If at first you don’t succeed….I’ve been playing around with the word art idea for a little while longer. Now I know these might look like some who has just got hold of Photoshop for the first time I still feel they have an intrinsic interest as images…
Out of them all this is the one I like the most.
The beauty of having time to think and experiment is that you have no real idea where these things will take you. Over the past few days I’ve been playing around with word art and half tone and things seemed to be progressing smoothly without any real idea as to where they might lead. Then last night I had an idea as I was falling off to sleep which I started to play around with this morning and these are some of the results. I have to say I find them rather interesting. I will let others judge as to how original they might be.
I have started to rewatch Civilisation by Kenneth Clarke (The Lord Clarke if you are that way inclined). It is a fascinating programme for two reasons: Firstly it is now 50 years old and so is a social history document in its own right. The opening sequences shows a number of cities including New York, Rome, Paris and London as they were in the 1960’s. From this sequence the city that appears to have changed the most is London. Secondly, the views expressed by Clarke himself are very much of his time and his class. He has a patricians view of the world which really has dated. Today we celebrate many things which he wouldn’t consider civilised. I am only halfway through the first episode but his view of post Roman history of western Europe was very much that of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Today this has been replaced by a much more nuanced view of how the Roman Empire disappeared and the world it left behind. There is seen to be far more continuity than change. This is a view not shared by Clarke but then again why should it be? He is a man of his time without the accumulated knowledge of the past 50 years.
Given all these problems it is still a masterpiece of television and one I am will consume at my leasure.
As I get older I seem to be easily disturbed at night. For those of us of a certain age that usually means a visit to the toilet! After that it is difficult to get back off! So one way around this I have adopted is to get up for an hour or so and read something interesting and then come back to bed – my current book at bedtime is Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson. I bought this a year or so ago at a charity shop and have been looking at on the shelf ever since – well insomnia has driven me to open the pages and dive in. A great read and yes it does help me go back to sleep – not sure if that endorsement would ever make it to the dust cover!
The reason for this rekindled interest in this book is that I am working on a project at the moment where I need to know everything I can find out about the iPhone and the images that can be produced with it. As any follower of this blog for any length of time will know that I am a big fan of the iPhone as a camera from all the way back to 2009. In this time I have acquired a number of photo apps which I have installed and then uninstalled as my tastes have changed. Well today I reinstalled an old piece of software, sorry app, WordFoto which goes go way back and I thought I would give it another go…I have to say I am pleased with the results to date.
Having had a look around the Wordfoto website I suspect that little development has been put into the app for some time – the galleries are a tell tale sign – no instagram nor Facebook mention only Flickr. When you have a little look at these galleries most of the images date back to 2011 – Instagram was launched just a few months prior . This being said just because it is ancient, by iPhone standards, doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth exploring. Most of the software I work with on a daily basis is just as old, if not older, and they all work fine with few effects of bloatware showing. I, of course, exclude Microsoft Office from this and especially Word which in my view reached its peak with Word 3 – it has been down hill ever since. I appreciate for many people who might stumble across this blog Word 3 was released before they were born (release date 1987) but that is how long I have been messing around with computers!
Anyway here are the links to the Wordfoto galleries should you wish to take a look:
No strings attached
Nowadays the papers and talking heads are always questioning the value of pure thought in what ever form it comes. Everything must have a purpose otherwise why should we the taxpayers pay for it they thunder. Well I made this little doodle this morning whilst talking to my good friend on the phone – it was based on some scribbled notes I made about a new book I’m working on and so as my friend talked I noticed that it looked like a cliff edge so I let my mind drift just a little more and low and behold I produced this.
Now I am not claiming that it is great art or saved one person’s life (it certainly didn’t cost the taxpayer one penny) but it pleased me so that is important – I’m sure my friend won’t mind that I did some absent minded doodling whilst we talked…seems like men can do more than one thing at a time after all. Now that is an argument I really don’t want to get into – haha.
There is an old joke about the weather in northern Scotland – if don’t like what you’ve got then wait five minutes and it will change …(of something like that). I guess that applies to me at the moment. Just a couple of days ago it was sunny and not a cloud in the sky – today there is plenty of sun, and rain and hail and cold north winds! As I write this the sun is out yet the windows are splattered with rain drops! Where do we go from here?
Still if you ever want to define anyone from Britain then just ask them to talk about the weather and you could still be listening hours later!
‘…Once more unto the halftone breach my friend’s once more…’as Shakespeare would have written – well at least in my mind. I have found an interesting side effect of this – it blows Shannon’s Entropy totally off course. Now I am no information scientist so what I am about to write might not be exactly correct but Shannon’s Entropy is a formula upon which JPEG reductions are based. How it works is that the software looks at each individual pixel and asks a simple question – is the colour data different from the previous pixel? If the answer to this is no then the software records no data for that pixel. If the answer is yes then it asks by how much. If the answer doesn’t reach above a certain threshold then it doesn’t then no information is recorded. This way files are reduced in size and still retain all the data needed for the human brain to understand what it is viewing.
So these two images demonstrate just how this works. The first one has significant areas that are just one colour so the JPEG software doesn’t record any data for this and when the file is decoded the software just populates the pixels with the same colour value. The second image is even simpler, having only three colours, white, black and grey and so should be an even smaller file but unfortunately it isn’t because as the software examines each pixel it comes across significant changes – the halftone dots – and so has to record more data – the JPEG file is 40% larger than the first one. I’m not really sure why that interests me but it does.
CReativity running dangerously close to empty…a blank pages and these are the result.
The other week Facebook asked me to update my date of birth so that friends could wish me happy birthday – the implication of this is that Facebook knows my birthday and so why don’t I let everyone know. Well I have news for Facebook – my birthday means next to nothing to me – it never really has. I remember when I was 21, yes I can remember that far back, I refused to have a 21st birthday party which most people thought was really stupid. Perhaps it was but birthdays mean nothing to me, well at least my own. I know other people have a really different view and good luck to them. I suspect that is what I most object to about Facebook’s insistence that I declare my birth date to the world – this assumption that that is what all people should want to celebrate – not me.
So today I have combined my left and right field interest – surveying old lanes (very very niche interest I think) and making more images for a photographic project – in this case the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It didn’t hinder things that today was a cool but bright morning, the birds were singing and for just a few moments it was possible to forget all the nonsense in the world. The lanes in question where part of a series that formed the medieval road from Oxford and Leicester and I gained some interesting information but perhaps the most revealing was that these lane probably have never seen so much horse traffic. In just over a 5 Km stretch of lane I was passed by at least 10 horses, all beautifully turned out, perhaps the last time so many beautifully turned out horse went along these lanes was in 1322 when King Edward 2nd and his court passed along them. For those of you who do not know the court of England was always on the move show where the King went 200 plus other people followed from the greatest in the land to the royal household whose job it was to ensure that the King wanted for nothing.
If you have difficulty getting an idea as to what this might have been like here is a similar scene from the first series of Game of Thrones:
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