Currently listening to Paris based Music Director Niru’s debut tamil film score for ‘Kalabak Kadhalan’.
Fresh music.
But I am afraid to see who is the hero of the film is – I just don’t want to find out its ‘SJ Suryah’, and start hating the music… I hope its a ‘Farhan Aktar type’ of new director. Tamil films badly need freshness.
Its one of those things – you keep flipping the channels and you catch 10secs of something and continue watching it for hours. That’s what happened to me over the weekend. I just fell in love with this HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm. It was spontaneous – it was funny, it was just so freaking fresh!
I just can’t curb my enthusiasm for it.
Its a show which is shot without a script. First TV show to use Cinéma Vérité (a style of Filmmaking like Dogme95 but more similar to Zen Filmmaking). Where all actors are given outlines, and they just push the story forward. Two camera guys follow the actors around with a digital betacam, and they just keep improvising. Since no one knows what the other guy is going to say – the reactions are genuine, dialogues real and finally acting – acting? what acting?.
Well here is one cool new camera – instead of going up in a mega pixel war like “64megapixel camera”, some Stanford students spent time on improving the imaging technology behind the capture device.
So, what the heck is Plenoptic ?
Apparently, its a camera which is capable of refocusing after the picture is shot.
Original Picture:
Computer Refocussed:
Notice how the focus has changed from white guy in the first picture to the black guy in the second picture – now that’s what I call a breakthrough imaging.
I have been playing the NEF (Nikon Electronic Format) images for all my shots – so I know the power post production brings out (hidden latitude and colorspace) from an image. I enjoy the freedom of changing even the exposure values in the post, as NEF is basically data which is stolen from the camera before they are put through the JPG compression grinder. Now this Plenoptic camera goes even one step further – it allows you to choose your Depth of Field and Point of Focus.
This opens up a boatload of creative opportunities! I have discarded so many many wonderful moments coz they are not in proper focus.
How do they do it?
They explain it here:
This is achieved by inserting a microlens array between the sensor and main lens, creating a plenoptic camera. Each microlens measures not just the total amount of light deposited at that location, but how much light arrives along each ray. By re-sorting the measured rays of light to where they would have terminated in slightly different, synthetic cameras, we can compute sharp photographs focused at different depths. We show that a linear increase in the resolution of images under each microlens results in a linear increase in the sharpness of the refocused photographs. This property allows us to extend the depth of field of the camera without reducing the aperture, enabling shorter exposures and lower image noise. Especially in the macrophotography regime, we demonstrate that we can also compute synthetic photographs from a range of different viewpoints. These capabilities argue for a different strategy in designing photographic imaging systems.
I don’t understand a word of it – but the pictures speak for themselves.