February 2020 – dangermouse.net

Market readiness

Saturday! One day to the market! So of course I spent time doin last minute preparations. I realised I was planning to go to the bank yesterday to get some change to use as a cash float, and also I needed to get a receipt book, but I forgot. I thought I was in trouble, because banks don’t normally open on Saturdays, but I did some searching and found a few select branches were open, including one a short train ride away.

So I hopped a train a few suburbs over and went to the bank to get a bunch of coins and low denomination notes ready to make change if people buy stuff with cash. And from there it was a 15 minute walk to an office supply shop where I got a receipt book, before walking back and catching the train home again.

This afternoon I spent some more time working on Darths & Droids story planning. And this evening I went out for dinner with my wife and Scully. We drove to a beachside suburb and had a pleasant Spanish tapas dinner looking out at the beach as the sun went down. Very nice.

New content today:

Episode VII story plotting

With this week’s ISO meeting over, I had time today to do other things. This morning I went to the golf course to play 9 holes, hoping not to repeat last week’s disastrous round. And it began promisingly, with decent scores on the first few holes. I even saw an ibis on the greenkeeper’s driveway:

On the 6th hole, which is a short par 3 with a very elevated tee off dropping down to a green far below, I got my tee shot very close to the green. Then I did a “chip and roll” shot to get the ball onto the green, and it stopped about 1.5 metres form the hole. And then I sank the putt, for a par! The first time I’ve pared that hole. It felt really good.

I did well up to the 7th hole, where a tree had fallen over during the recent storms we’ve had.

That’s actually the 9th green in the photo. The 7th green is behind me as I took the photo, and the tree must have fallen right onto the green before they cleared it away with a chainsaw.

Then I hit the 8th hole… Oh dear. It took me four strokes to even reach the beginning of the fairway. The ball kept landing in heavy, dewy grass, and whacking it as hard as I could just sent it 5 or 6 metres dribbling up the course to land in more thick grass. I eventually scored 13 on that hole. Oh well. Even with that, my total for 9 holes was still 2 strokes better than last week, which shows just how much better the rest of my round was.

Back home, I spent most of the day working on Darths & Droids. We need to get some sort of storyline planned for the next three Star Wars movies, and finalise which players are playing which characters, and what’s happening in their real lives. So I was busily thinking up plot points and making notes. It’s not quite at a point where I can start writing scripts for individual comics, but it’s a lot close now that it was yesterday.

Tonight, in lieu of our fortnightly Games Night, we had a birthday party event for Steven. It was at a local park, with a barbecue where we cooked sausages, and ate them with bread and salads. It was a nice park, with a lot of cool playground equipment, including a zipline. The kids all had a go, and then I tried it as well, and it was a lot of fun. I also had a climbing race with one of Steven’s daughters up the rope climbing thingy. And I managed to get my hand on the top post a second before she did, so I won!

New content today:

ISO meeting day 3

Day 3 of the ISO photography standards meeting began with more technical presentations and discussions. We heard information about the HEIF image file format, as well as proposals for standardising a high dynamic range (HDR) and wide colour gamut (WCG) encoding format for still images. There exist standards for HDR and WCG in video, but not for still photography yet, so we want to formalise one before manufacturers develop a multitude of competing formats.

We also had a big discussion about how to define exposure for blended images, as I mentioned was an ongoing problem yesterday. An idea raised was to categorise photos by the digital blending techniques used to produce them, so that we can then define different, meaningful exposures for the different categories. This seems to be what we’ll investigate, and some draft proposals will be put forward for the next meeting.

That next meeting is scheduled for June in New York City. My wife and I were planning to travel there, and combine it with a short holiday, but with the coronavirus still spreading we’re going to sit on that decision for a while. It’s possible the New York meeting may also be turned into a mostly virtual meeting.

Apart from the meeting, I took a couple of walks today, just to get away from sitting in front of the computer all day. And… that’s about it. It’s been a busy week – almost like being in a full-time job!

New content today:

ISO meeting day 2

Today was the big technical day of the ISO photography standards meeting that I’m attending virtually. We had presentations and discussions on the topics of standardisation of measurements of camera imaging noise, resolution, autofocus repeatability, depth metrology, image flare, as well as standardisation of Adobe’s DNG file format, and a presentation on new work by JPEG.

Much of it was very technical and probably not very interesting to most people. However the autofocus presentation had some fascinating experimental results. The presenter had at first assumed we could do image statistics to determine the best focused image from a series of photos taken by a camera. Defocus blur smooths out the image, so the variance in the pixel counts is lower, which means that if you measure the variance in a photo (of the same subject, at the same light level, taken by the same camera), then the image with the highest variance should have the best focus.

