The Upside Down Fire Method Creates Long-Lasting Flames [Household]

For the next Floridian deep freeze.

From Lifehacker:

“The Upside Down Fire Method Creates Long-Lasting Flames [Household]

Standard fire-building lore would have you believe a great fire starts with a tipi of wood and pile of tinder under it. Turning things upside down, it turns out, yields longer and hotter flames.

Tim Ferriss, of Four-Hour Work Week fame, was tired of how ineffective the tepee method was. That method—a pile of wood is arranged in an inverted cone, smaller sticks and tinder fill it in, and the fire catches dry wood at the top—sometimes produces an impressive, roaring fire. Other times, constant attendance is needed for even a modest, sputtering flame. At the suggestion of an associate, Ferriss turned the whole thing upside down:

1) Put the largest logs at the bottom, ensuring there is no space at all between them.
2) Put a second layer of smaller logs on top of the largest, again ensuring there are no spaces between them.
3) Repeat until you get to the top, where you will have strips of crumpled paper and – at the very top – 3-5 fire-starter squares (my preference) or fire-starter oil sticks. My favorite sequence from bottom to top is large logs (unsplit), split logs, sapling wood, cedar shingle wood, then paper and fire-starting squares.

This inversion ensures that the embers created by the lighter kindling-wood fall directly onto the heavier wood, and the entire fire burns more efficiently with minimal fussing.

While I can’t vouch for his exact method, I have been using a similar technique for years, with a small variation of building a bed of the heavy split-logs, then building a Lincoln-log-style fort of kindling atop that to achieve the same effect of dumping the hot embers onto the wood. One inexpensive addition to a home fireplace that will greatly extend the burn time and warmth of your fires a mesh fire screen, placed across the fireplace grate to keep the embers from falling through prematurely. I’ve used the spark screen off an old fireplace insert for years in this manner, but any sturdy metal screening should do the trick.

If you’re a devotee of inverted tipi, or you’re a devotee of another technique, gather round and share your story in the comments.

How to Build an Upside-Down Fire: The Only Fireplace Method You’ll Ever Need [Four Hour Work Week]

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Kindle 2 Official Images and Price Leak: $359 on February 24 [Kindle 2]

Looks cool. I’d buy one if the books were cheaper!

From Gizmodo:

“Kindle 2 Official Images and Price Leak: $359 on February 24 [Kindle 2]

Mobileread just got a bunch of official-looking Kindle 2 photos, which show it in various states being held and read, plus info that it’s being released for $359 on February 24.

From the photos, it looks definitely a LOT thinner than the first, and maybe even a bit smaller too. Unless that man has gigantic hands, the Kindle goes from the tip of his middle finger to slightly below his wrist—not too shabby.

The photos may look fantastic and the news, by association, may seem official, but we don’t know with 100% certainty that this is the actual price and actual release date until we hear from Amazon.

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[Mobile Read via Engadget]

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How On-Field Football Turns Into Seamless Television [Sports]

Always wondered about this. IMHO, ESPN’s college football coverage is the best of them all. Not a lot of gimmicks, fewer bigtime ads, just great coverage.

From Gizmodo:

“How On-Field Football Turns Into Seamless Television [Sports]

The quick composition of today’s football games, with footage coming from multiple cameras focused all around the stadium, has to be compiled and edited with incredible speed and confidence. That’s where Bob Fishman comes in.

The Atlantic has a great article about Fishman, known as Fish, who directs live football games on the fly. This stuff isn’t planned out beforehand— it takes both an eye for cinematography and pace as well as an extraordinary understanding of the game itself, and Fish does almost every major sport. He has to know, for example, that a certain college basketball team relies on a full-court press for steals, and that the camera is going to have to follow the play immediately after a basket is scored instead of cutting away to the coach or the crowd.

It’s pretty amazing stuff, a job very few people could even pretend to handle. [The Atlantic,image by Mark Peterson, Redux]

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Creating Lichtenstein Inspired Portraits From Your Child’s Photograph

Wow! Almost worth shelling out the dollars for Photoshop. Also noted a similar feature from Tiffen in their digital filter software.

From Digital Photography School:

“Creating Lichtenstein Inspired Portraits From Your Child’s Photograph

This is a guest post on Creating Lichtenstein Inspired Portraits is by Shalet Abraham from My Baby Photos

Roy Lichtenstein is an artist famous for his pop art Ben-Day dots. This tutorial will teach you to replicate Lichtenstein’s style incorporating Ben-Day dots, line drawings and digital coloring techniques. It may sound complicated but it’s really just a simple step-by-step process. When finished you’ll have a personal pop art portrait worthy of display.

