dangermouse.net – David Morgan-Mar

A Monday off!… mostly

Well, it was a Monday when I didn’t have any Outschool online classes, since I cancelled the full week’s worth of classes due to last week’s ISO Photography standards meeting, and my topic weeks run from Tuesday to Monday, so today is actually part of last week. Normally I do five classes on Monday, so it’s a busy one.

But I still had the three-hour lecture on Data Engineering to attend and help students with at the university this afternoon. But that by itself is a lot easier than the full Monday.

Tomorrow night there is a total lunar eclipse visible from here in Sydney, the full phase lasting from 10:04-11:02pm. I thought for a second it was tonight, and figured that was typical, since it’s currently raining steadily and the rain is set to last all night. But we might have a chance of clear skies tomorrow!

And in personal relevance of world news, I saw today that an apartment tower in Bahrain has been hit by an Iranian drone attack. One of my current Outschool students lives in Bahrain, so I really hope she was far from that attack and is okay. It’s pretty worrying, actually. Her next class is on Thursday, so I’m very hopeful that she’ll show up.

My first time at a sketching group

My wife has been doing sketching and watercolour for a bit over a year, and has recently been going to a few different sketching groups that meet up around Sydney to socialise and draw together. This morning one was meeting walking distance from our place, and she asked me to go along. We walked down with Scully and I took a small folding chair to sit on. My wife had used the chair before, but said it wasn’t convenient for her paints, since they had to go on the ground and it was too hard to reach them.

When we got there, she found a place to sit on the root of a fig tree, which was lower to the ground and more convenient. The group was pretty casual, with about a dozen people there. The subject was a Victorian terrace house, mostly covered in ivy. Everyone I saw was doing watercolour work, but I like to just sketch in ink or pencil, so I completed my sketch pretty quickly.

For this one I used two different grey felt tip pens:

Others including my wife were still going on their watercolours, so I flipped the page in my sketchbook and took out my selection of grey watercolour “brush” pens:

That gives a much looser style, since the pen tips are broader and it’s difficult to do fine lines, so I need to work in blocks of different shades of grey. Although the packet says “brush pens”, the tip is actually a flexible felt tip. Then I tried my Japanese brush pen:

This pen is an actual brush with bristles, supplied with ink from the reservoir. I really like this pen, because it behaves more like a calligraphy brush, and you can do thin and thick lines more easily than the felt “brush” tips. Finally, I pulled out a 2B pencil:

Unlike the pens, a pencil can produce different darknesses by varying the pressure, so can create shadows with varying intensity. I’m pleased with how these different media show off different aspects of the same subject. By the time I’d finished these four drawings, my wife was ready to go, having completed her watercolour drawing.

Finally, to show you the actual building, I took a photo:

As you can see, I ignored the car parked in the foreground and interpolated through the foreground trees as well (plane tree, and the fig tree that my wife was sitting on a root of). I also didn’t include any of the background buildings. I considered that, but decided against it. Anyway, it was a fun experience!

When we got home we had lunch, and then soon after left for an afternoon tea at my wife’s mother’s place, with my wife’s brother and sister as well. We had a few little cakey things cut into bite-sized pieces, including a very nice salted caramel tart.

Then we drove home and I had my only online class for the week: the older students doing the current affairs news stories. Today we discussed:

Austrian climber found guilty after girlfriend froze to death on mountain – considering questions about whether the mountaineer should be held responsible for safety of his climbing partner or not.
And the follow-up: How responsible are climbers for each other’s safety? Mountaineers react to manslaughter – thinking about how this might affect mountain climbing as a recreation.
Meet the mapmakers recording every remote road in Australia to keep travellers safer – talking about how trusting technology can make people ignore common sense.
Instagram to alert parents if teens search for self-harm and suicide content – discussing whether this is useful or harmful, and if Instagram is shirking its responsibility to keep teens safe online.
The Chinese AI app sending Hollywood into a panic – thinking about the potential impacts on the movie industry.

It’s always an interesting class, with some very thoughtful opinions and comments from the students.

Mostly just sorting and photographing cards

I spent most of Saturday sorting through Magic: the Gathering cards, photographing them, inventorying, and then posting for auction on eBay. I really wanted to break the back of this task, and I worked on the Ravnica block cards from 2005-2006, which was one of my favourite blocks when it was released and so I had a lot of cards for it. I posted auctions totalling over 2000 cards.

This clears out a significant chunk of my card storage space, and I think it may have turned the corner where I’ve now gotten rid of (or at least listed for sale) more than half my collection. My wife is keenly eyeing the storage space that I’m clearing out, to use for other things that need to be stored away.

