Classical Penguins

A murky memory for anyone who has studied English using textbooks that date back to the 80's or earlier are the minimalist covers for the books themselves. I didn't give them much thought at the time, but there is a kind of clean, cheesy look to them that is quite appealing. Penguin covers have become a bit of a design icon all on their own, even releasing a book on the topic and re-issuing a few classic design books using the old-school cover design. Pelican books also have some pretty distinctive covers, though I personally don't like the look of them as much as the Penguin covers.

However, what has been especially awesome in the past few months has been the interpretation of contemporary creative endeavours - in the style of these minimalist book covers. A few of my favourites:

Games:

Movies:

More movies

Harry Potter:

A template if you'd like to have a go yourself.

Water rocketry

As part of an inane quest to prove that all that one needs for an effective method of public transport is water and air, a bunch of us had headed off to Crissy field to do some launch tests with a rocket.

The rocket itself was a construction of Florian's design; the initial test was done at dusk on and employed the use of speedlites and an ingenious flash trigger to get some high-speed shots of the rocket at launch. Shelly's pics of this can be found here.

We headed out the next day to get some daytime shots; my camera gear in this case was a bit better equipped for the task. Florian had estimated that the rocket was easily travelling at 145km/h just after launch, experiencing about 40g of acceleration. Briony was happy to trigger the launches, with the rest of us snapping away at the rocket.

Briony adding air pressure to the rocket - we used between 40 to 10 psi.


Launch! Note the awesome sputtering you get when the rocket runs out of propellant (a more spectacular example can be found here).

mini muni

I'm still enamoured with the 50mm f1.8 lens on my camera. I've also found that if you're willing to wander around with the lens off the body, you can easily achieve some selective DOF/tilt-shift effects (a running series of experiments with this technique are here) A few pics of one of my fave subjects, the San Francisco MUNI, are below.

The Vader Project

At a work function recently, a bunch of artworks from the Vader Project were up on display. The idea was that a set of replica Vader heads were sent out to pop artists around the globe to reinterpret as they wish - the results were brilliant. A small subset of the heads can be found here; some highlights are below.