You never know where inspiration will come from. Recently I'd been reading all the buzz about Radiohead's newest music video for their song "House of Cards". What's so unique about their video? Well, to start, they shot it without cameras. Instead they used a new technology that uses lasers to produce real time 3D images. Now I really couldn't begin to tell you just how such a thing works, but you can watch a behind the scenes video here that explains a lot more. So how did the Radiohead video turn out? Take a look.

So that got me thinking, what could be done with lasers and a camera? I found a dark closet, a laser pointer, a bunch of random objects, a tripod and got to work.

First I set my camera up on the tripod and set it to "long time exposure". I found that the room was dark enough that even a 16 second exposure (the longest I could do) would turn out nearly completely black. The tripod is important for not only keeping the camera steady during such a long exposure but also giving you two hands to steady the aim of the laser pointer. I decided to first write my name with the laser during the exposure.

Pretty cool, but totally illegible (I can't read my own cursive either). So I did it in print.

I should note that the floor I'm "writing" on is carpeted and there's an Ethernet cable and part of a chair in the frame, but you'd never know it since only the "lasered" parts are exposed. Next up I put a motorcycle helmet down and traced it out as best as I could.

You can see the curved surface and face shield reflect the laser in different ways and add to the "halo" effect around the helmet itself. This is a good time to remind you that if you use lasers, be careful! Different objects can reflect their beam in many different directions and you should avoid getting the laser in your eyes.

That said, here's a perfect example of interesting reflections in this wine bottle:

Look at the way the left hand side reflected the laser. It looks to me almost as if someone threw the bottle down on the ground, it shattered, and the lasers on the left are the wine spilling out. What's your interpretation?

Next I tried to make it look as though the wine were shooting out the top. The intensity of the lasers reminds me of a neon sign (that intensity comes from keeping the lasers aimed at that spot longer during the exposure).

I just couldn't stop grabbing objects from around the house and lasering them up. Here I took a zippo lighter and tried to give it a "laser flame".

And finally I pulled out a guitar and tried to trace it out. This took a few tries since it is such a complex shape. I needed the full 16 seconds to trace it out. Here's the best one:

Now I'm wondering what other shapes, objects, and materials would look good under a laser? Maybe foil, or a glass of water? Let me know your ideas in the comments and I'll try them out for next time.

I was microwaving my lunch at about 11:30 am at Kodak in Windsor when the hail started. Everyone was watching out the windows as it went from pea sized to golf balls to baseball sized. Then it stopped and they announced a tornado warning. We went to the locker rooms in the center of the building and the lights went out around 11:50. We stayed there for an hour and then were moved to another more central room. We were let out about 1:45pm and found trees uprooted all around the parking lot. Many of my co-workers had windows broken out in their cars and one car was actually forced under an SUV from several parking spots away.

One employee saw the tornado from our lobby and described it as a "total blackout" as it passed in front of our building. The tornado's path went right between highway 257 and Kodak. Given that the tornado was reported to be between 1/2 and 1 mile wide we're lucky we weren't hit worse.

On my way home I was redirected trying to get back into Greeley and passed by some houses that were completely leveled just a few miles southeast of the State Farm building across highway 34. There were also some irrigation systems and high voltage power lines tossed to the ground. Below you can see a map of the approximate path of the tornado in relation to the Kodak plant, Windsor, and where I took the video below.

As of Tuesday the Kodak Colorado plant was still closed, awaiting the power to be restored. I didn't hear about this until I showed up for work Tuesday morning. Inside the building there are a number of roof leaks into offices and lights were working on generator power. They expect the power to be on by Wednesday. You can see below what parts of the plant and Windsor look like.

Here's a short video of what it looks like outside my Kodak building:

Here's an image of the stop sign entering the plant.

I then drove through Windsor on highway 257 and here's what it looks like looking to the west:

As you can see many people have been left homeless or had their homes severely damaged by this storm. To help out the relief efforts donate to the Red Cross or United Way of Northern Colorado.

UPDATE: Here are more pictures in a Kodak Gallery Album taken by Andrea Wieland, Kevin Wieland and Scott Tunney.

I've always been a fan of time-lapse photography, you know, the series of pictures taken at a certain interval over the course of several hours, days, etc. I always thought it'd be cool to set up a camera during some sort of project around the house or even at a party to see what sort of story the images told. Recently I had my chance. I'd stumbled across a great article on the blog Lifehacker with several tips for documenting your parties with photos. One tip suggested setting up a program to take images with your webcam at certain intervals of time and save the resulting "video" to your hard drive. So now I just needed a project to document. Well, lucky me when we decided to put hardwood floors (the Pergo laminate kind) in our kitchen.

So I grabbed my roommate's Macbook (with built in iSight webcam) and installed the program Gawker (free download, Mac only) which allows you to have control over how often a picture is taken (I chose every 20 seconds) and then how you want the resulting movie to playback (I chose 10 frames a second, standard video is 30, but that seemed too fast). If you're using Windows, a program called Webcam Timershot is available from Microsoft that does many of the same things Gawker does (also a free download, Windows only).