We also went for a walk with Scully in the early evening. My wife took her to the dog groomer today, so she’s all trim and neat. I made some sourdough bread, and cooked risotto for dinner, with green beans, mushrooms, and walnuts.

ISO Photography meeting Tokyo remote attendance day 4

First thing off the bat this morning I had an appointment with my physiotherapist. A follow-up to a couple of weeks ago when I had that painful back strain. Normally one visit sets me right and I feel good enough to cancel any follow-ups. But this time I thought I’d better go to the follow-up. My back is much better, but with a tiny bit of residual soreness. Anyway, the physio did some more stretching and moving muscles and joints back into place, and I could tell there was a significant improvement again.

After that I picked up the weekly groceries from the supermarket and came home in time for the start of today’s session of the Photography Standards meeting.

Today was just administrative cleanup, going through summaries of the technicals sessions, action items, resolutions, and confirming plans for future meetings. This caused a bit of consternation as the guy who on Tuesday had confirmed that the meeting in Cambridge, UK, in October this year was going to be from 20-23 October now said it was going to be moved to 27-30 October. I’ve already booked flights to London! But we were planning two extra weeks of vacation afterwards, so now the meeting is right in the middle of the three weeks. I suppose we can make that work – a week vacation, a week working at the meeting, then another week of vacation.

The meeting wrapped up around 2:30 my time. My wife had just got home from work, having Friday afternoon off. We’d planned to go out and do something together, but the weather was still rainy. Fortunately it stopped around 3pm, so we went on a long walk down to near the harbour where there’s a Spanish restaurant that we like. It was open all afternoon, so we sat and had some afternoon tea – my wife had coffee while I had a slice of Spanish cheesecake.

Then we relaxed and did some sketches. We were sitting outside, and I drew this of the restaurant window:

And a quick pencil of a house across the street:

After a while we ordered some patatas bravas, empanadas, and arancini tapas plates to share for an early dinner. Very nice. And after eating we walked back home, getting Scully a good lot of exercise before the evening.

ISO Photography meeting Tokyo remote attendance day 3

Today the ISO Photography standards meeting began after lunch, to allow attendees in Tokyo to attend the opening VIP session of the CP+ Camera Show in Yokohama. This is always a highlight of the trip to Tokyo for people, and the reason why the Tokyo standards meetings are always in February. But for me at home in Sydney, it meant I had the morning off, until 3:30pm.

I took advantage to take Scully on a long walk, before the rain closed in in the afternoon. We had a forecast for up to 50 mm of rain today, but this evening they upgraded it to 110 mm, and tomorrow’s forecast from 25 mm to 70 mm! So yeah, the afternoon and evening have been pretty wet.

I also spent time organising and photographing more Magic: the Gathering cards for eBaying. I listed a mixed lot of 340 bulk low-value cards from a range of expansion sets spanning 2010-2016. For this lot I’ll be happy to get a few dollars and clear out a stack of cards about 20 cm high.

When the meeting began, we launched into more technical sessions. The first was image distortion, which is an old standard being revised to handle HDR and colour encodings other than sRGB, and to add more possible test charts that can be used to measure distortion.

Then it was the revision of the optical image stabilisation standard, which is in a late stage, going through comments on the draft document text.

Then depth camera measurement. The first part, dealing with accuracy over a planar surface of constant distance from the camera, has been restructured and should be approaching the final drafting stages now. Then we discussed plans for a part 2 of the standard, to deal with depth resolution. We discussed various possible methods for testing this, using different 3-dimensional targets. We did some early experiments on this a few years back, but now it’s time to concentrate on them again and develop metrics that could be useful to characterise the cameras. The plan is to do more experiments and then hopefully kick things off in the next meeting or two.

A revision of the standard on camera image resolution is in the late stage of drafting, and will go to an international ballot soon.

Image noise was the most interesting session of the day (for me, anyway). This is another old standard that is now being revised to handle HDR images. A group in Paris has been doing experiments on this, and discovering that the previous formulae for calculating visual noise in an image don’t work when tested with a large group of test observers. It turns out that low spatial frequency variations in the image (e.g. a gentle brightness gradient across the image) caused it to mess up. It wasn’t noticeable with standard dynamic range (SDR) images, but with the increased contrast in HDR images it was enough to mess up the image statistics. They came up with three candidate new formulae for calculating noise, and showed they were backward compatible for SDR images. Now we need more experiments to confirm and select from them. There was also some discussion of the appearance of chroma noise without luminance noise, and how to characterise that.

The final technical session was for HDR imaging best practices, which was mostly administrative about editing the draft document.

