Forth of July Online Card and Newsletter.

Independence Day, 2009.

The 2008 Christmas cards never got out this year so I am doing a Forth of July 2009 newsletter to cover 2008 and the first half of 2009. I am pleased to be able to report that all family members are healthy and otherwise doing well. Here is a rundown of our current status:

Christopher graduated a year ago from the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, with a four-year degree in Graphics Design. He has returned to the Raleigh area where he works (and works and works) as a graphics designer for Capstrat – a communication company that specializes in advertising and corporate communications (fliers, brochures, etc.). Chris rents a room from his Army friend, Paul, and his wife, Jen, who have just had their first baby. Paul and Jen seem to appreciate Chris’s steadiness, his quiet lifestyle, and the rent that helps with the mortgage. Chris has a girlfriend named Reid who is finishing a PhD in Dye Chemistry at the NC State University College of Textiles.

Amber will be working for a few more weeks as a Medical Services Coordinator in the emergency room at the UNC Hospital. She will then move to St Petersburg, Florida, to attend the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in Bradenton. She has been living with her parents for the last few months to save up money to finance the move. Amber’s boyfriend, Lee -- Lee the Younger, or Not-Quite-So-Big Lee, or Lee With Hair – is also moving to St Petersburg where his is currently looking for work. If you know of any west-coast Florida opportunities for a young man with a PhD in chemistry let us know. (Yes, both kids are dating PhD level chemists – go figure.) Her mother and I are elated that Amber has been accepted into medical school but will be sorry to see her go.

Irene still manages the Cheese case at the Harris Teeter Super Flagship store in Cary. The cheese biz is not altogether immune to the slow economy and the trips on the corporate jet to visit cheese manufacturers have not been in the picture during the last year. Hopefully, once the recession lets up a bit, Irene can get a bit more traction with her ideas to take Harris Teeter to new levels of cheesiness. In the meanwhile, Irene still enjoys her volunteer work as a Docent at the North Carolina Museum of Art, which will be closing many of their galleries for almost a year starting this summer while they move into a new (huge) facility. During the move Irene won’t be giving many tours but the classes on the collection will continue so she and the other docents can hit the ground running when the museum reopens in April 2010.

Lee is currently sitting at his computer, writing a mid-year family newsletter, and waiting for the phone to ring with job offers. He is switching to the first person -- now. He … that is, I had expected to ride out the tail of the recession working on a contract for the NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources, but a black hole developed in the North Carolina State budget and the DENR contract was last seen near its event horizon. It may yet emerge (my champions at DENR assure me it didn’t actually fall into the black hole) but for now I am available. My previous employer, Keane, could not afford to keep me on their payroll while they found my next assignment but they are hopeful they can recall me, either for the DENR gig should it ever win its way free of the governor’s office, or for any of several other proposals they have bid. In addition, I have several other prospects I am working and, even if Keane comes up empty, I don’t expect to be unemployed for long so I am trying to enjoy it while it lasts.

One item on the plus side of unemployment is that it gives me an opportunity to do things with Irene as long as they don’t cost much money. We have both been getting more into photography. After a somewhat rocky start with her Kodak P712 (during which she struggled with the controls and the balky auto-focus) she has discovered that she really likes the long stabilized telephoto lens and birds without scaring them away. We’ve made multiple trips to the botanical gardens (which is free) in Chapel Hill and several to the NC Zoo (for which we have a membership). I’m glad she is enjoying her camera but I wish she would stop taking better photos that I do.

Hoping this finds all well.

Lee (Irene, Christopher and Amber).

The cover photo on this card is a composite of a photo Irene recently took of a distant thunder storm, and of some fireworks photos that I took from the deck of the Disney Wonder cruise ship.

Random Photos of Stuff We’ve Done.

Alaska Cruise: For our 30th anniversary, Irene and I took our second cruise of the Inland Passage of Alaska. This time we took my father and the kids along.
We sailed from Seattle and while we were there we had nice visits with Mike and Sandra, friends from our FSU days who we hadn’t seen in 30 years, and also with “Dex Quire”, a fellow blogger with whom I have struck up an online friendship through mutual weblog commentary. (http://dexquire.blogspot.com)

On the cruise we went…


... shopping in Ketchikan, and ...


... kayaking in Prince Rupert, and ...




... whale watching in Juneau.

Beach Week: Was on Hilton Head Island again last year. Somehow we never quite got around to that big group family photo – people kept leaving and arriving and we reached the end of the week to realize that there had never been a time when we were all there at the same time. Maybe this year we’ll get that photo for the Christmas card.