Photoshop Tool Bar

1. Open photoshop and open the photograph you wish to work with.
2. Make a duplicate copy of the the photograph (Layer –> Duplicate Layer). Title it “initial portrait”
3. Create a new layer (Layer –> New). Drag this layer between the two photographic layers on the layers palette. Use the paint bucket tool to fill this layer with the background color of your choice. Don’t worry – the color can always be changed later if it is not to your liking.
4. With the initial portrait layer highlighted use the pen tool to cut out your subject and remove the background (see this pen tool tutorial for details).
5. After your background is removed make a duplicate layer of the initial portrait layer (Layer –> Duplicate Layer) only this time open it as a new file.


How to open a duplicate layer as a new file

Your picture will look like this:



New duplicate image removed from background

6. Convert the image to grayscale (Image–>Mode–>Grayscale)


Convert to grayscale

The prompt will ask “Discard color information?”; respond Yes.

Your picture will look like this:



Picture after converted to grayscale

7. Apply the halftone pattern filter (Filter –> Sketch–>Halftone Pattern)


Halftone Pattern Filter

Your picture will look like this:



Halftone pattern filter

Click the fit on screen button in the lower left hand corner to see your whole picture then adjust the size and contrast sliders to get the effect you want. Be sure the pattern type is dots. Hit OK when finished.



Fit on screen button



Halftone Pattern Sliders

8. Re-convert image to RGB color (Image–>Mode–>RGB Color).
9. Make a duplicate layer of the image but place back in original document (note my original document was titled “other”). You may now close the separate dot file (you won’t need to use it anymore).
   

   Placing new duplicate copy in original file

Make another duplicate layer of the dot layer and title it “white” (open it within the same document). Go to Image–>Adjustments–>Brightness/Contrast. Adjust the brightness to 100% and contrast to -100%. On this layer your subject should be white. Drag the white layer just above the “colored background” layer.

Now you need to create a clipping path between the “white” and “colored background” layers. Hold down the alt key and run the cursor between the paths on the layers palette until you get two bubbles. When the two bubbles appear click to create a clipping path (indicated by a downward arrow).



Clipping path between layers

10. Hide the initial portrait layer by clicking on the eye in the layers palette.
11. Highlight the dot layer and change to “multiply”



Now you’re ready to color!

12. Click on the “New Fill Layer” button on the bottom middle of the layers palette and click on solid color.



This will open a new layer. Choose the color you want to start drawing with – usually the lips or eyes (don’t worry — this color is also easily changed). Drag this new layer just above the white layer. Create a clipping path between these two layers.

13. Click on foreground color and switch the color to black. Use the paint bucket tool to fill with black (the background color should appear around the photo).
14. Switch the foreground color to white. Click the paintbrush tool. Use the paintbrush to color your image.
15. Repeat steps 14-16 until your picture is completely colored in.

Your picture will look something like this:



Colored Photo

You’re almost finished!

16. Highlight the Dots layer and adjust the opacity to achieve a pleasing effect



You can stop here or you can take this one step further and add line art over the top. If you wish to add line art, click on the “initial portrait” layer and make a duplicate copy opening it in a new file. Then follow this tutorial to create a cartoon drawing from your photograph. When finished make another duplicate copy and place as the top layer over your Lichtenstein-inspired portrait. Your final result will look like this:



And there you have it! Lichtenstein-inspired pop art from your own photographs. Print on canvas and proudly display your art for friends and family!

Tags: Lichtenstein, Photoshop

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Library of Congress Photos on Flickr — ‘Mysteries that seem to be beyond all understanding’

Sorta cool.

From bookofjoe:

“Library of Congress Photos on Flickr — ‘Mysteries that seem to be beyond all understanding’

Above in the headline, a comment by one frequent annotater of the Library of Congress's photos on Flickr.

Wrote Noam Cohen in a January 19, 2009 New York Times article, "… to harness the public's knowledge about old photographs, the Library of Congress a year ago began adding photographs with no known restrictions to a Flickr service called the Commons. The Library of Congress started with 3,500 photos and adds 50 a week. The project relies on Flickr's ability to allow users to leave comments below the picture or even within the picture to fill in the blanks [top]."

"The Library of Congress photographs, in the first 24 hours of being posted last January, received 11,000 tags — ways of categorizing and connecting the photographs."

The Times story follows.

••••••••••••••••••••

Historical Photos in Web Archives Gain Vivid New Lives

IN barely 100 years,
photography has gone from a magical, even mystical process, to an
afterthought. Nothing better captures how much of an afterthought
photography is today than the banal miracle that is Flickr, the
photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo that has more than three billion photographs online. Billion.

