Another two weeks, another strip added to the skygrid. The solstice is immanent, and then the light starts to contract!
Tag Archives: boston
Weekend Icosacomposite Blitzkrieg!
I ran a letterpress job Saturday morning, and figured I’d have some time to do a composite video afterward. It kinda turned into an afternoon-long video outing, starting in Copley Square by the Boston Public Library, going to the Mass Ave bridge over the Charles in Cambridge, and ending up in Central Square. It got a little hot, and I ruined my New England fluorescent white-boy tan, but I think it was all for the better.
Urban Icosacomposite – Breakbeats by Boston City Hall
I moved perhaps 300 ft from my position in Quincy Market and set up my camera in the square facing City Hall, and managed to record a pair of buskers with guitars doing neo-folk instrumentals and a drummer with a collection of plastic pails. All of them were drowned out by the breakbeats blared by a group of breakdancers who set up shop at the end of the square, beguiling the tourists and eliciting cheers and gasps. If you listen carefully you can hear all these sounds and more, over the murmur of the crowd, the squawk of seagulls, and the roar of large trucks moving goods and garbage around downtown Boston.
Urban Icosacomposite: Lunchtime at Faneuil Hall
Another urban icosacomposite, this time of Boston landmark Faneuil Hall. I set up so I’d have a good view of the square in front of Quincy Market, and I was hoping to get the school crowds, the tourists and the people on lunch break. I also got a sketch artist drawing tourists – the cluster of camp chairs left of center is his setup.
End of May Skygrid
Chalk Random Walk: Bow and Arrow Streets, Cambridge
As part of my ongoing investigation with random processes, I decided to take my random walk series into the streets. Using a stick obtained from the local environment (under the hedges of the Democracy Center, in fact) and some hopscotch chalk from Michael’s, I drew a random walk on the streetbed, to the enjoyment and bemusement of passersby. The final masterpiece:
And a time-lapse video of its creation:
Two More Urban Icosacomposites
First Urban Icosacomposite
Bow & Arrow Spring Show plus Time-Lapse
Our Press Scholar, Gina Trakadis, decided a showcase of all the letterpress done at the Bow & Arrow over the last couple of years would be a good idea. So we got together as many samples as we could, and put them up in the ArtSpace in the Adams House residence hall at Harvard, where the Bow & Arrow Press lives. This would be the first time all of my letterpress tweets have been hung together in one setting. Here’s a photo:
And here’s a 60x time-lapse of the show and reception:
It was a good selection of prints and a great turnout tonight!
2013 Skygrid: March
We’re at the end of March, so I assembled the skygrid images into composites for everyone to see. Last time, each section of the grid was an average square 10 pixels by 10 pixels. This time around, I figured I could do averaged sections which give the base color change, and do squished and cropped sections which include a small bit of photographic detail. Here’s the average skygrid (click to embiggen):
And here’s the squished skygrid (again, click to embiggen):
To make it more obvious, here’s the average skygrid at full resolution around sundown:
And here’s the squished skygrid at the same time of day:
You can see the cloud shapes in each of the frames in the second one. You can even see diagonal progressions in several areas, as the same bank of clouds travels across the camera’s field of view over several minutes.
I’m pretty happy with this. The only tweak I wish I could do is get a more true color balance from the camera, but this is a security camera, and the people who built it were probably not looking for calibrated colormetric data in the video stream.