#swing lens

[10247]

One of the most insane building I've ever visited

HorizonS3Pro + Kodak Ektar100

[kenobihater]

reblog for a bigger sample size of former angry, creative, and/or highly dramatic children

[kitsunetsuki]

Len Steckler - Samantha Jones (Cosmopolitan 1968)

[thebarroomortheboy]

SWINGING THE LAMBETH WALK (1940) | dir. Len Lye

[heroinsight]

outtake for Harper’s Bazaar, 1966 by Len Steckler

[friend-of-a-cat]

OBSESSED with Parry by Miyamori Bungaku. Such a banger. Also the MV is so colourful and fun and adorable.

[themyscirah]

Okay so basically the United States MINT of all people is going to be working with DC to make a line of coins! These coins sadly won't be in circulation (the things I would do to live in a world where I could get Batman coins from the supermarket) as they're collectors coins, but will be releasing over the course of the next 3 years, 2025-2027.

Designs haven't been released yet (the same is true for all 2025 designs) but we know there will be 9 coins in total (3 each year) with the first year featuring (of course!!!) Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

Although we know the first three heroes to be featured, the remaining six have yet to be decided, and it turns out the Mint is putting out a survey on their site to gauge which of a group of culturally significant heroes people want to see most! (link to the form is mentioned in the article above)

The considered group includes: Supergirl, the Flash, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Captain Marvel, John Stewart GL, Aquaman, Hawkman, Jamie Reyes BB, Robin (Damian?), Cyborg, and Batgirl, of which 6 will be selected.

As someone who does a bit of coin collecting myself (mainly circulation coins like the quarters sets, but I also have a couple proof and collectors coins) I think this is a really cool and interesting idea that showcases the history of the comics medium and these characters and their influence on American culture. Really excited to wait and see what the designs look like for the coins already announced!

[obscure-vocaloid-artists]

CATTS is a spanish producer that uses a variety of genres to bring out the most of their music. They’re mostly an experimental electronic producer, but have also done select songs in swing tempo, dark cabaret, or even industrial and waltz-esque songs. They use a variety of vocals, including vFlower, GUMI, Kagamine Len, and even their own utauloid, Hajime Ichida.

They are part of the circle Cyanide Cats.

You might know them from...

Mind-Switcher, which as of writing, has gained around 40k views.

Other songs I recommend...

Melancholy Train - GUMI

What I Heard from the Mirror - v4flower & GUMI

Synthetic Heart - Yohioloid

Go show them some love!

youtube | twitter | soundcloud

[evilhorse]

You’ve got a great swing, sweetheart!

[unproduciblesmackdown]

behind the scenes shots ft. akd as the adjudicator, from this article about the cinematography

“In Hollywood, action filmmaking was kind of looked down upon until The Matrix, and then people realized that action could also be part of the story,” [director] Stahelski notes. “I come from a place of loving dance and theater and fine art — action can be all of those things — and one of my favorite painters is Caravaggio.” When he was looking for a cinematographer for John Wick: Chapter 2, Stahelski recalls, “I asked myself, ‘Who paints with light?’ The answer is Dan Laustsen.” In strictly cinematographic terms, Parabellum functions less like an action movie and more like a Hollywood studio musical. The film’s first battle is a close-quarters knife fight in an antique weapons shop, where the camera cuts from wide shot to wide shot, sustaining the action in long takes so that the audience can better appreciate the physical prowess of Reeves’ performance — an elaborate fighting style that combines Japanese judo and jujitsu, Brazilian jujitsu, Russian sambo, Filipino kali, and Muay Thai, more for the benefit of show than for self-defense.  “Ninety-nine percent of high-level stunt work is dance — not pirouettes, but how you move your body,” asserts Stahelski, who continues to train stuntpeople with Leitch through their company 87eleven. “I love the aesthetic of motion. A lot of our shots [in Parabellum] are lifted straight from Singin’ in the Rain and West Side Story. We’re mixing Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin with Hong Kong cinema from John Woo, Jackie Chan and the Shaw Brothers.” “We wanted to go wider than Hollywood action films normally do and really show off the choreography,” Laustsen agrees. “When the camera, lighting and actors are all moving together, it really is a dance.”

“After we made Chapter 2,” Laustsen notes, “we discussed how we could make 3 even more visually powerful. The main setting was still New York, but we wanted to bring out the city even more forcefully. We decided to shoot all at night, with rain as much as possible. Rain is fantastic because it gives a third dimension to the picture, but it is a challenge to do it, especially in a city like New York.”