Graduation: Chris graduated from Ringling just before we all left for the Alaska trip. Irene and I went down for the occasion and the morning of Graduation Day we went walking on the beach at the Ft. DeSoto State Park. Irene, who has lost the tan that used to protect her growing up in central Florida, got sunburned and spent the Alaska cruise smeared with cocoa butter. Now the kids and I will forever associate the scent of cocoa butter with glaciers, floating ice and the frozen north.

Washington DC: Dad came up in the fall for a Thanksgiving visit and, while he was here, we drove up to Washington to visit his friend George and to wander around the Smithsonian a bit. George and Lenore Cohen were gracious hosts and we had a wonderful time. The first day we were there we took dad with us to see some of the sights but the second day we left him to visit with George and Lenore which he seemed to enjoy. The weather was perfect – more or less sunny days with light snow in the evenings. Dad and George went to high school together (Woodrow Wilson High, class of 1944) and also went to George Washington Medical School (class of 1950).




George invited Dean Martin, another GW 1950 graduate, for dinner and a mini-reunion.



Miscellany: A few photos that speak for themselves.


Pirate Night on Disney Wonder Cruise Ship w/ Irene's Disney Friends.


Lifeboat Drill on Disney Wonder


Irene in Nassau


Wildlife Photography in our Back Yard


Polar Bear at North Carolina Zoo

Das Uber Maus

Consider this mouse.



It is active, ...



... athletic ...



... and elusive.

Clearly it is a superior mouse... a better mouse.

And I have trapped it.

So, by definition, ...



... I have built a better mouse trap.

Those of you who doubted my ability to catch the mice in my garage using a dodgy homemade trap cobbled together from hardware cloth, wire and half a Walmart minnow trap -- you know who you are -- are singing another song now*.

*Probably Michael Jackson's Billy Jean which is playing constantly on all media outlets just now and sticks in your head like superglue.

The most Beautiful Things on Earth...

... may be summer thunderstorms to your west southwest viewed just at sunset, from fifteen miles away.

Photo by the Teleospouse. My contribution was to slow down so she could get the shot and crowd the center line to give her as much clearance as possible of that tree on the right side.

Kung Fu and Cheech Wizard.

The other night at dinner I was talking with the Teleodaughter about Kung Fu actor, David Carradine, and the rumors surrounding his recent death. I mentioned another celebrity who was reputed to have met the same fate and the Teleodaughter admitted that she had no idea who cartoonist Vaughn Bodé was, nor did she know his character, Cheech Wizard (examples). This fascinates me since Bodé, at the time of his death in 1975, was immensely popular and he remains one of the three or four most influential comic artists of the last fifty years. Ask any artist to draw something in the style of the 1970s -- or ask a graffiti artist simply to draw anything -- and they will immediately channel Bodé although many of them might not know who he was. In death, Bodé achieved an odd sort of identity-free immortality. He dissolved into his decade and has become its graphic arts avatar. It's not altogether unlike the Buddhist concept of Nirvana. Bodé, who was interested in alternate spirituality, might have liked the idea, although it would not have entirely made up for finding himself so suddenly and embarrassingly dead.

David Carradine's signature TV show, Kung Fu, was ending its very successful four-year run at the time of Bodé's death. Carradine also made a contribution to the zeitgeist of the decade but, unlike Bodé, he stayed around to give an identity to the phenomenon. He had a presentable career since then -- he wasn't one of those actors who makes a career of signing photos taken forty years ago at media conventions -- but his early 1970s TV work defined him. His hardcore fans may prefer to remember his character, Frankenstein, from Death Race 2000 (also 1975) but for most people he was always "that guy who starred in Kung Fu in the '70s, only now he is doing ads for Yellowbook".

Star Trek Reboot -- Escape from the Swamps of Canon

It is probably a "spoiler" to tell you that the new Star Trek movie takes place in a different universe that runs parallel to the familiar Trek universe of the TV show and most of the other movies. But I don't care. The film does an adequate job of documenting the critical events that caused the time-lines to diverge but some people seem to miss it -- which irks me. So, if I can save one moviegoer from having to sit next to a trekker with a booklight clipped to his dogeared copy of the Star Trek Encyclopedia flipping pages and muttering to himself during the movie, this small spoiler seems worthwhile. The Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, etc. in the film aren't supposed to be the same Kirk, Spock etc. as the ones you have seen before. It's not a mistake if there are differences.

I've heard the alternate-universe plot described as a writers crutch. I guess it is... or, actually, more of a writer's prosthesis -- a marvelous device that lets a lame series with its legs crushed under tons of accumulated detail get up and dance a jig. The Star Trek franchise has been hoisted out of the Swamps of Canon and made fresh and new.

