Two photos with natural effects

Having recently joined a site for photographers I'm having a great time learning, like by studying great examples of incredible pictures from lots of expert photographers, and you also get advice on handling your own pictures.

Which means I'm finally learning more about photo editing. So will admit, mainly because I wasn't that serious yet, have just thrown up pictures on the web the way the camera presented them. Which is easier, so it's not that I was ever against photo editing, just didn't feel serious enough to do it with my own, but now am learning.

With that said, looking for an opportunity to share from the site, since I recently arrived and want to see what that looks like. And though I didn't do photo editing I have two photos which I think have natural effects. But it's just what the camera captured. So any effects are what it did, not me. And in these examples the camera was on my smartphone a Motorola Droid2.

Both of these photos are from the Winter of 2012, in San Francisco, and I've given them before in various places, but this way can share from my new profile.

Quiet along the Embarcadero by James Harris on 500px

The photo looks sort of black and white but is in color. It was just a grey, wintry day. You can see the color in the trees, the taxi towards the back, and the bow and arrow, called Cupid's Span.

So no photo editing was done here. It's just what the Droid2 decided to capture.

Entering Chinese New Year Parade by James Harris on 500px

Next the camera properly focused on one guy happening to look to the side, and you get this blurring from other elements because they were moving, which I like.

And again no photo editing was done. Pictures are just what the camera decided it wanted to take when I hit the button.

And that's enough for this check to see how photos pull in from the site.

So far looks like a better way to do it.

Now I can keep my best photos central to one spot, from which I can share easily.

Great!


James Harris

Exceptions and logic

One of those fascinating things to me is the power of thinking that comes with coding for computers, which introduces the necessity and power of exceptions.

Doesn't seem like much? Well consider these two examples:

Consider a small village where all men are shaved, the barber is a man, and the barber shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves, except himself, as the barber shaves himself.

Remove the exception and you run into problems as explained here.

So let's handle the abstraction: consider a set that includes all and only sets that exclude themselves, except itself.

So clearly the first example can exist! You can have a village with the conditions given.

But what about the second example?

If we follow the pattern from the first, it seems there's no reason for it not to exist! As the exception is key to making it logical.

Here remove the exceptions and the results do not work. Prior to computers maybe that was an impassable hurdle and seemed like something magical to the people who spent endless hours puzzling over statements similar to them with the necessary exceptions missing. Their thinking quite simply, was too primitive for the task.

All that effort through years by very intelligent people and I can just type up a quick post which you can read through in a few minutes.

Our civilization is far more advanced today than it was for those who ran in circles without realizing the full power of exceptions. 

We think differently in the modern age--thanks to computers.

Thinking I should tone down this post, but the concept is interesting enough for me to leave it in its strongest form.

That our tools shift our mental approach is not even something I came up with, as really was fascinated by it being mentioned as key in a TED talk by James Flynn.

It got me to thinking again about this area: what if prior people simply thought in a way that made it difficult to handle these things which they called "logical paradoxes" which is an oxymoron because their minds weren't quite ready for the answer?

James Harris

Counting primes, posting again

Turns out possibly the best available way to learn how to count prime numbers is also one of the easiest to show.

With ints or longs--where p_j is the jth prime:

P(x,n) = x - 1 - sum for j=1 to n of {P(x/p_j,j-1) - (j-1)}

That summation will count primes if you make sure n equals the count of primes up to sqrt(x), but no higher.

There is nothing else discovered that is as simple that is also as fast.

An example of it counting primes is with P(100,4) = 25. So then it counts primes up to 100, where there are 25, and needs to be told the primes up to sqrt(100) = 10, and there are 4 of them. And those primes are: 2, 3, 5 and 7.

That's using the form where it needs to be told the primes up to sqrt(x), but you can fully mathematicize it into a form where it finds them on its own. But that slows it down and it looks a little more complicated.

And I've posted about it before.

Have had it for over a decade. Came across it as a problem solving thing, just started thinking to myself about counting prime numbers.


James Harris

Enjoying photography is easier

Yesterday finally joined a great photography site which is 500px.com and wondering now what took me so long! It's been nice to put up some of my pictures and have people actually showing they like them and even better looking around at great photos from others.

It took the web for me to fully embrace my love of photography as it's made it so much easier.

For someone like myself technology has allowed so much more than buying an expensive book of photography, rarely, or mostly browsing them in bookstores, or checking books of photographs out from the library.

And now I can even put up some of my own! And share them.

Oh yeah, posting about it to note that rarity of the thrill when you come across a web community where you're just giddy with excitement. And so far haven't noticed any downsides. Which is so HUGE, as sad reality I've often faced on the web is quite different. Things seems to be so much fun until they aren't.

But no point expecting negatives. And here I don't. I've known about the site for a while and even had some interactions with it for some time. Increasingly that's the way I like to do it. Take your time on the web. You have to watch websites over time.

Which explains what took me so long. Like I didn't know.

So for now everything looks good, literally and figuratively.


James Harris

Benefits of community perspective

Seems to me when you think about community, especially a healthy one, you don't imagine people charging each other for everything. And in fact money is usually considered separately from within community though important for the community to have. And that perspective helped me out immensely when I started trying to figure out what was going on with my open source project.

When I first officially became an open source developer by putting my project Class Viewer on SourceForge back February 2004, I wasn't sure what might happen. Guessed anything from it could simply bomb or that it could bring vast amounts of attention for which I wasn't sure I was ready. And vaguely thought that if the latter there might be some way to monetize to some extent.

Over a decade later I'm puzzling over what actually happened, and gained insights by realizing that I provided a valuable tool for the Java software developers community as evidenced by continuing downloads, and it was best to push the idea of money completely out of the picture.

And from a community perspective I'm quite satisfied as I posted memorializing 10 years, where I noted over thirty five thousand downloads from over 150 countries, which I think can be considered indication of usefulness. And downloads continue.

With so many posts on other subjects some may wonder if project development will continue, and as far as I'm concerned it will as the project is still supported. Just don't have anything else I want it to do as of yet, and I've been pondering other subjects.

It's interesting to me that the more community level your project is, the less money I think will be involved, unless you can pull in advertising, as people don't tend to associate handing money over for community type things. Or that's my theory, as I sat down and worked out my own theory of money, which I've posted about before, as yeah, still need to make it, but a community type project is NOT the way, in my opinion.

And have to emphasize it's my opinion as maybe others find something different, but I've seen plenty examples by now that seem to indicate the truth of that perspective, and why wouldn't it be that way? Fostering community is a different world than trying to get people to hand over money for some product or service.

And in fact profit as a primary motivation has long been seen as detrimental to community.

So there's kind of a conflict I think where people who figure out how to make money are currently the heroes, because hey, plenty of people want to be rich, while those with more community type project, like a lot of the work to build web structure globally, which is mostly open source, are showing up in the news as being impoverished.

Of course if you understand money then you know why, and it's no more of a big deal than noting that water is wet.


James Harris