Art
Every year I release a small “Image Book” of my favorite pictures, images and art. Some of the images I’ve published here, some are new to you.
To see last years edition see: Image Book 2008
As always I’m releasing the PDF for free, download and enjoy it.
I also have a printed version in limited quantity, and if you like my work and want to support what I do. I’m offering a printed version of this book as a thank-you for US donors, while I still have supplies.
Soon I'll be buying a new camera, my old camera is now about...
'Stel' is a song I've been meaning to make a music video for since I released it in 2008, and with a few effects I wanted to experiment with and the short length of Stel made it an ideal test.
I used 2 effects pretty heavily, Adobe Premiere's "Time Warp" effect and PSCombine in video mode.
I used Time Warp to "morph" between stills, and all the video you see here, is actually still images taken with my still camera imported as video. Once the stills are imported as video I used Time Warp to slow them down by 200-500%. The result...
At the beginning of December each year I start collecting material for an anthology of my work of the year, the last couple years it’s been largely photography, but this last year I’ve taken less photos and produced more “things”, many I’ve posted about here. You can download the PDF of last-year’s book at: Image Book 2008 So how many files is a year’s worth of work? This year for me it’s 25,470. Now, if I could only post more often. If you are interested in this years book, please leave a comment, so...
Lately I’ve been playing around with generative art for framing and hanging, this is a collection from some code I wrote in Context Free. I’ve also recently discovered the function to render at high resolutions and really adds another dimension of detail in this kind of recursive art.
The frames you see here are cropped sections of one of the renders I found interesting.
If you want to explore one of the 5000x3500px high-res frames, it’s here: Missile Cloud 8 – VBX (7mb). I also have a 10k pixel, 22mb version, if anyone is...
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to take a bunch of photos in a turn of the century abandoned farm house, and it was very cool. It was out in the middle of nowhere, Minnesota. The house was in disrepair and was pretty treacherous, but not seriously dangerous. Some walls were smashed, garbage strewn around, and there were trees that had not been trimmed back in years. But no graffiti or fire damage. Check out the full galley here: Abandoned House Also, if you’ve been missing the lack of cool new...
In the past there’s been a lot of talk about laser etched/cut moleskine blank books, but it’s come to attention that the PVC outer layer is very toxic when vaporized. On the other hand, real leather bound journals are great for engraving on and make a great Father’s day gift. This isn’t really a new idea, but it’s great in context of Father’s Day. I chose an image from “Ernst Haeckel: Kunstformen der Natur” It has fantastic and artfully hand drawn illustrations of various plant and sea life, and better yet, is in public domain....
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything PSCombine related, if you are not familiar here is a short blurb: PSCombine is a program that will import your collection of images or photos and randomly combine them in Photoshop with a random blending, opacity, and filters. I like to think of it as "Computer Assisted Art". It’s free to use, all you need is photoshop, go check out the PSCombine project page for more detail. If you have a PSCombine gallery let me know, I would love to see it. John...
Last week I posted about a coin that I laser engraved and enhanced with some paint, but did not post step by step instructions. With a recent project for Midnight Research Labs, I had a chance to take some more pictures. I engraved the coin in the regular way and then painted over the whole sheet with a standard acrylic spray-paint. After the paint dried over night I used a random-orbital sander to sand off the excess paint. I also sanded the back sides of the coin so the back finish matches the front...
For the most of Monday my ISP and connection was having issues and the site was up and down all day (mostly down). In honor of the occasion I decided to make a Fail Whale stencil, something fun for the whole family for when the site goes live again.
Making stencils with a laser is as easy as it sounds, the most time consuming part is making the design. This version is loosely based on the twitter's infamous fail whale.
Download the Fail Whale Stencil DXF file.
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Theo Jansen’s work, he is the inventor of the Jansen Mechanism that I used as the basis of my recent Jansen Walker project.
Jansen was recently interviewed on the generically named "Robots Podcast" where he spoke about his thoughts on if he was a artist or scientist, if the Strandbeest have thoughts, his building materials, the design of the legs, how he would like the Strandbeest to outlive him, also microcontrollers and commercialism.
Check out the podcast over at Robots Podcast.
Shutter Speed: 1/200 sec Aperture: F/6.3 ISO: 1600 Focal length: 35mm Here in Portland on some of the old streets you’ll find metal rings embedded in the curbs that were originally installed in the early 1900’s and were made to tie your horse to. Eventually people started ironically attaching toy horses to the rings, and just the other day I found this dinosaur / Godzilla attached to a ring. Very clever. On another note, I’ve decided to discontinue my image-a-day posts, I’ll still be posting pictures from time...
Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec Aperture: F/13 ISO: 100 Focal length: 50mm
The kinetic energy of this photo is great, running to meet the bus while the bus drives on. Shutter Speed: 1/320 sec Aperture: F/11 ISO: 200 Focal length: 18mm
Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec Aperture: F/5 ISO: 1600 Focal length: 18mm
Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec Aperture: F/9 ISO: 100 Focal length: 18mm
Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec Aperture: F/5 ISO: 800 Focal length: 18mm
Cheese, cheese, everywhere cheese. Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec Aperture: F/5 ISO: 800 Focal length: 18mm I’ve taken a short break with the image-a-day (again) to spend some time on other projects, but I've resumed again and I’ll be posting every weekday.
You may or may not know that 4volt.com has been around since 2001, and in that time there’s been a fair amount of random stuff on it. Lately I’ve been slowly re-building the site, and tonight I’ve put together an archive of some of the more popular art I've posted. Some pieces are a little dated, but most of it holds up well I think. Things change in 8 years.
Shutter Speed: 1/50 sec Lens Aperture: F/10 Focal Length: 50mm
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec Lens Aperture: F/6.3 Focal Length: 50mm
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