... is better than snarking.
Dave Rubin's The Rubin Report is one of my favorite podcasts. These days, when I download a 'cast, if the synopsis reads like something I could formulate myself, I skip it and go on to The Romanovs or Fr. Mike Schmitz' excellent The Bible in a Year.
The other day, Dave hosted Trump-fanatic Michael Knowles, trans-expert author Abigail Shrier and journalist and essayist Nancy Rommelmann for a round-table discussion of the left's descent into madness and censorship. It was relatively predictable and I don't agree with their analyses, preferring my own drama-queen one, but it had this nugget of genius from Nancy.
I had thought this, but she put it into words better than I had in my head. I think about this all the time now. It's the reason I've been diving so deep into time-lapse photography. I want to learn how to create things that make people smile. I bought a SurfaceBook so I could learn how to draw with the goal of exploring surrealism. I've been reading Kipling with an eye towards experimenting with poetry. And so on.
I got a very nice compliment from a friend about a throwaway cloud video I'd posted on Facebook. He talked about using something like it as a backdrop for a talk at a Catholic retreat. That's exactly the result I want.
More Experimental Data
I now have two functional Raspberry Pis, each with a USB webcam attached. Both are now portable as I have a chargeable battery and a solar-powered chargeable battery to supply juice to them.
I hate the cameras.
The still photos are totally unpredictable. I've discovered how to manually set their parameters like brightness, contrast and saturation and allegedly how to turn off their automatic features, but I can't get a consistent result from one photo to the next. It's beyond frustrating.
Yesterday, I put my Logitech C920e in our bedroom and took photos of the art on one of our walls. No matter what I did with the settings, I couldn't find a stable combination. With the exact same settings, photos taken just seconds apart came out wildly different. I suspect that the camera is filming all the time and a "photo" is just a frame in its mpg stream.
Perhaps what I'm seeing is an artifact of the video compression scheme? Who knows? I'm pondering an experiment where I drop a cinderblock from the upstairs balcony onto the thing to see if that helps, but I'll reserve that as a last resort.
Today, I've got a sensor and lens kit coming that will connect directly to my Pi 4's camera socket. All it does is read its Sony IMX477 12.3 MP sensor and feed you the result. You can manually set everything, or so the marketing blurb says. I'm looking forward to that. If it works as advertised, then a pair of those, one fixed as the TomatoCam and one portable for cloud / bird / ocean / whatever movies, could provide plenty of raw material for fun videos.
3 comments:
That looks like a pretty nice little camera, hopefully it will work like you want. At that price, I expect it is more of a point-and-shoot camera without a case, and not some bare-bones webcam that assumes by default that you want it for videoconferencing.
Tim, I had looked into buying a dedicated point-and-shoot, many of which now have internal software which you can manage from a Pi, but I came back to the MTBF issue. The point-and-shoots, while they produce predictable, high-quality results, would take a pounding from my time-lapse commands.
Since the point-and-shoots take video as well, I could just record the video and use the Pi to manage and store that on a hard drive. Hmm. In the end, I'll probably give that a try as well to quiet the OCD demons in my head.
The reason that leftists almost invariably go out of their way to make themselves ugly, and to create public ugliness, including destroying the beauty that others have created, is that leftism is fundamentally a rejection of being.
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