Rolograaf’s vox

Made these today, but tried to make them look old. Just testing my new lens which has Macro in it's designation but really is more a close focus lens. An aperture of 3.2 makes a shallow focusdepth. A little HDR and Virtual Photographer filter as postprocessing, this is the result:

A few months ago I was fascinated by the concept of Interestingness and almost written a little post about it. Actually I wrote a concept in Dutch, but it was never published. Then suddenly there was the news that flickr had filed for patent on Interestingness, and sites like Boing-Boing and Slashdot wrote about it. I was too late and at once it was not so interesting to me anymore.

Still if you think about it, the concept Interestingness is interesting. Okay, I will translate the start of my blogpost I intended to write:

The well known search-engine Google gives every findable page a value ranking. This is called Pagerank. All pages which fulfill the search criteria get sorted and pages with highest pagerank get at the top. The algorithm which gives its votes and ranks to the pages which have been found by the web spider robot, is been kept very secret. And the reasons are clear, there is a lot of money to be made with high rankings, just like these annoying spammers get rich.

There are a few tips on how to get higher pageranks for the pages you want to put on the Internet. In the early days you could put the keywords you wanted your page to be found thousands of times in the page invisable for visitors. (for example with white font on a white background or in an unreadable size). Google will not fall for this simple trick, even worse, it will punish webmasters for this 'fraud'. This way some German websites of well-kown brands were completely removed from Google search results beacause they were suspected to tamper with their ranking. The automatic Google jury will try to give the most points to the page which is the most interesting for visitors, and this should also be the the real objective of the webmaster.

A similar phenomena is happening at flickr. flickr is one of the best and most popular social photo sites. That is what Yahoo, one of Google's biggest competitors, thought when they bought flickr. flickr does not have pagerank but something called Interestingness. And here is again the fascinating question: How did they learn the computer what people like? It is easy to measure how often a picture is seen by visitors. Also how many comments are given at a photo-page. Registered users (there is a free and a paid service) can also make any picture a favorite by marking it with a star. A highly favorited photo will naturally score in Interestingness, but there is something more happening.

flickr explains this also as follows: "There are lots of things that make a photo 'interesting' (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr."

I did not finish this, (yet?).
But to end this post with some pictures, these are my photo's (from my flickr Quadsk8 account) which were featured for exploration on flickr Interestingness pages:
1. Quadsk8 wishes you a happy 2006,
2. you'd better jump!,
3. Flyer RN&W II,
4. No, they are just acting,
5. Funky Furs

You will understand from these last posts that I am desperately seeking a nice model, first the selfportret-camera shot, then the flowers and now, as if it can't get any worse: Pets

Just toying around with Depth Of Focus (DOF) by setting a really large aperture (f/1.4) or letting the camera decide in the A-DEP setting.

HDR and ROC

These are the rest:

Close-up and lots of blurry foreground and background

Some more, taken earlier as you will understand. These were taken in a pitchdark room, I set the exposuretime to 15 seconds, with a little LED light I lightened the flower from different angles. This is the outcome

HDR does not make it any much nicer, but you never know until you try:

The last is a glass object standing on a glass table, just experimenting...


Pictures also on my Picasaweb album:

Experiments

Inspired by the Through the Viewfinder flickr-group I made a little experiment.

A friend of mine once gave me an old Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera (not digital) a Petri MF-104. It looks really nice, like one of the first SLR models. It has a manual focus where you see two half circles which you have to align to get a sharp in-focus picture. There is a small button-battery which needs to be replaced and I never bought a roll of film, so it is just sitting there, next to my monitor as a decoration.

I mounted this camera on my tripod and put it right before a large mirror. I adjusted the manual focus so it looked sharp on the mirror image. Then I took my normal DSLR and took a picture through the viewfinder of de SLR. I had several tries because the drop in light made the picture too dark. Finally I used the internal flash of my camera for some assisted lighting. It is not wise to use a flash when you point to a mirror, so I had to put a provisional diffuser in the lightbundle. Anyway, this is the best picture of this experiment:

Rolograaf_1_05-11-2006

Smart viewers already understand that I mirrored the picture so you can read the make and model.

Last post was an Halloween pic I took on this Party in Scheveningen with DJ Ron Funkytown and DJ Ben Liebrand.
Here are some more:

Yes, I made a Halloween pic, really!
here it is:

Rolograaf_1_27-10-2006

Hello and welcome,

It is time to renew my webpresence and the new Vox service could be a nice way to do this.
Hope you like it.

Here some recent pics of Jiggy North Night Rollerskate at Everland in Amsterdam.

Rolograaf_51_30-09-2006