Ploafmaster General

Dear goodness, please take a good hour or five to gawk at the photographic art of Dan Winters (Flash, yeah, but it's worth it).
(via Jason Crowgey)

Holy shnikes, there's apparently some chance that Harvey Keitel could replace Steve Carell on The Office.

Don't know how realistic this is, but it'd be hilarious to see the new boss go kinda nuts on Dwight with a stapler.

One of my favorite reasons or listening to Pandora is the discovery of new music. Tonight on my way home from class I discovered Blind Pilot, a band with some tasty acoustic-driven pop rock. Check out their video for "Go On, Say It" below:

[vimeo 5580872 w=640 h=360]

Blind Pilot "Go On, Say It" from Team G on Vimeo.

(The song I heard on Pandora, for the record, was "One Red Thread")

I feel like this has been posted all over the Internet today, but this video (as of this writing) still has fewer than 4000 views. Let your ears be glad as you see all the people mentioned in the title of this post get down to musical business in the best way.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G5JaicYuVU?fs=1&hl=en_US&hd=1&w=640&h=385]
(via too many people to list, but it bears posting everywhere)

'Cause if it's natural
Something glowing from inside
Shining all around you
It's potential has arrived.

From What is the Light by The Flaming Lips

Please do yourself a favor and watch a few of these short films about Simon's Cat. It'll make your day filled with jolliness.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tuf61OjvoPQ&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xd0d0d0&hl=en_GB&feature=player_embedded&fs=1&w=640&h=385]

PX 70 Color Shade film from The Impossible Project.
A door in a back alley off Harrison St. in Richmond, VA.

Awesome piano playing. Heart-stopping piano destruction.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcm_u6ls0Ac?fs=1&hl=en_US&hd=1&w=640&h=385]
(via yewknee)

With the All Delighted People EP only just released last Friday (Go listen! It's incredible!), this news is startlingly exciting: Sufjan Stevens has a new full-length album releasing on October 12th of this year. If you preorder The Age of Adz in the next two weeks you get a download code to snag the music in MP3 format two weeks before your physical media ships.

So. Pumped.

Mission Impossible 4...blah blah blah...Tom Cruise replacement...blah bla-- what?! BRAD BIRD is directing? The same Brad Bird who directed some of the finest animated films to grace the silver screen?

I'm actually motivated to see this now.

So it seems that a certain Mr. Stevens has added at some more shows to his touring schedule, one of which includes a particular River City...

I'll be trying to score tickets Friday morning.

On some occasions this film has some peculiar aging/color characteristics. This photo is only a week old and has taken on greenish-yellow cast.

Shot with PX 70 Color Shade from The Impossible Project, in Scott's Addition, Richmond.

Flickr user lost in pixels decided to make a pinhole camera from the shell of a freshwater mussel. Not much more to it than that, but the results are fascinating.

Grant Achatz working with Craig Schoettler on a re-imagined classic:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5PkO3kKAto?fs=1&hl=en_US&hd=1&w=640&h=385]

Oh, this was only PART of my dinner at Secco tonight.

This is the speck-wrapped hanger steak with charred local vegetables (field peas, I think, and carrots, squash, zucchini, and green beans), shaved summer truffles, and summer truffle sauce.

Uh-mazing.

Also, try the sea urchin dish. It'll rock your mouth's world.

Morning meal, last Saturday at Can Can.

Mercy!

Sufjan Stevens has released a new EP called All Delighted People, and you can listen to the whole thing for free on Bandcamp (or at the bottom of this post)! From there you can buy the entire EP for five bucks, or you can wait until next week to digitally purchase it elsewhere. Or you can wait until later this year to snag a physical copy.

Just listen! So much majesty!

http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer.swf/album=670192006/size=venti/bgcol=FFFFFF/linkcol=000000/

I found it interesting that Five Guys recently won the ranking of "best fast food burger" in the US from Zagat.

I'm not upset about that, either. They're from Virginia, the patties are thin so they get a little crispy and extra brown, and the burger buns are pretty tasty, too. But it reminds me. The full name of the restaurant is Five Guys Burgers and Fries, and I know plenty of people in different parts of the country who also love their fries.

But I hate them.

They're always a little too soggy and way undersalted. I don't want a salt lick instead of french fries, but I do want my fries to have at least a few crystals of sodium chloride across their collective surface. What is it about these fries that you folks love so much? What am I missing?

On the few occasions that folks have asked me for photography help, I've had to explain what "ISO" means and how it works. It's kind of a tricky subject, especially since its meaning in digital photography is a little different than its origins in the world of film. What it comes down to, ultimately, is sensitivity.