The Master Anamorphics’ low-distortion design also prevents dramatic, streaking lens flares, and so the technicians at Arri Rental in Secaucus, N.J., fashioned a flare filter — comprising three strands of nylon fishing line stretched across an empty filter frame — for the XT’s and Mini’s Internal Filter Modules. When a front-of-lens filter produces a flare, Laustsen observes, it “just looks like the light is catching on a piece of flat glass in front of the lens. It’s more beautiful when the flare comes from the lens itself” — and that’s the effect that was replicated with the behind-the-lens nylon lines. “With the filters inside the camera,” the cinematographer adds, “it was also easier for first assistant Craig Pressgrove to do the lens changes.”

The exterior of the Continental was shot in lower Manhattan, but the hotel’s interiors were filmed in downtown Brooklyn, in the former Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower — which now serves as an event space —whose glass-and-wrought-iron front doors open to a 128'-long vaulted banking hall with limestone facing, marble floors, carved teller stations, and a 63'-high ceiling supported by Romanesque columns. For its role as the Continental’s lobby, the hall was furnished by Kavanaugh with two round settees crowned with statues of the Roman war gods Bellona and Mars, a fully-stocked bar, and a lounge on the mezzanine. 

Parabellum’s stages were located at Gold Coast Studios in Long Island, N.Y. The first of the production’s two notable stage-bound sets is the Continental’s terrace, for which the Rockefeller Center rooftop garden was used in Chapter 2. The schedule didn’t allow for much time to shoot Parabellum’s scene, which takes place at sunrise. “You cannot make the sun rise [for] a movie,” Laustsen notes wryly. “It’s one or two shots, and then you have daylight, and then you’re fighting to control the light.”  So, for more control, the scene was moved onstage, where the set was surrounded with a sectional 45'x350' bluescreen lit with SkyPanel S120s; a 120' black velour curtain was used to control blue spill coming from off-camera. Early-morning ambience was provided by 176 overhead SkyPanel S60s, and the light of the rising sun was simulated by a 20K tungsten Fresnel and a 24K Dino light with medium bulbs, both gelled with 1⁄2 CTS. The other key set built at Gold Coast was the “manager’s office,” a labyrinthine two-story glass-and-steel structure meant to represent the top floors of the Continental, with a 270-degree view of the adjacent skyscrapers. It’s in this space that Wick and Zero ultimately face off mano a mano. “The concept was to create a space where everything is exposed, a place where there are no secrets,” Kavanaugh explains.  To help him integrate the lighting into the design of the set itself, Laustsen worked with a virtual-reality computer model based on Kavanaugh’s design. “Chad, Kevin and I had discussions about color — cool lights inside, warm light outside,” says the cinematographer, who wanted what he describes as an “organic” light element for both spaces. The art department therefore added a 35'x14' LED wall to the set’s second floor and a 28'x12' LED billboard to the rooftop; the latter was positioned between the glass structure and a 40'x440' Rosco SoftDrop that was backlit by 150 SkyPanel S60s through Magic Cloth sourced from The Rag Place.  Almeida and his rigging crew installed more than a mile of LiteGear Chroma-Correct RGB-Daylite LED LiteRibbon into the glass and steel set, using aluminum profile and plastic diffusers provided by Kavanaugh’s art department. Cues were orchestrated from an ETC Ion Xe console operated by Kent Arneson; Laustsen took advantage of that control to increase the intensity of the light over time — until the very end of the fight, when the two combatants are photographed primarily in silhouette against the LED walls. 

Wick literally fights his way through the set — alternately smashing his opponents and being smashed through glass pedestals, walls and floors — until he comes face to face with his nemesis. “We filmed this sequence with a [Chapman/Leonard Hustler IV] dolly and a Libra head, a Steadicam, and a couple of crane shots [with a MovieBird 45 and Aerocrane jib],” Laustsen details. “We didn’t want to go handheld because of all the straight lines. It would be a much more powerful look for the film if the frame was always parallel to the set.” “When we did bring in lights for the close-ups, we used Arri SkyPanel S60s and Astera AX1 LED tubes that we could attach virtually anywhere using magnets and clips,” Almeida adds. “The Astera tubes worked out great because they’re easy to hide, and if you saw a reflection, it just looked like the lighting that was built-in already.”

[gacmediadaily]

[10247]

Horizon S3Pro+KodakUltramax 400

A day walk in Sao Paulo old center.

Walking around downtown Sao Paulo for the first time in a year. I've walked these streets for decades and once again I could see the beauty I've always seen and the energy of the people mixed with the decadence and history of this city.

[kenobihater]

i legit don't get the appeal of viewing a character you like as a "100% unproblematic fave". y'all realize that a character can both be staunchly good with many positive traits AND have some flaws as well, right? to me, viewing a moral yet multifaceted character as faultless is like baking a cake with no salt. yeah, it's sweet, but it's too sweet because there's no salt to elevate the flavor! where's the depth in a character that is entirely perfect? where's the compelling motivations and character work? where's the humanity in that?

thankfully, i don't see much of this complete denial of flaws in the popular fanon of characters i enjoy, but what i DO see frequently is a shift in focus from characters' overall negative behaviors - behaviors directed both at themself and towards others - to depicting their self-destructive behaviors as their sole flaws. self-destruction is viewed as an "acceptable" flaw, unlike causing harm to others, and is often exaggerated if not invented out of whole cloth!

for an example of this distortion: there's a heroic yet flawed character i like with a high stress position that he wholly dedicates himself to, who probably loses a bit of sleep and is seen asking for and drinking tea ONCE to buy some time. what's the fanon version of him seen in many fics? well, his missteps and occasional emotional insensitivity have gone entirely out the window, and he's been transformed into a workaholic, sleep-deprived, caffeine addict who is incapable of caring for himself. he WILL collapse at some point in order to justify his love interest swooping in and insisting that this character, a fully grown adult man in charge of 1/10th of the entire army, learns ✨the importance of self care✨

i'm not arguing for every character to be deeply flawed - i love a good hero - but by making a canonically flawed character either 1) entirely beyond reproach or 2) a self-neglectful and/or self-flagellating martyr who has never hurt anyone but themself, you're sucking the life RIGHT out of them, and boring me to tears in the process.

[haciaelmar]

here we got | Mamiya RB67 | expired Provia 100F (cross-processed) | 2023

[coollyinterferes]

“Oi, you don’t look too good...”

“Are you okay?”

[deep-space-netwerk]

So Venus is my favorite planet in the solar system - everything about it is just so weird.

It has this extraordinarily dense atmosphere that by all accounts shouldn't exist - Venus is close enough to the sun (and therefore hot enough) that the atmosphere should have literally evaporated away, just like Mercury's. We think Earth manages to keep its atmosphere by virtue of our magnetic field, but Venus doesn't even have that going for it. While Venus is probably volcanically active, it definitely doesn't have an internal magnetic dynamo, so whatever form of volcanism it has going on is very different from ours. And, it spins backwards! For some reason!!

But, for as many mysteries as Venus has, the United States really hasn't spent much time investigating it. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, sent no less than 16 probes to Venus between 1961 and 1984 as part of the Venera program - most of them looked like this!

The Soviet Union had a very different approach to space than the United States. NASA missions are typically extremely risk averse, and the spacecraft we launch are generally very expensive one-offs that have only one chance to succeed or fail.

It's lead to some really amazing science, but to put it into perspective, the Mars Opportunity rover only had to survive on Mars for 90 days for the mission to be declared a complete success. That thing lasted 15 years. I love the Opportunity rover as much as any self-respecting NASA engineer, but how much extra time and money did we spend that we didn't technically "need" to for it to last 60x longer than required?

Anyway, all to say, the Soviet Union took a more incremental approach, where failures were far less devastating. The Venera 9 through 14 probes were designed to land on the surface of Venus, and survive long enough to take a picture with two cameras - not an easy task, but a fairly straightforward goal compared to NASA standards. They had…mixed results.

Venera 9 managed to take a picture with one camera, but the other one's lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 10 also managed to take a picture with one camera, but again the other lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 11 took no pictures - neither lens cap deployed this time.

Venera 12 also took no pictures - because again, neither lens cap deployed.

Lotta problems with lens caps.

For Venera 13 and 14, in addition to the cameras they sent a device to sample the Venusian "soil". Upon landing, the arm was supposed to swing down and analyze the surface it touched - it was a simple mechanism that couldn't be re-deployed or adjusted after the first go.

This time, both lens caps FINALLY ejected perfectly, and we were treated to these marvelous, eerie pictures of the Venus landscape:

However, when the Venera 14 soil sampler arm deployed, instead of sampling the Venus surface, it managed to swing down and land perfectly on….an ejected lens cap.