So once Gawker is installed and up and running it takes just a few clicks on in the straightforward menus to set everything the way you want it. The hardest part for me was actually remembering to turn the thing on the day we ended up installing the floors (the start of the video is about five really frustrating hours into the install and shows the final five pretty productive hours it took my roommate and I to finish the job).

Here's how the video turned out:

As you can see I spent a lot of time lounging out on the floor as it was built (that's me in the green). Overall I was very satisfied with the output and I look forward to using this as another tool to help document all those Kodak moments that last a bit longer than a moment, even the ones that take ten hours to install.

Do you have any tips for documenting your projects / parties / events with photos? Share them in the comments.

So what do you do when the Colorado winter sets in and there are piles of snow all around you and single digit temperatures outside? Go skiing! Unless, of course, you're like me and you don't have an extra $80 to spend on a day of sitting in traffic (see Vail and I-70, respectively) followed by an all-too-short-but-way-too-awesome time on the slope. If you're like me you spend some of your winter afternoons getting your enormous digital photo collections organized and optimized on your computer. I'll show you two great programs, one that will allow you to rename, convert, resize, rotate, and edit your pictures with batch processing (i.e. all at once), the other will help you bring some old low-resolution jpegs back to life.

I know what you're thinking, isn't this a post for 1000 Nerds? Well, not exactly. All the software I'll talk about is easy to use so even if you don't consider yourself computer-savvy you can still be photo-savvy. Plus, it's all free to download!

IrfanView
First we'll be looking at IrfanView (website and free download here: http://www.irfanview.com/). While the pronunciation is the subject of some debate (er-fan or ear-fan or erfan) there is little debate about how great this program is. As the website states, IrfanView will allow you to view, convert, optimize, scan, print, create slideshows, batch process, play movies / sounds, and more! I'll be focusing on the batch processing capabilities.

The great thing about digital photography is that I have thousands upon thousands of images on my computer. The bad thing about digital photography is that I have thousands upon thousands of images with names like "img_2202.jpg" all at various resolutions, sizes, and orientations depending on what model camera I took them with. This is where IrfanView comes in.

After downloading and installing the program, open it up. You'll see a black background and some menu options. Go to File - Batch Conversion / Rename (see below).

 
IrfanView has powerful Batch processing capabilities

Here you can choose to do a batch conversion, rename, or both at the same time. You can also choose the output format and directory and how you would like the files renamed (if at all).

Now on the Batch Conversion menu check the "Use advanced option" box and then click the advanced button (see below).

 
IrfanView's Batch Processing Menu

In the advanced setting is where the true power of IrfanView is revealed. Here you can choose settings for cropping, resizing, rotation, and a whole host of color / brightness related image settings. For more advanced users who know exactly what they want, this is a great way to batch apply effects to pictures. If you're not as familiar with brightness, color, or cropping with X and Y coordinates, that's fine too. Trial and error can help you get the results you want or you can stick to the very useful and straightforward rotating and resizing commands.

 
IrfanView's advanced settings are powerful for beginner and advanced users (click to see full size image)

Once you've dialed in your desired settings, hit OK. Back on the batch processing menu you can add your files to the queue from the Windows Explorer like interface, press start and sit back and watch your files convert while you grab another cup of hot chocolate.

Jpeg Enhancer
The second piece of software I'd like to pass along is called jpeg enhancer (free download here: http://www.vicman.net/jpegenhancer/ ). Note: after clicking the download link it will ask for your email, if you don't want to give it out just click the "I don't want to enter personal information" link at the top of the page.

Jpeg enhancer does exactly what it sounds like it would do, enhance jpegs. The jpeg format uses compression that over time (many, many, saves) causes artifacts to show up. Artifacts can also be present in low-resolution images (under 2 mega pixels). Jpeg enhancer does a decent job of cleaning up these artifacts and leaving you with a better image (although there really isn't any magic bullet for this sort of thing).

Opening up Jpeg Enhancer will get you the view below:

Jpeg enhancer, a program that enhances jpegs (click to see full size image)

Simply go to File - open and select an image to load. Jpeg enhancer automatically takes a shot at enhancing the file and you get a side by side before and after look (sorry I didn't have a low rez file to show you). Clicking the advanced box in the lower left corner gives you control over each of the enhancements applied to the image. After making changes, hit process again to see how it looks. When you're all done you can save your newly enhanced jpeg wherever you like.

With these two easy to use yet powerful tools you'll be making the best of those indoor winter hours so that as soon as spring breaks you'll be back to taking great photos outside while knowing all your photos inside are nicely arranged, resized, enhanced, and renamed.