Not of course that the film is perfect. There is, for instance, a scene on an ice planet where our hero is pursued by a series of increasingly large critters and every time the monster at his heels is replaced by one bigger and scarier he screams like a girl and runs faster, his only plan apparently being to keep running until he is saved by the inevitable Deus ex Machina. I didn't like that part very much but it was short. And I wasn't satisfied with the makeup on the obligatory green Orion woman with whom Kirk makes out -- her lip color didn't suit me. But, except for those small flaws I liked the film a lot. I remember thinking during the end credits that I would have liked rent out my house for the summer and move into the theater where I would live on stale popcorn and Star Trek until it was time to move across the hall for Harry Potter.

Last Unicorn Architectural Salvage in 3D

I recently took my Stereo Photo Rig to a local architectural salvage yard. Here are a few of the photos. These "crosseye" 3D photos were taken on the grounds of an architectural salvage company near Chapel Hill, NC. For directions, hours, etc., see their website -- www.thelastunicorn.com/ .

To view these photo you need to cross your eyes slightly so you see three vague images and then concentrate on the image in the middle which will be in 3D. It takes some practice but most people with good vision in both eyes can learn.












More photos are in my Flickr.com photo set.

Tea Party Stereo Photographs

Here are some stereo photographs from yesterday's Tea Party rally on the grounds of the State Capitol in Raleigh, NC. To view these 3D images you cross your eyes slightly so you see three images side by side and then concentrate on the image in the middle. Most people who have good vision in both eyes can learn to do it.

Click on any of the images below to see it bigger or view the entire set in Flickr here.

Building a Stereo Camera Rig (on the Cheap)

I'm going to be writing about the stereo (3D) camera I made with a total expenditure of about 70 bucks but, before I start I want to teach you a trick for cheating on the "Find the Ten Differences in these Pictures" feature in the Sunday Comics page of your newspaper. I want to do this first because the way the newspaper business is going the Sunday Comics may be gone before you can read this posting to the end.

The trick is this: you hold the paper so the two versions of the picture are side by side and cross your eyes so you are looking at one version of the picture with your left eye and the other version with your right eye. Just relax your eyes and let them cross so you see three copies of the picture and concentrate on the one in the middle. If the pictures are over/under you will need to turn the newspaper sideways. Assuming you have adequate vision in both eyes you can almost always do this with a bit of practice. Your brain will fuse the two pictures into one image that appears to float a few inches in front of your nose. The parts of the pictures that are the same will look normal but the parts the are different will appear to shimmer or flicker. That missing button on the clown or the dog's tongue out vs. in will be dead easy to spot.

I don't have any of those find-the-differences pictures laying around for you to try out (they are copyrighted and I am too lazy to draw one) but here is something I whipped up in PowerPoint. Look at it and relax your eyes. Let them cross slightly so you see three boxes, not two, and then concentrate on the box in the middle. The parts that are different will appear to shimmer or flicker. Try it and you'll see what I mean. Let your mouse cursor hover over the image for the answers.



Here's a slightly harder one, again a PowerPoint image. This time the only difference is the spacing between the letters. Some of the text is slightly to the left or right depending on the image you are looking at. What you should see is some of the letters appearing closer to you than the rest. Your eyes have to cross just a bit more to see those letters and your brain will interpret that as their being closer.



By a happy coincidence the technique for looking at crosseye-format stereo images is the same as we've been doing here. Here are two images I took at the NC Botanical Gardens in Chapel Hill last weekend. The photos were taken at the same time by cameras about four inches apart. Again your brain will interpret parts of the picture that are farther apart (so you cross your eyes more to look at them) as being closer. In these photos the bottle trees are farther apart (and thus appear closer) than the bench.


Click on the image to see it larger. It might help to slide your chair back and view it from a bit farther away.

In my description of the photo above I mentioned that the photos were taken at the same time. That's the hard part. If you are going to take 3D photos of anything that moves (ie. people) you need both images to be taken at the same time. One way to do this is to use a single camera with a beam splitter -- a collection of prisms and mirrors you put in front of your lens to split the image -- which gives you perfect synchronization but so-so images (because of all those mirrors and prisms and such.) See my posting on my Russian made SKF-1 beam splitter for more info. The other way is the use two cameras and try to figure out a way to make them do the same thing at the same time. That's what I have been trying to do lately.

I should probably mention at this point that I have not been altogether successful in that regard. I am still struggling with a few technical bits and if you are looking for complete instructions for making a reliably-synchronized stereo rig you can stop reading now, and if you are an optimist you can check back in a few weeks to see if I have the problem solved.

Here is a photo that shows the problems you run into if your stereo images are not properly synchronized. In this photo the two cameras went off a fraction of a second apart-- just enough time for a few things to have moved. The image on our right was taken first then the one on the left. When you view this as a 3D crosseye image the things that have moved will shimmer and flicker like the differences when we were cheating on the find-the-differences puzzle.


