From Rudy’s Can’t Fail café in Emeryville (owned by the band Green Day).

More:

Randy Pausch May 18th, 2008 graduation speech

Randy Pausch “The Last Lecture”: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (2007)

“The Last Lecture” book on Amazon.com

I’m absolutely loving Wordpress and will never return to a custom blog. I may change my blog design from time to time to achieve a different look and feel, but it will always run on Wordpress. It’s just so much more extensible and robust.

I caught a 10:20PM show of The Dark Knight last night and it rocked! Wow!

Over 30 minutes of the effects sequences were filmed in IMAX and they look absolutely splendid-shallow depth of field, super high resolution, beautiful and very realistic for the world the film lives in.

One of the problems with most effects movies is what I call “the Star Wars effect”-the depth of field is too long in the effects shots, like in the Star Wars prequels. While watching Hellboy 2 last week (a movie I hated) I couldn’t help but notice in the effects shots that there was too much depth of field-you could see everything from near to infinity, which is actually distracting because there is so much going on on the screen, you don’t know what you should be looking at so you check out of the scene. The Dark Knight is not like that.

Christopher Nolan did a perfect job capturing a totally compelling mood and story for the film. Everything from the dark blue look to the entire movie, to the totally boss score to the performances of the ensemble cast was right on.  Heath Ledger is amazingly awesome as The Joker. He totally steals the show, which is saying a lot for his performance given that he was up against the likes of Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Cain!

What makes this movie so good is that it never strays from being about the story (and the effects serve that story well). The script is so well-written, it delves deep into themes less cursory than ‘good’ vs. ‘evil’ which would be too predictable. Think chaos vs. order, anarchy vs. conformity, establishment vs. the individual.

The Dark Knight is one of the best superhero movies ever.

While the iPhone 3G camera is nothing to write home about in terms of specs., and I don’t think it has been upgraded at all from the first generation iPhone, it’s really great for snapshots. And, it can be a powerful thing to have a camera that goes with you absolutely everywhere. The trick is not to email them from the iPhone because that slims the images down. To get the full resolution images out of the iPhone, I either use Image Capture on my Mac or SmugShot to upload them directly to my SmugMug account.

Just like fun old cameras like the Holga, Diana or Polaroid SX-70, the iPhone cam needs a lot of light and the images are often not that sharp. It is a phone cam after all. But it’s great for these toy camera type of images (with a little bit of Photoshop post work thrown in):

]]> http://tristantom.com/76/pictures-from-my-iphone-3g/feed/ http://tristantom.com/74/snapshots-from-southern-california/ http://tristantom.com/74/snapshots-from-southern-california/#comments Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:34:23 +0000 Tristan http://tristantom.com/?p=74 I was in Southern California over the July 4th weekend. Here are a few urban images from my tiny point and shoot camera that I carried with me everywhere (for that snapshot ethic):

]]> http://tristantom.com/74/snapshots-from-southern-california/feed/ http://tristantom.com/70/video-how-to-viewing-exif-information-in-images/ http://tristantom.com/70/video-how-to-viewing-exif-information-in-images/#comments Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:10:01 +0000 Tristan http://tristantom.com/?p=70 This is a short video ‘how to’ on viewing the embedded EXIF information in images using either Photoshop or the Preview application in OS X:

Cool optical illusions eh?