However, doing an experiment in which he measured hundreds of images, he found that sometimes when the autofocus failed and the image came out blurry, it actually had a higher variance than in-focus images. The reason was that the camera added artificial image noise as an image processing step. The reason it might do this is because it’s known that slightly blurry images look sharper to human eyes if a little bit of image noise is added. So the camera has been designed to add some noise, to fool human users into thinking the photo is sharper than it really is. The result of this is that when a photo is truly out-of-focus, it adds so much noise that the variance ends up higher than an in-focus image. (This was a phone camera that was being tested, by the way, not a DSLR.)

So to make our standardisation of a method to measure autofocus workable, we have to deal with this artificial image noise that some cameras add to the image, and we can’t rely on the image statistics being sensible and based merely on the physics.

This sort of thing is becoming more and more of a problem for us in this work. Measuring the performance of a camera is getting more complicated because of all the post-processing that modern cameras (particularly phone cameras) do to make the image look “nicer”. Even a conceptually simple thing like defining the exposure time of a photo is riddled with complications caused by cameras that take multiple exposures when you press the shutter button, and then combine different parts of different images to produce a composite final image. For example: some areas of the resulting photo might have pixels taken from an exposure with one exposure time, while another area has pixels from an exposure with a different exposure time, while another area has pixels that are an average of two or more different exposures, and then the brightness levels might be adjusted in different ways. At one extreme, there is no single “exposure time” that physically describes what is represented by the pixels across the whole photo, and at the other extreme to fully describe the “exposure” you need to list an array of different exposure times and their blending coefficients for every pixel in the image. While that would be physically correct, it’s obviously impractical. We still haven’t figured out how to address this issue.

Another interesting thing came from the JPEG presentation. JPEG is not just an image format, it’s a large technical committee (separate from the ISO Photography committee), working on a lot of new stuff related to image encoding. Their representative was giving us a report on recent work they’re doing. One thing I thought was interesting is a new project to add privacy controls to images. Say you want to share a photo of yourself on social media, but you don’t want random strangers seeing your face. This JPEG project is working on a way to select a region of a photo (e.g. your face), and encrypt the image data for that region, so that a person without the key can see the background but where your face is it just displays a blurred/pixelated version, but a friend who has your encryption password can see the original photo with your face. (I described this to a friend of mine and he criticised the idea as unnecessary complexity, as there are already ways to achieve basically the same effect without building encryption into JPEG. I’m no expert in file encoding, and I suspect there’s more to it than that, but *shrug*.)

Anyway, this is kind of all I did today – this sort of highly technical stuff. One more day of the meeting tomorrow. There’ll be a bit more technical discussion, followed by administrative stuff. (And I’m not getting paid for any of this…)

Oh, the other thing I did today was go to teach my Ethics class this morning. I had time to do this because the virtual meeting is running on Tokyo time, so it started at 11 am Sydney time. So I had enough time to go teach my class. However, when I was set up and ready to go, and the school bell rang… no students showed up! I had to go find a teacher, and they told me that Year 6 was away on camp this week! So I packed up and headed home. Oh well… next week!

New content today:

ISO meeting day 1

Today was day one of the ISO Photography standards meeting, ostensibly held in Yokohama, but actually connected via teleconference from multiple locations due to the coronavirus travel restrictions and precautions. There was a large group assembled in a meeting room in Tokyo, which acted as the central location, and people (including me) attended remotely from 5 other locations. Tomorrow there will be more attending remotely, as we get stuck into the meat of the technical discussions.

The meeting started at lunch time in Tokyo, so I had all morning free. I started painting the wooden crates that I bought yesterday. I researched a little about painting wood with acrylic paint, and discovered that I should prime the wood first.

So I prepared to go out and went down to the garage, ready to drive over to the hardware store to pick up some primer. While down there, I figured I’d get out the hammer, which I wanted to use to drive a couple of extra nails into the crates to hold a slightly loose slats. I opened the storage cupboard in the garage, and to get the toolbox out I had to move a couple of tins of paint…

One of which was primer! So I aborted the hardware store expedition and returned inside to start work on the crates. Here’s one after priming (I forgot to take a photo of the bare wood before I started):

They’re very nice crates, made of smooth pine wood. They’re “craft” crates, not actual shipping crates for fruit or whatever. And here’s one after the first coat of black acrylic:

I think they’ll need a second coat for a smooth black look. In between coats I matted some more photos. I’ve done about 2/3 of them now. It’s quite labour intensive. The ISO meeting ended at 7:30 pm my time (5:30 Tokyo time). After exercising Scully for a bit outside, it was time to make a late dinner.

New content today:

Shop is launched!

Well today is a big day. I finished configuring my photo site shop and linked it up, so now it’s fully publicly visible.

In other news, I went on another expedition to the hardware store to get a couple of small wooden crates to use as display boxes for the matted photo prints I’ve been working on. They’re a perfect size, and I got some black acrylic paint to make them black to match the colour scheme of the rest of the market stall.