Click on the image to see it larger. It might help to slide your chair back and view it from a bit farther away.

So what has moved? The most obvious thing is the legs of the girl in the blue dress. She is walking across the frame right to left and, for the most part the displacement simply makes her look a bit closer than she actually is, but her moving leg and her swinging arm are too different and our brains can't fuse them into a consistent image -- so they shimmer. The young lady in the green dress was turning and the hem of her dress looks a bit odd. The lady in the background (white shirt) was putting her foot down and her left leg shimmers. And finally, the lady in the foreground -- the one who looks a bit like the Queen dressed up as Paddington Bear, and who says she was not dressed for a photo shoot and has expressly forbidden me to post any pictures of her in that outfit -- has moved her toes.

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Here is a photo of the stereo rig I built.



Lots of people have built stereo rigs, most of them better built than mine, but I don't remember seeing one before that converts from horizontal to vertical format.





It is constructed from two Kodak C530 digital cameras that I have modified to accept an external shutter button.



I chose the C530 for a number of reasons: First, it can be had cheaply -- a used one in good shape can be had for twenty bucks on eBay; Second, it is fixed-focus which should make the shutter delay more predictable; Third, it is small enough to sit side-by-side without making the lenses too far apart; Forth, it is large enough for a clumsy tinkerer to solder bits of wire into its innards and still put the case back together; and Fifth, it can be had cheaply.

Because the C530 is fixed focus there is no fancy three-way button that you push half-way to lock the focus. My plan was to make the additional connections to two C530s to allow them to be hooked up to external shutter connections. I had hoped to hook both cameras in parallel to a single switch. I haven't got that part to work yet but more on that later.

To open the C530 you take out six small screws -- two on each end and two on the bottom, make sure the selector wheel is set to the "OFF" position, open the battery compartment and pry the case apart at the midline.



This photo shows the shutter button circuit board, the control wheel and illustrates why the case won't open if the wheel is not in the OFF position.



Here is a detail of the shutter button circuit board.



The circuit board sits on top of the battery compartment and appears to provide power to the camera through jumpers J7 (battery common) and J5 ( +3 vdc ). It also provides +3v to JS (shutter?) when the button is pushed. Here's my guess for a schematic.



Since the shutter switch is between J5 and JS that is where my external switch connections ought to go too, so I soldered on a couple of bits of wire, routing them beneath the other connections and towards the end of the camera.


No, I'm not proud of those solder joints but there are good connections with no shorts.

It's a bit hard to see here but I have enlarged the screw hole enough for the wires to pass through it and used a pair of diagonal cutters to clip off the tab that the screw previously connected to. This allows me to close the case and route the wires out the old screw hole.

Once I had the wires connected to the shutter switches on both camera I closed the cases, put in some batteries and made sure I could fire the shutters by shorting the wires. So far, so good.

In theory I thought I could just hook both cameras together in parallel J5 to J5 and JS to JS and fire both cameras together with a switch between the J5 and JS connectors. The schematic would look something like this.



But that doesn't work. For some reason the cameras don't like to be hooked together. Once they are connected J5 to J5 and JS to JS and turned on they take turns going off a random until they are turned off, disconnected or run out of memory.

My new plan was to use a double-pole single throw momentary contact pushbutton switch -- one that is really two switches (for two separate circuits) that are both activated by the same button. The schematic for that would look like this:



But the problem is... DPST pushbutton switches are hard to find. Radio Shack failed me so I turned to the Internet. Not much help there either, as it turns out. I'll find one eventually. But for now, I have installed two buttons side-by-side -- close enough to press both of them with one finger.





My first session with the new rig was both encouraging and a failure at the same time. It was encouraging in that I got some very nice stereo images and the synchronization was occasionally fine -- indicating that the two cameras do have a very similar shutter-lag -- but discouraging in that I had trouble pushing both buttons at the same time and got quite a few photos like the one above with the little girl in the blue dress.

So, I have redoubled my efforts to find that DPST pushbutton and have ordered this button...



... which claims to have the electricla properties I am after and offers the additional advantage of being very, very big, red and silly-looking. I'll post the results of the installation of the Big Red Emergency button when it comes.

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Since I wrote the above I have taken the rig on another outing -- the Tea Party demonstration at the NC State Capitol and I continue to struggle with synchronization. In fact, it is difficult to get one of the cameras to fire at all sometimes. I think one of the buttons may be defective or have a loose connection. You have to push it just right to fire the camera. Maddeningly, it seems to fail most often when you are holding the rig overhead for a crowd shot like this one:



But it does work -- more or less -- and when it does work you can capture quite a nice image with it.