Sometimes the best said things are those not said at all. There's a lot of buzz in the business world around the concept of "Voice of the Customer" (VOC). Googling "Voice of the Customer" returns 82,200,000 results. Makes you wonder if sometimes your voice is getting lost in the crowd - doesn't it?

It's been my experience that Kodak is still listening. I've had the opportunity to be involved with numerous customer-centric local events during my five years with Kodak. I happen to be lucky enough to work with a very customer friendly product that just begs to be taken out and shown off: the Kodak Picture Kiosk. In case you're unfamiliar with our Kiosks, they are those nifty freestanding things you see next to the photo counter of your favorite store that look something like this:


 
The Kodak Picture Kiosk.

Kodak's Kiosks allow you to use the following inputs: memory cards (of all types), prints, USB drives, CDs, DVDs, your Bluetooth or infrared phone, or even film negatives and get great prints in seconds. You can remove red eye, add borders, text, create collages and more using the Kiosk's simple touch screen interface. So what does this have to do with the voice of the customer? Allow me to explain.

A small team of employees from Kodak Colorado, including myself, have had the opportunity to share our Kiosks with thousands of Colorado State University (CSU) Rams Football fans this season. At each CSU home game, we set up a booth in the large pre-game tailgate area called "Ramtown" (a bighorn sheep is the CSU mascot). The team takes pictures of fans with the actual bighorn sheep mascot and then prints out copies for the fans while they have the opportunity to explore the Kiosk's many features.


 
"Bubba," The giant inflatable CSU player.

The reaction has been tremendous! It's amazing that with so much technology around us that a simple picture can still make someone's day. And it's that thought that got me started on this whole voice of the customer idea-the idea that sometimes the customer's voice is a smile. Sometimes it's when, after using the Kiosk themselves, they come back-and bring friends to share in the excitement with.


 
The "Kodak Moments" Displayed during the game.

One particular instance that happened at a recent CSU game really inspired me to write this post. It was close to game time and people were starting to head to the gates to enter the stadium. A husband and wife had just had their picture taken and were waiting for their print. The husband waited outside the booth, buttoning up his jacket to guard against the cold air. The wife came into the booth and we exchanged pleasantries as her picture was printed. As the print emerged seconds later, I saw her face light up with a wide smile. She thanked me for the print and went to show her husband. Upon seeing the print his face lit up as well. They waited a moment, both of them pointing out things in the picture and laughing together, then walked together into the game. While it might seem silly, it's moments like this that make me proud to be a Kodak employee. Sometimes I think I get desensitized to pictures after seeing them day in and day out for so long. When I see a person's day brightened by the product I helped to create it makes me smile. It reminds me why I took this job in the first place and why I show up everyday with a contagious enthusiasm for what we do here at Kodak. 


 
Me manning the printers in our booth.

So in this season of thanks, I want to extend my thanks to all of you out there who've made your most precious moments Kodak moments in the past, and to Kodak for allowing me the chance to help people continue to create Kodak moments far into the future.

So it's been just over a year since I decided to ride my bike to work. Looking back there have been some highlights, and some lowlights.

Highlights:

• Putting over 600 miles on my bike from May-August.
• Getting my ride time down from 75 minutes to about 65 minutes
• Feeling the cool wind blow through my hair on the ride home
  

Lowlights:

• Pretty much storing the bike during the school year
• Only riding in a handful of times this summer due to summer classes
  

As you can see, I have some work to do. I need to make my commitment to biking a year-long affair, since it's too easy to justify not riding because it's been so long you have to start all over with short rides to build yourself back up.

And it's on that note that fate steps in.

There's a local microbrewery in Fort Collins, New Belgium Brewing that just so happens to not only make some of the best beers around, but also is strongly committed to the environment and the community around it (among other things the brewery runs on wind and solar power and almost zero waste is produced in the brewing process -- it's all reused for other purposes like livestock feed or compost). As part of their environmental campaigns, New Belgium sponsors something called the "Tour de Fat" (their flagship brew is Fat Tire Amber Ale). The Tour de Fat is a celebration of all things biking and beer related. It tours around New Belgium's distribution area (almost everywhere west of Chicago) spreading the joy of biking and good beers.

So where am I going with this? Well, at each stop on the Tour de Fat, New Belgium runs a rather interesting contest. If you agree to sign away your car (it's auctioned to benefit charity) and commit to living car-free for a year you will be entered to win a brand new custom-made commuter bike complete with trailer. Only one person is selected for each city from the entries they receive, and for the Fort Collins Tour de Fat my girlfriend Erin was the winner. This means that on September 22nd she signed away her trusty 95 Saturn SL2 in exchange for a handmade Black Sheep bike, made right here in Fort Collins along with a BOB Trailer to carry all her stuff. There was also an article from the local paper about the winning essay she wrote.

In the end this means I'll have some company and some competition to keep me motivated to ride. Also, as I promised, here's some more helmet cam footage, this time of the Poudre Trail.