For lunch I had the prettiest bowl of food I’ve eaten for some time:

And the rest of the afternoon I spent preparing for an ISO Photography Standards meeting, which begins tomorrow. It was scheduled for Yokohama, but I wasn’t applying on attending in person, choosing to participate by web conference instead. But with the coronavirus outbreak, the meeting has been converted to a full virtual meeting, with many of the participants attending only virtually. This followed the cancellation of the annual CP+ Camera Show, the largest camera show in Japan, which is what the standards meeting was scheduled around – normally attendees go to the camera show as well. Our next meeting is scheduled for New York City in June, but it may end up being affected by coronavirus as well, depending how the situation develops over the next few months.

So anyway, I’ll be busy with photography standards work for the next three days, and won’t have time for much else.

New content today:

Markets and shops

Today was double market day! There was a local arts and crafts market at The Coal Loader, a historical industrial site on Sydney Harbour’s northern shore, converted into a community centre. My wife and I walked down there with Scully and checked it out. Besides looking at the things for sale, I had a good look at how the various stalls were set up and kitted out, to get ideas for how to set up my own. I noticed that many of the stalls had custom fitted tablecloths on their tables, although some were more free-form or rustic. One stall had a bedsheet as a tablecloth!

On the way home we stopped for lunch, before completing what is a rather long walk from our home and back. Scully was exhausted by the time we got home, and we weren’t far behind.

In the afternoon, I matted more prints, and then this evening I did some final work to complete my web shop. I added shipping costs and tested payments by making an order. Everything seems to be working, and it’s now in a state where I can start taking orders! The last step is to link the shop from my photography website, and to set up some information pages explaining stuff like how the photos are printed and mounted, and how long it takes to ship and stuff like that, but it’s late now and I’ll do that tomorrow.

But if you’re curious to have a look, or maybe even buy a print, you can go to the shop directly using this link. (If you live outside Australia, I can only ship unmounted prints – please don’t order a mounted print – I might need to figure out a way to restrict that option for overseas addresses.) I have eight photos set up as products now, and will be adding more over time.

New content today:

Matting photos…

Saturday began with a round of housework: cleaning the bathroom, vacuuming, refilling the damp absorbers in the wardrobes, cleaning up the kitchen, etc, etc. Then I got stuck into matting photos for my market stall. It’s astonishing how much work is going in to preparing for this. With a few well-earned breaks, by the end of the day I’d matted 40 prints. Only 60 to go…

This evening was a family dinner, for my mother-in-law’s birthday. We went to my wife’s and my favourite pizza place, and had a good time. The owner came out to chat with us for a bit – it’s that sort of place. We noticed his wife wasn’t working tonight, and he said that she’d been laid up with a sore ankle. Hopefully she’ll be better soon.

New content today:

Craft day: greeting card display

I mentioned yesterday that I bought some cardboard to make greeting card displays for my market stall. Today I got crafty and made the displays.

First I had to design what they would look like and how to assemble them.

Don’t let anyone try to convince you that you won’t use trigonometry after leaving school. I also had to do coordinate geometry and solve a pair of simultaneous equations, as you can see. My design consists of a rectangular sheet of cardboard, scored and bent into a step-like shape, with extending tabs to slot into triangular side supports on either side. The whole staircase is angled at an angle of θ = arctan(1/4), to provide gently angled steps where the cards can sit and lean back without falling over. The whole stand has four tiers, wide enough to display two landscape format cards side by side.

The step section was the easiest, although I discovered that I needed to score the card a lot deeper than I first thought to get it to fold comfortably.

The triangular parts were trickier. I had to cut a triangle and then cut slots for the tabs at the angle θ. Fortunately the new cutting mat I bought yesterday made this easy, because I could place the triangle on it at the right angle, and then rule lines using the grid as a guide.

And here’s the completed stand, with some of my cards:

It worked really well! And it holds together without any tape or glue, which means I can disassemble it for easy transport as flat pieces. Making one of these took me all morning, and I took a break to go get some lunch up the street at a local fried chicken place.

After lunch… I made a second stand! And that was essentially an eight-hour work day, right there. I did have a bit of time at the end to start matting 30×20 cm prints of some of my photos.

You can’t see it in these photos, but these are really high quality prints on super fine museum quality art paper (Canson Rag Photographique, for those who know their art papers). And the matting really makes the photos look amazing (if I do say so myself). I’ve matted only ten or so prints – I have 90 or so to go. That’ll probably be another half day of work there.

It was a busy and exhausting day! I’ve put a lot of time, effort, and investment into getting ready for this market stall, and gearing up to launch my photography sales. Now I have to see first if I can recoup my investment, and hopefully make some sort of profit.

