ben syverson

wow

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:03:01 -0600

wow

Susan, November 2009

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:49:39 -0600

Susan, November 2009

Dear Canon, Thanks for responding to my last tumblr post by adding 24p to the 5D. I had no idea you...

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:35:48 -0500

Dear Canon,

Thanks for responding to my last tumblr post by adding 24p to the 5D. I had no idea you read my blog!

Love,
Ben

Hey Canon. Now that we know you’re not against 24p, please add it to my 5D Mark II....

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:42:51 -0500

Hey Canon. Now that we know you’re not against 24p, please add it to my 5D Mark II. There’s no way I’m downgrading to an APS-C sensor.

On Justin’s set

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 13:58:48 -0500

On Justin’s set

I’m still using a lot of PostScript fonts from the late...

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:27:08 -0500

I’m still using a lot of PostScript fonts from the late 80s. Can you name another technology that allows 20 year old files to see such routine and widespread use? Not only that, but PostScript is still state of the art. They had to cook up OpenType (bells! whistles!) just to keep selling fonts.

I mean think about it. Every single day I use font files that are older than recent college graduates. I used some of these exact files on my mom’s Mac SE-30 in 1988, and every Mac I’ve had since. I’ve never had to convert or upgrade them, and they work even better today (thanks antialiasing!) than they did back then. That is insane.

PostScript: UNBELIEVABLE!

Rolling shutter is fun

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 18:51:54 -0500

Rolling shutter is fun

If this thing has a decent 24p movie mode, watch out.

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:24:08 -0500

If this thing has a decent 24p movie mode, watch out.

Shooting miniatures for Sebastian’s video

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:21:32 -0500

Shooting miniatures for Sebastian’s video

Have never been this excited for a digital camera… I can...

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:03:00 -0500

Have never been this excited for a digital camera… I can finally use my crazy 16mm lenses again, like the 10mm f/1.8 and 25mm f/0.95.

Now we have to see how the video looks.

Logo for a fictional company in Sebastian’s music video....

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:52:00 -0500

Logo for a fictional company in Sebastian’s music video. The logo references Baltimorese and crabs (a Baltimore favorite), as well as Mars, where half of the video is set.

Dr. Spaceman

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 10:53:28 -0500

Dr. Spaceman

After 15 years of careful camera gear stewardship, you’re bound to slip up. On a music video...

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:12:58 -0500

After 15 years of careful camera gear stewardship, you’re bound to slip up.

On a music video shoot last week in New York, I changed lenses and set my 24L on the grass beside me. We wrapped, and later that night, we had torrential rain. Just a complete deluge. Our friends’ kiddy pool filled to the brim with rain water.

The next morning, I walked across the lawn, and my heart stopped. There was my poor little 24L, sitting patiently on the grass. It was half-covered in mud, and completely soaked. There was water inside the lens… big condensation droplets inside the focus window. I was too freaked out to even take a picture of it. “There goes $1700…”

I ran it inside, unscrewed the UV filter and rear lens cap, and immediately buried the lens in a big box of dry rice.

I checked it every few hours, and prayed to the camera gods for mercy. After 12 hours, I couldn’t see any condensation inside, so I decided to wait 12 more hours.

After a full 24 hours in the rice, I inspected it all over. No water to be seen. I picked it up, brushed it off, and took a deep breath. I switched it to manual focus, and slowly connected it to my camera. It came up in the menu as the correct lens, meaning the camera was talking to the chip on the lens. “Well, at the very least I have a manual focus lens.”

I took another deep breath and switched it to autofocus. A half-press of the shutter, and the ultrasonic motor snapped the whole scene into focus! I don’t want to jinx it, but so far, it’s as good as new. And probably cleaner. I kept right on shooting the video with it.

So for that, zombie lens from beyond the grave, I hereby christen you “Ophelia.” May the rest of your days be as dry as the dustiest corner of the moon.

Introducing the Syver6! I recently hacked apart a Holga to...

Fri, 08 May 2009 15:58:42 -0500

Introducing the Syver6!