We finished right on time, at 7pm Sydney time (5pm in Tokyo). The last day of the meeting is tomorrow, and we only have final administrative wrap-up left to do.

My wife and I planned to take Scully for a walk when the meeting ended, but by then the rain was really pouring down heavily, and hasn’t stopped now two hours later.

ISO Photography meeting Tokyo remote attendance day 2

Today was a full day of technical session at the Tokyo photography standards meeting, that I am attending remotely from home.

The first topic was skin tone specification for photographic test charts. We’ve been working on this for a while and the document is approaching readiness for international ballot to approve it as an ISO technical report. There are several available databases of skin tone spectral reflectivity responses, and the research done by the project leaders shows that Pantone’s skin database is the best approximation to measured real skin tones and variations. Though the report doesn’t recommend any particular database to use for photographic testing purposes – it merely evaluates the possibilities.

Then we discussed high dynamic range (HDR) user control readouts on cameras, to enable better professional workflow for things like museum image capture of artefacts for cultural heritage. This is a difficult task currently and the hope is this standard in development will make this task more straightforward.

Next was a revision of the camera reference model standard, which defines how a camera system works and its capabilities. We want to add capabilities reflecting multi-image data files, and other catch-ups with recent imaging technology.

Then came opto-electronic conversion function, for which we went through a draft of the proposed revisions and comments from technical experts. This topic is about how the electrical signal from image sensors is converted into a signal that (hopefully) corresponds to the amount of light falling on the sensor pixels.

The next topic was image information capacity, continuing development of a standard to measure image quality based on how much of the information (in the information-theoretic sense) in the image is successfully recorded.

Finally we had a double session on images with associated media. This is a relatively new area we’re working on, to define capabilities and formats for photos that have other media attached, such as short videos, or audio, or accessory images such as depth maps. This is getting into the technical weeds, with a lot of discussion around things like colour encodings, necessary metadata, and so on.

All this took up the full 11am-7pm day. I had time in the morning to do a 5k run and have a shower before the meeting convened. Afterwards I just made a quick dinner and relaxed to unwind.

ISO Photography meeting Tokyo remote attendance day 1

The latest meeting of ISO Technical Committee 42, Working Group 18 Digital Photography began today in Tokyo. I’m not travelling there this year, so I’m attending remotely, using the Webex conference app. Thankfully Tokyo is only two hours west of my time zone, so the 9-5 meeting is from 11am to 7pm here.

The first half of the first day is administrative stuff. I introduced a new attendee from Australia, who is actually the professor who teaches the Data Engineering and Image Processing courses that I tutor for at the university. He is of course an imaging expert too, and he’s taking over from me as the chair of the Standards Australia national committee on photography, since my term as chair has reached the term limit. I’m still going to be attending the international meetings and writing reports, but he’ll be chairing our national meetings.

One interesting thing from the admin session was a liaison report from CIPA, the Japanese camera manufacturers’ association. They are the body that defines the Exif standard for tagging photo image files, with metadata such as the time and date the photo was taken, latitude and longitude (if the camera has GPS, such as a phone camera), photographic data such as exposure time, aperture, focal length, and so on. There are many other tags for things like the photographer name and copyright information, and more technical things like the colour space. Anyway, they are working on new tags in a revision, including tags to specify image processing methods and the intent of the person doing the processing – as in are they processing the image for HDR display, or SDR display, or printing, or projection, or whatever. Because you may want different versions for all those things.

And a second new tag is very interesting. They are adding a tag to indicate whether the creator of the photo wants to allow it to be used to train machine learning/AI systems or not. The idea is that future AI training systems would/should check for this tag in all images they are fed, and reject any images tagged by the creator as “not to be used for training AI”, and only use those images where the creator has given permission. This does require the AI developers to implement and respect this, but at least from our side—the photograph creation side—we’ve provided a method for them to actually check. The idea would be that you’d configure this in your camera and it would write it to all your photos, or after uploading to your computer you can adjust the tag with software on a case-by-case basis. It also adds a piece of evidence that you can use to say “I explicitly did not give permission for this photo to be used to train AI”.

After the lunch break (2pm to 3:30 for me), we started on the technical sessions. We talked about angle-dependent image flare, low light performance with hand shake (i.e. an unsteady hand-held camera with long exposure times), vocabulary (a standard defining technical terms), and machine vision performance.

The low light presentation had a comparison between performance thresholds for artistic photography and security camera purposes. For the former, any perceivable drop in image quality is important, whereas for the security application, a drop in image quality doesn’t matter until it starts to make it difficult to identify people, car licence plates, etc. So they were quantifying the differences.

