Hasta La Gadget!

Timur Civan is a director of photography for movies, and a photographer. He’s also a tinkerer, and he got his hands on an old Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat, a hand cranked movie-camera lens from 1908. You see it above, wedded to his Canon 5D MkII. But where did it come from?

Civan got a call from his friend, known mysteriously only as “a Russian lens technician”:

He found in a box of random parts, hidden inside anther lens this gem. A circa 1908 (possibly earlier) 35mm lens. Still functioning, mostly brass, and not nearly as much dust or fungus as one would think after sitting in a box for over a hundred years. This lens is a piece of motion picture history, and at this point rare beyond words. So I say to him, “Wow… what do you have in mind?” he smiles, and says, (in the thickest Russian accent you can imagine) “I can make this fit EF you know…”

The results are astonishing. This century-old hunk of glass and brass makes a great picture. There’s vignetting at the edges, a softness and a lack of biting contrast. There’s also a color-shift in the non-black-and-white images. In short, the lens adds all the tweaks you might do in post-processing to Holga-fy your pictures. Civan is planning on shooting some footage with the lens, too, which is its purpose after all, and promises to share the results on the Cinema 5D forums, where he posted his photographs.

But aside from the great pictures, and the wonderful story of the mysterious Russian, we can learn something from this tale. Camera-tech comes and goes, but photography is really just about light. That’s why you should buy the best lenses you can afford. They will probably last longer than you.

102 year old lens on a 5DmkII [Cinema 5D forums]

NBC Universal expands its partnership with Netflix to bring popular television shows such as “Saturday Night Live” to the rental firm’s streaming service. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20017517-17.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Digital Home/a/p

If you play the guitar, and you have an iPad, you should buy TabToolkit. Short of having a teacher with you all the time, it’s probably the best way I have seen to learn new music.

Guitar Tab is a way of writing down music specifically for the guitar. It’s not as information-rich as standard musical notation, but it’s a lot easier to follow. At its core, TabToolkit will display tabs for you, just like they’d look on paper. But if you use Power Tab or Guitar Pro files, both designed to be read on by computer, then TabToolkit goes into overdrive.

Load in a song (from your computer or via the built-in web-browser) and you’ll see the tab along with musical notation, and below that there is a picture of a guitar’s fretboard and strings. Press play and things really get going. A line runs along the notation to show you where you are in the song, and red dots appear on the fretboard to show you where your fingers should be. Better still, the app actually plays the song thanks to a built-in multi-track synthesizer. That’s right, you get a whole band to play along with, only they never get tired and they never drink all your beer.

There are various controls and options. The best is the speed-dial: spin the wheel and you can slow the music down (or speed it up, should you really hate yourself). you can also choose which instrument you want to learn. Tabs default to the main guitar track, but you can choose to see any instrument for which a sequencer track has been included. You can also switch off the standard musical notation, change the size of the display, switch to left-handed mode (try that with printed tabs) and have a keyboard instead of a fretboard shown at the bottom.

There are some problems with this iPad version (launched in April – there’s an older iPhone version). While you can tap-to-stop the music, doing so skips the “playhead” to wherever you touch on-screen. Further, you need to hit the tiny play-button to resume. But that’s about it. As I said, if you’re learning the guitar, you owe it to yourself to spend $10 on this app. My favorite part? Take a look at the screenshot at the top: You can choose to have the metronome sound as a cow-bell. Just where might that be useful?

I played the guitar a lot when I was younger. Back then, there was no internet. Songs came in books, or on pieces of paper scribbled by friends. If something like TabToolkit had existed back then, I wouldn’t be such a terrible player today.

TabToolkit product page [Agile]

See Also:

• iPad Sheet-Music Foot-Switch is a Real Page-Turner
• Headstock Guitar Tuner Picks Up Vibes
• Turn Your iPhone Into an Electric Guitar With iShred
• Mobile Phone Guitar Makes Sweet Music

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Looking for a big picture? A really big picture? At CEDIA, Sony has introduced the VPL-VW90ES, the company’s first 3D front projector. It uses Sony’s 24p True Cinema to offer film-like performance, and incorporates frame sequential 3D technology with active shutter glasses.

This projector doesn’t need a special screen, so it can work with existing home theaters with minimal changes. It comes with two pair of Sony active shutter 3D glasses, which are also compatible with Sony’s 3D-capable Bravia HDTVs. Look for this projector in November for a list price of about $10,000.

Sony also introduced the VPL-VWPRO1 front projector (shown here), a high-performance 2D projector. It will be available in early October for about $3,400.

BookMaker, a Web site dedicated to online gambling, has calculated the odds on who will be next after RIM to offer a tablet in 2010. So, what’s your take?