Kana and I just rented a nice flat in Marylebone, so we set about at furnishing the flat. In our quest to find budget designer furniture we stumbled upon this gem, a 1950’s TV stand, which doubles up nicely as a coffee table. If you look on eBay you can find some even more reasonably priced than £35 we paid for ours. On top of the table lies Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics which makes a lovely accompaniment, if only I had time to read it. I can’t wait to be done with Derren Brown’s “Tricks of the mind”.

Last night I won the xchangeteam Freelancer Of The Year award sponsored by Revolution magazine, first prize in the category of “Digital Excellence”. I received a nice trophy, which I will take a photograph of later. It was nice to be recognised for all the hard work I put in last year. Many thanks to all those involved. The event was held at the Design Council in Covent Garden.

I been taking the train to Osaka quite often this last month and thought I would share the view with you. I recreated a Super8 video feel and added the Easy Listening sounds of The Cascading Strings to top it off.

For the super8 feel I used the excellent AE plugin called Misfire and added a few of my own custom effects. The original footage was shot on a Canon G9, a compact still camera.

Interesting video about NLP eye patterns.

“One of the most interesting examples of color effects is Baker-Miller Pink – a color that’s close to the bubble gum pink background color of this web page ( R:255, G:145, B:175) . Also known as :drunk tank pink,” this color is used to calm violent prisoners in jails.”

“University of Hawaii associate head coach George Lumkin was a member of the 1991 staff that saw visitor locker rooms at Iowa and Colorado State painted pink in the belief that the color made players passive. Now the WAC has a rule that a visiting team’s locker room can not be painted a different color than the home team’s. In other words, it can be pink, black or any color of the rainbow, as long as both locker rooms are the same color.”

Colour studies found via Color Matters.

Yesterday I was very happy to be accepted into the Space Collective. The Space Collective concerns itself with issues surrounding the philosophy of future technology. I have presented my first reflective input with a short piece on matters pertaining to the “Transferal of Consciousness”.

The Great Online Conciousness Transfer

This weekend I researched Mathematical based conceptual art and was fortuitous enough to come across Art+Math=X.  I very much enjoy modern computer based art that has come about following extensive custom program creation.  It enhances validation to know that creators have not simply opened an Abobe product and immediately begun at a point at which the specific Adobe software dictates. I have included (for your pleasure) some short extracts from the Art+Math=X internet based gallery.

Mark Stock – University of Michigan – “Sunset on Squares”.

“No construction method or camera could create the image in “Sunset on squares,” but three thousand bytes of scene description code and two weeks of processor time were successful. The basic 14-cube structure is nested in 7 levels of recursion to simulate the existence of 105 million cubes. The final scene was rendered at a very high resolution and used Radiance’s undersampled global illumination method to simulate the influence of multiple-bounce light interreflection.”

Douglas McKenna – Mathematics Inc. – “Golden Gnomon”

Rapidograph Pen Plotter Drawing.

Robert Krawczyk – Assistant Professor, Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture. – ‘Breaking Wave’.

“A custom program was written in Microsoft VisualBasic for the computation of the points and the assignment of the color values.”

Next month I will be moving to Japan for a two month sabbatical. It’s been four years if my memory serves me correctly since I left Japan. I look forward with some trepidation to see how things have changed, I know that I have changed a lot since that time. Bar Nobby Style is one of the bars I used to frequent in Nagoya.

The hidden venue is run by the overly enthusiastic Nobby, who renovated an old basement and created a minimal wooden/industrial style retreat. The special quality about this place was that you felt as if you were only one of a handful of customers who ever visited, something I never feel in London. I really hope that he still remembers me and that we can share a warm cup of sake.

Bar a few tweaks I have just finished reinventing my portfolio.  I see this not as a total reinvention only progression from one stage to the other, seeing off one stage off my career into the next.  I hope to allocate more time in the evening authoring journal entries and generally making more observational commentary on certain matters.

I have long been a fan of the Lomo LCA and use one regularly. I am not so interested in the cross-processed look, but rather the raw output from the camera, untouched.

These days I have a Canon G9 in my bag. It has features similar to that of a Lomo (depth focus etc) and this makes it an ideal Lomo LCA fraudster. I have therefore created a LOMO LCA effect in photoshop to make the G9 output look like raw shots. I may improve upon the file when I get time, however I’m fairly happy with the results and find it hard to tell the difference in comparison to my original lCA shots.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE.

Place your picture on the bottom layer (I have included and example)
Add a bit of Gaussian Blur (I recommend about 1.5) to your picture. Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

Download Small web size (2mb)

Download Large web size (44mb)

p.s. I’d be interested to see any snaps to you apply this effect too, post some links here.