agent offered to share my room with another photographer travelling alone too. It happened before and for a an expensive trip like a phot safari, this can be appreciated. Nevertheless, what had me thinking was slightly different: In this same trip, there is a lonely woman photographer; But the travel agent told me that they could not offer me (us?) to share our room because I am a man.

The implicit reasonning is that the sexual difference could create a problem that the agent does not want to be responsible for. It is still possible to negotiate this in the beginning of the trip though - under our own responsibility.

I was stricken by the fact that it is an a priori position deeply marked by the travel agent hypothesis that their customers are heterosexually inclined. My intent is not to criticize the agent, but to think about the fact that this is a preconception shared by the general public and reflected in many of our society’s aspects. Sexual tension between two people is only thought as possible between a man and a woman. This is the case when you may share a hotel/lodge room, you separate gym’s dressing rooms or toilets, you have special days for women in a hamam, etc.

Isn’t it weird that this hypothesis is still so common? I mean, after all, our societies ignored (or denied?) homosexuality up to quite recently. But current figures give estimates of the number of homosexual people at one or two millions in France [1], 800,000 among French men between 18 and 69 [2], nearly 1% of Canadian marriages [3], 65,000 in the American armed forces [4]. Simply from these figures, it is easy to state that the mere hypothesis of the absence of homosexuality should be abandonned by our society.

When will we see dressing rooms that are either without sexual distinctions or completely individualized, shared toilet rooms, etc.?

Look at it for a moment and you’ll see both the appearance of contrasting white spots and the power of your brain trying to create alignments (both vertical and horizontal).

We know that all cats (wild or tame) come from the same ancestor. You may not know that they can cross-breed more or less easily. This led LifestylePets to create Ashera a new kind of cat that is the result of cross-breeding Asian Leopard, African Serval and domestic cat.

Unfortunately, you will have to give them $20,000 to get one. About 20,000 times more than attracting a cat wandering in the neighborhood with a cup of fresh milk.

The future will tell us if this helps in saving some felines from extinction.

Martin Forget has a photographic eye I envy. His animal and natural wildlife photos are simply delicious, vivid, surprising like this one:

You will certainnly want to stop by his web site. But if you only have a minute, I invite you to a shortcut to his images on photo.net and you will see that he also looks upon other subjects.

In 1998, Nick Philip created an art installation willing to show the real volume of SPAM.

An email address on nowhere.com forwards all SPAM it receives to fax machines that print it all.

The excellent LifeHacker web site has a good list of top network utilities.

Las Cruces, New Mexico, will be the place to go in 2008 or 2009 when Virgin Galactic opens flights to space for business and tourism. In preparation, the SpacePort has to be built. URS Corporation and Foster + Partners have won the international competiton for soon-to-be-realized New Mexico Spaceport Authority Building.

Passengers to the Moon, please, board the next shuttle in gate 22!

This Mind Mapping technique is essentially simple to use, but it can be useful or necessary to be guided not to let yourself wander around aimlessly. That is why I appreciated to find this Beginner’s Guide to Mind Mapping Meetings at FileHacker.

Photographers are avid of more pixels per frame. Most of them are also fond of panoramic photos (they look so cool). Why not join forces and make a contraption able to shoot panoramas with billions of pixels (multi-giga-pixel panoramas)?

This is what Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon University did when they developed the GigaPan robotic camera mount (Press release). Rather than stitching together hundreds of images painstakingly taken one-by-one, the tripod mount is able to pan through a landscape and capture the individual images needed by a computer program to build these wondrous images.

In the end, if you want to see more (and browse a lot of panoramic images), you should stop by one of the following web sites:

• GigaPan web site
• The Global Connection Project (at CMU)

Not all the images are perfect, but some of them are gorgeous.

GigaPan motorised mount on a tripod. It hold nearly any kind of digital SLR camera and pans slowly to capture a full panoramic image.

 

The GigaPan is not currently available yet but could be no more than a few hundreds of dolalrs, and work with open source software (so, free software).

Source: Futura-Sciences.

You should visit the web site of Dave Anastasi (East3rd): He is publishing quite regularly his own photos. They are mostly abstract and colourful like this one:

I even subscribed to his RSS feed to be sure to receive all of these photos as soon as they are available. A refreshing sight, a surprise per week (more or less).