Arte De Timo

Category: Creative and Maker Projects

This category is for all those little things I am doing around the house or for myself or someone, that isn’t quite “art” not is it attached to a big area of study or activity.

  • Game table build

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    Claro Walnut, 40in frame with felt covered 1/4 ply top. There will be no legs on it; we’ll be putting it on top of a coffee table.Tolerances are about a 1/16th of an inch. PU finish and top mounting hardware to come.

  • DIY DVD-R Spectroscope – Looking at lights with a camera

    Over the last couple of years, I have had the fortune and curse of shooting with a lot of different lighting gear, and in a range of situations for both video and still photography. This range of experiences has improved my instinct for the quality of light in front of me. I have used everything from broadcast, tungsten lighting and ultra high-end strobes, to highly touted LED light panels and off camera flash kits. I’ve shot video and stills in churches with stain-glass filtered light, in dark back rooms, and in all manner of mixed light. It’s been a great education, and has presented an enjoyable set of challenges for me to solve.

    During all this shooting, I started getting curious about why all these lights are so challenging to master. They all seem to have their own quirks and problems, but in general, light behaves the same way no mater where it is, or where it is coming from. Strangely, many photographers become jaded toward one type of light or another, though. Why, I wonder? Young artist often claim to only shoot with “natural” light. One local TV cameraman I talked to swore off any sort of LED lighting as “too green.” Another expert wrote off one brand of strobes, because their trigger system is “crap.” I started thinking and paying attention.

    I’ve had my share of fouled up footage and lost moments, but I can’t say I’ve become all that passionate one way or the other about any particular type of lighting. Each lighting system/source is meant for a particular type of job and provides its own quality. Since I don’t focus on one type of shooting, I guess I just try to adapt to what I have in front of me. Often, I manage to get great light even without that one perfectly designed light for the job. That is the part of photography I love.

    Thinking about how much jaded information is out there, and all the bottled up expertise no one shares, I started to play around with my own ideas on lighting to see if I could develop a better, simpler approach toward lighting technology. I decided to see if I could adapt some non-photographic LEDs and lighting setups into something predictable for the camera. (Here is a video from one of my first experiments.) It raised more questions than solved problems.

    There are a few variables I consider in lighting sources after the choice between continuous or strobe (for obvious reasons):

    Is it affordable?

    Since I don’t own a studio, nor shoot studio style work more than a few times a year, I can’t justify buying ProFoto’s or Arri’s for many thousands of dollars. I need tools that will pay off in low numbers of shoots.

    Is is portable?

    Again, I don’t own a studio, so any equipment I own needs to be tucked away, and portable enough for me to setup shop in a living or conference room. In addition, if it won’t be plugged in, I need it to run on small batteries.

    Is is controllable?

    This point is a little more broad, but lights need to be flexible in terms of modification, intensity, and placement. A flash kit does me wonders in small rooms using a couple of umbrellas and maybe a gel. But, for example, if I shoot formals at a wedding with thirty people, I’m going to need some mono-lights or a pack of some sort to light up a big area. That’s when I lug in my big cases, and/or rent a professional light pack and kit.

    Likewise if I am doing an interview, I can get away with plugging in some LED or other bulb type “hotlights,” then bouncing the light around with modifiers. If, on the other hand, I needed to light a whole set in detail, I would need something bigger like a big set of HMI lights. That situation hasn’t come up for me, (since I don’t shoot music videos, yet) but I have had a chance to use that sort of setup. With digital control boards, massive power needs, and truck loads of gear, that sort of setup enters a whole other ball game. I am glad to have been able to shoot a bit in a broadcast studio, but those situations remain out of my league for the present, nor really capture my interest.

    My experimental follow up

    After utilizing some LED spot-lights as modifiable, continuous lighting for interviews, and quick video productions, I tried to answer the question of how a camera sees the color of these lights. I looked up how to build a simple spectroscope out of a DVD disc, and started looking around. By no means is what I present here scientific, or even remotely accurate, but it does demonstrate the variations in light colors.

    Here are the spectrographs as my camera saw them:

    CFLTypical CFL

    sunlightSunlight bouncing off of a white card

    tungstenGlassFrosted Tungston Bulb Through Frosted Glass

    normalLEDWarm Philips LED Bulb

    fullSpecLED“Daylight” LED Floodlight

    flashFlash

    Each image shows the actual image at bottom, and the channel histogram on top. The right side of the histogram shows the more intense light, the left is less intense. The peaks demonstrate color spread (e.g. a sharp blue peak on the right side demonstrates a lot of pure blue light in the image.). I shot these with my Canon SLR pointed at the DVD disc tilted at 60 degrees, and light passing through a sixteenth of an inch slit. To process them, I fixed all images at a temperature shift of 7000K which is minus a lot of blue, and a green/magenta shift of 70/150 which is 25% toward magenta. I left the camera raw calibration at Adobe Standard, which is wrong for shooting, but I figured would work as a benchmark as long as it was consistent. Finally, I set all color and contrast adjustments to their zero/defaults and only adjusted the “exposure” enough to fill the channel histogram to the range offered by the software.

    I think these images are informative about two things:

    1. An SLR sensor seems to favor green over what the eye sees. I saw much more red and purple in the spectrum when I looked through the spectroscope. The camera always captured the most green.
    2. The quality of light coming from various light sources isn’t as shifted or complicated as I might have guessed. The only light source that shows a clear split spectrum was the CFL.

    Looking at the histograms, it is hard to know how balanced each light sources is, but it is clear that the flash is very close to the sunlight spectrum, and most of the others aren’t too bad, either. I think I would only be concerned with a light like the CFL, which is missing all sorts of colors, and a “warm” type light which is missing a lot of blue.

    My goal with this wasn’t to capture a raw spectrum from each light source, but more-or-less get a sense of how the light might get to the camera. I did things like point the spectroscope through the glass in light fixtures, and leave windows open, and other lights on. In the case of the sun, I bounced the light off a white card, since direct sunlight entering a camera is rare. Also, the spectroscope-camera combination seems to favor greens heavily (which matches the technical descriptions from manufactures). To my eye, as opposed to the image form the camera, each spectrum was subtle and contained a lot of differences in the red end and the blue end. This shows how heavily digital cameras process the light that hits the sensor. I, as a photographer, imagined that I was getting mostly what I saw through the view finder, but the reality is digital images are not very close to what I see with my eyes (a quick discussion of the topic). Post-processing, then becomes that much more important to get all those color perceptions back. Having an adequate light source is only the first step.

    I think what I have learned is that most lighting setups work OK considering how the camera is getting color out of a scene. When I notice that something is off in a light’s quality, it is probably so far shifted, the camera won’t be able to compensate for it. Those situations cause problems for photographers. Daylight bulbs seem to give my cameras, at least, enough color information to create good balanced images and videos. If I can see a color shift, particularly in the greens and blues, it is probably time to find a different light. That’s good info to have.

    I’ve gained a little more understanding of human-made light with this experiment. That is important in photography. It is a technical craft, that when controlled and mastered opens up doors to artistry and expression. NOt getting all the tools working to their fullest will hinder that goal. It also gives me some direction in my cheap DIY lighting explorations. I like that.

  • Bumper Avocado Crop


    Last year was a weird weather year around here. If you live in Califa you may have noticed it, too. Everything seemed to run about a month behind, and was fairly mild. My apples didn’t like it, nor my tomatoes. My grapes, plums, oranges, and nisperos, all loved the extra month of mild weather, and gave us bumper crops. Apparently the Avocados liked the weather, too, but because they are on a long growth cycle, we haven’t reaped the benefits until this year.

    They flower in May and set fruit in June for a crop the following Spring, so last year’s good growing weather has lead to a huge crop this Spring. It’s the biggest I have ever seen on the tree, and the first year we moved in was a pretty big year. When left to grow unchecked, they will go into a two year cycle, with on and off years. Many fruit trees and vines do that actually. That is why it is always best to prune trees back a little each year, so that the plant’s energy is more balanced year to year.

    Two summers ago we had the avocado tree heavily pruned, so our neighbors wouldn’t get knocked out by falling one pound avocados (I couldn’t reach over the fence that far with the picker to get them off the tree.) So last year we had a tiny crop due to the fact that we pruned off most of the fruit. The result was that it spend most of the great long growing season storing up energy to send into the fruit this year.

    I think the bees were a little mixed up last Spring too. Since many of the flowering trees came late, I think the avocados got a lot more attention, which set a lot more fruit.

    The question, now, is what are we going to do with so many avocados? Guacamole party anyone?

  • First Racking

    I took a wild guess, and racked my one gallon of Viozinho this morning. As you can see it isn’t very clear at this point, but the smaller jug was very clear before I messed with it. It’s a little on the brown side, too but I’m not too concerned with that right now. All in all the wine itself looks to be proceded in a predictable way… well not predictable to me, but what I imagine would be to a professional. The process on the other hand, as usual has not been wonderful.

    About a week ago, I was reaching for a book neer the bottle, and as you might guess it fell it the weirdest and most Murphyesque way, bouncing two feet around a chair right on top of the the air locks. One shattered, and the other went flying across the room. The bottles and wine were safe, fortunately.

    After checking two local brew shops, who “for some strange reason” were completely sold out of the cheapest most abundant part of home brewing, I finally found one at a crazy price in a wine makers shop. Not a good sign for Timo’s home brew wine.

    Flash forward to this morning and Murphy was still dictating the direction of things. Starting the siphon on such a small container was much less than smooth. I had practiced with water for about 20 minutes and thought I had it down pat, but alas there were a lot cuss words flying as my precious wine spilled all over the place and my hand came in contact with all the equipment. I even had an extra set of hands, but it didn’t help. I seem to have an aversion to smoothness when it comes to making fermented beverages (Don’t ask about the other night of beer bottling! I must have said, “That’s never happened before” about ten times.)

    Anyway, I did pull off a little for a taste. I was expecting something horrid, akin to the plum wine I made a couple of years ago. That wine had so much acid in it, and so little sugar entering fermentation (I miss calculated the recipe) that the bottle I opened last month didn’t even pass as a good vinegar. This true wine was not vinegar, though. It actually had a pretty good feel considering I’ve never tried Viozinho, nor have any idea what a wine at the first racking is supposed to taste like. It wasn’t even a struggle to swallow.

    I kept the stems with the berries when I crushed it, which isn’t normal for a white wine, but as I have mentioned before, I have no idea what I am doing. Some of that carried through as a sour tannic note. It actually tasted like a young intense Chardonay in a lot of ways. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t very good, but if it ages well, it will pass as wine.

    I have been thinking of adding 3 or 4 more vines in the back yard. My first choice was a classic red, like Cabernet, or Syrah. Maybe even a Durif, After tasting the potential of what I already have, though, now am I am considering upping the anti. I may make this whole project even more complicated (the way I like it,) and try my hand at cloning the Viozinho onto a resistant rootstock, so I would have 5 vines all with the same varietal.

    Of course I haven’t found a source of rootstock, and have never grafted vines before. But, I watched a couple of videos on Youtube, so how hard could it be, right?

  • Lomax

    In his world he went by the name of Lomax. There he could search for his meaning in life without the hardships of really finding himself. The real flesh of Lomax lived in a small flat like so many of his kind. The new young. Not really attached to much that was out there. He just drifted in and out of his games and rooms. Lomax had the power to change his world. He could be the astronaut that Mrs. Rinkly told him he could be in 2nd grade. He even became the ruler of his own nation on one spin of his globe. When Chromium met him there wasn’t all that much to know. She knew how Lomax lived and died. She knew where he lived and who he worked for. Chrom didn’t need the man behind Lomax. She needed his jack.

    Lomax’s favorite food came out of a can. He liked those classic ravioli’s that played in his memories from childhood. The canned food he picked up on the way home from work every few days kept him alive; nothing more. Lomax wasn’t trained to do what he did. He didn’t mean to fall into his industry, but there were big bucks in it for him when he began. There isn’t too much to say about his cube. Like the rest of the state, he had 25 square feet to call his own.

    He sits in front of his screen so many hours a day that he forgets what his voice sounds like. His mental waves are filled with the pounding nature of Lomax, his identity. The power his keyboard offers thumps through his mind so often that there is little distinction between the man and the reality he finds on screen.

  • My First Try at Making Real Wine


    I have very little idea how to make wine, but it is something that has always interested me, and living in California, it is something that’s just part of life. Anywhere you travel in this state you are bound to come across vineyards and wine tasting rooms. Go south from the Bay Area on US 101, and you will literally be driving through vineyards within an hour or two. Another hour more, and you will be in the heart of the Central Coast wine region with wineries and tasting rooms at every exist.

    Go to the North Bay, and well, I don’t have to tell you where you are, but you will be in some of the most picturesque viticultural districts in the world, if not the best producing ones. Head east, or in just about any direction, down any road and you will likely find a vineyard of some sort. All my memories are filled with grape vines, from visiting my aunt’s house in the South Bay hills, to heading to Monterey, or to the mountains to fish. Everywhere, there is a vineyard in central Califa.

    Even later, I couldn’t get away from the vines. Not that I wanted to. I did my undergrad at “The” wine university. You know, the one that now produces the worlds premier viticulturists and enologist, who go on to head up every major winery around the world. When I went there, though, the school celar wasn’t open to the public, and Mondovi hadn’t turned it into a wine tourist trap, so we only heard rumors of the vintages that got dumped down the drain instead of being drunk each year. Now they get sold off to the public, and the wine culture descends on the campus in hords to visit the Mondovi wine complex, celars, and wine shops etc..

    One of the things Davis used to do, and still does, I think, is give away vines to the first few hundred people who get in line at the viticulture booth on Picnic Day. They are the vines that students practice their grafting techniques on, so they often aren’t wonderful, but they are free. In the past, before the world knew of this little give-away they gave away interesting varieties, and it was easier to get them.

    Six years ago, my wife (also an Aggie) and I went to Picnic Day and got two of the last scrony vines they were giving away that year. I think it was the fact that they were small that let is in on something cool. No one else wanted the runts, but they were just a small slow growing varietal. The variety was called Viozinho, a white wine grape. (More on that in a bit.) We’ve been to Picnic Day since, and have gotten other vines, but these were the only ones that resulted in a producing vine.

    Funny enough, at the time I had no where to plant them, so I potted them up and put them on the balcony of our place. For a couple of years they languished, putting out a few leaves each spring. One eventually died, but in the third year the survivor showed some good growth, so I was happy to keep it on board. In that same year we bought our house, and I found a good place for it in the ground. Having little idea what type of grape vine it really was, or its characteristics, I just put it where there was room. It had more sentimental value than anything at that point.

    In its new home it didn’t do a whole lot except grow. Last year it produced some grapes but the squirrels (I hate squirrels!) ate every last berry, so I had no idea what the grapes where finally going to be like.

    This year was different. I netted the whole thing as soon as they were forming sugar, and they grew and grew. So many and so well in fact, that my poorly made trellis partially collapsed.

    With a whole crop to deal with, I finally looked up what they where, and thought about what I was going to do with them. They are a grape used in making Porto, a fortified wine from Portugal. They are supposed to have great character, but are little grown because of the slow growth and low yield. In fact they seem to only be grown commercially in the Douro Valley in very low quantities. The guy at my local brew/wine store had never heard of them.

    So what do you do when you have something little heard of, and considered a treasure? Of course, try to learn how to use it for what it is meant for. I only have enough for about a gallon of finished wine, but it will be a good first trial. Also, since this variety is rarely ever made into a varietal wine, and is usually blended, the low volume works in my favor. My guess, is that it will be very acidic and complex, so I will have something good to use in blends with future years (maybe going the Porto route,) or with my plum wines, which have little complexity.

    Who knows where it will go, but so far it’s been fun starting down another path of learning. I already had the vine and the equipment, so I have little to lose, and wine to gain. Should be fun.

  • October is a Good Month


    This is a pumpkin from my garden. It’s one of the best I’ve grown.

    October is a great and odd time of year in California. It is a time when some of the trees drop their leaves as is traditional in the Fall, but others are just getting geared up to produce their crops. It’s a time to harvest everything thats been growing all summer, or clear out the old plants, but it is also the time to plant and nurish the second round of crops for the year.

    The weather is hot, then cold. The daylight is fading, but the skies are ablaze with light. Oktoberfest is a good celebration for this area, and I understand why it is so popular. Enjoy the beer and pumpkins everyone, because this is a special time of year around here.

  • A spike in renovation

    While renovating a small part of one of our buildings (the office out back) I ran into this while digging. What do you suppose it is? Obviously its a 10 inch steel spike, but the configuration is fairly odd. Working on this old house is always fun, cause I never know what I am going to find or what challenges I might be in for.

  • Comic Books


    At one point in my life I wanted to be a comic book artist. I know I used to draw a lot, but I’ve never really bothered keep track of what I drew or when. Now that I see this old sketch book my mom found, I remember drawing all this, and all the hopes and dreams I had when I was making them. I’m not exactly sure when I did these, but based on the last two, they were done in the years leading up to high school.

    I sense a strange mix of geekiness, artistry, angst and anger in all this. I am sure my early self, the one that drew all these, would have be mortified to see my current self sticking them up on the web like this. I’m glad I’m not that kid anymore, and can look back on these drawings without the embarrassment I had in my youth. Talk about a Napoleon Dynamite, “Lyger” moment here.

    It is amazing what some old drawings can stir up in ye ole’ noggin. There is so much buried down in my psyche that I don’t often access, yet is still present and influential in my personality.

  • Reclaimed Wood Stool

    I’ve been working on this for a while. It’s gone through three iterations, and then the long process of finishing it. The base is Douglas Fir 4×4’s and 4×6’s (even with hidden nails that killed my jointer blades.) The top is White Oak with Claro Walnut tenons. The finish on the bottom is a dark shellac in 4 coats, and the top is finished with Polysure, an Eco-friendly polyurethane. I worked with the natural irregularities and rough surfaces of the wood to develop the asymmetric design. The different woods and finishes create contrasts that are carried into the varying organic and angular lines.