And in the vocabulary discussion we talked about defining the term “photography”. One comment on the draft document suggested that everyone knows what photography is, we don’t need to define it. But then a person in the meeting pointed out that we are the International Standards committee on Photography, so if anyone should have the imperative to define what it is, it should be us.

The meeting ended a little early for the day, after which I made dinner for my wife and myself, and then we took Scully out for a walk. The evening air with the sun down was still warm and humid, but a breeze has picked up which made it bearable.

Extra public holiday messes things up

Today was busy. I had to go up to the post office first thing when it opened at 9am to mail a package of Magic: the Gathering cards to an eBay buyer. It was the only time I had available to do it, as I had Outschool classes to teach from 10am to 2pm, with a break for lunch, and then I had to go straight into the city for today’s Data Engineering lecture at the University of Technology.

During the lecture, the professor pointed out to students (and me!) an issue with an announcement last week by the New South Wales Government, that we would be getting an extra public holiday this year, on Monday 27 April. 25 April is ANZAC Day, and a public holiday, though this year it falls on a Saturday. There have been calls for ANZAC Day to be treated like other public holidays such as Christmas, which if they happen to fall on a weekend we get a “substitute” (technically actually an extra) public holiday on the following Monday. The extra holiday is popular with many people but war veterans have resisted it for years, saying it would devalue the day itself.

But this year the Government decided to go ahead and declare an extra public holiday. The problem for us is that this means we can’t have a Data Engineering lecture on that Monday, and so the remainder of the course has to be pushed an extra week out, lengthening the semester and making the due dates for all the student assessments a week later. The professor said this had caused a lot of headaches at the university, with a lots of semester plans upended across the faculties. It makes me wonder if the Government considered stuff like this when they decided to declare a holiday just a couple of months before the day.

The class ended a little early, so I had time to make pizza dough and cook a pizza for dinner when I got home, before my late classes began at 8pm, which took me through to 10pm. A very full day!

A sauna-wave

I don’t know if it counts as a heatwave as such, but we’re in the middle of a patch of very warm and extremely humid weather. We only got up to 32°C today, but it was oppressively humid. We’ve had the air conditioning on all day to cope, and when I went outside to take Scully out for a bit, it was really like walking into a sauna. That sort of weather where you start dripping with sweat in a few minutes, even if you’re not doing anything.

We were supposed to get a storm tonight, which might have offered some relief, but again it missed the city, this time winds blowing it to the south. Overnight the temperature is expected to only get as low as 23°C. Anything above 20°C is an uncomfortable night. But according to the forecast we’re not going to get a night below 20°C for the next week…

I did some housecleaning today, and organising some things that I’d shoved under the bed in our post-repainting clean-up. I found some more Magic: the Gathering cards from sets that I’d already eBayed in the past few weeks, which is a bit annoying… I’ll have to sell them off as small odds and ends.

Last night I started watching Jurassic World: Rebirth on Netflix. I’ll finish it tonight, but it’s half decent so far. Better than Fallen Kingdom and Dominion, anyway.

Pasta night!

This morning I went for my first run since straining my back. It’s mostly recovered after my visit to the physiotherapist and I wanted to get some exercise. But I took it easy and only ran 2.5k instead of my usual 5. Also, it was hot and humid: 27.3°C and 74% humidity. So my time wasn’t great, but at least i did it.

Before lunch I laid out and photographed more Magic: the Gathering cards, this time all my cards from Time Spiral block (2006-2007). It was a total of 945 cards, so took some time to lay out so I could photograph them all. And then after lunch I had to count and catalogue them all into a text list for posting on eBay. Which also took some time. So that took up a chunk of the day.

When I took Scully out for a toilet about 3pm, the hot sun was giving way to heavy storm clouds. I took this shot of some mammatus formations.

The rain radar showed heavy thunderstorms approaching, so we went back inside to wait the out before a planned walk with my wife later in the evening. But the wind shifted and blew the storms north of the city, and we didn’t get any rain beyond a scant few drops.

For dinner I made pasta. As in I made pasta. I’ve wanted to make my own pasta for a while—I’ve never done it before—and the other day I saw a cooking show on TV where a guy did this super simple version. It’s just a dough of strong flour (i.e. bread/pasta flour with high gluten content, not cake flour with lower gluten) with half as much water by weight. You knead it a bit and let it rest a few minutes, then cut it into pieces and roll it out into long strands with your hands. I made mine about 4 millimetres thick. This shape is called pici.

For a sauce, I roasted some cherry tomatoes to caramelise the skins:

Then mashed them up with some freshly chopped basil while I boiled the pasta.

Served with shaved Parmigiano Reggiano:

It was delicious! And my wife said from now on I have to make pasta like this all the time.