by cg on February 5, 2010
Willow Garage, a robotics research facility here in Menlo Park, may be my most favorite InMenlo assignment to date. This past Wednesday, CEO Steve Cousins was kind enough to take me through the large, bustling plant, where there are futuristic wonders to be discovered at every turn.
Privately funded Willow Garage is developing advanced robots – both hardware and software – with the goal of advancing robotics to the tipping point (still thought to be many years hence) at which the field will advance rapidly to the eve of, say, affordable domestic robots that can load dishwashers and perform other simple chores (remember Rosie the robot maid on The Jetsons?).
With nearly as many robots as humans, the corridors at Willow Garage are busy. Autonomous robots known as the PR2 (Personal Robot 2) can navigate the halls, open doors (first making sure the door is unlocked by gently trying the knob), find outlets and plug themselves in to recharge.
Another robot, the tall, thin Texas model, allows remote workers to interact with on-site peers via ‘telepresence.’ Indeed, while I was photographing robotics program co-director Eric Berger (inset photo, above), Dallas Goecker, a Willow Garage engineer who lives in Indiana, came over to see what was going on (you can see “him” in the background of the larger photo on InMenlo). Earlier I photographed designer Curt Meyers with some 25 of his “Texas” model, known plurally as “Texai” (top photo).
Willow Garage, in keeping with its mission, is an open source developer, and makes its software, including contributions to the Robot Operating System available online. The institution is in the process of making the (reportedly) $500,000 PR2 available to researchers, also free. We were impressed. Wow…
by cg on February 4, 2010
It was a very full day for your deeply fatigued author aujourd’hui, as it was yesyerday, and he is prevented from sharing yesterday’s most exciting experience by the editor of a certain community blog, aka the spouse, at least until InMenlo runs the post.
The fatigue, by the way, was earned and not some cancer artifact (for a change) – we’ve just been very busy. Rehab (today at UCSF in the City), taxes, an insurance switch, a sewer line that keeps backing up, InMenlo assignments, closing the books for 2009, my domestic responsibilities… well, I’ll stop now.
We can, however, reveal our big excitement (other than the embargoed item referenced above) was that we found a need to extend our new photo friend, light stick, to do special effects: in this case to produce photos that had that Wired Magazine “weird science” look – the spooky blue glow, the hot magenta/red highlights et al.
Normally, this is done with studio strobes covered with expensive theatrical gels, but your hemiplegic-but-mobile photog managed to extend his battery-powered setup by buying some colorful acetate report binders in the office supplies section at Fry’s this morning, and, after trimming them with scissors, gaffer-taping them over the strobe heads. Final cost? $3.95 plus tax. Can’t wait to share some of the pix…
by cg on January 29, 2010
After we were fortunate enough to catch the assignment to shoot Tuck and Patti for InMenlo, we began hankering for a portable lighting setup, like the one we rented to shoot monsieur and madame.
The usual traveling one-light setup consists of a monobloc (an integrated power supply and strobe/modeling light), an umbrella or softbox, a light stand sufficiently robust to support the usual, ruggedly-built 200 or 400 watt-second device and all the small stuff – cords, flash meter, sand bags, gobos, grip gear, cameras et al. etc.
Needless to say, it took me about a half hour to set up, and bless ‘em, Tuck and Patti were completely understanding, but that’s not going to often work for me or most of the time-pressed people I’m likely to shoot these days. I’m slow enough getting in to their office, as it is.
So I’ve been trying to think of a very lightweight, easy to set light that I could handily take along to assignments. One of the (nice) dirty secrets of the latest-gen digital cameras is that their noise (aka ‘grain’) figures are very low. One needed to tote serious power in order to reliably get a decent f-stop on Ektachrome 100 – not so, these days. Modern DSLRS have image quality at ISO 400 (DX-format) and even ISO 1600 (full 35mm frame format) that one was reserved for fine-grain transparency film.
Indeed, AA-battery powered strobes will provide sufficient light for many applications, particularly when a 460-pixel-wide image is the target medium. So we’ve been web-surfing, cruising the product offerings, and come to see I’m about the last photographer to notice this datum. There are a ton of relatively inexpensive products available to make a cheap, portable light source, a number of which I snapped up at Keeble & Shucat this morning.
