This survey essentially saying that most people now want real smartphones (that are able to run real applications and such) and don’t want to deal with simple basic feature phones anymore. Good to hear. I’ve been saying that feature phones will be bust since 2004.

Rico Bergholdt Hansen re-posted his amazing shots on Vimeo as a new video after some of my suggestions. HD version here.

* What a stupid show “Terminator” is. So this guy had his house burned down and he lost his AI computer program that he was working for years. 2-3 weeks later (in the show’s timeline), he already had re-written from scratch the AI chess program and he was ready to compete at a Chess competition. Not only it’s not possible to write alone such a complex software “that learns” in 3 weeks, but even if he had done so, it would still be full of bugs and not ready for the competition. If the writers instead had said that the guy had a backup of the software in a safe location I’d believe them, but re-writing from scratch software in such a little time shows how the writers have no fucking clue what they are doing. It’s so fucking pissing me off having clueless people writing technology shows. You see, the people who watch sci-fi, are usually technologists and geeks. And that’s an audience that you can’t serve them shit. They’ll go elsewhere.

* “Prison Break” instead had a great episode tonight. Very intense. Too bad it will be canceled, I don’t think it will get lucky this time.

* Very interesting analysis from an MIT media professor about “Lost” and “Twin Peaks”. He claims that the puzzle factor of these series is what people want, and no matter how many people are crying foul and shout “give us answers”, in reality they don’t need answers, but even more deepen puzzles. From the moment you give them the ultimate answer that resolves the show, their interest is over for that show. This is what happened to Twin Peaks after the Laura Palmer murderer was revealed: the ratings went downhill. Not everyone likes puzzles, but everyone is intrigued by them, at least in the beginning. Because of this, such shows can lose as much as half their audience over the years, but the ones who will remain, will be fanatics.

* I’ve grown to hate John Locke. And on the upcoming “Lost” episode it will be shown what an ass he is, and that he doesn’t really know what the hell he is doing. Bleh.

* This is the story of Anonymous’ Los Angeles chapter against Scientology, in HD. I love their masks. “Remember, remember… the fifth of November…”

Gray cards allow you to set the right white balance, while at the same time they help the camera guess the right exposure, shutter speed, aperture and gain. Doing color correction in-camera with a gray card creates no artifacts & it’s more accurate that when using digital color correction on post. More information here.

While gray cards are mostly used indoors (very good to calibrate exposure on low light among other gains), you can certainly use them outdoors too if the light conditions are weird (e.g. snowy surroundings, shooting under shadowy trees, cloudy days). Buy an “18% percent” gray card for $4. The smaller ones (more convenient to carry, but not as good for outdoors) cost $2. I made a video to show off the capability.

Here’s how you use them:
1. Place the camera at the place you will be shooting from.
2. Place the gray card vertically (without an incline, facing at the lens) on the spot you will be shooting at. If outdoors, place it as far as you can, as long as it still fills the frame when you zooming-in to it.
3. Put the camera into the non-automatic mode, and select the “Custom white balance” setting. All Canon camcorders allow for custom white balance (even the cheapest ones), but most of the cheaper non-Canon cameras don’t have this feature. If that’s the case, then you can’t use a Gray card, you need a camcorder that’s more serious than a toy (sorry, I had to pick at JVC).
4. Zoom-in all the way to the gray card to fill the frame (nothing else should be shown in the LCD screen or viewfinder but a dark gray color). At that point, set the custom white balance (according to your camera’s manual).

That’s it, shoot using that setting and enjoy true whites that are not yellows or reds. If the lighting conditions change (e.g. you moved from a very shadowy tree to a less shadowy place, or if the sun changed position a lot, or if you moved to another room), you will have to redo the four steps above.

I am out of review article jobs these days, so I have lots of time to watch TV now. I don’t like reading much (I have a hard time focusing for more than 2 minutes at a time), although I might just read the new “Firefly” novel that got released recently (dunno yet).

So I asked for the Gold Edition DVD box of “Twin Peaks” for my Valentine’s gift. I am eager to watch “Twin Peaks” as I’ve always heard good things about it but when it used to air in Greece I was snobbing it. Apparently, if you like “Lost”, you will like “Twin Peaks”. Same eerie mysterious atmosphere. Netflix does not carry all the DVDs, so I am (hopefully) getting this off Amazon for $80.

I added “Space: Above and Beyond” on our Netflix queue though, and I will use their online watching facility to watch “Earth 2“. Hopefully Comcast won’t cut us out because of the downloading bandwidth…

While reading some of the customer reviews on the “Twin Peaks” Amazon page, someone mentioned “The Prisoner“. I had never heard of that TV series. I did some googling on it, and after reading what was it about, I found the premise and mystery around it very interesting. In fact, without even having seen the series, I feel that this could be a very good remake for the TV if talented writers are hired. Instead, we get a remake of “Knight Rider”.