New content today:

One of those days

I had a mostly awful day. It started promisingly, with a trip to the golf course, and went as far as the first hole, where my tee shot went sweetly down the fairway and I scored 4 strokes on the par 3 – my best score so far on that particular hole.

But then things went downhill, as I made my worst ever scores on all of the next five holes. I did manage a nice bogey on a par 4, which would have been an amazing par if my chip shot had just rolled another 3 centimetres. It’s the closest I’ve come so far to holing a chip from off the green.

After completing my round (just 9 holes), I dropped the clubs at home and set out to buy a tablecloth for my market stall, and a couple of easels to display large prints, and to pick up a DVD I’d ordered online. I chose pickup because I was planning to drive to a large hardware store a couple of suburbs away to get the easels (not my local one, which didn’t stock them), and to park there while I walked over to the shops to get the DVD and tablecloth.

The first problem occurred when I reached the hardware store. It wasn’t there. Apparently it had moved several years ago, after the last time I’d been there. Right across to the far side of the suburb – too far to walk. So I turned the car around and and started heading over there… then realised I had to get the DVD and tablecloth first, because the easels wouldn’t fit in the car and I’d have to leave the roof down, and I didn’t want to do leave the easels unguarded in the car while I got the other stuff. So I turned around again and headed back… running smack into some roadwork that slowed traffic to a dead stop. I spent 20 minutes driving what should have taken less than 5 minutes.

I went to the DVD shop to pick up my order. I told the guy at the checkout counter that I was there to pick up an online order, and he told me to go to the end of the counter and he’d call someone to assist me. I waited there at least 5 minutes, while three staff members nearby did some stuff on their terminals and completely ignored me. Eventually I said, “Excuse me, I was told to wait here for service, but nobody is serving me.” That got them jumping and one of them got my order right away.

I scouted 7 different homeware, kitchenware, and department stores for tablecloths, but it seems that tablecloths must be out of fashion, because a few of them didn’t even have any, while the others had a very restricted range. I wanted a simple black one. The only black one I found was in the department store… for $120. So I made do with a grey one for $12 from another shop.

Then I went to the art supply shop to get some stiff cardboard to make a greeting card display stand. Up the front was a sale display with cutting mats, which would come in handy, so I grabbed one of those. Then I spent some time at the cardboard sheet racks deciding which sort to get. They had solid black cardboard, marked down from $15.95 to $14.35 a sheet. I grabbed two.

At the checkout there was a new guy, who had trouble entering the prices. He kept saying that he couldn’t get the sale price of the cardboard to come up. We went to the back of the store and he grabbed the actual price display off the shelf and brought it to the front. After some fiddling he managed to do something and got the correct price. Then he scanned the cutting mat, which came up as $15 instead of the $9.50 advertised sale price. I told him it was on sale for $9.50, but he couldn’t get the register to accept that price.

Eventually as customers started piling up behind me, he said he could charge me $15 and give me a gift voucher for $5.50. I didn’t really want to do that, so he said the only thing he could suggest was waiting for his manager to return from her break. So I waited…. must have been ten minutes or more. Eventually the manager returned and took over. She started fresh and entered the cardboard, saying it was $18 or something a sheet. I said no, it was on sale for $14.35. She said, no, it’s not. I said look, there’s the sale tag the other guy got. She looked at it and said no, that’s for a different product.

I took her to the back of the store and showed here where the tag had come from – the same spot I’d gotten the cardboard sheets. She said, “Oh, someone’s put it in the wrong place. Look, it says white core board, not black display board. It should have been down here on this shelf. The white core board is normally $15.95, on sale for $14.35. The black display board is $18, and not on sale.”

I’d had about enough of this and just wanted something cheap that I could use so I said I’d take the white core board then. Okay, so we swapped the black board for white core (which is black on one side, not both sides). She rang it up, $14.35. Good. Then she scanned the cutting mat. $15. I said it’s on sale for $9.50. She said no, it’s not supposed to be on sale. I was getting a bit exasperated now, and showed her the sale sign on the front display, and this time it was marked with the name of the right product. She said okay, she’d give it to me for $9.50, but she made out like she was doing me a big favour.

So finally I had my cardboard. Then I had to drive over to the hardware store. I’d expected to be home well before 11 am, but now it was already midday. So I stopped to have a quick salad for lunch, and then set off. I pulled into a side street and stopped the car partway there to check my navigation, and I saw that the side street I happened to pull into led straight to the new hardware store location. So I continued down that street another few blocks… almost reaching the store, except for the fact that the street dead-ended, with a building in between me and the hardware store that I could see behind it. So I had to go back and around a longer way.

Once there, buying the easels was actually okay, and I headed home, getting in after 1pm, over 2 hours later than I expected when I set out.

After all that I just collapsed and watched TV all afternoon, rather than doing anything productive. And then during dinner I bit my lip painfully. Twice.

New content today: