This is what it’s all about

Jackie Robinson In 3-D

With perhaps days/hours to go before the baby, I’m doing a big push on Jackie Robinson to see how far I can get before my life changes so much.  I had a big day in the shop yesterday and took these stereo photos.

Together, they can be viewed in 3-D.  If you were one of those who could left your eyes relax and see those old 3-D, computer-generated drawings, then you SHOULD be able to do this the same way.  I can do it.  But it takes a few moments to get it.

The trick, for me, is to get far enough away from the two photos, so that they are a little smaller than a postcard, held at arms length.  Then you stare, allowing your eyes to relax and not truly focus.  When your eyes are relaxed correctly, you should see double–that’s 4 images.  Keep trying different pressures on your focus until the two center photos become 1 photo and it will be 3-D.  It’s eerie.  When you get it, you will KNOW, so if you are wondering, then you don’t have it.  Remember: Try and make the middle two images merge into one, so that overall, there are 3 photos, and only concentrate on that middle photo–that’s the one that will become 3-dimensional.

How did I take this photo?  With a 3-D camera?  Nahh, with my own camera.  Since I’m working with a tripod, and nothing is in motion, the time lapse between photo1 and photo2 can be ignored.  You couldn’t do this trick with live action, because p1 and p2 would not match.  But in the studio, you just take one photo and then move the tripod 80mm to the right and take another one.  80mm is about the distance between people’s eyes.  The “interpupillary distance”.  Actually, in the population, it’s much smaller for most and is smaller for women and bigger for some ethnic groups.  It runs between 65 and 83 mm.  At 25.4 mm per inch, you do the inch-math.

With the two photos of EXATLY the same thing and yet from two slight different (80mm apart) vantage points, they are about what your brain takes in and processes into one, 3-D image.  The slightly different perspective means that the right eye sees a little further around Jackie’s left side, than the left eye can see.  That info is used by your wonderful brain to give you all sorts of depth and distance information.  Imagine trying to golf without it!  “How far to the pin?”  “Where’s the 150 yd marker?”

And for you Liberals out there, remember, the beauty of the eye and the brain and the depth is pure chance–we’re talking NO INTELLIGENT DESIGN, right?  Don’t even think those words in a public school.

Before you go thinking I’m some kind of techy person, realize that 3-D cameras and looking at “stereo-images” like we are here, originated at about the time of the Civil War.  Stereo view photos were all the rage from about 1870 to 1910.  They looked like this:

They were viewed in a viewer that looked like this:

The slides were available as canned, commercially produced photos of current events and famous places and landmarks.  Think GAF-viewmaster from the 1970’s:

I’m not sure why they fell out of favor.  Perhaps WWI, which destroyed so much of what good was happening in the world around 1914.

Anyway, they did commercially produce stereo cameras for the home-gamer and here is one:

All you need is the ability to take TWO images simultaneously, one interpupillary distance apart.  Now if you search for these things, you will only find, I believe, film cameras from yesteryear.  There doesn’t seem to be any digital stereo cameras available.  There are a couple of guys who have hacked together two digital cameras, but the hack is never simple and the mounting and alignment is never easy.  Both lenses have to point at the same focal point out in space, or the pictures will look hokey–like mine!

What I want to know is why doesn’t SOMEone produce a decent digital stereo camera?  WHY?  With PC’s bringing down photography prices and giving us all sorts of exotic ways to display them, it’s a perfect marriage!  I have searched, but not recently, so it’s possible that there is something out there now.  If anyone knows of a product, comment in please.

For Jackie fans, Jackie may be getting his first paint today on the lower legs and shoes and pants.  It’s always the single biggest, quickest change in the statue and for a medium that goes crawling by in the hundreds of hours, this is a welcome thing.

Jack In A Block

Jackie’s hands are in that block.  Although I’m not quite there yet, I’m dreaming of the moment I can begin to cut up that block.  My wife thinks I should be dreaming of our impending baby–on or about March 17th…

Yankees 2009 Team Salary Payroll

Here are the MLB team salaries going back to 1993.  Figures are from USA Today.  Notice where the Yankees are each year and by how much.  It’s breathtaking:

Babe Ruth Homer in the Gloamin’

Work has been challenging, so I wanted to harken back to the last big project that went really well.  Here is the life-size Babe Ruth statue in the Gaylord National Hotel in Washington, DC.  This 2000 room hotel will likely have every room filled soon for the innaguration and I wish like heck the Jackie Robinson statue was done and down there, but it isn’t.

I took this photo and I just like the sillouette against the 18 story high atrium.  That atrium has to be seen to be believed.  The sun has just set over Alexandria, VA and the house lights are about to kick in and do their thing.

Would that I

Jack in his earliest full figure mode.  We’re a bit beyond this point by now.  Other statues have had the “second-story, box-construction”, but none have been done as well as this one.  After a few attempts and some wasted wood, I have gotten it right.  Not only the size but the fact that you leave the back out, and do that as a separate piece–a third peice, to be joined later.  I’ve finally gotten smarter and gotten over my monolithic thinking.