Flower macro shots using close-up lenses (Tiffen CU+4) on the HV20, slow motion and extreme color grading. Download the 720p MP4 file or view the HD version online here.

Took 7:15′ hours to render just these 4′:10″ minutes of video, so you better watch. 😉

You don’t want to carry around tripods or even a monopod? This is a solution that it’s almost as good as a monopod in stabilization performance, it fits in your pocket, and costs just $5. Some manual assembly is required.

* Polaroid film is now past. It’s the end of an era. I only shot Polaroid film maybe twice in my life (I have very few pictures of my childhood and friends, we never had a camera in my family until the recent years), but it still feels sad.

* If I am right (I am probably not), the season finale of Lost’s 5th season (next year), it would be all about how the Oceanic Six had to leave the island, and as a flash-forward, how they come back. It would be very interesting, from the director’s point of view, to put together the two scenes: the Oceanic Six leaving the island, and some of them eventually coming back to the island years later. Two opposite scenes, back to back, within 3-5 minutes. And they can add some poetic justice into it, having the Six being unhappy leaving the island because they leave people behind, and happy coming back to it for the final act, after having spent 5 seasons wanting to get out of there. That would be killer. That would be art. I am pretty confident that this is how it’s going to play out.

* Popular Mechanics site has a very nice analysis on the “Lost” helicopter, and why the science around it doesn’t work.

* I was thinking earlier that “Lost”‘s and “24”‘s seasons airing at the second half of the TV season makes sense. The reason many shows lose viewership is because of the 2-month hiatus every year because of the Christmas season. TV networks could instead have completely different programming for Fall and different one for Spring. For fall: 12 episodes of a given series from September 10th to December 10th. For Spring: 18 episodes for another series from 15 January to end of May at the same timeslot. This way, you eliminate the problem of overworking the crew for 26-episodes (that’s what they used to do in the past), you have back to back episodes without holes so you retain your viewership, and you have a richer programme. And if you give writers artistic freedom and an end-date like the “Lost” writers have, you can do miracles. Problem is, TV networks would never agree to such a schedule, and the main reason is because they need to know when to cancel a show or not. The way it works now, they use their Fall ratings to decide if they will cancel shows or not. By doing this 12+18 you need to know beforehand how many episodes to order, and that can be proven expensive if the show is not a success.

* I posed the question over at DarkUFO’s site about how viewers watch “Lost”. Apparently, 25% of them pirate it. However, let’s be clear about it: the people who pirate it, are mostly viewers from other countries that their TV channels will either never show “Lost”, or they broadcast these episodes weeks or months later. This is simple a clear cut clue that “selling shows abroad” does not work anymore. The Internet has taken barriers down, and everything that’s time critical, it has to happen NOW, otherwise face lots of piracy. I think that TV networks should stop thinking of making money by selling shows abroad as much as they could in the past, and instead open their web sites for everyone (not IP-lock them as ABC does these days), and add ads in there, and let EVERYONE, from any country in the world, to watch these shows. Money, again, should come from ads. Sure, ads won’t be as targeted anymore, but what can you do? At least you could potentially have more viewers as long as IGMP Multicast takes off with routers/ISPs. Interestingly, in the poll, so far the iTunes option has 0%.

* Sushi tonight, out with my JBQ. Yum!

“Lost” did about 15.1 mil viewers last night, which was not too bad at all (it’s still the No1 show in the key demographic slice despite overall viewers going down over the years). I’ve noticed two occasions on last night’s episode that show the brilliance of the writers.

1. When Jack tells newcomer Miles that there are guns pointed into his head and Miles doesn’t believe him, and then voila, Juliet and Sayid are appearing off the jungle aiming Miles.

This is reminiscent of the scene where Tom Friendly told Jack in Season 2 the exact same thing and Jack didn’t believe him. “Liiight uuup”, Tom shouted, and dozens of fires were lit. It shows how the “Others” are now the old force in the island, with most of their good men/women dead, and the Losties are the new arising power there. It shows how much the group has grown up since their crash, how much more experienced they are, and how much the tables have turned.

2. Team-Locke creeping out Charlotte.

Locke and his people were downright creepy to poor Charlotte who had just parachuted to the island along the other 3 guys. Exactly the same way the “Others” appearing creepy to the “Losties” on the previous seasons. Team-Locke is not willing to talk about the island or its powers, or even who they are individually, just like the Others did in the past.

This is tragic irony at its best. We spent 3 seasons siding with the crash landed losties, only to find out that they have become as creepy as the “Others” because of the circumstances. This is great writing. This just shows that something that someone might call “good” or “bad”, is simply “a point of view” and neither good or bad. You got to love the philosophical references on “Lost”.

On a related note, Matthew Fox (“Jack”) said that if they will shoot new episodes after the strike ending, it won’t be more than 4-6 episodes.

Macro footage shot with my HV20 and a Canon 50mm 1:1.8 macro lens, turned into a slow-motion abstract project. View in HD and/or download it here.

Update: Video updated and replaced with a new version.