The Happiest Place on Earth
At least it is for guys like me.
I recently moved out to Banff to attend the Banff Centre of the Arts. The week preceding my move was one whirlwind after another. I received an email a week before I had to be in Banff requesting me to come be a part of the program. Within that week, I cancelled my bills, changed my address, gave notice, sold my furniture, and in the last three days before moving, I worked 36 hours as a production assistant at the Rifflandia Music Festival.
It definitely sucked leaving all the people in Victoria. Every time I had left before, it was more a temporary thing, and a return flight was always booked. With this trip however, there’s no certainty to where I’ll end up after this program. So that day and flight out was quite hard on me. Luckily I was surrounded by great people and a great girl to make it a little bit easier on myself. She went above and beyond in that last week and it made everything much easier on me.
But that’s the boring mushy stuff. Holy smokes the Banff Centre is awesome. This place fucking rules. The amount of great people here, the setting, the gear, the access to studios, microphones, musicians, and everything is super fantastic. I’m so excited to get working on projects here and becoming a better engineer. The thing I think I’m most looking forward to is being an engineer for a full-time job. Not like in the past where I got to go into the studio after classes or when I could find time, but that it’s my primary requirement that I be in the studio as much as possible. That’s a very exciting realization for me.
The new people here are awesome as well. I’m impressed how quickly and how well I get along with the other work studies. It must have something to do with the air and the environment that just makes people so friendly. We spent the last week going out nightly and just hanging out most of the time together. I’ve taken it upon myself to show these guys (2 brits and a yank) the greatest of Canadian stereotypes. We’ve done Tim Hortons, and today we’re going to go have some poutine. It’s going to be a grand ol’ Canadian time. Maybe I’ll get them to say eh and wear toque’s too!
1 000 000 000 000 Frames A Second
This is incredible. Watching the duality of light in super duper slow motion! Awesome! Science rules!
In 1964 MIT professor Harold Edgerton, pioneer of stop-action photography, famously took a photo of a bullet piercing an apple using exposures as short as a few nanoseconds. Inspired by his work, Ramesh Raskar and his team set out to create a camera that could capture not just a bullet (traveling at 850 meters per second) but light itself (nearly 300 million meters per second).
Stop a moment to take that in: photographing light as it moves. For that, they built a camera and software that can visualize pictures as if they are recorded at 1 trillion frames per second. The same photon-imaging technology can also be used to create a camera that can peer “around” corners , by exploiting specific properties of the photons when they bounce off surfaces and objects.
Among the other projects that Raskar is leading, with the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture research group, are low-cost eye care devices, a next generation CAT-Scan machine and human-computer interaction systems.
Papers:
Andreas Velten, Thomas Willwacher, Otkrist Gupta, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Moungi G. Bawendi and Ramesh Raskar, “Recovering ThreeDimensional Shape around a Corner using Ultra-Fast Time-of-Flight Imaging.” Nature Communications, March 2012
Andreas Velten, Adrian Jarabo, Belen Masia, Di Wu, Christopher Barsi, Everett Lawson, Chinmaya Joshi, Diego Gutierrez, Moungi G. Bawendi and Ramesh Raskar, “Ultra-fast Imaging for Light in Motion” (in progress). http://femtocamera.info
“Though photographs in the near future will still be composed by people holding cameras, it will gradually become more accurate to say pictures were computed rather than ‘taken’ or ‘captured.’”Popular Photography magazine