While it’a about wood, it’s specifically about 4 equations:  Wood=$.  Wood=LBS.  Wood=Time.  Time=$.

The project at my IT job is going full bore.  I’m 12 hours a day on site every day and I haven’t even looked at Jack Roosevelt this week.  And a time when I was cruising too!  Hurts, but what can you do.

I am working with a project manager from the vendor who is challenging every fiber of my self-restraint.  And this vendor has already pushed us back 4 months on this project on basically, a whim.  I got a call from the VP of Client Services saying, “…ahh, we can hit our Sept go-live and training dates, but you won’t have the best experience.  If you want to push back to Jan, we can recommend that will be better.”

I was dumbfounded.  I was also impressed with their honesty, but overall, they were telling me flat out: “You aren’t a big client and/or you don’t mean a whole hell of a lot to us right now.  Your gig, is peanuts–we have bigger irons in the fire and we’re pulling the resources from you to deal with that, and you will probably be better off listening to us”.

It’s like a waiter saying, “you don’t really want the lamb (something that actually happened to me in Toronto once)”.  You listen to that because you KNOW it’s difficult for them to say, so you KNOW that there’s a damn good reason that they are saying it!

My one feeling after agreeing to table the project to January, was that, “…boy, after pulling that, they are going to really overdeliver in Jan on the professional services…”

Ha!  WRONG!  I would want to overdeliver to a client after pulling that stunt, but THEY see it differently.  They gave me not just the junior varsity, they gave me the freshman squad.  You know when a project manager is so clueless, that they don’t even know they’re bad?  They still have that dopey, annoying, high-opinion of themselves while they happily waste your time, money and resources.

On their leaving the data entry portion of the project, on Thursday, this woman said to me, “…don’t worry, as your people key in more charts, the folder with the charts to be keyed, will go down, and the completed folder will grow”.

She took a few more words to say it than that, but it was essentially that same message.  At the point I was hearing it and realizing what captain-obvious thing she was saying to me, it was all I could do to not laugh out loud in her face.  And this was after her lying and unpreparedness, cost me a few grand earlier that day–to which she instantly blamed another vendor.  You can’t make this up.

I’m not half the man I used to be

Too much work is preventing me from doing much work–on Jack, that is.  I was cruising, and the the stall.  Nothing I can do about it.  12 hour days with an hour commute at either end will do that.  Overall, he’s on his way.

I had a guy offer to split a rec baseball team with me and he’s an A#1 guy and it would be great, but with the baby on the way, it will be hard, so I had to tell him the truth, which was, just that.

I also spoke to the coach from last year’s, legendary Dodger team that shocked the town and won the world series for 8 and 9 year olds.  He would have me back as much as I can contribute with the baby, but he said that many others in town want to draft my nephew–after all, he did close the playoffs and world series and was a year younger than the older boys.  He should rage this year, or “own”, as he says.

The Real Jackie Robinson

Double Vision

Here is the output of a program I wrote in VB dot net.  It’s a slap-together program but it does what I want it to do and it’s not for sale, so I don’t care about the polish or lack thereof.

Among other things that it can do, it allows me to resize and overlay and most importantly, fade the opacity of photos, so that I can compare.  Compare what?  Compare a photo of a person in the position I’m sculpting with a photo of the work to-date.

It does in actuality, what sculptors do in their heads.  While most sculptors would love this for helping them “see” what to take-away, because of how I work,  it helps me save time and material in knowing how much wood to ADD before I do the take-away thing.

I’m still going to measure like crazy; and squint; and visulaize and draw on the piece with pencils and sharpies, but to have a static record that I can measure OFF of, without repeatedly posing and measuring myself (don’t laugh, it happens all the time), I can be quicker and more precise.

The unsettling part is that the overlays reveal errors that I have made that annoy me.  Hopefully, we can correct for them and the viewer will be blissfully, unaware and no, I never say specific, negative things about my work because that would prejudice the viewer and if they don’t find the faults that I find with the piece, are they really there?  And also remember that my standards are a lot higher than the typical, casual viewer.

Back to work.  –Fog

A Jackie Robinson tree grows in Brooklyn

And this is what we did with the tree:  (Sorry about the load times for those with slower connections).

A photo of the early going: just get that head shape down and begin to draw on the nose location and start to dig down and define it.  Until the nose is perfect, and there’s enough meat to do the other stuff in the right places, nothing else matters.

Everything looks too big and too thick because it IS!  But you have to start defining and establishing the features.  Remember, it’s take-away, so you always err on the side of BIGGER.

Somewhere around here I started to “recognize” “The Man” and not just “A Man”.  It’s a big moment.

Never touch the ears until the very end.  Last.  Because I said so.

Still a long, long way to go from here.  I have 3 other photos still in the camera, that are beyond this point.  The whole head came down and narrowed in size 10% at least.  The hat was re-worked to lost about 30% of its volume.  The ears, etc.  Come back and I’ll have the newer photos in here.  Merry Christmas!