Psychedelia

Eventually managed to get round to procuring all of the requisite paraphenalia to paint with q-tips on a canvas of milk with food colouring paints. It turned out to be a bit messier than expected, and it took me a while to locate a quick-release plate for my tripod, having used the gorillapod so much recently.

An interesting process with very hit and miss results. This is one of a couple of hundred shots that were shot with the camera in timelapse mode on a tripod pointed directly down onto a plate of milk to which food colouring has been added (the liquid kind, not powdered curry colouring). Tilting the plate (in a gap in the interval shooting) creates flow in the milk which is made visible by the food colouring. Dipping a cotton bud in washing up liquid and then placing it in the milk/ink mixture also creates flow. The whole process is very much a trial and error experiment as to what comes out well but the tripod and timelapse/interval shooting mode means that you can get on with the dirty stuff whilst knowing that it is all being captured . I tried video mode but there wasn't enough light to be honest.

The camera was taking shots 3 seconds apart and I put together a hundred of them in sequence to make a 3 second animation which has quite interesting possibilities too. There is a lot of post processing going on, from camera raw processing to multi-layered photoshop comping to get this kind of a result, and whilst the original is interesting the edits are essential really. The original article from which I got the idea was at photojojo which is sometimes very inpsirational and their newsletter is well worth signing up to.

The rest of the day involved a lot of programming (second job) in emberjs and d3js and I've definitely hit that point where I think I want to write everything again but that will probably be more of a lessons learned and the next project will be better organised. Using JSLINQ a lot more and loving it, a really small footprint that basically gives you SQL for JSON. Understood how to create SVG gradients and consequently CSS3 gradients and my brain was a bit blown by the striping capabilities of gradients in both media.

The Daily Shitometer for today is about 6 out of 10 and falling (mainly over, drunk...) from yesterdays high of 8 but at least the weather is holding out.