“Flickr is to photography what the Pacific Ocean is to water, what Times Square is to humanity,” the cultural critic Luc Sante
wrote in an essay for the January-February 2008 issue of Photograph
magazine. “Flickr is a great leveler, sweeping away distinctions
between amateurism and expertise, art and record-keeping.”

Against this backdrop, there are the relics from the earlier age of
photography, historical photographs that have been preserved in
national libraries and archives or photo agencies and news media
operations. Their relative scarcity alone can make them seem like
treasures.

They, too, are finding their way onto the Internet. Compared with
the stream of photographs being uploaded (an estimated three million a
day on Flickr alone), the historical material can seem a mere trickle.
Yet over the last year there have been important new efforts to put
these classics online, both to find new audiences for material
typically used by researchers and to use those audiences to breathe new
meaning into photographs from long ago.

Last month, in what is believed to be the largest donation online of
“free” photographs — that is, unrestricted for commercial or
noncommercial use — the German national archive uploaded nearly 100,000
historical photographs to the Wikimedia Commons, the virtual archive
for material used in Wikipedia articles.

Wikipedia articles include only photographs that have been licensed
in the freest way, and there must be a stipulation that the copyright
holder either agrees to such terms or that no one holds a copyright.

It is for this reason that articles on Wikipedia for famous people like, say, the basketball great Julius Erving,
frequently have no photograph. And another basketball star, George
Gervin, is illustrated by an oddly shaped photograph that, as a note
explains, originally showed Mr. Gervin posing with Senator John Cornyn of Texas. Mr. Cornyn has been cropped out, but since it was found on his official site, it is in the public domain. Harsh.

The photographs donated by the German archive have a lower
resolution than what you would see in print (those still cost money),
but are fine for online use. These lower-resolution photographs have
been available at the archive site,
although watermarked and with rules against commercial use (an
unreasonable restriction by Wikipedia terms). The archive agreed to
change, recognizing that the number of people who visit Wikipedia so
dwarfs its own online visitor traffic.

As would be expected from a trove of 100,000 photographs, there are
the bizarrely mundane and the breathtaking: in 1984, transporting
lumber in Bad Berka in Thuringia, Germany; in 1919, a family of 11
living in poverty in a single room, photographer unknown.

The archive’s motives were not entirely selfless; it hopes to
harness the Wikipedia editors to improve the cataloging of the
photographs, said Oliver Sander, who is responsible for the collection
at the archive. There are 58,000 people in these photographs who lack
an ID number assigned by the German library, and the archive would like
Wikipedia editors to help identify who is in these photographs and add
these codes. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the capacity to implement
this with our list of people,” Dr. Sander said. “Maybe Wikipedia
members could add this ID to our list. That was the first benefit from
Wikipedia.”

Thus far, 29,000 photographs of people have been so coded, Dr. Sander said.

In a similar move to harness the public’s knowledge about old photographs, the Library of Congress a year ago began adding photographs with no known restrictions to a Flickr service called the Commons. The Library of Congress started with 3,500 photos and adds 50 a week.

The project relies on Flickr’s ability to allow users to leave
comments, below the picture or even within the picture to fill in the
blanks. In a report assessing the project (conclusion: it has been a
huge success) the library detailed the information that had been
gleaned from Flickr users.

There are tiny signs whose texts have been discerned; a
photographer’s logo, Byron of New York, “which provided a fundamental
new piece of information and connections to many related photos”; a
photograph that originally was described as showing “industrial
buildings and a town in Mass., possibly Brockton,” now has been
identified as being a shoe factory, indeed in Brockton.

Flickr is choosing to move slowly in its commons, which it doesn’t
see “as a revenue driver,” said Kakul Srivastava, general manager of
Flickr.

“It depends on what your goals are — if your goal is to get as many
photographs up there as possible; uploading photographs is not a
technical issue whatsoever,” she said. “Instead, it is about being able
to share these photos in more manageable chunks and take the time to
absorb the content, to discuss it.”

The Library of Congress photographs, in the first 24 hours of being
posted last January, received 11,000 tags — ways of categorizing and
connecting the photographs. To Ms. Srivastava, the reflections from
users about a photograph of dockworkers — discussions about segregation
in America and changing work habits — are highly relevant to the
project.

One frequent annotater of Library of Congress photographs of New
York City on Flickr goes by the name Epicharmus. “I’m not sure I’ve
‘discovered’ anything so much as made connections between bits of
information that are already public,” he wrote in an e-mail message.
The library’s photos, he added, “have mysteries that seem to be beyond
all solving — could there be any person alive that can correctly
identify the location of this tenement or that factory wall?”

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