Hand Coding

I was a bit surprised when I recently came across the trailer for the remake of Death at a Funeral. (After all, the first one only came out in 2007.) Just to see how the films compared, I made a mashup trailer out of the two trailers—and, yeah, there are a few similarities. (For one thing, Peter Dinklage stars in both films.)

Minor spoilers below. But, heck, I’m talking about stuff that’s in the trailer(s) anyway.

Admittedly, I haven’t seen either film, but on a more serious note, one thing that struck me was the wafting homophobia in each of the trailers. The unmashed-up version of the trailer for the 2010 remake, for instance, includes a shot of Martin Lawrence’s character in a full-body grimace upon learning of his dad’s sexuality. For cripes sake, who cares if your dad is gay or straight? Family is family, no?

(To be sure, I’m not in favor of outing nor blackmail, but I don’t think either of those factors fully explain away the “eww—teh gay” vibe from each of the trailers.)

On a lighter note, though, if I get some recommendations to see the 2007 film, I might consider adding that to my Netflix queue. On the other hand, I think I'll be staying far, far away from the 2010 remake.

This “laundry formula testing facility” commercial for Clorox’ Stain Fighter & Color Booster seems to imply that only women do (or should do?) laundry. Even the man-unable-to-operate-a-washing-machine scenes from 1983’s Mr. Mom seem unwatchably dated today. And that was almost thirty years ago.

I expect better, Clorox.

It should have been simple:

1. Buy font with awesome ligatures.
2. Use font.
3. Get awesome ligatures.

So, that’s the short version. The longer version is that I bought Liza Pro Display the other day, partly because I needed a script typeface, but partly because it had some sweet ligatures.

Ligatures, in case you’re not familiar with them:

“In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called “contextual forms” where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or proximity to the end of a line. […]”

Liza Pro is published by the Underware foundry and their website has an online test page where you can try out the typeface beforehand. Try as I might, I couldn’t replicate those results in any of the common apps I had. I didn’t annotate all the rendering errors in the accompanying image, but among them, OpenOffice and Pages both do a poor job of linking the letters together, and Word simply refuses to create any ligatures.

Going off the foundry’s website, they do include a table of apps known to include contextual alternates (which is apparently the secret sauce that one needs to get this working). Indeed, many of the apps listed there come as little surprise—InDesign, Illustrator, and QuarkXpress all basically work out of the box.

As luck would have it, I have none of those.

I do happen to have Photoshop CS3 (which did make the list), but that’s probably the last app I’d want to use for composing a letter, jotting a note, or anything approaching word processing or desktop publishing. So, at this point, it seems I’m kinda stuck.

To be fair, I don’t consider Underware at fault here; it just so happens that top-to-bottom OpenType support for ligatures & contextual alternates seems relatively sparse within the I-can-afford-this application space at the moment. And it’s not that I have qualms about paying for software—I just don’t have a spare $520 for Illuatrator or $640 for InDesign lying around [sad fontbone].

I saw The Book of Eli with some friends the other day and, well, it wasn’t exactly my favorite movie of the year. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you haven’t seen it yet, you’re probably not missing much.

Review: The Book of Eli from Alex Bischoff on Vimeo.

Minor spoiler warning: I give away the name of Denzel Washington’s character. I doubt it’ll affect your enjoyment of the movie (or lack thereof), but there you go.

I recently saw Daybreakers, the new vampire film starring Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe. I’ve uploaded a review with some thoughts. Short version: I rather liked it.

Review: Daybreakers from Alex Bischoff on Vimeo.

If or when Vimeo adds captioning support, I’ll add captions too. They haven’ t yet. [sad trombone]

Star Wars Uncut is a project in which they’ve cut up Star Wars into 472 fifteen-second scene; from there, people can claim a scene, reenact it, and then at the end, they’ll all be stitched back together. This sounded like fun, so my friend Bryan and I claimed Scene 222 and reenacted it with a few friends.

The original scene is available on the Star Wars Uncut site and I’ve embedded our version of the scene below:

I’ve also cut together some of the behind-the-scenes footage from when we were filming the scene:

Some friends and I went to the Dallas Stars game last Friday. I hadn’t been to a hockey game in a couple years and so I was rather looking forward to it. Plus, I had brought my camera along to see if I could get some shots.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that hockey can be deceptively tricky to photograph. On one hand, it’s somewhat dark inside the arena, but at the same time, longer shutter speeds can more easily blur the action. The general solution, I suppose, is just to use higher ISO settings. (I went to ISO 400, myself, but in retrospect, probably should have bumped that up to ISO 640 or even ISO 800.)