ISO, in analog photography, refers to a standard for identifying how well film captures light. The higher the number, the more sensitive. Higher sensitivity comes with a trade-off, however; you get distortion. In film this comes in the form of larger crystalline structures on the resulting negative, or "grain." So pictures taken on film with a high light sensitivity look a little coarse and lose some of the fine detail. To many photographers the grain is only a slight trade-off since it can add depth and character to images. Different film stocks from different manufacturers have varying qualities under particular lighting conditions.

In digital photography, ISO refers to the camera sensor's responsiveness to light. When you crank up the ISO to a higher number you can capture more light. But you still have that trade-off; increasing the ISO on a digital camera creates visual distortion, or "noise." The best digital cameras, in my opinion, degrade gracefully at higher ISO settings. The noise looks less like static on a television and more like, well, film grain. I've seen it on certain Ricoh point-and-shoots, Leica's crazy high-end digitals, and even my iPhone 4 (when converted to black and white).

This graceful degradation reminded me, recently, of another artistic tool where distortion isn't all that bad: guitar amplifiers. A great deal of guitar amplifiers have a knob labeled "gain," and this is directly analogous to a digital camera's ISO setting. That's because it's increasing the equipment's sensitivity to the incoming signal (in this case the electrical sound signal from a guitar). If you turn up the gain too high you overload the amplifier and the sound output starts to break up, creating distortion.

Quite a few musicians enjoy their distortion, of course, but have varying tolerances for how easily it kicks in and how evenly it builds. Amplifiers that allow players to crank up the gain without distorting the sound can fetch a pretty penny. Nikon's D3s and Canon's 1D-MkIV, similarly, don't come cheap, because of their respective abilities to crank up the ISO setting with less noise than other cameras. Some amps, on the other hand, are desired specifically for their distortion characteristics, and famous makers such as Marshall, Fender, and Orange, are sought after because of their signature overdriven tones. Likewise, I might choose Kodak's Tri-X film over Ilford's Delta 400 because I prefer the look of one film's grain structure over another.

So maybe this will clear things up if you play electric guitar, I suppose. Or perhaps it will confuse you further. I just hope this makes ISO a little easier to understand for some folks.

I sure wouldn't mind having a few of these solar-charged lightbulbs hanging around.
(via Uncrate)

At special request from my sister-in-law, here's a little touch of beer nerdery.

For the longest time I was pretty sure I wasn't a fan of wheat beer. All wheat beer. I know, that's like saying, "I only drink red wine," or "I only drive cars over emperor penguins," but so goes my irrational mind sometimes. The point is, having tasted a few wheat beers over the past decade, I had come to the conclusion that they all had an unrefined bite and little more than summer trend status here in the US. Silly lemon wedge. So when the warmer months rolled around I generally avoided the slim, straight-sided glasses of cloudy blonde libation and stuck to my cloying brown ales instead.

About two weeks ago, however, I sat down at the bar of one of my favorite watering holes and was offered (without asking) a taste of a new Belgian ale on tap. I still don't remember the name of it, but it do remember that it was a "Belgian white" and it was incredible. I've since tried (and quite enjoyed) a few others, and it led me to examine just what differentiates wheat beers from each other.

First off, almost every wheat beer on the market is an ale. That means it's fermented warm with ale yeast which often results in a fuller and sweeter (if only in aroma) brew. There are rare wheat lagers out there, and they're likely more crisp and light. Beyond that distinction, we have two major schools of wheat beer: the German "weissbier" or "weizen," and the Belgian "witbier."

Hefeweizen seems to be the big German player here in The States, and that's basically an unfiltered wheat beer made from at least 50% malted wheat (as opposed to all barley). It's usually quite carbonated to balance out the sweetness factor, and that may be what I don't like too much about it. But it sure seemed to be a gateway drug to Beer Land for my wife and sister-in-law, so it can't be all bad.

The Belgian witbier is often made with raw wheat (unmalted) and brewed with a spice/flavoring blend called "gruit" that is often made up of coriander, orange, and hops. This stuff is magical to my palate, and it's the style of beer that I photographed - and later consumed - in my post last week (Ommegang is the brewery, and the beer was incredible).

I wish I had some witbier right now, actually. It's hot and humid outside today, and it's well past 5 o'clock at this somewhere.

At 28 years of age and having lived within 2 hours of our nation's capital for over 10 years, I have only just visited the Lincoln Memorial for the first time this past weekend. It was rather glorious.

Handcraft. Chocolate. Beards. There's not really a lot left to say about why I love this 8-minute video (via Devour):

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=13664547&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=0&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0

The Mast Brothers from The Scout on Vimeo.