Playing with pinholes

Pinhole cameras that is.

I've wanted to play with pinhole cameras for years, but I never got started. The mess and expense just seemed too far out of reach. A few weeks ago I saw a video on the Makers vlog tthat made everything sound so simple that I decided to just dive in. I gathered up a shoe box, a soda can and some black duct tape and got to work.



In about 15 minutes, I had a camera. I darkened the bathroon as best I could, loaded some photo paper into the camera and headed into the world to make art. After making the exposure, I mixed up the chemicals and developed the photo. I was amazing to see the image come up in the developer. It actualy looked like something. Not great art by any means, but a recognizable image. My dauther Sabrina, and I spent the rest of the day running around taking pictures and playing mad scientist in the darkroom. Here are two of the images.




During the week, I read all I could about the subject. I learned that I should really create an exposure chart for my camera. Normally this involves measuring the pinhole diameter and doing some calculations. Since I didn't have a slipe projector or scanner to help me meacure my pinhole, I decided on an alturnative method.
I took a series of exposures and deturmined that 30 seconds was optimum for that day. The day had a sunny clear sky so using the Sweet 16 rule I figured my camera is about f/185. So far my method seems to be working. Here is the output from those tests.

Building games with Phrogram

I've been playing with Phrogram for the past few weeks. I absolutely love it. I've been a software developer for many years now, and I've always wanted to create a game to play with my children. I've done simple stuff like a math game to help Sabrina with her multiplication, but never a full on graphics based game. I guess that my time for programming projects outside of work is so limited that I really don't want to spend hours spelunking the depths of DirectX, just to create a simple game. Phrogram takes care of all of the DirectX stuff so I can concentrate on the game itself.

When I was younger, I had an Atari 2600 (Wow, am I dating myself). Each Atari game console came with a game called Combat. I loved Combat, especially the tank games. Each player had a tank and you roamed the screen shooting each other. My father and I spent hours playing together. So when I found Phrogram, Combat was the game I wanted to create.

Within a hour or so, I had a joystick controlled tank that you could move around the screen and shoot at a target. Remember this was a new system for me to learn and that hour includes creating my tank graphic. Try that with straight DirectX!

I had a problem though. Phrogram only supports one joystick. What was I to do? Create an AI of course! I did some research and was starting to write the code when Phrogram suddenly came out with support for multiple joysticks. Happy Day! I hope to have the game finished up this weekend. I'm still going to build that AI though.

In short, Phrogram is gets you huge bang for your buck. If you want to create some games without a huge time investment, try it out.