Anyway, we’ve come away with a very light, relatively easy-to-set-up thing we call the ‘light stick,’ basically a modern version of the light 1930’s photogs christened the ‘bare bulb.’ We used it today, but I’ve promised InMenlo not to publish the photo before they do. Short take… I like it…
by cg on January 23, 2010
The boss over at InMenlo decided there would be no respite this weekend, and we found ourselves slaving over a hot Nikon again today, shooting an artist, a neighborhood, an old truck and a rainbow, which, added to Friday’s jazz musician and café and ongoing weather coverage made for 7 assignments in 48 hours. We even had to write some of these things.
We start early and we finish late – no wonder my poor blog has suffered neglect this past week, with either no posts, or thin prose mostly complaining about how tired we are, or, worse, yet another fruit shot. It is written: “No man can serve two blogs”…
by cg on January 20, 2010
After spending the morning getting back to my press photographer roots (yes, Virginia, we do have hemiplegic press photographers, if only me), I came home to start work on the 2010 income taxes, which I’m determined to ship the moment the last W2, or 1099, or 5498 or 09876t54321 arrives. Fortunately, our very good tax man, Ed Sallee is cool with me shipping what I have on hand – he can prepare the e-file and wait for the hard copy to punch the ’submit’ button.
Long time readers know I scan everything, including the waterfall of paper merde that daily fills our mailbox, to PDF files on my computer. After OCR works its magic, I can (often) find nearly everything germaine to the IRS using Apple’s Spotlight search or, even better, a PDF browser built on Spotlight called Yep. Yep has some AI which learns, so it does things like attach a “business expense” tag to Fry’s and other often-expensed receipts, which makes it easy to flip through them for the legit biz expenses, versus the personal stuff.
Yep finds every PDF on the hard drive, a good thing, since I always have to search for the oddbal stuff (though I’m still way ahead of digging through shoe boxes), so serendipitous results sometimes appear. Today, for whatever reason, a scan turned up amidst the receipts and forms, of a film envelope, the kind I used to employ to file negatives at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner back in paleolithic times. I’d used this particular specimen 31 years ago, to list all the pictures I’d taken in 1978 that I felt were noteworthy.
Some of these negatives may be lurking in my garage, where a massive project is (kinda) underway. Much more fun than dealing with the taxes…
by cg on January 18, 2010
My ‘office’ at the new Peet’s was mobbed this morning, as was the ‘Y’ earlier when we did the strength and cardio rehab that occupies our early morning three times a week. The holiday, and, rain produced a larger than usual crowd, and the regulars – startups and investors, Stanford students and a certain staffer from InMenlo, had to compete for seating with the drop-ins. I wound up sharing a table with a tall, blond, netbook-toting co-ed.
As is the case when our coffee bar is crowded, it was hard not to overhear nearby conversations. One conversation, between two men who’d both left the Catholic priesthood for secular pursuits, was particularly fascinating: they were talking about local congregations and priests and the struggles of others – many others – who, like them, had left seminary or the priesthood. We nevertheless managed to set up some content-gathering appointments for InMenlo.
Earlier, we had bumped into friend Daniel Clendenin, a theologian whose name had come up in conversation with the Reverend Matthew Dutton-Gillett last Friday as he and I sat at the Madera bar. So it’s only natural to get Matthew and Dan together, perhaps over a drink. Hmmm. I sense a new spiritual enterprise forming… Matthew earlier mentioned that he was working on the “water into wine” thing…
by cg on January 10, 2010
Our first big project in 2010 is the revamping of the former Dotcom Garden , now renamed Grace’s Garden, for my two-year old granddaughter.
Working from a plan drawn up by Dandelion Designs, ace gardener and landscaper Felipé Bustos (whom we’ve known for some 20 years) did the work of removing the old garden including the former gravel ground cover and grading the new space.
He and his troops then muscled in the beautiful new planter boxes made by carpenter David Sanchez (also a recommended local craftsman). Final positioning of all the pieces, a new drip irrigation system, a play area, dirt and plants et al. remain…
Willow Garage, a robotics research facility here in Menlo Park, may be my most favorite InMenlo assignment to date. This past Wednesday, CEO Steve Cousins was kind enough to take me through the large, bustling plant, where there are futuristic wonders to be discovered at every turn.
Ms. Grace Getze arrived Saturday afternoon, an event which explains why there was no blog post yesterday. A 2-year-old is about as much fun, and as much work, as a couple of sixty-ish people can handle in the space of a day, leaving precious little time for things like updating gulker.com. 