Photography

Who were the jockeys in Muybridge's photographs?

Before 1878, few people knew what a galloping horse looked like in slow motion. That changed when Eadweard Muybridge, witnessed by the local press, used a clever apparatus to take a series of photographs as a horse galloped by. The result was “Sallie Gardner at a Gallop”, a.k.a. “The Horse in Motion”. Back then, you could watch the series of photographs as a movie on a zoopraxiscope. Today, you can watch it in an online video.

I first became aware of this piece of history when my co-worker Karl Henkel made a colorful rendition of related photographs, “Annie G. Galloping” (pictured at right). I looked up the story behind these photographs, but it didn’t answer the question I was wondering about: Who were the guys riding the horses?

iPhoto-Thunderbird Bridge

iPhoto logoFor years, iPhoto users have been stuck using a limited number of email clients to send their photos easily. This was mostly remedied by the iPhoto Mailer Patcher, but it left out non-applescript aware applications because, after all, iPhoto uses applescript to interface with them. One of the more notable omissions is Thunderbird.

Finally, this void has also been filled, via the iPhoto Thunderbird Bridge. It’s still quite primitive, but all the basics are there for iPhoto-Thunderbird integration.

If you’re an iPhoto/Thunderbird user, give it a whirl.

Data Integrity: Resurrection

flame signFaced with a need to recover images from Robert’s camera after a defective card-reader nuked the filesystem superblock, a quick utility came to mind. Nuked superblocks mean no file allocation table. It means no metadata. But it does not mean no data.

  • Target medium: 1GB XD card from a digital camera.
  • Data to recover: JPEGs. Lots of them.

Whipping out some jpeg-format-and-filesystem-jutsu, here’s the solution (for less than that $20 shareware recovery utility):

Review: Bower VL46TC Fisheye with Macro Lens Extension

The Bower VL46TC Titanium Super Wide-Angle “Fisheye” lens with “macro” claims to be:

  • “Titanium” (I think it’s actually aluminum)
  • “High Resolution” (It’s a glorified magnifying glass, so it unavoidably blurs around the edges.)
  • “Digital” (This one baffles me. It contains no electronic parts whatsoever.)
  • AF” (AutoFocus. Again, contains no electronics, or even moving parts. My lens’s autofocus still works when this is attached, for the most part. However, under some circumstances, the attachments confuse the camera and necessitate manual focus.)
  • “To fit : […] ALL FINE SLR CAMERAS.”

OK, now the fun stuff: pictures!