I recently hacked apart a Holga to accept Canon EF mount lenses, and adapted a 75mm lens from a folder to EF mount for the camera. The whole enchilada weighs only 271g (it’s slimmed down since the above photo) but is a full-blown 6x6 camera. I think it has to be some kind of record.

Objective C, AppKit & Foundation

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:01:00 -0500

With several development projects going on the iPhone, Mac and web (both server-side and client-side), I recently standardized on a single programming language and development framework, for the sake of my own sanity. The language is Objective-C, and the framework is AppKit & Foundation.

That of course makes sense for the iPhone and Mac, where AppKit and Foundation are part of Cocoa. But it’s unusual for the web.

On the server side, I’m building a kqueue-based dynamic server in Objective C that can be compiled under GNUStep for deployment on any machine.

On the client side, I’m working with Objective-J and Cappuccino, an absolutely incredible browser-independent implementation of AppKit & Foundation (and much more actually, including CoreGraphics). Given how many developers are piling onto the iPhone, I think the Cappuccino’s future is very bright.

Standardizing means that when I want to add an item to an array, whether its for the iPhone, a Mac, my server, or a web application, I never have to shift gears. It’s always:

[array addObject:item];

It’s bliss.

Satromized 1, 2009

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:17:22 -0500

Satromized 1, 2009

Graceful Degradation

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:48:00 -0500

I recently launched a web update for Susan’s business site, up in the air somewhere, and I took it as an opportunity to improve the semantics and aesthetics of the HTML and CSS.

We were having problems with the Blackberry web browser, because I had her product images loading into the background of a div via CSS. Blackberry just ignored the CSS, so the product images wouldn’t come up. Also, all of the navigation menus would come up first, so every time you loaded a page, you’d have to scroll down to see the content. It was also annoying if you listened to it on a screen reader; you had to listen to every menu option before you could hear the content, for every page.

The first problem was solved by loading the product images with a standard img tag, as it should have been all along. However, on pages where the image is just a background (such as the “info” pages), the image remains a CSS background, so it doesn’t load the unnecessary image on non-CSS browsers.

The second problem was solved simply by rearranging the HTML so that the image comes first, then the product information, then the product menu, finally followed by the less-used menu items like “info” and “links.”

This is essentially how the site is supposed to look, as rendered in Firefox. You can make the browser window as large as you like, and the image will appear to go on forever. (Click for large image)

Here it is on the iPhone. Under duress, I added a meta tag to the HTML to change the viewport width. Apple, I’m speechless. This should so obviously be a CSS property instead.

When Netscape 2.0 came out in 1995 and introduced background images and tables, I could not have been more psyched. I spent eight hours listening to Live Through This and experimenting with tables. To this day, when I hear any song from that album, it makes me think of cellpadding and border widths. ANYWAY. By doing some simple object detection to disable Google Analytics’ JavaScript code in older browsers, and by using HTML comments to hide CSS from non-CSS browsers, I was able to get the site to load in Netscape 2.0 in Mac OS 7.5.5 (1.0 doesn’t seem to like my emulator. Or 7.5.5?). The 1995 version of myself would be furious (“What, no background pattern?!”), but here it is. And this is about how it should load on the Blackberry.

Finally, here’s how it looks in elinks, a text-based browser. The site remains understandable and navigable. elinks is even listening to some CSS, floating the right-side menu items to the right!

This is my favorite site I’ve designed. It feels like a full, rich experience, with big images and a catalog feel. Yet the entire site—all 51 pages and their images—takes up less than 2MB (it would fit on a floppy!), so it’s quick to browse, even over slow mobile connections. I love it.

Oh my god… I’ve been waiting for this moment for years! Goodbye Islip, hello LaGuardia!

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:38:00 -0500

Oh my god… I’ve been waiting for this moment for years!

Goodbye Islip, hello LaGuardia!

Animal House, 2009

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:19:48 -0500

Animal House, 2009

Magic Missile was awesome the other night…

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:10:37 -0500

Magic Missile was awesome the other night…