Not All is Crap in the World
Wednesday, July 14, 2010 at 1:26PM 
I was having a bit of fun today combining the 3D Camera iPhone app (Alex Lindsay’s pick of the week on MacBreak Weekly yesterday) with Plastic Bullet (his pick a few weeks ago). After brunch at the amazing Brown Sugar Kitchen, I stopped by one of my favorite West Oakland sites: the concrete plant at Peralta and 24th.
No sooner had I started snapping my stereo pairs than I heard a loud “Hey!” In front of me, a dude in a hard-hat was pointing behind me. A guy in an orange vest was trying to get my attention.
Immediately I began subconsciously preparing my customary sanctimony. This is a public street. I’m just taking snapshots. It’s my right as an American. Today we celebrate our Independence Day. Etc.
(You may recall that I blogged a while back about a PDF you should print and keep with you called The Photographer’s Right, to help you with said sanctimoniousness.)
I turned to orange-vest man and he shouted over the truck noise “Hey, would you like to go inside? The angles are better! I’m the manager here, I can take you around!”
Say what?
Leave it to Oakland to continue to surprise even a guy who’s lived there for over ten years.
He led me around while I happily snapped, and I took his business card, expressing my sincere intention to use his location in a professional shoot if ever the right job came along.
There’s no conclusion here except that I thought I’d try to balance out all the whinging I do on this blog a bit. Not all is crap in the world.
Just the new Sony camera.
Reader Comments (24)
You have to hella heart Oakland on days like these.
Let's shoot a fight in there!
Love the last line. XD
Hey Eric, If you put that on a shirt I'd buy it... and I'm not even from oakland. Stu- nice post. Could you elaborate on the last line a bit?
Why would they not release a camera that can do progressive? That's stupid. Perhaps with enough complaints they could change the specs by the release time?
I saw a small bit on the new Sony earlier today and it looked...almost interesting, until I see here that it's not set up to do 24P.
The larger chip size I can get behind, now let's get the processing right. They do that, they'll sell so many (at the announced price roughly $2K point) the manufacturing plant won't be able to keep up.
As it is, it's a fancy HD webcam.
I took a photo.. ONE photo outside a mall of an ATM (upon request of the bank i was reccying for) walked inside the mall to get a juice and was accosted by mall cops for taking a picture. Well i just LOVE authority so you can probably guess how it went. Anyway yes im completely pre programmed that if i pull out a camera im just mentally counting down how long till dick with a lanyard comes up to me. Thanks for the glimpse of the brighter side, always good to hear, would add one if i had one.
The lack of 30p 24p and even 720p60 and raw images makes it a failed product from the start. My 7D still has a long lifetime when you look at recent developments.
Great post 5tu, I was really not expecting the dude to actually give you more access and better angles. Thats a breath of fresh air in this over policed society!
My brother's Kodak Zi8 shoot and share camera does multiple frame rates (720p60 and 1080p30). The $500 Nikon d5000 does 24p... The fact that it is a "consumer" camera is no defense.
Great Post. Maybe if we ignore this camera it will go away.
Just this last weekend I just shot part of a music video in a warehouse right across the street from there!
Great story Stu, thanks for sharing the info.
Oh, and Sony pulls crap like that now because it's expected of them.
It's as if they've realized they have a shitty reputation they need to continually live down to and the release of this camera without 24/25p just helped them meet their quarterly quota for being craptastic.
Sony, we all need a bad guy to point the finger at, thanks for being that guy.
glad you find nice people too
If I may add something, I was to Japan for two weeks in 2007, and it's still one of my 2 or 3 favorite places on earth, just because nearly everybody was extremely helpful and polite (even if they don't speak a word of any language that's not Japanese)
about your last line... that must be the best review on the new sony I have read yet
that new camcorder is just a modded nex5, only a little less crippled, and it looks like sony will launch a $6K model in a couple of months that will have nearly the same hardware but without artificial crippling
I totally understand how sony would like to take important features away in order to sell the same hardware at hugely different prices, to people with different needs and budgets
but they also have to understand how I think they're just a bunch of crooks for doing so
Thats great!! Love that the location guy was so cool!!
If you look closer to some videos at YouTube, you'll find slides mentioning that the new sony can actually record 30p/25p. It is just packed in a 50i/60i container.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIvLDf7W9jU
Can you remove whatever "Flash" component you have on your site. In Safari, I'm constantly getting a message "A Script in this movie is causing Adobe Flash Player 10 to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive." YIKES.
There are some nice folks out there. I'm cruising by a local demo site and noticed a couple of giant backhoes with tank treads tearing the building down. I had been wanting that kind of sound for a WW2 scene for tanks. Not only did they have no prob with me recording but let me get up nice and close with my boom. The resulting audio was great and they get a free plug in my thank you credits.
Stu, longtime lurker here. I'm glad to see you are trying your hand at 3D photography (if only on an iphone). I got hooked on it, built my own rig, and the rest was history. I'll next take a 2D photo ever again (excepting only extreme telephoto shots). It's a real art form, not just a gimmick.
Dear the dude,
First, please review my comment policy and identify yourself in the future,
Second, I don't know what problem you're experiencing, as there is no flash on most of my pages, unless its an embedded YouTube or Vimeo video. I browse ProLost on Safari and never experience this problem.
Dave G. I hate 3D movies but love 3D photography, been doing it for years!
Sorry but I beg to disagree..
I lost my job (editor for 39 years)....
I ost my health insurance...
my cat got diabetes...
my mom died.
From where I am sitting All is crap with the world ;-)
Tom,
I wasn't sure if your comment was an inside joke with Stu because of the wink, but if it isn't and you have endured all of that, I can only empathize and wish you well through your struggles.
Stay strong. Keep on.
Digigenic:
Thanks for that. No, the wink was just me trying to rise above the situation with a little humor in referencing Stu's title for the current blog which was "All is not crap in the world"
Same thing happend to me when i was filming a truck that had crashed of the road in a roundabout. It was quit alot of policepeople around se we were standing pretty far off so no one would get pissed. We also had a road in front of us with pretty heavy traffick so not a very good spot. Then suddenly an officer spots us. He starts to walk over and the rookie reporter next to me starts to get nervous. I tell her "just stay here, he can´t do anything". He comes closer "Hey, what are you guys doing over here...you can´t get any good shots from there can you? Come over here!" Then he stops traffic so we can pass over to the middle of the roundabout getting al the shoots we need!
Stu,
Thank you for all of the great posts, truly inspiring. After dissing Plastic Bullet's automagic function on first viewing, now I reach for it almost daily...it's pretty damn wonderful.
My own favorite 3D stereo photography iPhone app is Stereomaker.
I've recently been bulletizing iPhone snaps and then running them through SM...it's hard to go back to cameras that don't have a powerful computer built in after that...
Here's some primitive, almost unviewable pairs (due to the severe retinal rivalry that results from the randomness of PB and my floundering attempt to make art this way):
Louisville Bridge
Lompoc Gumballs
And monoscopic happiness:
James and Elena at 21C
All is not crap in the world? I'd say that if the world seems crappy right now, it's somehow in balance with exploding technicolor imagemaking wonderfulness...
btw, speaking of retinal rivalry, I love the retinal rivalry(intended?) of the Central logo on the cement truck...