What may be the most squirrely bit about photographing hockey, though, is that the ice is really white and it can throw off one’s exposure. Most cameras judge exposure by trying to ensure that each shot has an average overall brightness of medium gray. What ends up happening in this case is that the camera sees the white ice and thinks that the shot is overexposed; so, the camera lowers exposure until the ice is back to a medium gray (which, of course, actually means that the ice is now underexposed).

To counteract these types of exposure issues, I ended up adjusting my camera’s exposure compensation to +2/3 stop; that pretty much took care of it. The shot that you see above is a panorama made from ten shots stitched together. If it helps put its dimensions in perspective, if you consider that a widescreen HDTV is 16:9, this image would be around 20:9.

My friend Brad Graham has passed away, seemingly of natural causes. I heard about it this afternoon and I made an effort not to cry at work, but now that I’m at home, I’m not doing a very good job of holding things back.

I knew Brad from SXSW. Some people like to use the cliche that “so-and-so was the nicest person you’ve ever met”, but Brad really was the nicest person you’ve ever met. Whether you may have known him for five minutes or five years, but he’d treat you like a friend that he had known for ages.

Goodbye, Brad.

I visited my family in December and it was great seeing all of them. I hadn’t seen my brother over Thanksgiving (as he’s been living in South Africa) and it was especially good seeing him again since it had been a while since he and I last had a chance to hang out.

I grew up in Pittsburgh and it’s been several years since my parents moved to Charlotte, but I'm still getting used to the weather there (in a good way). Usually when I’d visit them in December it'd be pretty cold in Pittsburgh, with snow more often than not. In Charlotte—at least for this most recent trip—we had a few days with highs in the 50s. Rather pleasant, that.

Photo-wise, I’ve posted a baker’s dozen shots (not that I was aiming for that number—it just worked out that way). (Bonus trivia: Apparently, a baker’s dozen is also known as a Roughrider’s dozen. Who knew?) I brought along one of my new flash toys for the trip, Lumiquest's Quik Bounce reflector. What’s nice about the Quik Bounce is that it can either be configured to send all light forward or it can be configured to send 80% upward (for bouncing off the ceiling) and 20% forward.

As it would happen, my parents’ family room has vaulted ceilings (while the kitchen has normal-height ceilings) and so a flash reflector/diffuser that relied upon one or the other wouldn't have really worked for me. (For instance, if I hypothetically had a Lumiquest 80-20—which is hard-coded to always send 80% upward and 80% forward—I would have been up a creek in the family room since the upward-sent light would dissipate before having a chance to bounce off the ceiling.)

With the exception of the on-the-trolley shots (like this one) and the ice-skating shots (like this one) I used a flash—predominantly fill-flash—on all the other shots in the set. Overall, I’m fairly pleased with how the Quik Bounce performed. I can see myself using the Quik Bounce again, and if anything, the one thing I’d consider changing—and this doesn’t really have anything to do with Lumiquest—might be to try setting up off-camera strobes for some of the shots. Maybe next time.

I joined my family for Thanksgiving in Charlotte, NC. Well, not my whole family—my brother Adrian has been living in South Africa since August-ish and so he wasn’t able to join us. I missed him a bit; he’s a good brother. Fortunately, I’ll be seeing him (and the rest of the fam) for Winterfamilytime later in December, so I’m looking forward to that.

My family doesn’t often have big Thanksgivings—sometimes it’d just be the four of us—but this year we had something like fourteen people. My dad’s sister Angelika’s family was all there including my cousin Ian’s new wife Brianna—uh, would that be cousin-in-law?—and some friendly neighborhood folks as well.

In my effort to try to be a good host to everyone, I ended up neglecting my photography a bit. In all, I took a few dozen shots and I’ve posted four of them. Interestingly enough, my Canon 40D’s autofocus system ended up leading my astray on one of my shots (the one with my Dad and Angelika talking, which is also featured at the top of this post).

My intention at the time was to keep my Dad in focus while placing Angelika outside the depth of field. As I later found out—and this was when I was reviewing my shots on my computer screen back here in Dallas—is that Canon’s autofocus system (at least on the 40D) apparently places a focal-preference to objects that are closest to the lens (even if they aren’t the largest objects in the scene). To be fair, I’m not really blaming Canon for this; I could have (and perhaps should have) used manual autofocus-point selection to ensure the precise focal point that I had in mind.

In the end, I still kinda like the shot for some reason. Maybe it’s the canonical Dad Face that my dad has at the time. (He tends to have that look on his face when he's listening intensely to someone. It’s part of what makes him my dad.) As my friends are fond of chiding me about, I only post a fraction of the shots I take on Flickr; put another way, if I didn’t like a shot, I wouldn’t be sharing it with other people. Even though I can’t quite put a finger on it, part of me wants to be able to put a finger on what I like about it (and I can’t).