Back at it

It seems that about once a year or so, I get the bug to do something more creative. Judging by the dates on the previous posts, that time has come around again.

This year is a bit different though. About four weeks ago my Grandmother passed away, and this past week I went down to here house in Los Angeles to help my father settle the estate. A couple of things really hit me. The first was how much useless stuff we seem to accumulate in this life, the second was the only stuff that anyone cares about is the stuff we create.

My grandmother was a painter, though I think she enjoyed the study of art more then the doing of it. She had a number of canvasses through out the house. Hardly any of them were signed. I guess she knew who painted them, so why sign them. I personally think that is a mistake. Those paintings were a part of who she was and those who look upon them should know who created the, We should leave our mark upon this world, and be acknowledged for it. I hate the idea of passing through this world without a least an acknowledgment of my part in it.

My grandfather was a photographer. Grandma still had all of his old camera and darkroom equipment in the closet off the study. He also had a bunch of photographs of his days during World War II. In addition he had a ton of old family photos and slides of his travels.

The short of this is that I took for myself some of Grandma's watercolor equipment and Grandpa's camera and darkroom stuff. I want to use it to pursue the creative and artistic sides of me. I plan to spend a little time everyday expressing my creative side, whether it is drawing, painting, photographing or simply writing in this blog. Fifteen minutes everyday, that is my plan, hopefully something good will come of it.

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.